Episode 31: Coraline (2009)

Theme: Creepy Movies for Kids
Hosts: Oz & Curtis

This week, Oz and Curtis kick off Creepy Movies for Kids with Coraline — the stop-motion fever dream that teaches children an essential life lesson: if someone offers to replace your eyes with buttons… politely decline.

Join your two favorite kid-friendly horror guides as they unravel:

• A movie marriage of ParaNorman, Alice in Wonderland, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness — because apparently every children’s film now requires at least one alternate dimension and one emotionally damaged protagonist.

• Why Coraline’s real parents are so aggressively uninterested in her existence they make the Peanuts adults seem attentive.

• How the Other World is basically the MCU if Kevin Feige were a spider demon with a sewing fetish.

• Wybie, the neighbor kid built entirely out of neck creaks and social anxiety.

• The neighbors downstairs, who deliver both cryptic warnings and the most anatomically confusing puppet burlesque show ever put on film.

• The Cat, voiced by Keith David, who once again proves he deserves an Oscar for “Best Use of Silk-Smooth Sarcasm.”

• And of course, the Beldam — the only villain in cinema history who looks like she could kill you and critique your sewing technique.

From mouse circuses to ghost children to a final showdown involving a severed robo-hand and a very unlucky well, Oz and Curtis dive into why Coraline works so well as a gateway horror film. It’s spooky, it’s weird, and it gently prepares kids for the day they inevitably stumble into an actual horror movie and realize, “Oh… this is what Oz & Curtis were preparing me for.”

Final Verdict:

Oz — 7 buttons
Curtis — 25 taxidermied miniature schnauzers
Both — Not accepting any dolls EVER again.