The words “children’s horror” don’t connect for most — until they consider Roald Dahl’s books. His works have been labeled everything from masterful storytelling to terrifying and harmful.
Disney’s version of “The BFG” sanitizes Dahl’s macabre tale of a race of giants that attack sleeping children.
Dahl wrote “James and the Giant Peach” and “Matilda,” among other stories. The most recent of his books to become a blockbuster film is “The BFG” — or “big friendly giant” (the other giants are happy to kill and eat any child).
Directed by Steven Spielberg, Disney’s onscreen version of “The BFG” sanitizes Dahl’s macabre tale of a race of giants that attack sleeping children.
For example, the film spares viewers from seeing said giants — with names such as Bonecruncher, Bloodbottler, and Childchewer — devour kids.
The BFG does, however — spoiler alert! — snatch Sophie, the story’s heroine, from an orphanage and take her to his homeland. There she learns that his task in life is to collect, record, and deliver pleasant dreams to children. She helps him with this task, but the evil giants are never too far behind, hoping to gnaw on her as well.
Sophie gets the Queen of England to help them in their battle against the wicked giants. Good finally wins, but evil puts up an intense and frightening fight.
This storyline is common for Dahl, whose plots share similar motifs. Children are always in danger and usually live in poverty. Many are orphans who suffer loneliness and abuse. Adults are, more often than not, wickedly cruel or stupidly inept. And though good wins, evil and fear are never far away, biting at protagonists.
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In the book “Roald Dahl and Philosophy,” the authors explain Dahl’s brand of storytelling, saying his work “leans to the horrific.”
One wonders what type of person conjures such children’s stories. A brief overview of Dahl’s own life might shed some light.
Born in Wales in 1916, Dahl had already lost his 7-year-old sister and his father by the time he was 4. Soon he was sent to an English boarding school, which he described as tyrannical and abusive. As children’s writer Michael Rosen has said of Dahl, “Those sadistic parents in his fiction are a reframing of his own experience.”
After graduation, Dahl shunned college and traveled the world as an oil salesman for Shell. Later he was an RAF fighter ace during WWII, though he sympathized with Hitler .
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After harrowing battles and a crash landing that left Dahl in need of a hip replacement (he would eventually keep his old femur head in a jar in his writing shed), he moved to the United States, where he married actress Patricia Neal in 1953.
The two had five children. Their only son was critically injured at 4 months old, requiring round-the-clock care. Neal herself had three brain hemorrhages and also required Dahl’s constant care to recover. And Olivia, his oldest daughter, died of measles at age 7. “Limp with grief” over Olivia, Dahl reportedly took his pain out on second daughter Tess, who has told the British media that her father was a furious man unwilling to seek emotional therapy.
Still, critics of Dahl say that his darkness did not come from his experiences, but from his own personality. Book reviewer Kathryn Hughes once told the Guardian, “No matter how you spin it … Roald Dahl was an absolute sod. Crashing through life like a big, bad child, he managed to alienate pretty much everyone he ever met.”
Though he made a mark on children’s literature in 1964 with “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory,” Dahl regularly wrote pornography for “Playboy” and strove to write for adults, not children.
Friend and fellow writer Noel Coward once said of Dahl’s adult fiction, “The stories are brilliant and the imagination is fabulous. Unfortunately, there is, in all of them, an underlying streak of cruelty and macabre unpleasantness, and a curiously adolescent emphasis on sex.”
Dahl in fact resented being branded a children’s author and severely berated his children’s literature peers in a New York Times article. Still, he continued writing children’s literature — perhaps because he grew to enjoy it, or perhaps because he was subconsciously trying to heal his own fractured childhood. Today, ironically, he is considered one of the most beloved children’s authors of all time.
Though it’s impossible to say with certainty that Dahl somehow translated his own experiences and bitterness into stories, his regular themes of unhappiness, cruelty, the macabre, and fear do make one speculate.
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