If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

'My Favourite Thing is Monsters' is by Emil Ferris, and published by Fantagraphics. Find her on twitter at @emilferrisdraws.

Vanessa Thompsett, who gave the talk about Children's Horror at Nine Worlds Geekfest, is on twitter at @thixotropic.

Transcript

Adam: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, I’m your co-host Adam Whybray along with your other co-host Ren Wednesday and in this episode we’ll be going over why we started a podcast in the first place, as well as recapping the four podcasts we’ve delivered so far just so everyone can catch up to speed at the beginning of 2018. The opening theme music is by Maki Yamazaki, and the end theme is Joe Kelly, with artwork by Letty Wilson. Do enjoy!

theme tune

Ren: So, for this episode I thought we would do just a kind of mini episode catch-up, maybe some general chat as a kind of fill-in one over the Christmas and New Year period before we get into a new topic.

Adam: So if you’ve gorged yourself to blotation on Christmas food you can sit back and listen to us sum up the podcasts so far, and have a bit of a chat about children’s horror. Hopefully not too much the horrors of the year, this is intended to distract form all that.

Ren: Yeah, this is an escape.

Adam: Palliative.

Ren: — Because we sort of just launched into it and didn’t really do any general ‘why are we here what are we doing’ chat at the beginning.

Adam: That’s a good point actually! Maybe I just work from the assumption that everyone has so many things that scared them as a child that such a podcast spoke for itself.

Ren: I don’t know if everyone lives with such memories of childhood horror as we do.

Adam: It’s hard to know how historically specific it is, because sometimes I do think that growing up as a kid in the early ‘90s was a particularly fertile period for children’s horror, and you had these slightly uneasy programmes on kids tv, like The Demon Headmaster, and you had this rise in young adult fiction. But then the ’70s was also known for Children of the Stones, etc. More fantasy, but still quite troubling in its own way.

I’ve recently read The Water Babies —

Ren: Oh, you read it?

Adam: God, I read it. It’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever read! It was horrible! Every time a child’s introduced they just die, and it’s like ‘don’t worry, they’re not really dead, they’re a water baby or flew off somewhere’. I don’t know. So you know, we didn’t have it as bad as Victorian kids with all their stories about dying chimney sweeps and men with shock-hair who cut off your thumbs.

Ren: Oh yeah, I was wondering if we might do cautionary tales at some point.

Adam: Well, it would allow us to do the Tiger Lillies version of it as well.

What inspired you? Like, what often seems to happen when we work on projects together, one of us comes up with an idea, and then we come together on a shared interest. You suggested doing something about childhood, I think?

Ren: I think I was thinking of things that we’ve watched together, and things that we’ve talked about…

Adam: Things we’ve developed in-jokes over.

Ren: Basically!

Adam: I know you also suggested doing one on British comedy or ‘90s comedy, but that would just be us making Lee and Herring references, and we do enough of those already.

Ren: I think we’ve been quite good at not doing too many TMWRNJ in-jokes.*

Adam: I try to watch myself.

Ren: As I mentioned, I was inspired to do a podcast after going to talks at Nine Worlds, which happens every year in London. And I’d been to a talk at the previous Nine Worlds by Vanessa Thompsett, which was about children’s horror. And I was so excited to see this on the schedule, it was the one thing I absolutely wanted to go to, and it was really good, and inevitably I’ve actually forgotten all the interesting and insightful comments that she made, but she talked about Coraline, and The Witches, and a few other things, and about childhood fears and how they come through in these films. Super interesting.

Adam: I mean The Witches was definitely one that really scared me as a child. It’s interesting for me, I don’t know how common this is because I was diagnosed with OCD really young, at least twelve maybe earlier, so sometimes I don’t know if something is typical or just characteristic of OCD.

But for me, often the things I associated with giving me fear and anxiety, the object themselves, seemed to have an almost unholy charge to them. I remember going round to a family friend’s house, and The Witches being on a bookshelf, and I wanted to take it out and put it in a different room. I didn’t even want to sleep in the same room as that book. It almost felt like the book itself was the Necronomicon or something, it had this charged power or aura of evil and danger about it.

Ren: I was very scared of the boiler. The boiler in the house had a sticker on it that said ’sacrificial anode’. I don’t know what that means. I still don’t know what that means.

Adam: I don’t think you want to know what that means!

Ren: But I thought it was going to kill me.

Adam: Awww. If you’re comfortable delving more into this, did you imagine it having an inner life? Did you think it had some sort of malevolent design on you?

Ren: I’m not sure how much I believed it, or if I just made up a story that scared me and then I was scared of the boiler. But I was scared of its sacrificial intentions, whatever they were.

Adam: Did you think that the boiler itself had sacrificial intentions? Or that the boiler was a means, that it was being used in some kind of sacrifice. Did you think that the boiler was some part of the ritual?

Ren: I think that was more what I thought. That the boiler was some kind of arcane instrument in a sacrifice.

Adam: Like an alter piece.

Ren: Yeah.

Adam: It’s quite interesting you say that, because I also used the boiler to induce horror in my siblings, in a playful sense, but when Leon was young, in particular, I used to make theme parks round the house.

And the stairs would be a slide, I’d put a mattress on the stairs, and one room would be the roller coaster, which would be an extreme piggy-back ride with lots of twirling round, but I remember I used to reserve the bathroom for a kind of interactive story experience.

So they’d sit on the toilet with the toilet seat down, and they’d either have to close their eyes, or put a towel over their heads, and then I’d narrate a kind of scary story. It was meant to be a bit like those games you play at Halloween, where you have to put a blindfold on and then touch things, and they say ‘these are the old crone’s eyeballs!’ and then you touch the peeled grapes.

I’d do that with shower gel and other things that were in the bathroom, but my most effective one was a bizarre goosebumps-inspired time travel narrative. You ended up seeing one of your ancestors, and then you saw their decayed corpse. We’d got these plastic masks for Christmas, animal masks, just plastic spectacles with a nose piece, and they weren’t that scary unless you turned them inside out and just saw the fleshy rubber, and then they looked horrible!

So I dressed up the boiler in one of my mum’s dresses with this inside-out animal mask, and then at the end of the story I threw open the closet door and whipped the towel off their head and they were confronted with this terrible monstrosity, this dressed-up, decayed, monkey-corpse boiler thing. And I remember it made my brother scream, so it must have had —

Ren: Good work. So, I guess when you’re a kid, you don’t so much know exactly what’s possible and what’s not possible…

Adam: I think that’s why The Witches scared me. Particularly the opening chapter when the various historic witches are described, and the things they do to various children. With Goosebumps, I did read some of the Goosebumps books, but some of them I remember I got out from the library and never actually dared read them. Just the names and the covers were enough.

Ren: Yeah, me too. I could never bring myself to read Say Cheese and Die because it looked too scary.

Adam: I think I bailed on that one. I started it but I think the idea was too upsetting. That’s the one with the camera that shows who’s going to die?

Ren: Which is horrifying. And also kind of similar to my recurring childhood nightmare, in a way. I’m just revealing all my weird childhood fears. I had this nightmare about a red pen that drew on people or things and transformed them into other… people or things, or transformed them in some horrible way. It was very scary.

Adam: Would it kill the people? Or transform them into monsters?

Ren: Yeah, transform them into monsters.

Adam: A particularly vivid nightmare’s just come back to me. (God, this is the closest to a therapy session our podcast’s come yet!) In which I woke up, and I think it might have been influenced by The Dark is Rising, of which I heard a radio adaptation, I think it was from six to half six on Sundays which I used to listen to on Radio 4. There was a Dark is Rising adaptation, and my memory of how the first book begins, I might be wrong, we might look at this later in the series. *

Generally my issues with sleep were not so much nightmares, I remember being worried about seeing a monster at the end of the bed and that sort of thing, but I was very worried by the idea of not being able to wake up, or of not being able to sleep again.

And I think it all stemmed, I was very literal as a child, I would take things very literally, so one thing my mum said to me, and bless her I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, she said ‘if you don’t get to sleep, you won’t be able to move in the morning’ or she might have said ‘you won’t be able to get up in the morning’.

But whatever it was, I took it to mean that I would be frozen in bed, effectively. That I wouldn’t be able to move my limbs, and if I didn’t get sleep I would be in this locked-in syndrome essentially. And this terrified me for quite a long time before I dared raise the topic with my mum. So I’d get very worried about not being able to get to sleep, which in turn would mean I couldn’t sleep.

So shall we have a brief recap? I tried to think of some different categories for us to look over our last few podcasts.

What would you say is the scariest thing we’ve either watched or read?

Ren: The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray.

Adam: Yeah, that seems like a clear answer.

Ren: It’s really going for it on lots of levels. Lots of horror.

Adam: Yeah, it’s rooted in fantastical horror yet there’s a lot of really grimy real-life horror in there too. And I think it’s so closely aligned with its characters perspectives that you really feel the danger they’re in. And there’s some flat out revolting descriptions. I mean, if I say scariest moment that’s probably also going to be from Alaizabel, right?

Ren: Yeah, just the Wych-Kin, the one that shrivelled the beggar into advanced decay in a moment of seconds is just really grim.

Excerpt from Alaizabel episode:

Jimley Potter, master pickpocket at the age of twelve, street-urchin in the employ of Pete the Knife. He slept, twitching, in his cot in an empty warehouse, along with six other boys his age who formed the rest of Pete’s gang. It wasn’t a bad life, stealing other people’s purses, keeping a bit and giving the rest to old Pete. Apart from the occupational hazard of being hung, it was really quite rewarding.

It was of the hangman’s noose that he dreamed now, a gallows standing alone on the Yorkshire Moors, the rope swinging steadily. He often dreamed of the noose, but he never remembered, just as he would not remember this one, which was remarkable because of a new element in it. There was a small child standing by the gallows, a little girl wearing a black funeral dress, and a black cloak with a hood set halfway back on her head. He could see she was entirely bald. Her eyes were downturned at first, but when they looked up at him he could see that her irises were red as blood, and her face as cold as the grave. He awoke as normal that morning, stretched, and got up to have breakfast. It was only later that day that the Crimson Fever began to make itself felt.'

Adam: Do you think that’s the one that would have scared you most as a kid as well?

Ren: Well, the one that scared me most as a kid was Rawhead, walking behind you with his extra step.

Adam: I think out of everything we’ve looked at so far, Return to Oz would have scared me most as kid. Now I just enjoy it as a phantasmagoric genre-piece, but as a kid the rows of screaming heads would have really upset me I think. Also just that opening sequence.

Extract from Return to Oz episode:

So, Return to Oz is set six months after The Wizard of Oz, and we come back to Kansas and everything is not going very well at all. Obviously the house got destroyed in the hurricane, and Uncle Henry is in kind of a funk, and he isn’t building the new house as fast as he should be, and Aunt Em can’t cope with all the farm chores, and Dorothy can’t sleep and she keeps telling people the stories of Oz and they don’t believe her, and even Billina the chicken isn’t laying eggs and is being threatened with being cooked up. So it’s a fairly bleak set-up. And they’re unable to work out what to do with Dorothy, so they take her to a doctor for ‘electric healing’.

Adam: ‘What you need is a little electric healing!'

Adam: I’ve written ‘most problematic moment’ but I think there’s an obvious answer to that one.

Ren: Yeah, there’s a clear winner to that one. It’s The Boxtrolls!

Extract from Paranorman/Boxtrolls episode:

Ren: So, I, yeah. I mean, it is just very transmisogynistic which for people who don’t know that word it’s kind of the intersection of transphobia and misogyny that is levelled at trans women and trans-feminine people, but it just encompasses a lot of these tropes of seeing femininity in a male character as disgusting and whatever. So there’s this scene where Eggs tries to show the crows that Madame Frou Frou is actually Archibald Snatcher by removing his wig, which is actually like a very old transphobic movie trope that goes back decades'

Adam: I don’t think you have to read that much into it to have issues with it, sadly. Which one would you be most keen to introduce children to? If you had access to many impressionable minds.

Ren: I do want to say Return to Oz, though that seems slightly cruel. Maybe the Oz books.

Adam: The Oz books were a lot more charming than I expected.

Ren: I think if they could handle Return to Oz, that would be the one.

Adam: I think The Demon Headmaster would make them healthily suspicious of institutional power.

Extract from The Demon Headmaster episode:

Adam: And although the headmaster seems to have demonic aspects it’s never clearly established whether he’s an alien or a human or a demon, or quite what he is.

But his actual power of hypnosis is one clearly rooted in reality, and in fact a lot of the means at his disposal in the first book and the first three episodes of the tv series are ones that an actual cruel or abusive headmaster would have. The children get told off, and when they go home to tell Dinah’s mum what is going on, she says to the two brothers Harvey and Lloyd: ‘you’re lying, you’re making this up, you got in trouble for bad behaviour, that’s what the school told me’. And of course this is wholly plausible.

I think it speaks to that terrible power disparity that you feel quite keenly as a child between yourself, and if not necessarily individual teachers, then the school as an institution. And between children and adults. And that fear that things might happen to you, and might be done to you, and you might not be believed.

Ren: Yes, definitely. And it’s that fear’s heightened with the hypnosis which means that they definitely won’t be believed, because all the other children have been hypnotised to repeat these rote phrases talking about how marvellous the headmaster is.

Adam: Shall we briefly talk about My Favourite Thing Is Monsters? Because it’s so good. Before we finish I want to talk about my favourite, it’s not a children’s horror, but it has a child protagonist and one of my favourite things of the year, which is Emil Ferris’s My Favourite Thing is Monsters, which is a remarkable graphic novel published by Fantagraphics.

Ren: It’s just ASTONISHING. Just incredibly good.

Adam: To the degree that it’s hard to do it justice. I do feel a bit lost for words when confronted with it. Because it’s a mammoth book for one thing. You read the digital version, which is maybe a little less imposing, because the actual book is huge.

Ren: Well, it felt very long, because it is very long, but also I was reading it in the guided view, where it takes you from panel to panel, to read it. Although there aren’t really panels so it sometimes shows you the whole page and then zooms into bits so you can read the text, so it felt like this incredibly long guided tour through all these hundreds and hundreds of drawings and little bits of text and dialogue.

Adam: The book itself almost has the feel of a scrapbook, it has clippings and it’s all drawn on notebook paper so it looks almost like a child’s exercise book, and it doesn’t really adhere to the panel format so it’s this great sprawling mass of images and ideas and annotations.

It’s semi-autobiographical, and you have no idea when reading it what’s real and what isn’t, but that’s part of the intrigue and fun of it. It focuses on Karen, who believes herself to be a werewolf and wears a detective’s coat through a lot of the story, and lives in a neighbourhood of Chicago in the 1960s, so growing up where Ferris grew up herself.

And her upstairs neighbour who she is very close to is murdered, and she decides to set off on an investigation. And it’s made up of recollections, and drawings by her brother Deeze, and reflections and presumably Karen’s drawings of the front covers of various horror magazines.

Ren: And also lots of renditions of various artworks, because they go to visit the art gallery several times throughout the course of the story.

Adam: And the technical chops on display are…

Ren: Yeah, just astonishingly good drawing.

Adam: So there was an article in The Guardian with sadly very few comments, and one of the comments was very dismissive like ‘The art doesn’t look like anything special’. And I was like, ’What. Come on.’

Ren: (belligerently) ’You what mate?’

Adam: Pretty much my response. It’s really warm, it’s intimate, it’s provocative, it’s deeply intelligent — but pulls all this off with a real lightness of touch. It doesn’t feel like reading some big, heavy important novel. It’s fun, even while it deals with really dark themes.

Ren: And I definitely relate to the idea of… well, I think the author said in an interview that when she was growing up she didn’t want to be a girl, she didn’t want to be a boy either, but she didn’t want all the things that came with being a girl and a woman. And wanted to be a monster. Which I relate to in a non-binary way.

Adam: I think the potential for the monster identity as an exciting and creative thing, rather than just a horrible bad thing is really usefully explored.

Ren: Yeah, and Karen is realising that she’s queer as well, so there’s that association with being queer, being an outsider, being a monster. But being a monster in a good way.

Adam: Yeah, it’s really amazing. I recommend it to anyone, basically. And if you find it too cost-prohibitive, it’s slightly less expensive digitally, or ask your library to get a copy, because every library should have this one.

Right, well. I think our next episode is going to be on ‘the goosebumps’. Not all the goosebumps, obviously.

Ren: Starting our epic journey into ‘the goosebumps’.

Adam: This is going to be an occasional thing we dip our toes into, because there is a lot of them. How many of them are written by R.L. Stine? It’s hard to say. But I think the ones we’re looking at do have the classic R.L. Stine feel to them.

Ren: So, keep it spooky.

Adam: Happy 2017, creepy kids.*

Ren: Try not to be too scared by your boilers. See you next time.

_Outro music _

• This Morning with Richard Not Judy. Sorry. This is an in-joke because Richard Herring started to introduce the show by saying ‘Welcome to This Morning with Richard Not Judy, the show that everyone’s calling Tuhumrunjuh’.

• The rest of this thought seems to have got lost in the edit, but from what I recall, Adam’s Dark is Rising inspired nightmare was that he would come done the stairs in the morning and find his family frozen in a state of suspended animation, and be unable to wake them or communicate with them.

• Happy because it’s over.