Why Dracula Isn't Scary

Children are often scared (or not scared) by odd things. At around the age of five, my favorite movie was Dracula, and I watched him gleefully appear on the screen. In contrast, the movie that scared me so much I could not watch it all the way through was the cartoon Dot and the Kangaroo, because Dot and the Kangaroo discover mysterious cave ruins with cave drawings of a creature called the "bunyip." The movie never even actually shows this mysterious bunyip personage, leaving my parents moderately baffled why I ran out of the room each time the movie was in danger of making a passing reference to the bunyip.

At this point in my graduate student career, I like to think that these childhood fears indicate I had already grasped (at a rudimentary level) an awareness of the sublime as defined by Burke and explicated by Radcliffe. In her essay "The Supernatural in Poetry," Anne Radcliffe, a pioneer of the Gothic, distinguishes between two types of fear, "terror" and "horror." According to Radcliffe, "Horror" is associated with the graphic and the certain--for example, Dracula sucking blood. Granted, she doesn't mention Dracula, but trust me, the blood was graphic, and it was way cool! "Terror," however, is associated with the uncertain and obscure, what cannot be seen. Terror is the bunyip hidden beneath your bed. Terror is the poisonous iocaine powder that is tasteless, odorless, but smellable if you are an expert tracker. Terror is an invisible six-feet tall rabbit named Harvey looming menacingly over you and making invisible threatening motions at you in a bunny-like manner.

Radcliffe goes on to make the startling claim that "They must be men of very cold imaginations ... with whom certainty is more terrible than surmise....neither Shakspeare nor Milton by their fictions, nor Mr. Burke by his reasoning, anywhere looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime." To paraphrase Radcliffe: "They must be children of very cold imaginations ... with whom Dracula is more terrifying than Dot and the Kangaroo.... Dot and the Kangaroo is a source of the sublime, and therefore not appropriate for children under the age of ten." (In Edmund Burke's philosophy, the "sublime" was associated with fear and a sense of awe, and is thus distinct from "beauty," which is more pleasing.) I think the moral we should draw from all of this is that, when children are capable of deep thought and imaginative power, we need to show them movies with a lot of graphic violence and dismemberment so they aren't scared.