Remember our favorite horror stories? About a red hand, green fingers and a black sheet. Or this one: in one black, black city... Or about the hatch in the wall and the hands from the picture? And about the skeleton that crawled out of the piano and demanded a bank of blood from the girl (this was my favorite, and sending me to the music school was a mistake, yes). Do you remember with what a serious look all this was told by the older comrades? And this feeling when out loud, “Well, what the hell, this can’t happen,” and then at home in an empty apartment you didn’t really want to leave your familiar corner of the sofa once again? Well, it was a difficult time, we tickled our nerves as best we could, although these stories seem like such childish babble that it’s even surprising how already quite grown-up children, teenagers, could fall for it. Although about baby talk... Some fairy tales for small children, in my opinion, are much more convincing and scary than these stories from the Pioneer magazine. I still get goosebumps down my spine from “Sister Alyonushka, swim out, swim out, to the shore; cast-iron cauldrons are boiling, damask knives are sharpening, they want to kill me!” And this summer at the dacha I read to my child the fairy tale “Vasilisa the Beautiful” with illustrations by Bilibin - remember where the terrible Baba Yaga is, and the dead mother, and the revived doll, and all the skulls with glowing eyes? - so then I myself felt somehow terrified to leave the kitchen in the evening and let our grandparents out of sight. Chukovsky is no longer as scary as in folk tales, but still quite bloodthirsty: “sharp teeth pierce into the very heart and drink her blood,” “bring me the animals of your children, I’ll eat them for dinner today,” “It’s come "It's dark, don't go outside the gate. Anyone who gets into the street gets lost and disappears." Well, adults love horror films, and children get their share of thrills this way.
But the world is moving towards humanism (I sincerely believe!), and everything is becoming kinder: both cartoons and books. Villains are no longer killed, but simply... defeated. Monsters, although scary, are not dangerous, and monster girls are also beautiful. The witches are charming, the skeletons are now mostly where they should be - in books about anatomy, but there is no death!
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