-The Other World is at the bottom of the well. The well and the portal behind the little door are extremely similar in appearance.
-The Beldam is a witch who made herself immortal by using children’s souls. She was there probably before the town was founded. The reason she has a spider motif is because she acts like one, creating a web to attract and trap her prey. Her monster form is the result of her overuse of black magic, she’s not human anymore.
-The Cat lived at the same time as the Beldam, and tried to save the ghost kids like he did with Coraline. They’re both connected to the Other World, which is why he can travel there.
-The key is basically the Beldam’s magic wand. It ties the real world and the Other World together. That’s why there’s only one.
-The Beldam made dolls as a hobby or for a living, before she began stealing souls. This is why everyone in her world has button eyes, they’re all just living dolls she’s created. It’s also why her true form looks like a spider made out of sewing needles, and why she can only copy things in the real world. Sewing buttons onto a child’s eyes is making them another of her dolls, her property.
-The reason the Other Father and Other Wybie rebel is because they’re simply following their orders. The Other Father was made to love Coraline, and the Other Wybie to be her friend. The Other neighbors were made just to entertain her, not care about her.
Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me
Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age
“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”
This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”
Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much
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