Children’s scary stories of the 21st century: pragmatics and existence

Abstract

Children’s scary stories remain a productive genre in the 21st century and attract a lot of interest from folklorists, anthropologists, scholars of culture, and psycholinguists. Our work examines the materials of regional field research in the mining and factory zone of the Chelyabinsk Region, collected during practical trainings with students of the Miass branch of Chelyabinsk State University. Our goal was to answer the following questions: what are contemporary children afraid of or, on the contrary, what are they trying to not be afraid of with the help of children’s scary stories? Is there a local factor to such narratives? How do traditional motives and characters change when influenced by popular culture? Our conclusions came to be as follows: We have recorded a lot of mentions of traditional mythological characters: cannibals, zombies (“zombaki”), undead, house spirits, water spirits, the Queen of Spades, ghosts - in order of decreasing number of mentions. Contemporary realities, e.g. mobile phones, GPS navigators and computers, are now listed as “killer objects” in children’s stories. In the texts that dwell on violation of a ban, the main antagonist is an undead person and the scene takes place in a cemetery. Vampires, warlocks and witches lose their negative connotations due to literature and cinema; they become attractive to children and teenagers and disappear from children’s scary narratives. The local factor in children’s scary stories in the Southern Urals is represented by extraterrestrials and people in lab coats appearing from the mountain range; the theme was reactualized after the fall of the Chebarkul (Chelyabinsk) meteorite on February 15, 2013.