Remember our favorite scary stories? About the red hand, green fingers and black sheet. Or this one: in one black, black city... Or about the hatch in the wall and hands from the painting? And about the skeleton that crawled out of the piano and demanded a blood jar from a girl (that was my favorite, and sending me to a music school was a mistake, yes). And remember how seriously all this was told by older comrades? And that feeling when out loud "what the hell, this can't be", and then at home in an empty apartment you didn't really want to leave the 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 childish babble... Some fairy tales for little children, in my opinion, are much more convincing and scarier than these stories from the "Pioneer" magazine. I still get goosebumps from "Sister Alyonushka, swim out, swim out, to the shore; the cast-iron cauldrons are boiling, the damask knives are being sharpened, they want to cut me up!" And this summer at the dacha I read to my child the fairy tale "Vasilisa the Beautiful" with illustrations by Bilibin - remember where there is the scary Baba Yaga, and the dead mother, and the living doll, and solid skulls with glowing eyes? - and then I myself felt somehow creepy in the evening leaving the kitchen and letting our grandparents out of sight. Chukovsky's tales are not as scary as in folk tales, but still quite bloodthirsty: "he plunges his sharp teeth into the heart and drinks her blood", "bring me your children's animals, I'll eat them for dinner today", "It's dark, don't go outside the gate. Anyone who gets outside gets lost and disappears." Well, adults love horror films, and children get their share of thrills in this way.
But the world is moving towards humanism (I sincerely believe it!), 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. Witches are charming, skeletons are now mostly where they belong - in books about anatomy, and there is no death!
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