Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is the name of a children’s book published a decade ago, heavily influenced by the Harry Potter series. My oldest daughter read it when she was 9, along with its sequels; she liked it, didn’t love it, never really talked about it. She’s now 12, and last weekend I took her and her younger sister, just 10, to the movie version—a prestige project by Tim Burton, one of the most successful directors of the past 30 years.
And here’s what we saw. We saw monsters plucking out the eyes of children. We saw a group of humanoid monsters eating raw eyeballs. We saw a kid with the power to reanimate the dead make an eyeless child zombie pop out of a bed and speak. These were not hinted at; they were shown, graphically and in close-up.
My 12-year-old buried her head in the seat at our local multiplex, which fortunately reclined so that she could twist her body away from the screen. My 10-year-old whimpered and grabbed at me for dear life. These girls are not generally fearful. They happily ride upside down and backwards on rollercoasters. But they were alternately terrified and grossed out by this film. I hadn’t noticed that it is rated PG-13; I assumed from the source material it would be fine. The posters and the trailers suggested it was the Harry Potter knockoff the book’s publishers had wanted people to think it was.
It’s not the fact that Miss Peregrine tries to scare kids that bothers me. Children were terrified in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs back in 1937 when the queen transforms into a crone. And few movies have scenes as disturbing as the one in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio (1940) when the truant boys are turned into donkeys. What’s so striking about this one is the fact that it is nakedly and unashamedly graphic in its violence. Had Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children been released in, say, 1972, it would have been rated R. The advertising copy would have been awash in lurid warnings about how doctors were standing by in case people had heart attacks and how the theater managers were handing out barf bags to all the patrons. And no children would have been anywhere near the place.
Of course, had this been 1972, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children would have been called The Corpses Have No Eyes, would have had a budget of $200,000, and been the work of enterprising young men desperate to catch a break in the movie business rather than a major fall release that cost $110 million to make.
As Jason Zinoman relates in his fine book Shock Value (2011), the success of microbudget horror movies like Last House on the Left and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre convinced Hollywood 40 years ago that graphic horror was a selling proposition beyond the drive-ins and urban grindhouses. That’s still true today. But the market for such fare was clearly supposed to be teenagers looking for thrills and adults who can take it. It was never supposed to be marketed to kids or hidden away inside fare intended for kids. In that sense, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is an immoral bait-and-switch.
And it’s not even good. It’s long and quite dull, and once again for inexplicable reasons, Hollywood saw fit to cast a young British actor named Asa Butterfield in a lead role as an intense kid undergoing a grueling apprenticeship. Butterfield was the orphan living in the train station in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. He was the young genius recruited to fight an interstellar war in Ender’s Game. In the upcoming The Space Between Us, he’s a kid born on Mars who comes to Earth and is sickened by the gravity. And here he’s Jake, the neglected son of a type-A mother and a wastrel father whose beloved grandfather is awash in dementia.
The problem is that Butterfield—I’m sorry to say, because he’s a 19-year-old kid and it’s really not his fault—is one of the most charmless performers ever to hit the screen. He’s glum and humorless and without any twinkle or sparkle of life. He either has the world’s best agent or he does something at auditions that he cannot bring to the actual movies he gets cast in. Whatever the case, you put him at the center of a movie and the movie has a sinkhole at its center.
There are moments of real beauty and power here, especially in the way Burton makes it clear that Butterfield’s suburban Florida suburb is weirder and more unsettling than the Welsh island where the supernatural home of the title is located. But that hasn’t become the stuff of my daughter’s nightmares: The eyeballs did. Thanks a lot. I hope the producers lose their shirts.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
