It’s spooky season yet again, and for many people that means it’s time to watch spooky movies. There are so many traditional Halloween movies that make you want to cuddle up in a blanket with a mug full of hot chocolate to complete the mood. One that takes most kids in our generation back to their childhoods is Coraline. Coraline Is a creepy classic that we all had nightmares about, but watched over and over again nonetheless. The animation is amazing, and so are the discrete little details so cleverly hidden in the background.

The directors of Coraline had some very unique ideas, and with a film like this, there are definitely going to be some conspiracy theories. The first one, which is probably the one I’ve heard most often, is that the Other Mother might’ve won after all. At the end of the movie when Coraline’s family and their neighbors are drinking lemonade, the cat is shown disappearing into the Pink Palace sign. Since the cat could only do that in the Other World, this scene suggests that the magic is still there. Another example can be observed in the middle of the movie when Coraline goes back to the “Normal World,” she finds her parents stuck inside a snowglobe, which obviously doesn’t happen in real life. Because of these two scenes it’s believed that Coraline was in the Other World that whole time, and that the Other Mother conjured up the image of the snow globe to trick her.

The second theory that makes a lot of sense, is the one that claims that Wybie’s grandma, Mrs. Lovat, knew about the Other World and that she only rented the apartment out to the Jones family because they had a daughter. When Coraline meets Wybie, he’s surprised that his grandma rented it out to her family and said, “My grandma, she owns the Pink Palace, won’t rent to people with kids.” When Coraline asks why, he says that he’s not allowed to talk about it. This drew fans to believe that Mrs. Lovat knew that the time was coming for the Other Mother to strike and she wanted to protect Wybie so she used Coraline as bait instead. 

There are also clever details in the background which you might’ve missed, but are meant to foreshadow the rest of the plot. On the Welcome Home cake that the Other Mother made for Coraline there is a huge hint about her plan: There’s one loop on the “o” in “Welcome,” but two on the “o” in “Home.” According to Graphology, the study of handwriting, when there’s a double loop on an O it means that the person who wrote it is lying, which suggests that Coraline is in fact welcome in the Other World, but that it’s not her home. Yet another important detail would be the portraits of the silhouettes of children in the Other Mother’s dining room, as they most likely represent other children who she’s taken in the past who are still trapped in the Other World. 

Coraline is a very well thought out and amazingly portrayed movie. Everything hidden behind the horror is crucial to our understanding of the story. When we were younger we never realized that all of these little features were there because we were too busy hiding from the movie under our blankets. A movie like this takes a lot of thought and creativity, and it was drawn out in a way that conveys to the audience perfectly the idea that we should be careful, because things aren’t always as they seem.