9 / 10
Official trailer
The Film That Caught Me Off Guard
ParaNorman looks like a zombie comedy for kids, and for about an hour it’s one: jokes about bad horror films, a boy who talks to ghosts, a chubby best friend and a town full of shambling corpses. Then it turns into something much sadder and kinder, and I’ve loved it ever since the first time it caught me off guard.
Chris Butler and Sam Fell directed it at Laika, the Portland studio behind Coraline, and Butler wrote the script. It came out in 2012, did respectable business and was nominated for the Oscar for best animated feature. I give it a 9, and it’s the Laika film I return to most.
A Boy Who Sees the Dead
Norman Babcock is eleven and lives in Blithe Hollow, a small Massachusetts town that makes its living from a three-hundred-year-old witch legend: witch statues, witch souvenirs, a school play about the witch trial. Norman can see and talk to the dead, including his grandmother, who still sits on the sofa knitting, and everyone in town thinks he’s a freak, his own family included.
The film opens on a cheesy zombie movie playing on the family television, complete with bad dubbing and a boom mic dipping into shot. The camera pulls back to Norman watching it with his dead grandmother, and his father shouts from the kitchen that he’s talking to her again. In three minutes the film has told you its tone, its hero and his problem, and done it with a joke about horror films.
The Family
His father, voiced by Jeff Garlin, is embarrassed by him and frightened for him in equal measure.
His mother, Leslie Mann, tries to smooth things over. His sister Courtney, voiced by Anna Kendrick, is vain and furious and, when it counts, completely loyal. The grandmother on the sofa, voiced by Elaine Stritch, is the only one who understands him, and she’s the one nobody else can hear.
It’s a portrait of a family who love a child they don’t understand, and it’s never sentimental about it. The father’s fear that his son is strange, and his attempts to make him normal, are recognizable to anyone who has been a different kind of child, and the film lets him be wrong without making him a villain.
That makes the ending more moving. When the family finally sees Norman clearly, there’s no big speech, just a small moment of acceptance. It matters because the film has been honest about how hard it was for them to get there.
The Uncle
Norman’s great-uncle, Mr. Prenderghast, voiced by John Goodman, is the wild-haired, unwashed old man everyone in town thinks is mad. He can see the dead too, and he tells Norman the truth: every year, someone has to read a story at the witch’s grave to keep her curse asleep, and he’s been doing it for decades. He’s dying, and the job is Norman’s now.
Then he dies, and Norman has to prise the book out of his stiffened corpse in one of the funniest and grossest scenes in any family film. Afterwards, the uncle’s ghost keeps turning up to give instructions, including once from a toilet cubicle. Goodman is terrific in about six minutes of screen time. The scene is a brilliantly odd introduction to the film’s supernatural rules. The dead in ParaNorman are messy, grumpy and inconvenient, and they need things from the living. That idea pays off in ways the audience doesn’t see coming.
For Writers
The uncle dies early and keeps giving instructions as a ghost, and prising the book from his corpse is played as comedy. The film treats death as ordinary. It’s exactly how Norman experiences it.
When you write a story about something frightening, humor can make the frightening parts more frightening. The reader relaxes, and then the story takes the ground from under them.
Find the most ordinary way your character could experience something extraordinary, and write that scene first. Let the reader get comfortable before the story turns. For more, see my article on character deaths that matter.
Neil
Neil is the film’s secret weapon. He’s round, cheerful, bullied at school for his weight and his allergies, and he responds to everything with unbreakable optimism. He decides that Norman is his friend, and nothing Norman does can change his mind. He has a dog whose ghost still follows him around. That helps.
When the zombies arrive, Neil treats it as the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to him. Tucker Albrizzi gives him perfect timing, and every scene he’s in is lighter for it. The film also gives him real dignity: his kindness, the one quality nobody in town values, turns out to be the one that matters most.
He also gets one of the film’s best lines about bullying, a cheerful, matter-of-fact observation that being picked on is simply part of life, and his refusal to be bitter about it makes Norman, and the audience, look at their own grudges differently.
The Dead Rise
Norman is too late with the story, and the curse wakes seven dead men from their graves: the Puritan judges who condemned the witch three centuries ago. They lurch into town, and Norman, Neil, Courtney, her crush Mitch and the school bully Alvin end up fleeing them in a van.
The zombies are grotesque, rotting, falling apart as they move, and they’re also pathetic. They moan, they stumble, and they seem to be trying to say something. The film plays it for comedy and slowly lets you notice that these monsters are more frightened than frightening. The design is a clever piece of misdirection. The zombies look like the monsters of every horror film Norman loves, so the audience expects them to be the villains. The film spends the next half hour taking that expectation apart.
The Mob
The sharpest turn comes when the zombies reach the town center. The townspeople, led by the school drama teacher and a crowd of armed locals, turn into a howling mob and go after them with torches, shotguns and anything else they can find.
It’s played for laughs until you realize the film is showing you exactly what happened three hundred years ago, with the roles reversed. The living are the monsters. The dead are the ones asking for mercy. For a family film, that’s a bold idea, and ParaNorman commits to it completely.
This is the film’s moral center. Fear, the film argues, turns ordinary people into the monsters of their own stories. It happened in Blithe Hollow three centuries ago, and it happens again in a single night. I think this is the bravest scene in any Laika film, and the moment the torches turn on the dead is the moment ParaNorman stops being a kids’ zombie comedy for me.
For Writers
The mob scene reverses the story’s roles. The townspeople become the monsters and the zombies become the victims, and the audience realizes what happened three hundred years ago.
Identify the injustice at the root of your story, then write a present-day scene where the same thing nearly happens again, with the sympathies reversed. If history repeats in your story, telling the reader it’s happening again is weak. Showing the same pattern with the roles swapped is far stronger.
Agatha
The witch turns out to be Agatha Prenderghast, an eleven-year-old girl who could see the dead, like Norman, and whom the town hanged for it. The seven zombies are the men who condemned her, and they’ve come back to beg Norman to stop her curse because they know what they did.
The climax takes place inside a storm that Agatha has become, a furious face of lightning over the forest. Norman walks into it alone and finds a little girl sitting under a tree, and the two of them talk. The animators made her half-formed and flickering, a child made of anger and electricity. Norman doesn’t defeat her. He tells her a story about a girl who was treated badly, and lets her rest. Laika has made few scenes as moving.
Their conversation is the heart of the film, and it’s the scene that justifies the 9 on its own.
Norman doesn’t fight her. He listens, tells her he understands and helps her remember who she was before she became a curse. I find it almost unbearably sad, a boy talking a murdered girl down from her own rage, and I’m grateful the film trusts children to sit through it.
For Writers
Norman ends the curse by talking to Agatha. He hears her story and tells it back to her. That’s enough.
Let your hero win by understanding. Write the scene where the antagonist’s case is finally heard in full, and make the hearing the thing that ends the conflict. In a climax, a fight is the easy ending. If your antagonist has a real grievance, defeating them throws away the reader’s sympathy and your best idea.
Printed Faces
Every frame was built and moved by hand, and ParaNorman was the first stop-motion feature to use 3D color printers to make its characters’ faces. Norman alone had thousands of printed faces, swapped frame by frame, giving him a range of expression no hand-sculpted puppet could manage. Laika later received a special technical award for the technique.
You don’t notice it while you’re watching. That’s the achievement. The faces feel alive, and nothing about them looks mechanical. The town looks lived in and a bit shabby, the zombies are wonderfully disgusting, and the storm sequence is some of the most beautiful stop-motion ever filmed.
Laika has kept pushing the technique ever since. Every film it has made shows the same obsessive care. ParaNorman is where the approach first reached a big audience, and it still looks great more than a decade later.
A Love Letter to Horror
Chris Butler clearly grew up on horror films, and ParaNorman is full of affection for them: the zombie movie on the television, horror posters and toys all over Norman’s bedroom, a ringtone borrowed from a famous horror score, and a synthesiser-heavy soundtrack by Jon Brion that nods to John Carpenter.
It never mocks the genre. It argues that the monsters in those films were often misunderstood and that fear turns ordinary people cruel.
There’s also a small joke at the very end, when Mitch, the jock Courtney has been chasing, mentions his boyfriend. It was the first openly gay character in a mainstream animated film, handled so lightly that most people barely noticed.
A Town That Sells Its Crime
Blithe Hollow makes its living from the witch. There’s a statue of her in the square, witch souvenirs in the shops, witch-themed signs on the businesses and a school play every year that re-enacts her trial as a piece of harmless local color.
The town has turned the worst thing it ever did into a brand, and nobody in it ever stops to ask what really happened to the woman at the center of the story. The legend pays the bills, and questioning it would cost money.
The film shows this without comment in its early scenes, and it’s easy to laugh along. Norman’s classmates rehearse the play in bad costumes. Tourists buy key rings. The local drama teacher treats the trial as a chance to show off. It’s only later, when Norman learns who the witch really was, that the souvenirs start to look obscene.
That’s the film’s quietest and sharpest idea. Communities that commit an injustice rarely forget it.
They retell it, soften it and sell it, until the victim becomes a cartoon and the crime becomes a tradition. ParaNorman is about a boy who insists on the original story, and the town that would much rather keep the gift shop.
For a family film, it’s a surprisingly grown-up theme, and it’s handled with a light touch. Children will enjoy the jokes about tourist tat. Adults will think about the real towns that have done exactly the same thing with their own history, often on the streets where the injustice happened.
Laika After ParaNorman
ParaNorman was Laika’s second feature, after Coraline, and it established the studio’s pattern: dark, strange, handmade stories that take children seriously. The Boxtrolls followed in 2014, Kubo and the Two Strings in 2016 and Missing Link in 2019, each pushing the printed-face technique further. None of them has quite the balance of ParaNorman. It’s funnier than Kubo and more emotional than The Boxtrolls. It’s the Laika film that best shows what the studio can do when comedy and grief sit side by side.
Where ParaNorman Falls Short
The middle runs a little long, with a stretch of chasing and bickering in the van before the film’s real story arrives. And it’s a hard sell: parents who took young children expecting a spooky comedy got a film about a murdered child and a town’s guilt, and some of them were upset.
Neither of those hurts it much. The darkness is deliberate, and most of the middle is fun. The exception is the van stretch, which sags, and I’d have trimmed five minutes of bickering to get to Agatha sooner. That’s the only thing keeping it from a 10, and I’d still put it near the top of the animated films of its decade.
Craft Note
Craft Note
ParaNorman reverses its monster halfway through. The witch was a frightened child, the ghouls were her judges, and the final act belongs to understanding instead of victory.
For an antagonist with a real grievance, the obvious ending is defeat. That ending throws away the reader’s sympathy and the story’s best idea.
Let your hero win by listening. Write the scene where the villain’s case is finally heard in full, and make that hearing, not a fight, the thing that ends the conflict.
The Verdict on ParaNorman
Yes. It’s a 9. It’s scary enough for older children and sad enough for adults, and it has more to say about fear and cruelty than most live-action horror films. What I admire most is that it lulls you with an hour of zombie jokes and then makes you look at the gift shop, the mob and a dead little girl without flinching. Watch it in October, and don’t be surprised if the last twenty minutes stay with you.
