Each week, Weird Things’ own Matt Finley breaks down one of the oddest elements of our culture in a feature we call Monster Of The Week. This week we focus on the Tooth Fairy, Monday he questioned why we value baby teeth to begin with. Wednesday we delved into the bloody origins of the legend.

On the barest cultural level, if you strip away the membranous wings, packed wallet and any over-eager pseudo-anthropological interpretations, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is the narrative spoonful of sugar that helps the inevitable biological medicine – specifically, the terrifying reality that all of one’s teeth are about to loosen and drop out – go down. Quite simply, kids are less apt to be scared by the unique and uncomfortable process of losing their teeth if that process comes with its own smiling, magical (and accordingly wealthy) benefactor. On a literal level, if you strip away the glittery trappings, all the tooth fairy really amounts to is an otherworldly home invader with a cryptic agenda and a free pass into a nation’s worth of children’s bedrooms.

Fittingly, one of the primary talents of the horror genre is processing sugar back into bitter, bitter medicine by exploiting the darker side of pleasurable activities and joyful traditions. Sex, parties and road trips frequently serve as typical set-ups for mounting bloodbaths. More to the point, Santa Claus, another breaking-and-entering denizen of popular folklore, has repeatedly been portrayed standing on the woodsman’s side of a bloodied axe. Is it really all that surprising that the tooth fairy has, likewise, been depicted as a nefarious trafficker of living nightmares?

Given the conclusions we’ve arrived at thus far, “Every legend has its dark side.” seems like a more than fitting tagline for a horror movie about the tooth fairy. My two favorite things about the so-taglined 2003 horror film “Darkness Falls” are the adorable Emma Caulfield (for anyone aware of my Buffy obsession, this requires no explanation), and the fact that the ending credits had to be extended to 11 minutes in order to pad out the film’s meager 75-minute runtime. My least favorite things are all the aspects of the film that are actually relevant to this post. Basically, a disfigured woman who, because she gave out coins to children who lost their teeth, was known as the “Tooth Fairy,” is wrongly accused of child murder and blah blah blah. Now, when a kid loses a tooth, her ghost shows up and kills them. Likewise, the 2006 straight-to-video “The Tooth Fairy” centers on a witch who murders children for their teeth. (It might be the ghost of the witch. I can’t honestly say that I care.) Additionally, “Hellboy II:The Golden Army” and Graham Joyce’s novel “The Tooth Fairy” both explore the darker ramifications of this magical nighttime marauder. (Apparently there’s also an episode of “All in the Family” where Archie Bunker refers to an effeminate dentist as the “tooth fairy.”)

Get the rest… AFTER THE JUMP

The big question: Understanding that the tooth fairy legend is rife for horrification given that it’s well-known, inferably creepy and devoid of a unique canonical back story, why make a teen- or college-geared horror movie about something the intended viewership no longer believes in? Sex, parties and road trips all make for pretty intuitive horror backdrops because the primary horror-going audience can conceivably imagine themselves stranded in the middle of murderous hillbilly nowhere, or being suddenly scythed off their wriggling eff buddies, whereas, lost teeth and pillow money represent fading memories of an irretrievable past that’s terrifying only in that its relationship to the present belies the transience of youth and the unstoppable progress of time. So… why?

One possibility is that we have an underlying yearning to nullify our past gullibility (or, to put it a bit more sweetly, childhood naivety) by returning to the fictional dogmas of our youthful realities and turning them inside out. As if the revenge of the tooth fairy portrayed in the films is actually our revenge against a narrative that tricked us – that exerted a calculating, if benevolent, power over our immature minds, making us passive participants in an ongoing and involuntarily inherited story arc that, as adults, we can now actively control, distort and subvert.

But I don’t know. That view is a little agro for me.
I like to think that these re-imaginings of the tooth fairy story are our way of allowing a trusted, comfortable narrative to mature alongside us. And I can’t deny that there’s some degree of bitterness in that growth, though I don’t view the bitterness as directed at the story, but rather at the generalized loss of innocence that found the curtain pulled back on the banal, yet frustratingly byzantine, machinery of real life… of money… of love… and, of course, of our parents, who were ultimately unmasked as the legend’s true protagonists.

The innocent mythologizing of currency; a belief in actual magic; and a beautiful, misguided self-worth that placed an external and measurable value on even discarded aspects of ourselves – all things we couldn’t take with us into adulthood. But the legend itself – that’s another story. So we forced it to grow along with us, and to suffer the same loss of innocence. How could the results be anything but awkward? Really, the tooth fairy story as horror movie only makes sense for an audience full of confused teens and disorganized 20-somethings – before that, the story inhabits our lives as an aspect of reality. After that, we inhabit the story as its main character – tooth fairies to the gullible (nay, innocently naïve) children in our lives.

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