Monster House

If anyone was considering taking their cousins/friend’s kiddies/children to see Monster House, I’d like to suggest that you don’t.

This movie upset me so much that it made me cry and I had to lecture the two lovely little girls that I took to the movie with when it was over, trying to hammer it in that violence is not a way to deal with angry, hurt and psychopathic people. They need love and understanding, not to be blown up by dynamite.

The movie was going along just fine until it started explaining itself: the monstrous house, which is an enormous mouth that wants to devour children and eats their toys, is actually the soul of dead obese woman who used to be in a freak show. People threw things at her and when she was rescued by a man who fell in love with her, local children still threw stuff at her while he was building her a house. She rages at the children and falls off the house and dies – then haunts the house. The husband that falls in love with her, instead of being a hero for loving a fat woman, is a pathetic enabler who has to “let go” and destroy his wife/house in order to free the neighbourhood children from the tyranny of the house. In the end the three kids whose quest it is to kill the house end up dynamiting the house to oblivion.

Apalling!!! The tiny time devoted to showing the fat woman abused was enough to make me start crying for the house. The movie portrays fat women as evil (the other women are stylised skinny), does not demonstrate in a way that small kids would understand the link between the woman being abused and the anger and hurt that fuels her devouring hunger for kiddies and doesn’t show any useful, healthy or sympathetic way that the kids could have helped her to heal.

Obviously the movie was written and produced by men.

Please don’t let the kids in your life absorb these lessons.

Rachel F