In this episode we talked about the film The Hole (2009), directed by Joe Dante.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Adam Hello and welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. Today we’re talking about the 2009 film The Hole.

Content warning for some brief descriptions of physical abuse.

Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi Adam

Adam Hello Ren, I hear you’re sleepy

Ren Yes, I am somewhat under the weather, but I have a lemon and ginger tea next to me which is hopefully going to fortify me to talk about this strange film about a hole.

Adam And really, what is there to say about a hole? It’s in the ground, it’s dark, it’s bottomless in this case, and things emerge from it.

Ren Yeah, mm-hmm.

Adam And who knows from whence it came!

Ren Yep. This film is The Hole from 2009, not the film The Hole from 2001, which — I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. Have you seen it?

Adam It’s okay. It’s a kind of by-the-numbers teen thriller with a bunch of bratty overprivileged teenagers squabbling and possibly murdering each other. I think in some minor state of undress. It’s very much part of that wave of I Know What You Did Last Summer, etc.

Ren Yeah. Is it also about a bottomless hole?

Adam No, that hole does have a bottom. The hole in that film is a lot less intriguing, it’s more of a shaft than a hole, to be honest. There is a hole, but the hole is just where the action takes place. It didn’t earn the title The Hole, which is presumably why there was another film called The Hole, because the filmmakers presumably thought the hole itself needed to be done justice to.

Ren And I think the hole is a very compelling force in this film.

Adam Oh yeah, the hole is the starring vehicle.

Ren It’s not an incidental hole.

Adam It’s got star billing. The Hole: starring The Hole.

(Clip of the trailer for The Hole)

Ren This film starts off with a family moving into a new house in suburban America. There’s a mom and two kids — Dane and Lucas, who are approximately 17 and 8, and we learn that Dane’s a rebellious kid because he says: ‘sheesh’.

Adam He does, and I’ve written down also ‘stinks’, like ‘you stink’. And in a text message early on: ‘this place sux’ with an x.

Ren He’s also wearing a T-shirt of the 2000s band The Killers, which made me laugh. Rebellious teen, listening to the work of Brandon Flowers.

Adam I don’t think Brandon Flowers would want Dane to be part of his fanbase. I know Brandon pretty well, I don’t think he would be keen.

I’ve kind of got over my — for some context, listeners — when Ren and I were at university I had a bit of a thing about Brandon Flowers just because I find his name really funny. There’s no other reason for it, I just like the fact that a self-confessed rock star is called Brandon Flowers.

Ren He’s a sensitive guy.

Adam He’s a sensitive guy. And he has lyrics like: ‘Do you want to come with me, do you want to see my bones? I mean your bones. It’s only natural’.

The lyrics of a sensitive man.

And before we move on from The Killers, since you bought them up, there is a Werner Herzog documentary about The Killers, probably his best work, I don’t think he just did it for money whatsoever, I assume that Werner Herzog is a big Killers fan, just like Dane in the film.

It documents a gig of The Killers, and it also takes place —

Ren Yeah??

Adam Seriously, I’m not making this up! There’s a Werner Herzog documentary about The Killers on YouTube. Which I’ve watched more than any other Werner Herzog film.

Ren You are a connoisseur of film, so.

Adam A large part of it takes place at this bizarre fake ranch in Vegas, which Brandon Flowers talks very earnestly about and how it was important to his childhood, and Werner Herzog tries to very lightly tease him about how it’s all fake, and Brandon Flowers is like: ‘it didn’t seem fake to me, as a kid, it seemed real, growing up in Vegas’. And then Herzog makes him stand in front of this awful animatronic cowboy, and holds the shot for a full minute with Brandon Flowers looking amazingly uncomfortable.

It’s really good. I’ll have to send you the link, because it’s worth watching for that first shot alone.

So anyway, the film’s set up so we know that this teenage Dane is a very rebellious boy because he’s a fan of the infamous band The Killers. Not Slipknot, not System of a Down —

Ren Do you think they didn’t know who The Killers were and just thought they were a metal band based on the name? ‘Ooh, the Killers, pretty hardcore’.

Adam Well, there’s a Mountain Goats song called The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, and the lyrics refer to a death metal band who considered the names: Satan’s Fingers, The Killers and The Hospital Bombers. And when they play it now, John makes a point of mentioning that some of these names have since been adopted. So who knows, maybe The Killers started out as a death metal band. Not so much Mr Brightside as MR DARKSIDE.

Ren Yeah. Swimming through sick lullabies.

Right, let’s move on.

Adam Let’s move on before it's just an hour of me talking about The Killers.

And I chose this film, in case people are wondering why we’re talking about The Hole from 2009, which pretty much everyone has forgotten about, and it’s because it’s a Joe Dante film. And I’m sure like many listeners I loved Gremlins, more than Gremlins II, which is the correct position to hold, unlike my brother who says that Gremlins II is better. But he also says that season two of Twin Peaks is better than season one, which tells you a lot about my brother’s tastes.

So I love the anarchic madcap energy of Gremlins, I remember Small Soldiers from when I was a kid, and I was just intrigued that Joe Dante had directed another kids horror film as late as 2009. I remember vaguely it coming out at the time, but I didn’t see it. And of course we’ve previously covered Eerie Indiana and some of the most iconic episodes of that were directed by Joe Dante — particularly the ones with the really skewed suburban aesthetic.

Ren Which we don’t really get in this, apart from the hole, obviously, it’s a pretty straightforward suburban aesthetic.

Adam It is, I was expecting much more in the way of warped visuals and exaggerated set design. You get that a bit towards the end of the film, but mostly as you say… it’s got that kind of wintery, over-exposed aesthetic of a lot of 2000s slightly low-budget cinema, so it looks visually slightly dull, a bit televisual I guess. And it only visually comes to life in the last half hour of the film, which I was a bit disappointed by, I was expecting a bit more visual razzmatazz.

But in preparation for this I also watched Explorers, which was a film Joe Dante released a year after Gremlins, and that is much more rooted in an everyday suburban reality, until that is, the last half hour of the film, where they go to space. So structurally this is quite similar to Explorers. But Explorers is a really amicable film, with these really lovely three leads — it’s actually River Phoenix and a young Ethan Hawke, and they’re very charming.

Whereas Dane here is set up as not very charming and likeable, I think it’s fair to say. Would you agree, Ren, as you texted me while watching.

Ren I did text you in the first half hour of this film, saying ‘He’s such a jerk!’. Which I think is fair, that’s what they’re going for.

Adam It is explained later, but yes. He’s quite rough with his younger brother, right —

Ren — Well, yeah, and I don't know if this is a casting issue, but in the beginning their mom’s at work and they’re having to amuse themselves around the house, and Dane’s hitting his little brother around the head because the actor who’s playing Dane —

Adam — Chris Massoglia —

Ren— Yes, Chris Massoglia, he’s obviously a teenager but physically he’s pretty fully grown and tall.

Adam Whereas Nathan Gamble on the other hand —

Ren Nathan Gamble who plays his little brother is a very weedy pre-pubescent, so it doesn’t look quite right, them roughhousing.

Adam Yeah, agreed, it does make it really uncomfortable. And I’m usually not really fussed by swearing in films either way, but the swearing in this film really stood out to me.

Ren Oh yeah? Where’s the swearing?

Adam There’s quite a lot of the older brother swearing and then the younger brother imitating him before their mother tells them off. I think it’s just there to establish that the older brother is going down the wrong tracks and being a bit of a bad influence.

I think it’s deliberate, because it really goes into why the older brother is upholding, I guess what we’d call toxic masculinity but basically being a jerk. But it’s very different to what we get in Explorers, the three lads are all introduced as being victims of bullies. They’re misfits and they have to band together. Wheras Dane in this film is very much established as a bully.

Ren Yeah.

Adam And a mildly lecherous bully at that.

Ren Yes, because he sees his new neighbour Julie who’s having a pool party — she has a massive pool in her backyard.

Adam ~~America~~

Ren Dane is being a peeping Tom on the first night, or the first couple of days they’re there.

Adam He’s sketching her.

Ren Oh yeah, he’s drawing her. And it’s Lucas who goes over there first and introduces himself to Julie.

Adam It reminded of the remake of Rear Window, I think starring Shia Labeouf. But at first, with Dane at the window being moody and secluded, I thought it was going to go down a Rear Window route, with him spying something sinister next door perhaps. It reminded me of the Simpsons parody, with Bart when he’s broken his leg from the pool party, peering out at Flanders’ house with the telescope. It might also be that Joe Dante directed The Burbs, with Tom Hanks, if you’ve seen that one?

Ren No.

Adam It’s alright, it's like a horror-comedy with Tom Hanks —

Ren Is that like The Birds by Hitchcock, but they’re little birbs.

Adam I think it’s more like the suburbs, rather than goofy meme birds called birbs. So in that film Tom Hanks plays this clean-cut guy whose neighbours may or many not be serial killers, so there’s a lot of him peering out of the window and then sneaking into the house. So I thought that’s where this might go, but actually the danger is coming from inside the house in this.

Ren Yes, and they find it quite quickly. This trapdoor in the garage with big padlocks on it, and they manage to open it and find this very deep hole. And they start experimenting with it and throw some nails down —

Adam — Oh yeah, did you like the cool 3D effects where the nails were tipped down the hole? Because this film was originally released in 3D and there are some times where that is very noticeable. One of the nails slowly rotates and comes right up to the camera, so you’re like ‘Oh no, my eyes!’.

Ren Okay, that makes sense.

Adam And they also lower a toy Cartman figure down the hole, which shows how tough Dane is, because he’s watching South Park inappropriately.

I mention that partly because I managed to impress one of my year 10s with my street cred this week. She came to the door of the classroom and she’d done a sketch of the kids from South Park and she said ‘Do you know what this is?’ and I said, ‘Oh yeah, South Park’, and she shouted across to one of the other kids ‘Sir knows what South Park is!’ So pretty cool.

I didn’t say: ‘I was watching South Park when I was your age, kid, but now I find the libertarian politics a bit problematic.’ But I thought it, obviously.

Ren Yeah, yeah.

Adam But Cartman is lowered down the hole but doesn’t come back, because the hole is so deep.

Ren No, he gets stuck, and the rope comes up frayed. And Julie turns up because the last thing she saw was Dane running after Lucas with murderous intent —

Adam — Oh yeah, and she’s thinking, he might actually have killed his younger brother, this kid’s clearly quite dangerous, I should check he’s okay. Just how you want to introduce a teenage love interest in a film.

Ren Yep. So they show her the hole, and she takes a moment to make the innuendo, so we get that out the way. And she tells them about Creepy Carl who used to live in the house, and that the hole must be one of Creepy Carl’s things. She joins in the hole exploration, and they put a camera down there on a rope. They watch the film on the TV, and there’s some kind of light, and mass, but then their mum comes in and they stop looking at the TV, but you can see in the background that there’s an eye on the screen.

Adam Yeah, I liked that, it was quite an effective little moment. It was a bit of a found footage moment, which was obviously a bit old hat by 2009, but I still thought it was quite neat.

Ren Yeah.

Adam And the hole’s just sort of there for a little while. The film takes a while to get going, because there’s the hole, and they close the trapdoor, then open it again, but nothing really comes out of the hole for quite a while, not that we see.

Ren Yeah, we just get Dane getting to know Julie, and the town, and we get a bit of foreshadowing about an abandoned fairground called Frolic Gardens, and then the next creepy thing that happens is that Lucas is at home by himself, and he finds this creepy puppet on his bed. It’s established that he's afraid of clowns, and he finds this creepy clown doll —

Adam Well, it’s a jester. There’s a bit of blurring in this film between clowns and jesters, I’m not convinced they’re the same thing, but the film treats them as though they’re the same.

Ren He assumes that it's Dane who put it in his bed, so he puts it in Dane’s bed. And meanwhile Dane and Julie are in a diner or something and Julie’s in the toilets and hears a crying girl. She looks under the cubicle door and sees blood drip and then the lights go out. She tries the handle of the bathroom door and it’s locked, and this little girl whose face is obscured, starts limping towards her, until someone else opens the door to the toilets and the girl disappears.

Adam So I think we’re starting to assume at this point that these are emanations of the hole. We get the puppet and it’s not quite clear, but then we see the little girl and it’s like ‘Okay, these have come from the hole’. So I thought at first that the kids would only be able to see their own fears, and that was the rule, but they seem to be able to see each other’s fears as well, but other children can’t see them. So I found that quite confusing, it was a bit messy.

Ren Yeah, it is a bit odd. Sometimes it only seems like they’re only appearing for the person whose fear it is, but then they’re not.

Adam Yeah, it might seem like a little thing and I don’t like being too pedantic, but I think that messiness with the rules did take me out of it a bit. Because I don’t know to what degree these things are a threat to all the kids or just one of them.

Ren Yeah, I don’t know if it's trying to obscure the fact that these are manifestations of their fears by making them appear to all of them.

Adam I mean with Julie there's clearly a bit of a mystery about why she’s seeing this little girl, but there isn’t a mystery with the two boys. In a way this subplot with the little girl is more intriguing. Like with Lucas he says ‘I’m afraid of clowns’ and then he starts seeing a clown, so no mystery there, he's seeing the thing he’s scared of.

But with Julie her subplot became the more interesting one, even though she’s introduced as very much the slightly sexualised love interest. She’s introduced through Dane’s gaze, and in relation to the two boys, but at least the screenplay gives her more to do as it goes on.

I thought that Haley Bennet was quite good as Julie.

Ren I thought so too. And from IMDB it seems as if she’s doing quite well in the film industry, but I thought that she was the strongest actor.

Adam Agreed.

Ren So Lucas gets some creepy jester puppet shenanigans in the basement, where it’s winking and gnashing its teeth at him, and when Dane comes home they go and look in the cellar and the creepy little girl is there.

Adam And Dane says ‘Is that one of your friends?’ and Lucas says ‘I don’t have any friends’, which was quite a sad exchange.

Ren Yeah! And then the little girl says ‘I don’t want to die’ and then climbs the basement stairs and disappears. Julie comes round and they see the creepy girl again and follow her and she slithers back into the hole.

Adam Yeah, there’s a stop-motion pixellation effect on her movements there which I thought was quite effective. So they’re quite jerky as she slithers back into the hole.

Ren Yeah, and I think they’re less distressed by this than they really should be. I think this film is quite inconsistent in their reactions to all this creepy stuff.

Adam That’s really true actually, they keep taking it in this ironic teen way like (sarcastic Dave Foley voice) ‘Oh yes, creepy things coming out of the mouth of hell, huh, it’s probably the devil who’s going to come up and kill everyone!’ like, yeah, maybe?

And they try to do a stakeout, possibly for the devil and they sit around with a paintball gun. Are you allowed, legally, to just have a paintball gun? That seems quite dangerous to me, I’ve been paintballing and you had to have protective equipment and be under supervision, you couldn’t just have one! I had an 8 year-old kid shoot me in the ear, it gave me tinnitus!

Ren Oh no!

Adam And that was with protective gear, it went underneath somehow. So I wasn’t very keen on the idea of these kids just having paintball guns at home.

Ren Julie’s pretty gung-ho about them having a gateway to hell under their house.

Adam Yeah, she’s like 'I think it’s pretty sick’, or something like that.

Ren Yeah! And then the mom comes home and nothing has come out of the hole again, so they think they should lock it back up, but the locks have disappeared, so they push something heavy over it and come up from the basement.

Their mom has a date who looks a bit like Jonathan Frakes, an avuncular doctor, who Dane is rude to. But we learn from this exchange that her ex-husband was a bad man, which will become important later.

And the next morning they find the trap door is open again, as it does.

Adam They’re not too fussed. Mildly miffed.

Ren Yeah, but there’s a heavy leather belt on the safe that they pushed over the hole, which Dane seems to recognise, and from the previous exchange with the mother we get where that is leading.

Adam And then do they go and see Creepy Carl?

Ren Yes, then they go and see Creepy Carl in the old glove factory.

Adam Which gives Julie the opportunity to pick up a dirty old disused glove from the ground and put it on and wear it! Why would you wear the glove!

Ren She does do that. She’s a chaotic one.

Adam I didn’t understand, I thought the glove was going to have some purpose, but she just wear the dirty glove for the rest of the scene then takes it off!

Ren So they find Carl ensconsed in this old factory, surrounded by lightbulbs and lamps and chandeliers and so on, and they say ‘Oh yeah, about that hole’ and he’s like ‘You didn’t open it did you?’ and they’re like, ‘Oh yeah.’

Adam ‘Yeah, of course'. And Carl is much more concerned than they are.

Ren Yes, he seems to have a much better grasp on opening a portal to hell than these children. He says ‘the darkness, it saw you, didn’t it? It’s going to come for all for us!’ and they’re like ‘alright..’

Adam Yeah, they really roll their eyes. They’re a bit freaked out, but they’re also like ‘Oh, look at this crazy old guy!’, and like, you should probably take him a bit seriously!

Ren You did see a girl disjointedly slither into a hole, did you forget about that?

AdamYeah, what’s really odd is that I’ve written down for (booming sound effect) Claim Of The Week: The Darkness Will Come. But actually that’s not a Claim of the Week, that’s a totally legitimate prediction and observation from Carl, he’s right. And I only read it as Claim of the Week because that’s how the kids treat it. They’re like, ‘Look at him making all these ridiculous claims about the hole’, but they’re not ridiculous! It clearly is some kind of evil hole.

Ren Yeah, as you well know!

Adam Yes, as has been evidenced! It’s like the X Files where Scully rolling her eyes and being like ‘Of course aliens don’t exist, Mulder’. Scully, you’ve seen the aliens! Literally every single week.

Ren Yeah! They do have this odd kind of affect as if they’ve had their memory wiped periodically throughout the film. Like ‘don’t you remember…?’

Adam And it’s odd because clearly this is a horror film, albeit a young adult horror film, and surely the best way to make something scary is to have your characters scared. The whole reason the Blair Witch Project is scary, despite nothing happening, is that the three actors seem terrified. But when your actors are playing the characters as if they’re not fussed, like ‘eh, whatev’, it’s hard to be that scared because it’s hard to take the demonic apparitions too seriously.

Ren I was wondering if it was a deliberate ploy to make it less scary so it would still be suitable for children. You know, the characters aren’t so scared so you don’t need to be worried.

Adam Oh yeah, I can see that! But then Gremlins, it’s an interesting one because it has a certification that suggests it’s not for children but it was obviously marketed to children with mogwai toys and a video game and so on, but —

Ren What certificate did it have?

AdamI’m pretty sure the UK certification was a 15, I’m not sure about the American one. I just looked on the BBFC website and it says that when it was submitted in ’84, it raised similar issues to the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Which makes sense, because Temple of Doom is quite a lurid film, and one that is clearly aimed towards children but is actually quite violent and unpleasant.

I don’t know, I just felt like there were quite a lot of scary ideas in The Hole, like the idea of there being a hole that your worst fears come out of is a scary idea, and the idea of it being in the basement below where you sleep is a scary idea. So I don’t understand why it wasn’t scarier.

Ren Yeah, I mean I had moments where I was like ‘Ooh, this is a bit creepy’ but then the characters just being kind of indifferent made it less so.

Adam Although there is a slightly scary moment coming up, actually, in the swimming pool. So they see Creepy Carl and they take a book away of sketches he’s been drawing — these charcoal black pencil sketches of it’s hard to say what. And Dane’s a bit of an aspiring artist and he gets quite caught up in examining these pictures.

They’re going to have a swim in Julie’s backyard pool, and he won’t swim, he just sits by the side of the pool looking through Carl’s sketchbook trying to work it out. And he notices that there’s the shape of a hand on one of the pages.

And then Lucas in the pool has an incident.

Ren Yes, he hears a jingling bell and he’s looking around because he thinks it’s the jester, but then he sees it’s just the dog, but then he’s on the lilo and he gets dragged underwater by something. The dog barks for help and the kids rescue him. And this time he is properly distraught, and he says that it was the jester trying to drag him down through the grate?

Adam Yeah, I guess so!

Ren And later Dane sees a handprint on Lucas’s leg, and it’s a little Jester-hand shaped bruise. Dane’s up in his bedroom and he takes all the pages of the notebook out and sees that they might fit together into one big drawing. But he hears this melancholy whistling and goes downstairs to find a letter addressed to him from New Jersey Penitentiary, that just says ‘Hello boy’ in shaky letters.

He wakes up Lucas and they keep getting separated, they’re not very good at keeping track of each other, and there’s a cop who’s talking to Lucas and Lucas assumes that Dane calls him. The cop says he’s looking for a girl, and shows Lucas a polaroid, but when he turns round the back of his head is blown out and we can see his brains.

So Lucas goes to get Dane and they follow the cop who also slithers back into the hole, and at the same time Julie wakes up and the little girl’s there again, saying ‘Save me, Julie’, and she meets up with Dane and Lucas and explains that the little girl is called Annie, and they used to be best friends but Julie says she let her fall, but she knows what she has to do.

She runs to Frolic Gardens, the abandoned amusement park, with Dane following her —

Adam It’s quite a Stephen King subplot this, it’s the kind of thing you could imagine happening in the main of Stephen King’s books, with this rusty abandoned theme park and a character confronting their past trauma.

Ren Mmhmm!

Adam Personally I wanted a bit more creepy theme park, but I pretty much always want more creepy theme park.

Ren Yeah, we didn’t get a lot!

Adam There’s some slightly mean-faced rollercoaster characters on the carriages.

Ren I was kind of rubbing my hands together going ‘Ooh a creepy theme park? an abandoned theme park?’ but we mostly just get the skeleton of the roller coaster.

Adam It just seems a bit of a shame, if you’re going to have a theme park scene in a kids horror film, you might as well blow your budget there. There wasn’t even a mirror maze chase scene!

Ren I know, you’ve got to have the mirror maze!

Adam Like if you compare it to the fairground scenes in Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Ren Oh yeah, that was what we watched that had the carnival scenes.

Adam And again, that’s not a perfect film but it does put a bit more into its carnival scenes.

Ren I wonder what film we would watch as a quintessential creepy theme park children’s horror film?

Adam I mean, I really love the creepy theme park scenes in The Lost Boys. But it’s really debatable whether The Lost Boys is a children’s horror film. It’s probably a horror film that a lot of kids watched, even though they probably shouldn’t have, technically. It’s probably more child-friendly than most children’s horror films.

Ren Like the protagonist in Nightbooks.

Adam Oh yeah, of course! I always think of Horrorland from the Goosebumps books, which is a particularly good evil theme park. So I don’t know, this scene was a bit disappointing, Julie goes up the rollercoaster and relives her trauma of Annie falling.

Ren Yeah, they have a little reckoning. Annie who’s played by a boy, apparently? Played by a boy called Quinn Lloyd, I couldn’t find any reason why that happened, but that happened.

Adam Quite nicely played. All the child actors are quite decent here. I just wanted more! I wanted a creepy ride or… I mean, we have the creepy clown but the creepy clown doesn’t seem to hang out in the theme park, weirdly. It’s too busy in the swimming pool.

Ren So while that’s going on, Lucas has been told to wait in the garden. So he is, but he hears Dane’s voice calling from the basement and he follows the sound and it turns out it’s the jester again, but this time he has a scrunkly little voice!

Adam I really like the jester’s scrunkly little voice. He’s like a little jester gangster. (Makes scrunkly jester gangster noises)

Ren A chittery, cackly little voice.

Adam(in Jester voice) You want a piece of me, eh?!

(Clip from The Hole: Jester saying: ‘Whoopsie daisy! Hehehe You want a piece of me? Hehehe’)

RenHe makes a lot of little noises like (more jester noises)

Adam (Jester noises continue)

Ren Which was really enjoyable.

Adam Yeah, I texted you when you’d watched two thirds of the film and had to pause and told you to keep watching, because you have the jester’s voice to look forward to.

It’s quite a good punch up as well, the fight between Lucas and the jester is pretty full on. The jester’s gnashing its teeth and gets some good punches in.

Ren Yeah, it’s jumping on Lucas’s head and punching with its little fists, running up and down the stairs. Eventually the jester gets thrown into a fan and is all shredded.

Adam I’m not completely convinced that would happen to a wooden jester. I don’t think a fan alone would destroy this jester.

Ren I think he would get jammed, probably stuck in the fan.

Adam I mean, as we know from Slappy in Goosebumps, all you need to do is to push one of these things on its back, and then it will wriggle around like an insect and won’t be able to get up.

I don’t know, maybe it was a bit more articulated than Slappy. But that does mean that at this point in the film Julie has faced her fear, and Lucas has faced his fear of clowns or jesters. And Dane has told Julie, quite unconvincingly, that he’s not scared of anything.

Ren Yeah, but then they put together the jigsaw of sketches and see that it shows a big man dragging a small boy away, and at the same time Lucas sees a big man in his room, so tall his face is obscured, he’s just this enormous presence.

So Dane explains to Julie about his father, who’s in prison for beating his family, and that’s why they keep moving, because he keeps finding out where they are.

Dane realises that Lucas has been dragged into the hole, and so Dane goes in after him.

Adam And this recontextualises in quite a sobering fashion the bruise left on Lucas by the jester. Like in retrospect it becomes the kind of sign you would see in safeguarding from physical abuse.

So I feel like the film is trying to approach this topic with a certain level of seriousness. I don’t love the film, but I do feel like it was trying to take on this serious topic quite seriously, and quite sympathetically towards the kids and the mum.

Ren I think so, but it is quite a shift because it only comes in in the second half of the film, this topic, but then it dominates the last third.

Adam I found it interesting, because it does help you re-contextualise things. There’s always a reason why kids behave as they behave, and it helps you understand Dane’s anger and violence towards his younger brother.

Ren Yeah, I did feel a bit bad for judging him earlier.

Adam I think that’s deliberate though. It’s very easy, particularly as an adult, to judge a kid when they’re behaving in a violent or abusive, or just a mean and cruel way. But it’s something you have to remember as a teacher, when dealing with kids who behave in this way, that there’s always going to be a reason behind it, basically. These kids are often really struggling with things that you’re not really privy to, as a teacher.

So I liked that. I don’t know if this would be a healing film for anyone like Dane who had gone through this, I’m not sure. I think maybe there’s a tension that there’s quite a generic idea of facing your fears that dominates the first two thirds, and then it very much shifts to being about the trauma of this experience with his dad.

Which isn’t very present in the first two thirds, and it suddenly feels like you’re in a quite different film.

Ren Yeah, and it’s a different scale of fears that we’re approaching now. And I guess Lucas is pretty little, and his dad was sent to prison when he was quite small, so he doesn’t remember any of that.

Adam But anyway, he has now been kidnapped by… it’s hard to say if it is really an emanation of his Dad. There’s a really creepy Junji Ito story, one of his most disturbing, about a guy on death row who sends out a psychic emanation of himself. Actually to try and apologise, grovelingly to the family of the person he killed, but he keeps appearing in the house. It’s a very unsettling story. And I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be that the dad was using the hole to communicate, or if this was just a figment that the man in prison had nothing really to do with.

Ren Yeah, I’m not sure.

Adam I just couldn’t tell to what degree this was his dad, and to what degree it was a demon who pretended to be his dad? I don’t know if that matters or not, but I just found it a bit confusing.

Ren It would kind of resolve in some way the real life threat, if Dane beating this manifestation of the dad also beat the real-life dad, so they don’t have to keep moving around. But I don’t think we really get any indication of that.

Adam Yes, because the reason they keep moving around is because the dad keeps finding out where they are and sending these creepy or threatening letters, which Dane has received again and what seems to spur this episode. But I don’t know if the idea is that even if he continues to receive these letters, he’ll be able to think, OK, my dad is in prison and he'll be able to not be scared anymore. It’s a little unclear what this resolves.

But anyway what happens is that Lucas gets kidnapped, and then Dane has to go down into the hole to save Lucas from this giant, demonic version of his father.

Ren Yeah, who’s played by Jon DeSantis, who is an impressive 6’9”, so he’s playing big monster dad. Dane finds Lucas in this closet, in this distorted, Persona-like building.

Adam This is where the set design actually becomes expressionistic. Because up until now it’s all taken place in this perfectly ordinary non-spooky suburban environment, except for this mildly spooky theme park. Whereas now we really get what I was expecting from the film, which is the kind of aesthetic you get in The Twilight Zone, the movie segment which Joe Dante directed, or some of the more visually weird segments of Gremlins or Eerie Indiana, which are these giant, slanted buildings and weird, oversized props.

Which is probably where we have to do Texture of the Week.

(Rattling, echoing)

Ren and Adam Texture of the Week!

Ren What’s your texture of the week, Adam?

Adam Well, basically it’s a film in which all the textures are saved for the last ten minutes of the film? So, I guess particularly the bandy stairs, I don’t know if they’re shelves that make this twisty staircase which is what Lucas escapes up, before the final confrontation between Dane and his father. How about you?

Ren I think they did very well with the texture of the monster dad’s leather belt. It’s massive and it sounds very heavy, like it has a real weight to it. I think that’s some real prop work there, or sound work, or both.

Adam Actually the figure of the father reminded me a bit of the figure of the father in Paperhouse. Who’s a bit more ambivalent, we’re never quite sure if the father in Paperhouse is abusive, we know he possibly had problems with drink but it’s kept quite obscure whether the father is a dangerous figure or not. But certainly the father who’s drawn without eyes in Paperhouse is this quite scary threatening figure who lumbers about. The father here seems a bit more sure of himself, and less lumbering, but similarly a gigantic towering figure.

Ren Yes, and Dane stands up to him and says ‘You can’t hurt me anymore’, to which the father hits him across the face. And as Dane’s fear starts to evaporate, the building around them disintegrates and they’re standing on this black and white tiled floor, and it ends up as just a circle of this floor in the void. And the father starts to shrink as well as Dane’s fear is overcome. Dane catches the belt and is whipping it around his head towards the father, who says ‘Like father like son!’, but instead of striking him with it, Dane wraps the belt around the ceiling fan so he can hoist himself up and escape, and he tells the bad father that he’s nothing like him.

And they escape, and the mom comes back from her trip and asks ‘What’s under that trap door?’ but when they look in it’s just shallow dirt and pipes. And then it ends on an ‘uh oh!’ because Lucas asks if she has any fears, and she says ‘I used to be scared of a monster’, and the trapdoor creaks open again.

And that’s The Hole (2009).

Adam Yeah. It’s okay.

Ren It’s okay.

Adam It’s a little bit underwhelming, I think it’s fair to say.

Ren Yes, it’s quite a slow start. And you said it was quite a bottom heavy film.

Adam I wonder if it would have worked better as a book, to be honest. Because you could have spent more time inside the character’s minds, really exploring what they’re scared of. In some ways it’s very similar to Stephen King’s It, but obviously the emanation of fear in that is able to shapeshift, and you have the iconic figure of Pennywise. But there's no equivalent to Pennywise in this, except from I guess, the jester. But it is only a little toy jester.

Ren Do you think the hole should have had an identity of its own?

Adam Maybe the hole needed teeth? And a funny voice? Yeah. I don’t know, maybe it makes sense, it’s a film about a hole and there’s an absence there, and a hole is an absence.

Oh, we should mention as well, that poor Crazy Carl gets killed, and they’re not very fussed.

Ren Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot to mention that, all his lights got snuffed out and the darkness got him.

Adam So he didn’t make a claim of the week, he said the darkness would come and it did, and it killed him. And they’re just like, oh yeah, Carl’s dead. Poor guy.

Ren Poor Carl. It feels a bit half-baked this film.

Adam Yeah, it feels like maybe Joe Dante didn’t get to stretch his wings as much in this one. I think it’s also that it never really revs into gear, if you compare it to Gremlins which after the first fifteen minutes is pretty nonstop, The Hole is is pretty slow. But it’s not really slow in a creepy way, because the suburban environment feels so un-spooky. Which does ground it in a reality, and the reality of these kids’ traumas. But it doesn’t quite work, sadly. But that’s okay.

Ren It’s definitely worth exploring in the canon of children’s horror.

Adam I’m glad we’ve covered it. And I also thought that everyone and their grandmother’s dog has done a podcast on Gremlins, so it seemed worth it to do a more obscure Joe Dante film.

Ren Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam Yeah! Be edgy teenagers creepy kids, and listen to The Killers!

Ren It’s only natural!

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye creepy kids!

Adam The edgiest band.

(Outro music plays)