Column 80s Fantasy Film Club The NeverEnding Story: Childhood Trauma and the Stories That Change Us An emotional touchstone for a generation of fantasy-loving kids… By Tyler Dean | Published on June 12, 2025 Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures In this column, we’re looking back at the 1980s as their own particular age of fantasy movies—a legacy that largely disappeared in the ’90s only to resurface in the 2000s, though in many ways, the fantasy films of the Eighties are far weirder and less polished than what we got in the aughts. In each of these articles, we’ll explore a canonical fantasy movie released between 1980 and 1989 and discuss whatever enduring legacy the film has maintained in the decades since. For a more in-depth introduction to this series of articles, you can find the first installment here, focusing on 1981’s Dragonslayer. Last time we talked about Titans, specifically how they clashed, in Ray Harryhausen’s final film. This time, we’re going to drown in the Swamps of Sadness and get deeply retraumatized by 1984’s extended Limahl music video, The NeverEnding Story. My little brother is named Sebastian and I called him “Bastian” for many years because of my deep-seated love for/fascination with/horror of The NeverEnding Story. It was one of the first films I can remember loving in spite of my family’s feelings about it rather than because of them. My stepfather, Eric Luke, wrote the Joe Dante-directed kids-on-bikes cult classic Explorers (1985), and the story goes (in my family, at least) that it was seeing a screening of the rough cut of The NeverEnding Story that caused the studio to pass on Wolfgang Petersen as director. I grew up in a world where the adults in my life hated the film and I was obsessed with it. So, how does it fare, over 40 years later? Does its nostalgia hold up, or was the man who showed Dragonslayer to a nine-year-old right all along? Let’s find out… Based on the first half of the 1979 German children’s fantasy novel Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende, The NeverEnding Story features Barret Oliver as Bastian (Bastian Balthazar Bux in the original novel), a bullied latchkey kid mourning his recently deceased mother, who receives a magical book from a mysterious bookseller (Thomas Hill) and retreats to the ridiculously spooky attic of his elementary school where he spends the day reading about Fantasia—a land ruled by the Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach) and endangered by a nebulous, annihilating force called “the Nothing.” The majority of the film follows the young warrior Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) on a quest to stop Fantasia’s advancing apocalypse, eventually culminating with the rebirth of the fantasy world when, in an inflection point for young viewers being introduced to the concept of meta-horror, Bastian himself must give the Childlike Empress a new name.  It was a huge box-office success that led to two (less well-received) sequels. While critical reviews were mixed but decent, it garnered very little love from awards organizations—though it was nominated for Saturn awards for “Best Fantasy Film” and “Best Music” and Noah Hathaway won another for “Best Performance by a Younger Actor.”  So, does it hold up?  Let’s not mince words: The NeverEnding Story is an absolutely gorgeous film. The Italian-German illustrator and children’s author Count Ulderico Gropplero di Troppenburg (who went by the nom-de-plume Ul de Rico) contributed concept art beautifully realized in Friedrich Thaler’s matte painting backdrops. These vistas are reminiscent of Ted Nasmith and Alan Lee’s illustrations of Middle-earth, but more fantastical and mixed in with a heavy dose of prog rock album cover art. There are images that both myself and my viewing partner found, upon rewatching, have wormed their way into our deep subconscious. The backdrops in the Swamps of Sadness are reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich. Internal views of Childlike Empress’ Ivory Tower feel inspired by Brueghel the Elder’s painting of the The Tower of Babel. I realized my obsession with Giorgione’s Female Nude may well stem from the shattered frescoes in the temple where Atreyu confronts Gmork. Again and again, the film delivers gorgeous tableaus and vistas that are as evocative and mysterious as they are technically masterful. The costumes and creature design, headed up by Katharina Litzinger and Jörg Trees, adapting from Ul de Rico’s concept art, is similarly marvelous. The film is filled with fantastic creatures: from those made from multiple stone faces to the awful, chelonian decrepitude of Morla, the Ancient One, and culminating in its most memorable achievement, Falkor the Luck Dragon. Built like a pearlescent, serpentine Cairn Terrier, Falkor manages to always look soft, friendly, and just a touch intimidating in his glittering Scales and downy, luxurious fur.  For most millennials, the scene in which Atreyu’s horse, Artax, sinks and drowns in the Swamps of Sadness—clearly a take, as my viewing partner pointed out, on Bunyan’s Slough of Despond—is an elemental nugget of our collective childhood trauma (just admire this incredible cosplay). And, while it holds up as an unsettling scene, it’s striking to me how much of the rest of the movie is equally frightening and suffused with unnameable sorrow: the Rockbiter’s speech about his “big, strong hands” and his despondent wish for oblivion after he’s unable to save his friends from the Nothing; the laser-eyed Sphinxes at the Southern Oracle, bare-breasted and perversely serene, turning an armored knight to slag and cinders while the twitchy gnome, Engywook (Sydney Bromley), cackles in delight; and of course, the very concept of the Nothing, depicted through darkening skies and howling winds, shredding the scenery while Deep Roy, decked out in Victorian country finery and seated atop a delightfully canine racing snail, cries out in mortal fear. Like many children’s films, the story is (not so) secretly about a child dealing with grief. Bastion’s father (Gerald McRaney) ranks among the worst cinematic fathers per minute of screen time, demanding that Bastian “keep[s his] feet on the ground” and not let his mother’s recent death continue to affect his grades or his extracurriculars. While the film’s nominal message is that fantasy and imagination is part of the healing process, it also leans pretty hard into the cosmic horror of reading a book that seems to be coming, terrifyingly, to life. Bastian screams and hurls it across the attic when it describes him as Atreyu’s true self, or when his yelp of fear is heard by the characters he’s reading about. Most tragic, when he discovers at the end that he is the only one who can save Fantasia, he initially resists, echoing his father’s now-internalized cruelty, sobbing “I have to keep my feet on the ground” before finally giving in and shouting his dead mom’s name (“Moon Child”?) into the wind, redubbing the Childlike Empress. It plays out as a descent into madness, a final giving-in and submission to that which is strange and impossible bleeding into the real world. As Nietzsche said, “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” It’s scary and sad and deeply affecting. In putting Bastian through these trials, the movie captures, perhaps better than any other children’s film I’ve seen, the idea that reading fiction is a liberating experience in many ways because it is fundamentally unsafe. I still remember being about nine and reading Katherine Paterson’s Sign of the Chrysanthemum, a book which ends somewhat unhappily (though positively cheerful when compared with her most famous novel), and being so distressed to discover that novels didn’t have to deliver entirely resolved and uplifting endings that I could not sleep for hours after my bedtime. I found myself similarly overwhelmed at 17 after getting to the two-thirds mark of A Storm of Swords, and, again, in grad school, reading the end of Vernon Lee’s “Dionea” too late at night. The NeverEnding Story perfectly nailed that moment of realization for me, both when I saw it as a child and in my recent viewing. Its plot may be episodic and disjointed but it always feels emotionally right, even if “right,” in this case, means “harrowing and unsafe.” The NeverEnding Story was followed by the two aforementioned sequels: 1990’s The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (which eight-year-old me absolutely saw in theatres), loosely based on the second half of Ende’s novel, and 1994’s The NeverEnding Story III: Escape from Fantasia, an original story. There was also a single season of an animated series, which aired on HBO from 1995-1996.  The NeverEnding Story will always hold the title of “most traumatizing children’s film” for a certain sort of millennial viewer. While ’80s genre films provided plenty of traumatizing moments (see my article on Willow for a brief foray into Cronenbergian body horror, or my article on Dragonslayer for an explanation of the ways in which this entire project is, in some regards, an exploration of the half-remembered darkness of things glimpsed on cable at a young age), this is many Xennials’ urtext. Not many films can boast a scene of visceral pet-death that ends with two boys sobbing unrestrainedly and have it not feel cheap or unearned. That scene of absolute devastation in children’s entertainment casts a long shadow that surely influenced later films—My Girl, Babe: Pig in the City, and the 2006 remake of Charlotte’s Web all come to mind—even if no one has ever quite been able to replicate it since.   It is also worth mentioning that one of the more polarizing moments in recent, nostalgia-bait-centric pop culture history centers on Limahl’s title track. Season 3 of Stranger Things (2019) has Broadway child stars Gaeten Matazzaro and Gabriella Pizzolo sing Limahl’s earworm of a title track, “Never Ending Story,” while fleeing from a twenty-foot-tall flesh monster. Stranger Things, for better or worse, is often deeply (deeply) obsessed with evoking nostalgia in its viewers for the ’80s and the Spielberg-led “kids on bikes” genre in particular. In a season that also featured an extended monologue about New Coke, this climactic (and deeply silly) moment provoked more eye rolls than ovations: another hollow attempt to provoke a feeling based on rote recognition rather than any genuinely earned good will. But hear me out! That moment is also kind of perfect? Limahl’s song is absolutely iconic but also completely, tonally at odds with Petersen’s film (beyond a general Eurovision-y vibe). It’s a dreamy, fizzy romp that opens and closes out 94 minutes of nightmare after nightmare. For all its various heights and nadirs, Stranger Things (especially that uneven third season) doesn’t pull its punches when it comes to body horror. Pair that with the fact that it is the climax of a season that reads as an extended metaphor for the lingering trauma of child molestation (I lay that argument out in full in this essay from 2019) and the insertion of the song sits pretty accurately in the exact same context as the original did. The angelic “ah-ah-ahs” tinnily playing over David Harbour’s thousand-yard stare as he gazes, despondent, down the cold metal of a hallway in a secret Soviet base is a perfect encapsulation of the song coming in over the end credits of the original film. Whatever other sins the show committed, it found a way to perfectly preserve The NeverEnding Story’s legacy in that one moment. But what do you think? Is my reverence for The NeverEnding Story misguided? Did it fill you with a deep horror (and attendant sense of responsibility) to realize not only that a book could change you, but that you might change a book? Let me know whether the movie holds up for you, and be sure to join us next time when we rip our gaze away from existential dread and turn towards the scantily-clad cartoon women of the Frank Frazetta/Ralph Bakshi leer-fest Fire & Ice.[end-mark] The post <i>The NeverEnding Story</i>: Childhood Trauma and the Stories That Change Us appeared first on Reactor.