This year's Oscar boning

When we spent last night in a hotel (while my dad and his wife are in town visiting, and therefore, able to babysit our son), we wanted to watch something that wasn't too dark.

We were referring to the tone, but the other meaning of "dark" was the salient one in this situation.

On our hotel TV, we just couldn't figure out how to lighten the contrast on the decidedly murky film ParaNorman, in which all but a scene or two is set at twilight or just plain night. At least you could distinguish contrasts during the twilight scenes, which were lit with an otherworldly beauty. At night? Fuggedaboutit.

This wasn't the only circumstance that destined us to only half-see ParaNorman. We'd been out for a Mexican dinner and each had two margaritas, plus I'd had a beer right when we got to the hotel. Combine that with a day spent replacing the fence between our property and our neighbor to the west of us -- day two of that project -- and we stood a pretty low chance of staying awake throughout the 93-minute movie, even starting it before 9 p.m. There was one last sleep-inducing factor: The bed is the most comfortable spot from which to watch a movie in your hotel, and under the blankets is even one step more comfortable.

So I'll probably need to see ParaNorman again before I can be sure what I truly thought of it. However, it does give us a third straight year of boning up on an Oscar nominee right before the telecast.

Boning up on nominees is something many people do in the weeks leading up to Oscar night, but I am not really one of those people. My obsessive watching prior to the Oscar nominations, in order to complete my year-end rankings in as thorough a manner as possible, obviates the need for much of that. This year, for example, I'd seen all the best picture nominees before they were announced. Add to that the fact that I'm usually done with watching movies from the previous year for a couple months after ranking them, and I'm usually not consuming a lot of nominated movies leading up to the show.

Right before the show, however, has been the exception. Two years ago, I watched best foreign film nominee Dogtooth on the afternoon of the telecast. Last year, that same slot was devoted to best documentary nominee If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front. ParaNorman keeps the tradition going, and gives a third new category of nominee over the course of those three years. In fact, I'd have a complete perspective on the best animated feature race if only I'd seen Frankenweenie.

Both Dogtooth and If a Tree Falls were big hits for me. Given the unfavorable circumstances, I can't say quite the same for ParaNorman, though what I saw was probably better than I thought it would be. The film certainly has a unique visual scheme, and I thought it showed a pretty bold tendency to be darker than your average children's fare -- without being out and out inappropriate.

I just wish it had been darker in tone only.

Spawning the next generation of horror fans

I have a friend with an eight-year-old son who's been into ghoulies and goblins over half his young life.

You name it, he loves it. Ghosts. Skeletons. Witches. Jack-o-lanterns. Eyeballs. Fake blood. Even severed body parts don't faze him, though they would have to be the kind that looked pretty fake.

I'm sure that at least some of this has to do with having watched The Nightmare Before Christmas at a young age, and then seeing Jack Skellington and friends at Disneyland. But the joke was that he would start preparing for Halloween sometime in May. The best part of the joke was that it wasn't really a joke. He does start preparing in May -- or at least he used to. He'd probably start even earlier, except there has to be some amount of preparation that just qualifies as ridiculous -- even if our definition of what constitutes ridiculous might be different than his.

My friend's son is not alone. It seems that one of the chief ways for a young kid to assert his budding adulthood is to test his limits when it comes to fear. Even if this stuff is not all that scary, and the horror characters are pretty PG version of what they represent in reality, it still says something that young kids prefer things intended to scare them than things intended to be cute or make them laugh.

Naturally, the movies have taken notice.

Hotel Transylvania, opening today, is the middle of three high-profile animated movies released in a span of less than two months that seek to feed the macabre to children. Last month we got ParaNorman. Next month we'll get Frankenweenie.

Each of these movies actually appeals to me in some way, though it's unlikely I'll see any of them in the theater. At least they aren't just another movie featuring animals who team up for crazy adventures.

As discussed previously, the "fear" peddled here is very mild. My guess is that most of the characters in these films are comic relief, and their voices will be goofy if not actually cute.

Of course, this trend is nothing new -- it's just thrusting itself into the forefront of my consciousness because of the timing of these three movies. I'm not even sure there will be another movie aimed at children released during their two-month reign (unless you count Oogieloves. And really, do you?). Which means that if parents wanted to take their kids to the movies between early August and early October, they needed to test their children's tastes for this PG horror -- if their kids weren't already begging them to go, that is.

But like I said, it's nothing new. Allmovie.com has a very useful feature on each of its movie pages, which is to list similar movies -- a godsend when writing a post like this. The similar movies for ParaNorman include Coraline, Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (the word corpse in the title of an animated movie?), Igor, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 9, James and the Giant Peach, Monster House, Beetlejuice, Alice in Wonderland, and of course The Nightmare Before Christmas, among others that don't advance my thesis in any useful way. Oh, and of course Hotel Transylvania and Frankenweenie. For Frankenweenie's page, you can add to those titles Edward Scissorhands (not really a kids movie), Where the Wild Things Are and some other rather inexplicable choices, including Midnight in Paris and When in Rome. (Hey, I never said the algorithm was perfect.) Transylvania's page also offers us Monsters Inc. (that should have come up earlier), Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events and The Addams Family.

So, "scaring" kids has been a big business for years.

In fact, you could argue that a film in which there isn't some kind of intense antagonist is dramatically limp. Think of how far Disney has gone portraying its variety of witches and wicked queens over the years. It would be easy to say that some of those baddies are more intense than they really need to be. But clearly, having something that's genuinely at least a little scary raises the stakes for kids.

Since Hotel Transylvania stars the voice of Adam Sandler, I'm going to say there's a ceiling on how scary it will actually be. However, I'd bet you a hundred bucks there will be at least one character who can remove some or all of his limbs, and possibly even his head.

As long as it doesn't look realistic, I guess.