Horror for Kidz
STEVEN UNIVERSE is a badass show. It centers around Steven, a goofy 13-year-old kid with superpowers who goes on adventures with a trio of aliens. Despite developing a large following among teens and adults, the target audience is generally considered to be children aged 8-12.
The show is incredibly rich, and it’s rightly lauded for the way it approaches relationships, queer identities, trauma, and emotional growth (among many other things). But I’m not gonna talk about all that here. Today, I just wanna talk about one particular episode from the beginning of the first season.
“Cat Fingers” is the sixth episode in the series. It begins with Steven learning that his alien friends can shapeshift - and since he’s part alien, maybe he can do it too. Despite being cautioned against it, Steven tries it, and turns his finger into a cat.
From there, it progresses as a fairly typical Midas touch/”careful what you wish for”/”know your limits” story: Steven delights in his new ability, runs around showing it off, and indulges in it further by gradually turning the rest of his fingers into cats - only to realize that “cat fingers don’t function well as fingers”, as he has trouble picking things up and using his phone.
This is a pretty standard episode structure for a kids’ show: our hero makes a mess, and has to learn a lesson to be able to clean it up. With his alien caretakers away on an adventure, Steven tries to force his body to stop being cats through willpower alone, but only succeeds in making it worse.
And worse.
And worse.
At this point, the episode veers hard out of familiar territory. “The cat fingers are taking over my body!”, Steven wails, as he begs his father to help him. But his dad has no idea what to do either - and any attempts to fight back against the cats only result in them attacking Steven’s dad with their fanged mouths as they subsume more and more of Steven’s body. Steven is an unwilling prisoner of his own ravenous, rebellious flesh. And the animators go buck wild with this.
This isn’t just a short visual gag, either. The show lingers here, with several shots dedicated to Steven’s roiling anatomy and cries of pain. And both characters react with seriousness to what’s going on, tears rolling down their terrified faces as they scream in fear and desperation. It’s intense.
Ultimately, Steven figures out that the cats hate water, and pushes himself through his dad’s car wash - which successfully cleanses him of the sentient feline growths and brings his body back to normal. His alien caretakers return, and offer two morals to this story: either Steven should’ve listened to their words of caution, or they should’ve had more faith in Steven to be able to fix his own problems.
Then Steven makes a couple of groan-worthy cat puns and the episode ends.
So…what’s going on here? Why did this happen?
The cute designs of children’s media are mixed with the grotesque sensibilities of horror in “The ABCs of Beth”, the 30th episode of RICK & MORTY
At first, I wondered if this sequence was made as a particular kind of metatextual joke we see a lot these days in shows like FAMILY GUY and RICK & MORTY: where horror (or violence, or sex, etc.) is injected somewhere it shouldn’t be (like a kids’ show, or some other familiar trope space), and that juxtaposition is heightened and made funnier by playing it straight and leaning into the genre shift. Those shows are aimed at adults, but we’re seeing a whole lot more metatextual humor in media for children too - just look at any Disney movie from the past 10 years - so it’s plausible we’d see a joke like that ihere.
Disney’s brand these days relies heavily on making jokes about the tropes typical of its old brand, as shown in this scene from 2018’s RALPH BREAKS THE INTERNET
Could the sequence at the end of “Cat Fingers” be just another one of these sorts of jokes, snuck into a kids’ show but aimed at older viewers?
Well, maybe. At one point in it, Steven cries out “I’m a monster! I’m an adorable cat monster!”, and that line is definitely meant to juxtapose the cutesy aesthetics of the show with the horror of the situation. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.
For starters, this scene is the climax of the episode, not an aside. Then there’s the length: the detour into body horror here lasts about 2-3 minutes (out of a total episode runtime of 11 minutes). So this sequence is too long, too drawn out, for the point to just be “isn’t this situation so silly?” - or for the point to just be a reference to other media (more on that later). It’s definitely meant to be a tonal shift, but I’m not sure the point of that shift is just to make a gag.
Besides, there are other moments in STEVEN UNIVERSE where the show makes references to other horror media (like the work of famous horror mangaka Junji Ito) - and they tend to be more direct and much shorter.
A scene from THE ENIGMA OF AMIGARA FAULT, a short story by Junji Ito
A scene from “On the Run”, the 40th episode of STEVEN UNIVERSE
So I think there’s something else going on here - something simpler.
Yes, the climax of “Cat Fingers” has some amount of metatextual humor, and some amount of reference to other media meant to be recognized by older viewers. But it also just stands on its own as a solid piece of horror aimed at kids. And that’s what really interests me.
Viewer beware,
you’re in for a scare
Let’s start with a question: Can you make good horror media for kids?
It seems like a silly question at first - of course you can. This is obvious from loads of examples of horror media aimed specifically at younger audiences. The Goosebumps franchise of horror novels, for instance, is the second-best-selling children’s book series (after Harry Potter).
At the same time, if you search for “horror movies for kids”, you’ll find a decent amount of stuff like MONSTERS, INC. and HOTEL TRANSYLVANIA which aren’t really horror…right? I mean, sure, intuitively one expects that making media more kid-friendly means “toning it down” in some sense, but for horror it feels like making it more appropriate for younger audiences requires turning the dial down on things that are core to the definition of horror as a genre, to the point where if you go far enough you end up with something that doesn’t pass anyone’s sniff test for “horror”.
We can see these assessments of horror’s suitability for kiddos embodied in the various organizations dedicated to rating media based on its content. These ratings systems are often somewhat reactionary in nature, sometimes arising in response to a cultural panic about what things our children are exposed to, but they can still give us a sense of society’s basic perspective on the question of “is horror inherently inappropriate for children?”.
Some rating systems don’t really address horror directly at all. The ratings used by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council (for English and non-French programming) only mentions “comic horror” as an example as the type of violence that might be “generally considered acceptable for youngsters 8 years and over to view on their own”. Systems like this focus more on depictions of violence, suggesting that beyond that there’s nothing particularly “adult” about horror.
In the US, the TV Parental Guidelines’ ratings only really care about whether or not a piece of media might frighten someone under the age of 7 - but for audiences older than that, how “frightening” something is doesn’t factor into its rating. This lines up with the Pan-European Game Information labels, though they also go a bit farther and have a separate content descriptor for media that might be scary - indicating that while it doesn’t rule out the media for anyone other than the youngest children, it’s still something parents should keep in mind.
The British Board of Film Classification (which also rates TV shows and video games) is interesting because it does call out “Threat and horror” as one of the criteria in its rating system. Even more interesting, it doesn’t necessarily prohibit horror for any of its ratings - instead, it stipulates that in order to be appropriate for all ages, “scary or potentially unsettling sequences should be mild, brief and unlikely to cause undue anxiety to young children,” and “the outcome should be reassuring”.
Now, what do we mean by “horror” here?.
Coming up with a totally comprehensive definition for “horror” as a genre is an enormous (and largely impossible) undertaking - I’m not gonna try to do that here. But I do think I can articulate some definitional elements of the genre, specifically ones that are represented in content ratings systems like the ones described above, which are focused on suitability for young audiences.
In these sorts of discussions, there’s two major elements that factor into an “I know it when I see it” working definition of horror: being macabre, and being upsetting.
When I say “macabre”, I mean that the media in question tends to focus on iconography or subject matter that is, well, macabre - either explicitly or conceptually. This covers things like graphic depictions of violence (e.g. gore), and things that suggest it (e.g. ghosts, corpses), as well as anything we generally feel we are “supposed to” think of as spooky/creepy/etc. (e.g. monsters). This part of the sniff test is why we can confidently call a movie like SHAUN OF THE DEAD a horror comedy instead of just a black comedy, for example.
Meanwhile, “upsetting” is basically the general case of “scary”. While there’s plenty of examples of horror media that isn’t primarily focused on scaring the audience (like SHAUN OF THE DEAD), there’s obviously a strong association between horror and fear - enough so that it feels a little silly spelling it out like this, but I want to be thorough here. I’m going with “upsetting” instead of “scary” because I think it’s more descriptive, while also avoiding the typical hair-splitting that tends to bog these conversations down (“Is JOSHUA really trying to scare you?”; “I didn’t think 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE was scary…”; “HOUSE OF LEAVES is really a love story”; etc.).
Lastly, I want to point out that any given piece of media isn’t necessarily monolithic in its genre classification. We don’t have to decide whether or not JURASSIC PARK is a horror movie in order to acknowledge that it absolutely contains horror sequences.
So with all that said, let’s take another look at “Cat Fingers”.
Body horror is for kids, actually
The finale of “Cat Fingers” is both inspired by, and a direct reference to, the climax of the 1988 film AKIRA (adapted from the manga of the same name), wherein another teenaged boy with superpowers loses control of his body. His name is Tetsuo.
In this sequence, Tetsuo’s reality-altering psychic powers go on a rampage through his body, expanding it into a nearly-inchoate mass of tempestuous flesh and wires, plastic and sinew, antennae and organs. The transformation is horrific, not just to onlookers but also to Tetsuo himself: it’s both physically painful and emotionally distressing - as in “Cat Fingers”, the terror of being unable to control your own body as it does terrible things to those around you is heavily foregrounded. In both scenes, the person whose body is the source of danger to everyone around them is the one who is crying for help. Pleading and scared, Tetsuo reaches toward his friends, only for his writhing body parts to attempt to consume them.
The climax of AKIRA is one of the more iconic examples of “body horror”, a subset of horror focused on malformations and distortions of the human body. There’s lots of flavors of body horror, but the one in AKIRA and “Cat Fingers” focuses on a person who is still conscious and lucid while their body violently rebels and exerts an unrestrainable will of its own. Not only are these scenes very similar in their premise (a kid’s superpower runs amok, with grotesque results), there’s even some direct visual cues - like the way both Tetsuo’s and Steven’s faces get squished by the bulging flesh around them.
Like the scene from STEVEN UNIVERSE, Tetsuo’s transformation sequence features very little in the way of traditional gore, with only a few frames of blood as one character is crushed to death. (It’s definitely an intense and memorable moment, but it’s also a small part of what’s going on, visually.) However, I think this scene still fits a reasonable definition of “gore”. The whole thing is animated with enough detail, and enough effort to portray recognizable portions of human anatomy (and particularly internal ones, like organs and blood vessels and flesh), that although it’s not “realistic” it still amounts to something very similar.
In this case, the decision to portray Steven’s revolting body as a pile of kittens instead of a pile of organs works primarily by abstracting the depiction of a body in turmoil. For example, the design of the cats is extremely simple, drawn with substantially less detail than the faces of other characters in the show. It’s not so much that the kittens look especially adorable or safe, it’s that they don’t look much like anything in particular. In terms of our sniff test for horror, we wouldn’t say “Cat Fingers” is gory, and it’s only really macabre in abstract.
But there’s a reason why this scene still readily reads as body horror - while other scenes from children’s media where a character loses control of their transforming body, don’t.
The normally-human-looking Maui loses control of his shapeshifting powers in MOANA (2016)
That comes down largely to the other pillar in our sniff test: the scene in “Cat Fingers” is designed to be upsetting.
This is blunted a bit by gags, but there’s still a fair bit of sincere fear and anguish coming from the characters. After Steven cries “I’m a monster! I’m an adorable cat monster!”, his dad responds “No you’re not, you’re my son!”, with terrified tears in his eyes. Steven had just asked for the car wash to be turned on, but the lines were delivered like Steven asked his dad to kill him.
And the way the bubbling cat heads take over Steven’s body clearly conveys physical discomfort. Steven is crawling, crying, and sweating under the strain of it all - he can’t even speak without these growths crowding out his eyes and mouth.
These elements give the sequence an intensity that manages to push past the pastel colors, complete lack of violence, and meowing emoji-faced cats. And it makes me think that body horror might be especially well-suited for media that wants to be kid-safe, but still horrific.
Let’s take a look at another example.
BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES was aimed at slightly older audiences than STEVEN UNIVERSE, but still very much for children - originally airing on Fox Kids during the after-school weekday block. Season one included a two-parter called “Feat of Clay”, which told the origin story for the villain Clayface.
The episodes are about a successful actor named Matt Hagen, who suffers a disfiguring injury and subsequently becomes addicted to an experimental chemical that “can do in minutes what plastic surgery would take years to accomplish” by letting you sculpt your face as easily as clay. When Matt attempts to rob the factory where it’s produced, he’s caught by a pair of thugs that try to murder him while making it look like an accident - by force-feeding him so much of the chemical that his entire body dissolves into a featureless, vaguely-human-shaped pile of goop.
What’s left of Matt is found by his companion, who gasps “What in heaven’s name did they do to you?” as Matt himself awakens - only to see what he’s become in a mirror, and roar in agony. And that’s where the first episode ends.
I gotta say, that got me pretty good as a kid.
Compared to “Cat Fingers”, the violence in “Feat of Clay” is a bit more explicit: the goons are actually trying to kill Matt, and they do so by essentially waterboarding him with chemical sludge. However, the fantastical properties of the goop they’re pouring on him adds enough un-realism that it slides by as fantasy violence.
Here, the vocal performance does almost more to convey the horror of the situation than the visuals: Matt’s gurgles of protest as he’s forced to swallow an experimental chemical to keep breathing, his bubbling sigh as he begins to melt, and finally his cry of pain at the sight of his own reflection. Like in “Cat Fingers”, these performances ratchet up the intensity by focusing on the aguish of the characters, making for a perfectly bloodless - but nonetheless upsetting - experience.
In the second part of “Feat of Clay”, Matt discovers that he can now effectively shapeshift at will - but it takes too much concentration and effort for him to pass long enough to return to his normal life. He collapses under the weight of the realization, his huge clay shoulders heaving as he sobs: “My career! Life! It is gone! And I can never get it back! I'm not an actor anymore! I'm not even...a man…”
You know, just normal kid show stuff.
As it turns out, excellent dialog isn’t the only thing notable about the second half of “Feat of Clay”. For its animation, the American showrunners contracted Japanese studio TMS Entertainment (formerly Tokyo Movie Shinsha), which had worked on scores of TV series and movies since the 60s. In fact, two of the four key animators for the second “Feat of Clay” - Hiroyuki Aoyama and Yoshinobu Michihata - had also been among the 60+ key animators for AKIRA. You might not guess that from looking at most of the episode…up until the finale where - you guessed it - Matt loses control of his body.
This was “the best animation of the series” according to producer Bruce Timm: “The first time we saw it in the editing room, we couldn't believe how beautiful it was. It has all those transformation effects that only TMS could do.” For an episode of children’s animation from 1992, it’s pretty stunning. And while this scene might not feel as gruesome as the finale of “Cat Fingers”, it’s still a memorable bit of body horror.
One last example from this time period: “Proteus” is a two-part episode from X-MEN: THE ANIMATED SERIES that originally aired in 1995, where the X-Men battle Proteus, a mutant with the ability to warp reality at his whim. This is as nutty as it sounds, as demonstrated when he stretches, contorts, tears, and melts a screaming Wolverine like Silly Putty.
When Proteus leaves, reality snaps back to normal, and Wolverine reforms - cowering in a fetal position. The experience is explicitly traumatic for him; the next time he’s confronted by Proteus, he has flashbacks and runs away screaming.
These scenes are all gruesome without being gory, and I think this highlights the versatility of body horror - and thus, how it can fit so well in media aimed at younger audiences. Abstracting the violence being done to these bodies, while still relishing in its depiction to the point that it becomes a spectacle, is a kid-safe way of indulging in one of the main appeals of horror: fascination.
Horror is famous for provoking the twin reactions of revulsion and interest: we cover our face with our hands, but still peek through our fingers. After all, dread is still a form of anticipation - it still yearns for release, even when you expect something “bad” (i.e. creepy, gory, etc.) to be on the other side. And this is all just as true for children as it is for adults.
See, the value of body horror here isn’t just that you can remove things that may be unsafe for kids to view (e.g. blood and guts) - it’s that you can do so while maintaining, or even tightening, your focus on horror.
Acquired taste
Of course, body horror isn’t the only way to make good horror for kids. Hell, “Cat Fingers” isn’t even the first horror episode in STEVEN UNIVERSE.
In the fifth episode, “Frybo”, Steven uses alien technology to animate a fast food mascot costume. His instruction to “just go make people eat fries” goes wrong exactly the way you’d expected it would, and the rest of the episode is spent fighting the grinning mascot as it goes on a rampage.
But the Frybo costume was creepy even before the show added veins to its face and made it bleed ketchup. The creepiest part of Frybo’s design didn’t change at all when it became a monster - namely, its over-excited smiling face.
In fact, exaggerating an emotive facial expression is a great shortcut to horror designs - and we see it all the time. There’s a scene in MASK OF THE PHANTASM (a movie accompanying BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES) where the corpse of one of the Joker’s victims is found contorted into a wild grin that sticks out in my memory, for example. (By the way, MASK OF THE PHANTASM has the same TV rating in the United States as “Cat Fingers”: TV-PG.)
The crazed mascot in “Frybo” (2013)
A disfigured body in MASK OF THE PHANTASM (1993)
Part of what makes STEVEN UNIVERSE stand out to me, and the reason why it was the origin for this essay, is that it’s a kids’ show that leans into horror surprisingly early and earnestly. It didn’t have to: unlike BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, the premise and setting and tone of STEVEN UNIVERSE don’t intuitively lean towards horror. But it seems like the creators didn’t think that horror was so anathema to their audience that it needed to be sequestered in isolated gimmick episodes.
Which brings us back to the question: Can you make good horror media for kids?
Lots of people have written about why kids watch horror media. I’ve seen explanations ranging from “there’s a special allure to the taboo, and horror is considered taboo for kids” to “horror media is a safe way to experience the adrenaline of fear” and more.
These explanations are probably all varyingly true for different people. There isn’t one answer for the appeal of horror (or any other genre), and I don’t intend to suggest there is one. But I do see an assumption that underlies a lot of these video essays and think pieces: that it’s surprising for kids to enjoy horror, that there must be something unusual going on to explain this behavior.
You see this assumption, for example, when a video essay tries to pick apart why a deliberately creepy and sometimes scary cartoon like COURAGE THE COWARDLY DOG was extremely successful in children’s programming blocks.
This assumption might seem intuitive: horror is upsetting, and no-one normally wants to be upset, right?
But there’s a value judgment sneaking into that assumption, that makes us overlook a basic observation about human experience and behavior:
Unpleasantness is relative.
It’s a lot like spicy food. I’ve seen at least as many think pieces about “why people like food that literally hurts them” as I have about “why people like media that literally upsets them”. Just like with horror, you’ll find tons of hand-wringing over whether spicy food is safe for kids (as though kids in Western China haven’t been growing up eating spicy zhajiangmian noodles this whole time, to pick just one example). It is, by the way.
I didn’t grow up eating spicy food myself, but you know what I did love? Warheads: a sour candy whose entire marketing identity is how painful it is to eat. My friends used to argue about which flavors were the most intense, chase rumors about secret super-sour ones that could only be found in the mythical Next Town Over, and taped their wrappers to our notebooks like Boy Scout badges for suffering.
When there’s a long-running, mass-produced, popular candy brand whose gimmick is “pain is fun, actually”, you gotta confront the fact that these behaviors just aren’t all that weird.
Just like vindaloo and Warheads, it’s not really particularly unusual that kids would enjoy horror. The spectrum of human experiences and tastes is so vast and so malleable, and “liking horror” isn’t so far beyond the pale that it requires some extra explanation.
Unpleasantness is relative.
The media rating organizations I mentioned earlier focused a lot on whether the media in question would be upsetting to young children. This can (understandably) lead to conflating “upsetting” with “unsafe”. To be clear, it’s important that these organizations exist, and that they accurately label and categorize media so that people can make informed decisions (including on behalf of children, who are often not in a position to choose what they are exposed to). But those informed decisions can sometimes be “let them enjoy something a little spicy.”
To quote Dr. Anca Safta, a pedriatic gastroenterologist quoted in one of the infinite “can kids eat spicy food” articles out there:
“We live in a society where we think that baby foods have to be bland, but really you don’t have to do that.”
Noted film scholar Linda Williams let her seven-year-old watch the slasher movie A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, and I don’t think she’s raising a serial killer by doing so. Indeed, contrary to the common fear-mongering that early fixations with the macabre lead to gore-obsessed perverts, Williams notes that these movies instead sparked a certain media curiosity in her kid: “he is actually more interested in talking about them than seeing them”.
