This video called Haunted Playground was created a by a young girl named Maniechan Xiong. And, it is truly scary. Don’t watch it late at night, all alone, with the lights out. But, even more than Maniechan’s keen understanding of the horror genre, her video brings up intriguing issues about what is seen as possible for youth to produce and what they ought to produce. So often with media, there is this fear that children are overwhelmed by media’s influences, e.g., Barbies make girls anorexic, seeing smoking in movies makes kids smoke, etc. And, even with video production, the idea still pervades that if youth are to use something as powerful as video, then they must use if “for good,” e.g., for anti-gang PSA’s, light-hearted stories about their schools, etc. But, this is not the philosophy of In Progress, a youth-based arts organization that focuses on teaching youth to create a range of media. This video is just one of many examples of youth-produced work (more examples can be found here). What intrigues me about this video, however, is how it breaks the boundaries of what is expected from young girls when they create their pieces. This is not a fluff piece about hair and toys (Actually, I have seen very few youth-produced videos that are fluff pieces. To see a range of youth videos, check out Listen Up!). It is a piece that plays with the generic conventions in order to tell a deeper story, to put the viewer in a different place. It reminds me of Pippa Stein’s Multimodal Pedagogies which discusses how young South African girls write and draw stories using local traditional genres to tell stories in their own lives without having to face adult restrictions about what is seen as acceptable for the girls to tell. This video is another powerful example of how, if given the chance, young girls can and will tell stories that are meaningful for them.