The Hollywood Height Bias

Let me begin with a statement: this may sound crazy, but this is what I took from the episode “Fear Itself” and “Gingerbread” mixed my reading of Kim’s post. When I first watched “Fear Itself”, I did not really think about the size of Gachnar. He was small, which automatically meant he was not scary and that the fears they had experienced were simply tricks. We see this same kind of height bias in “Gingerbread”, when the two innocent children meld together to form a huge, muscled demon. As the giant demon, he is supposed to be far scarier. This may sound crazy, but as an RA who is small and has to confront people on a regular basis, I have to say short people should not be so blatantly discounted. When I watched this episode again, I immediately thought of the differences between the original Mr. Hyde and the modern Mr. Hyde. We watched the different clips of how people want to see Mr. Hyde now and the new portrayals are consistently hulking giants. Apparently in order to be scary to modern-day audiences, Mr. Hyde can no longer be short; he needs to be a least twice the size of an ordinary person. I disagree because I think the original Hyde is plenty terrifying. It is more suspenseful to imagine Hyde’s twisted frame slowly stalking the streets, than to deal with Hyde on steroids. He is so different from the tall, dignified Dr. Jekyll that if Utterson had not read the letter left to him by Jekyll, he would have never been able to fully accept the idea of such an extreme transformation.

In all these instances, however, it is as the short character that the demons have the greatest affect. In “Gingerbread”, the demon is actually more powerful as the two children. The children wreak havoc on the town because they seem so innocent. If it hadn’t been for Giles (Giles appreciation!) revealing the demon’s true form with a spell, Buffy’s and Willow’s mother would have remained under the spell and both Buffy and Willow would have died. The demon loses all his power when he is shown to be a giant, scary looking creature. In fact, as the children, he has lasted for hundreds of years, but as soon as his true form is revealed, he dies. As Kim mentions in “Fear Itself”, Gachnar is incredibly strong. Most of the episode is spent watching the Scooby gang run around trying different remedies and failing at them. They, as big people, cannot win against Gachnar, a tiny demon, until they see his true form and lose all fear of him. Some posts mentioned that their authors took away the idea of controlling fear, instead of letting fear control the mind, but all I could think of was how unfair it was for poor Gachnar to be squished while Hyde was allowed to be terrifying.