It’s not every animated film that features zombies, witches, and corpses falling on top of troubled children. But, just in time for Halloween, LAIKA pictures gives us ParaNorman, about a troubled little boy who saves his small-town from zombies. As I watched this movie, I couldn’t help but wonder if this movie was less about zombie wars and more about culture wars.
The film introduces us to a marginalized and bullied middle-school boy, Norman, who sees dead people. In fact, he speaks and converses with the ghosts of the dead, but seems socially paralyzed around the living. He hears his parents arguing about him in the next room, mostly because his father is embarrassed of him. “He’s afraid,” Norman’s mother reassures him. “Not afraid of you; he’s afraid for you.”
As the movie goes on, Norman’s town is threatened by a curse that a hanged witch (the town of Blythe Hollow is obviously based on Salem, Massachusetts; kitschy tourist industry and all) pronounced on the village some three-hundred years earlier. The zombies aren’t just any old disembodied corpses, searching for brains. They are the re-animated remains of the Puritan judge and jurors who sent this “witch” to her death. In the end, we learn that the alleged sorceress was, in fact, a child who, like Norman, just seemed “different.”
On the one hand, I had to smile a bit at the casting of the zombies as Puritans. After all, Massachusetts Puritans didn’t just persecute witches but also my Baptist ancestors. On the other hand, though, I wondered whether the Puritans here weren’t a stand-in for all of us who claim a Christian witness in contemporary America.
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Jesus once told of a wealthy man who went on a long journey. Before the man left, he entrusted his wealth to three servants. To one he gave five units, to another just two units, and to the last he gave only one. Each received “according to his ability,” Jesus said. The servant with the [...]
