NO FAIRY TALE, THIS: (From top) A scene from Babel; a scene from Blood Diamond; a child negotiates the killing fields of Blood Diamond

It’s kiddie season at the movies, and children are everywhere you look: brandishing machine guns in Blood Diamond, fighting for their lives in the desert in Babel, suffering from mortal wounds in Pan’s Labyrinth, being blown to bits in Déjà Vu, sleeping in public toilets in The Pursuit of Happyness and getting massacred in The Nativity Story.

Hollywood historically has steered away from depicting children in peril, typically limiting any life-or-death struggles to cartoonishly violent genre films such as The Shining, Aliens and Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But as this new batch of movies underscores, the old rules of childhood engagement are rapidly evolving. Instead of consigning children to the periphery of horrific realities, these films are dragging kids — preteens to toddlers — right into the middle of the mayhem.

In a way, the movies are reworking the troubling narratives laid out ages ago in the works of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Dickens. And like those authors, some of the film makers are using children to make political points. Others find that putting children into jeopardy gives their dramas more of an emotional wallop. But even for a generation of viewers desensitised by a 24/7 stream of broadband brutality from sources as divergent as the Iraq war and the Ultimate Fighting Championship, some of these movie scenes may prove difficult to stomach.

“These are not your father’s fairy tales,” says Guillermo del Toro, the writer-director of Pan’s Labyrinth, whose opening shot features an 11-year-old girl apparently dying from a gunshot wound. Catherine Hardwicke, director of The Nativity Story, made the decision to depict, rather than just allude to, King Herod’s biblical Massacre of the Innocents in her film, with two-year-olds being dragged to their deaths.

“I think people now are going for a much more realistic, authentic approach,” says Hardwicke. “You don’t want to leave out things that add to the realism and take you into the moment.”

Some of the most troubling imperilled kid scenarios unfold in Babel, a drama featuring four seemingly unrelated but ultimately intersecting stories. In one, two small American children are abandoned in the desert with their nanny but no food or water; in another, two young Moroccan brothers shoot a rifle with catastrophic results.

“I wrote Babel from the point of view of a father, and the pain that you feel when something goes wrong with your kid,” says the film’s screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga. Rather than concoct stories for shock value, Arriaga says some of the incidents involving Babel’s children are directly drawn from real events. Mexican children as young as six months old, he says, are abandoned on the border and left to fend for themselves. “Of course it’s horrifying,” says the screenwriter, from Mexico City. “But it happens. Art has to begin to address the world’s problems. And we cannot be shy of presenting problems because we are afraid of scaring the audience. There is an audience willing to see what’s truly going on in the world, and closing our eyes will not help solve the problems.”

Mirroring events

Real-life depictions of children in dire circumstances turn up in several other movies. At the centre of Blood Diamond stands a drama about an African diamond smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio) battling his conscience. But the movie also focuses on Sierra Leone’s civil war, in which children were taken from their families and forced into battle, where they killed other children.

The Pursuit of Happyness (which hits US theatres December 15) tells the real-life story of Christopher Gardner, a struggling San Francisco salesman of medical equipment who became homeless. While living on the streets, Gardner (Will Smith) labours to complete a stockbroker internship and care for his young son (Smith’s own child, Jaden). In one of the movie’s most heartbreaking sequences, Gardner can’t find anywhere to sleep and must repair to a public bathroom, where he fashions a bed for his young son out of toilet paper.

Terry Gilliam’s Gothic fantasy Tideland follows the plight of 10-year-old Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) after the back-to-back drug overdose deaths of her junkie parents. A paranoid taxidermist, a lobotomised epileptic and a bunch of talking headless dolls vie for her attention in the film’s creepy, pastoral Wonderland.

Although the Motion Picture Association of America gave the film an R rating for what it describes as “bizarre and disturbing content, including drug use, sexuality and gruesome situations — all involving a child …,” Gilliam insists Jeliza-Rose is never in peril. Moreover, he dismisses the notion that children are any more deserving of sympathetic treatment in films than adults. “We seem to be trapped in a lot of middle-aged people’s idea of what a child is,” Gilliam says. “That usually means some delicate little creature who’s a victim and who needs care constantly. I think that’s nonsense.”

Del Toro, the writer-director of the alternately tragic and magical Pan’s Labyrinth, shares Gilliam’s perspective. When he was putting together his first film, 1997’s Mimic, he was warned by a marketing executive that the two things he couldn’t do in an American movie were to kill dogs and children. He immediately added a scene in which one dog and two children die.

Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), the young protagonist at the centre of Pan’s Labyrinth, is as determined and independent as the adults around her. “She comes to a crossroads in her life,” Del Toro says. “She has to choose between continuing to have a fantasy world and being a nicely dressed little lady.” At the same time, he says, “she is basically an innocent being manipulated by everyone around her.”

Those manipulations quickly lead Ofelia into danger. “Many fairy tales, especially the harsher ones of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde and the Brothers Grimm, have a fair amount of tragedy for children. I think children are and always have been central to the drama of the fantasy genre.”

But on hearing descriptions of the upcoming films, David Walsh, president of the National Institute on Media and the Family, worries that focusing on children in peril could amplify fears in a society that has already circled its wagons around the young. “The impact of this stream of movies will be to accentuate the ‘mean world syndrome,’ making parents and kids think that the world is a hostile place,” says Walsh. “There is a real downside to that. As we get more protective of kids, we shield them from many important experiences — as we hover over them in protection, we’re robbing them of opportunities to solve their own problems.”

A spectre of suffering

In the sci-fi drama Déjà Vu, a domestic terrorist loads a New Orleans passenger ferry with hundreds of pounds of explosives. When the film opens, crowds of people pile into the doomed boat, and director Tony Scott offers several close-ups of children on a school outing. According to Bill Marsilii, who wrote the film’s script with Terry Rossio, the idea was to make the crime so hideous that the time-travelling efforts of a federal agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) to prevent the bombing take on a level of urgency that lasts until the end of the movie.

“At one point, Tony was pushing strongly for the boat to only have servicemen on it,” Marsilii says. He adds: “It’s easy to goose a reaction from an audience by killing kids. But none of the choices that went into creating the opening were done blithely. I don’t think I could ever start a movie with the death of that many children on-screen unless the whole rest of the movie was about trying to undo it.”

Hardwicke sees her Nativity — and its scenes of infanticide — in part as a correction to the films that have preceded it. “You look at historical epics of the past and everyone is white, clean and movie-star looking. I don’t think that’s what audiences want anymore,” says Hardwicke.

“We’re trying to transport you to another place and make you feel the dirt under the fingernails. We wanted you to feel that horror because that was part of the horror of the time,” she says.

©Los Angeles Times