**This piece contains minor spoilers for the TV miniseries “Over the Garden Wall.”**
We should scare our children more, starting with our television screens.
As an insufferable television and film aficionado, this writer admits that even the milder episodes of “Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!” unsettled him as a kid, driving him to leap behind his couch and cower until the credits rolled. The hypocrisy is clear.
Fear is healthy and normal. It’s also a fundamental block of emotional development in children. When present, it means your body is working overtime to remove you from a potentially harmful situation.
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This feeling can also arise when a human is unfamiliar or stepping into what they believe is “strange” territory. Averting associating fear of unfamiliarity with negativity is crucial for a child.
In other words, to live in an accepting world, it is good for children not to fear the unknown.
Enter “Over the Garden Wall.”
Opening with the hypnotic “Into the Unknown” played on a baby grand piano by a well-dressed frog, the gorgeously animated miniseries grasps the audience for a tight two hours filled with humor, horror, philosophy and waves of green amphibians.
The show follows two young half-brothers wandering through a vast, dangerous forest known simply as “the Unknown.” As they trek through this Sleepy Hollow-reminiscent vision of “Olde Americana,” they quickly realize that nothing is as it seems.
Visual media can become the fairy tales of yesteryear, and “Over the Garden Wall” proves itself a worthy spiritual descendant of those thematically rich and often quite disturbing stories. The series is undoubtedly scary, complete with jump scares, menacing imagery and a slew of creepy character designs meant to unnerve.
However, such scares are massively beneficial in developing well-rounded children.
“Over the Garden Wall” has plenty of them. A menacing shadow creature, only known as The Beast, constantly pursues our heroes. A young girl transforms into a hideous wailing banshee. A cult of pumpkin-wearing skeletons won’t let our heroes leave their town.
These encounters are always animated brilliantly to accentuate the weirdest and most off-putting features of the creatures inhabiting the Unknown. However, the real tension is created by what the audience doesn’t know — the fear of the unknown.
Why are these odd townsfolk so off-putting? Why is this gracious yet hideously appearing character so menacing? Nothing is as it seems.
We, as humans, almost always judge books by their covers. “Over the Garden Wall” challenges this impulse better than any other animated media.
What we believe to be a scary and villainous character may turn out to be empathetic and compassionate despite their frightful appearance. By turning the audience’s expectations upon their heads, the younger viewers’ acceptance of the mysterious concept of the “other” is expanded and enriched.
This is true for any piece of spooky television or cinema. By conquering our fears on the screen, we also redraw the lines of what makes us comfortable. When instilled from a young age, it has the potential to cultivate a generation overflowing with tolerance and kindness.
This is not to say every piece of horror media is good for a child’s brain. This writer claims no responsibility for the traumatic effects of showing “The Exorcist” to a 7-year-old. However, spookier media offers a setting where a child may overcome their fears without any true danger.
Such an overcoming of fear, even on a small scale, can wildly invigorate a child’s emotional intelligence.
From old abandoned shacks to the mysterious mist-laden moors of the forest, the Unknown is littered with what would initially be interpreted as foreign and dangerous. Alongside our heroes, we conquer these fears one by one.
Through the final musical sequence of the series, we reprise “Into the Unknown” as we revisit every uncanny location revealed across the runtime. Now, we recognize these places not as foreign but as familiar. The simple act of encountering each place was enough to quell the fear.
As a child, the whole world is “the Unknown.” As we grow, we can either approach it like the cynical older brother, Wirt, or the innocent and joyous younger brother, Greg. There is great merit to both approaches, and the opposing approaches in the show are both met with varying pleasant and unpleasant results.
Interestingly, “Over the Garden Wall” is often said to provide a mysterious feeling of familiar comfort to older viewers. Perhaps this is because when we conquer our fears and are rewarded with a new perspective, we are closely bonded with that experience. It was our conscious choice to make ourselves uncomfortable and learn something new.
This phenomenon can occur even in the controlled environment of your living room, in front of a TV.
To truly conquer the very human fear of the unknown, maybe we, especially our youth, can take a page from “Over the Garden Wall.” Nothing is as it seems … and that’s okay.
Aaron is a junior in Media.
