The Spirit of the Beehive

The horror genre is known for excess, darkness, and worst possible scenarios. Frequently it is a genre of exploitation, where violence and gore make the dimmest inklings of audience imaginations explicit in on-screen terror. The Spirit of the Beehive may be the gentlest, quietest, and most subdued horror film possible. Because the protagonists are children, their delicate perspectives are heightened to a place where everything is unsettling, even though nothing really happens. The film portrays this fear as perfectly real and legitimate, however. Those horror genre feelings of dread, worry, and fright are still there, shared by the spectators and the six-year-old protagonist, creating an empathetic truth about the experience of childhood, with all its wonders and anxieties.

Imagination is not just the realm of beauty, wonder, and internal power and discovery. It is also the realm in which the intangible and the hard to describe animate themselves into something present and haunting, even actualized in particularly innocent minds. In this film, those psychological animations are kept from being explicit (at least until the end). Instead, Ana’s hard, somber stares and wide eyes offer insight into her inner thoughts and feelings. Without her ever articulating her fears and without her ever quite understanding the implications of the frightening things she experiences, we (the spectators) are kept at her eye level. Her smallness is our smallness. It was extraordinary how this film reverted me back to my childhood; at Ana’s age I had Ana’s mindset. My imagination was vivid and active and often joyful, but the other side of that joy was a subtle, passive, omnipresent, gentle dread.

Some films tend to condescend and cheapen this aspect of childhood imagination by revealing that, “See? There’s nothing to be afraid of!” But in Spirit of the Beehive, Ana’s young mind does not make these things scarier than they “really are”. She simply recognizes the threats that abound, including the fictional ones. Indicated and catalyzed by an afternoon at the movies, Frankenstein represents the stories (and, modernly, the films/television) we expose children to. Almost archetypally, fairytales, folktales, and scripture stories all have a frightening aspect to them, and these narratives stick inside young minds as they struggle to make sense of them. In whispered, tucked-in conversations Ana asks why the monster killed the girl, and why the people killed the monster. But her teacher is her sister Isabel, unreliable because of her own naïveté and because teasing is so much fun. So without answers to her questions Ana believes some things that are not quite true, and cannot quite let them go.

Most of the threats in The Spirit of the Beehive are without an actor of the threat. Footsteps in the night belong to their father, but without seeing him pacing the floor above, the noise is frightening. Don José is not real, but he does not have eyes. He is a teaching tool, according to Ana’s teacher, but to Ana he is an uncanny thing, a disembodied, two-dimensional presence that vaguely scares her. The poisonous mushroom is a deception and an interruption. “It smells so good,” whispers Ana as they stare at it on the forest floor. Perhaps if it had been up to her, she would have eaten it up. The train is dangerous and frightening because of its huge size and huge mass and amazing speed. She is so small compared to it. Ana even has a childlike glimpse of her own mortality when she leaves her head on the rail for one more second than Isabel feels comfortable with. Morbid curiosity is a motif in this film ever pulling Ana closer in, rather than repelling her away from the things that could hurt her.

The greatest potential threat of all is the soldier Ana finds and takes care of. In this case, her imagination has been so fixated on the spirit Isabel told her about that this man is something familiar to her, and not more frightening than he is exciting and interesting. Her curiosity and her sympathy and her youngness lead her into a dangerous situation, and when sternly confronted by her father she runs away.

The climax of the film is the only time Ana is outside of her house at night, wandering alone in the dark forest, afraid of the punishment she thinks she will receive. The sequence is a culmination of fears as she sees a poisonous mushroom, and then, in the reflection of a pond, believes she sees Frankenstein. This is the only time Ana’s inner space is made physical and exterior for us to participate in. At the height of her experience with danger and fear, the real and the fictional are embodied identically, resulting in a traumatic shock she will overcome with time, we are reassured.

Where other horror films tend to dwell in small, dark, cluttered spaces, The Spirit of the Beehive roams in broad, barren landscapes and the girls’ large, beautiful, mostly empty home. Where other horror films revel in ugliness and darkness, The Spirit of the Beehive is filled with golden light and lovely faces. Where in Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (another horror film about children’s imaginations) the threats are manifest in highly physical, textural entities and spaces, The Spirit of the Beehive the threats are usually real things, realistically rendered, and implicitly heightened by the perception of a very young person.

Sideways Stories from Wayside School

In a pessimistic and reductive overstatement, adults are the culturally preferred binary, the ones in control who create rules and insist that the rules are followed for the sake of logic, justice, and general order. Children are the binary under the control of adult authority and within adult systems, whose nature is supposed to be anarchic, perhaps good, but inherently in conflict with rules intending assimilation and obedience. These cultural perceptions are alternately (and often simultaneously) affirmed and problematized by Louis Sachar in Sideways Stories from Wayside School. Sideways Stories, written by an adult for children, and about both adults and children, is a book that breaks the rules over and over again. For a piece geared towards third to fifth graders, the conventions of a chapter book are subverted in the form, tone, and content, resulting in an exercise in literary experimentation. The experimentation throughout Sideways Stories from Wayside School results in a chaotic, fast-paced, funny, and sometimes unsettling children’s chapter book that deals with absurdity and the underlying truthfulness of the illogical and the irrational.

            Sideways Stories is a series of vignettes rather than a linear narrative. In fact, perhaps the most linear aspect of the book is the fact that new information is learned about characters as we go on. But this is also an experimental trait of the novel, since each chapter is about a different person, and several chapters function to reveal the very assumptions we make when we enter a narrative. It is interesting which reveals are new to only the reader, for instance, the fact that Nancy is a boy; his classmates know this and do not think his name is unusual, but our assumptions about genders and identity are put into question with the first sentence of Nancy’s chapter. Other information revealed in the story is new to both the diegetic characters and us as the readers, and odd mysteries are revealed and resolved within and outside of the story world simultaneously. A character referred to as Sammy is, in fact, a dead rat hidden under a pile of coats. Sammy’s ability to speak and the class’s ignorance of his true identity make this story preposterous. This is Sacar pointing out that stories and books themselves are a platform for experimentation and nonsense. Because the information is often incomplete in Sideways Stories, the book is unreliable, and so the reader must adjust his or her imagination accordingly. In doing so, the absurdity of the narrative construct itself is transparent. (Even the physicality of the medium is put into play; the reader must turn the book upside down to be able to read what John is saying when he stands on his head, since he can only read upside down.) The result of these subversions is that of surprise and humor, and perhaps a bit of mistrust.

            But at Wayside School, skepticism is warranted. The absurdity here is fluid. Sometimes the entire class is acting absurd. Sometimes only one person is. Sometimes only one person is outside of the absurdity. Adults can be the absurd players. Children can be the absurd players. Groups and systems are sometimes presented as illogical structures, while sometimes individuals are the problem. The variety of the absurdity and its iterations are endless, and the reactions to and results of surreal and illogical happenings are just as varied.