The Chilling Truth Behind Coraline

Background
Coraline is a stop motion movie that takes place when a young girl, Coraline, moves with her family to Oregon and encounters a multitude of unique neighbors. One day while Coraline is exploring her new home she finds a mysterious door and discovers an identical world.

In the world, she meets all the same characters, including her parents, but unlike the real world, everything is livelier and the people around her all have extortionary attributes. For example, her father, once a boring writer, is now an excellent gardener and pianist. Sure, the world she stumbles into might “seem like a dream come true” as a character in the movie puts it, but Coraline shortly finds out that everything is now what it seems.

Many people do not know that Coraline, the movie, is based off the novel written by Neil Gaiman. The movie incorporates a lot of the same ideas as the book, the only minor changes known by readers of the book is that Wyborn, Coraline’s new “friend,’ was not in the original and was added exclusively for the movie.

Eerie Theories
If you are unfamiliar with Coraline, then I would urge you to watch Youtuber My Little Thought Tree’s video on it, where he does an excellent analysis of the movie in over 15 minutes.

One of the biggest theories in the Coraline world is that in the end of the movie she returned the key to the other world back to the other mother. As the movie ends, Coraline goes out at night to throw the key down a well so that nobody ever gains access to it. What Coraline did not know was that the Other Mother’s hand was following her once she escaped her trap, and it followed her all the way to the well and attacked her. Just in time Wyborn and his cat companion came to the rescue and together they threw the key down the well.

What a lot of fans theorize is that that well that the key went down, is another portal to the other world, not only that but it was the original portal to the other world. Which leads us to the next theory about how the beldam or “the other mother” got to the other world in the first place.

To sum up that theory, the beldam was once a woman of high status which The Pink Palace, the place where Coraline moves to, was built for. We came to that conclusion because in The Pink Palace there is a garden that looks suspiciously like the face on the beldam in her true form. We assume that the construction of The Pink Palace and the time the beldam, or the “Great Dame” as theorizers call her, happened somewhere in the early 1900’s because that is around the time that the first ghost child disappeared. Now how the Great Dame got to the other world in the first place is up to who you ask. Some people say that she just fell by accident, while others differ that her child fell, and she went down to save them.

That theory is the one that most other theories stem from, which would lead us down so many other rabbit holes like “Is Whyborn’s cat the son of the beldam reincarnated?”, “Are there any other portals?”, and even “Did Coraline ever truly escape from the other world?” and many, many more which you could spend hours studying.

There is an extremely extensive and well thought out video put together by The Theorizer on YouTube called “CORALINE THEORY: Literally Every Mystery Solved” and he spends about 2 hours detailing theories from as early as 2015 and if you want to do a deep dive into anything like this, his channel is a wonderful place to start.

What Truly Makes Coraline So Ghostly
What truly makes Coraline so terrifying is the mystique of it. Not necessarily the beldam or the other world, but the questions it leaves you with that stick with you and haunt you. Humans feel the need to know everything and when we do not know something it makes us uneasy, which is exactly what the creators behind Coraline set out to do.

It is known that Coraline had very few cuts, and since it’s stop-motion, everything done was intentional. Every eerie shot, every time a character does a creepy twitch in the other world, everything was created intentionally to add a disturbance to the audience.

And it works! “When I rewatched Coraline for the first time since I was like 10, I really remembered how scary it was…maybe not scary but there is something so cool and unsettling about it,” said Juliet Jollymore. Tewnet Amakelew added, “I didn’t like it. The other world was so scary because everybody had buttons sewn into their eyes… the ending was not for me; I only liked the cat.”