More laziness than creativity in new horror subgenre featuring familiar storybook characters as killers

The title character of “Pinocchio Unstrung.”

And they died gorily ever after.

That’s the way stories once meant for children often seem to end today as, rewritten for adult audiences, they feature fairy-tale favorites picking up chainsaws, comic-strip heroes brandishing axes, and nursery-school characters on murderous rampages.

What was once a bad-taste joke — maybe you’re unlucky enough to remember the gory, big-screen “reimagining” of an old kids show, “The Banana Splits Movie,” back in 2019 — has become a strange and pervasive movie trend.

I noticed it the other night as I was searching for a dose of my usual comfort food — an old-fashioned, black-and-white monster movie. I didn’t expect to find one — streamers seem to abhor anything more than a few years old, which is why I’m buying more physical media than ever — but I thought I’d see what was available.

Having quickly exhausted the offerings on Netflix and Tubi, I turned to Paramount+. I clicked on “horror.”

It was a horror, all right. “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.” “Bambi: The Reckoning.” “Popeye’s Revenge.”

And that was just the first row of titles. The list went on and on, with some childhood favorites even inspiring multiple monstrous films. Three movies featured fiction’s most famously accident-prone siblings, climaxing with “Jack & Jill: The Hills of Hell.”

A poster for “Tooth Fairy: Queen of Pain.”

Another clumsy character had his own triple-feature, including “The Madness of Humpty Dumpty.” And there were plenty of one-offs, too, such as “Tooth Fairy: Queen of Pain” and “Easter Bunny Massacre.”

It’s not just this single streamer, either. Apparently, the Mother Gruesome trend has become so popular it’s now a popular genre, inspiring its own specialty production company, which has dubbed its weird world the “Twisted Childhood Universe.” (Its latest, “Pinocchio Unstrung,” just debuted on DVD and digital; see trailer below.)

To be fair, many of these tales were pretty grim stuff in their original versions, full of mutilations and murders. You wouldn’t read a nursery schooler the real “Little Red Riding Hood” unless you wanted to give them nightmares. (In one telling of “Cinderella,” the stepsisters cut off their toes trying to fit into that glass slipper; the original version of “Pinocchio” ends with the title character lynched, his little wooden body dangling from a tree.)

Honestly, animators have spent years taking the grim out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

So yes, there is a long tradition of violence in children’s fiction. Also of horror stories creating fear by making the familiar strange, unearthing the discomfort in what used to be comforting.

Before “Psycho,” the worst thing travelers could imagine finding in a cheap motel was bedbugs. Then Norman Bates added something far worse. And since then, countless films have demonized dolls, birds, even television sets.

The icons of children’s literature, though, were generally safe from horror-movie exploitation.

For a while. But then, in 1984, we got a serial killer dressed up in a Santa suit in “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” Two years later, Stephen King published his novel “It,” about a demonic clown.

Greasepaint grotesques had always been a little creepy, honestly. But a blood-soaked bozo quickly became a cliché. And now Pennywise has plenty of murderous company.

A poster for “Easter Bunny Massacre.”

It’s not hard to figure out what perfect nightmare of a storm led up to this current onslaught. Streamers need enormous supplies of cheap programming. Cheap horror films need a snappy title and a gimmick. And with all of these familiar characters in the public domain, the transformation of bedtime stories into deadtime stories was predictable.

Undoubtedly there will only be more as the years go on, too, as copyrights continue to expire. A rabid Snoopy, chasing Charlie Brown off the baseball field? A feral and ferocious Hobbes, red in tooth and claw, chowing down on Calvin? Horton hunts a human? Sadly, it’s probably only a matter of time.

But while it might seem inevitable, does it have to be inescapable? From the little I’ve seen of this recent crop of movies, the imagination rarely extends beyond the cheap shock of the title. There isn’t much there for any truly adult viewer beyond the unexpected crudity of a familiar name now attached to a bloody killer — as easy a shock as a four-letter word.

(And speaking of shocks, I do worry a little about an unattended child, or their uninformed babysitter, looking for a kids’ movie and picking one of these monstrosities by mistake. Parents, consider yourselves warned.)

Less obvious and perhaps more widely worrisome is how all this speaks to the general coarsening of our pop culture, in which everything has to be dark and dangerous — even stories once suitable for the youngest of audiences.

Captain America and Superman may still uphold old-fashioned ideals, but they are exceptions in a world where most superheroes are damaged and dysfunctional. Legendary good guys like Robin Hood are now grimy outsiders. Where is the escape in escapism if everything is coldly ironic, or bitterly cynical?

We need entertainment and adventure, and while I would argue that we need horror films, too — in times like these, catharsis doesn’t come easy — they should spring from some inspiration deeper than vandalizing a beloved classic. Spray-painting a dirty word on a nursery wall isn’t transgressive; it’s just gross.

Why not let our innocents still hold on to their innocence as long as they can? Believe me, it will be gone soon enough. And that’s no fairy tale.

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