Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Mini Episode: Picture Books

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This episode we talked about: Not Now Bernard and Tusk Tusk by Dave McKee, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.

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, and you can find her work at makiyamazaki.com. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and their band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at behance.net/lettydraws

Transcript

**Ren: ** Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re doing a mini-episode about creepy and spooky children’s picture books. Enjoy!

Ren: Hello Adam!

Adam: Hullo Ren.

Ren: So we’re doing a little mini-episode today —

Adam: Oh, you’ve already put a cap on my rambling!

Ren: Yep. Because we’re going to do a series next, for the first time, we’re going to do three books in a trilogy.

Adam: I didn’t know that was the plan!

Ren: Yeah, so that’s the plan.

Adam: That sounds good. The Deptford Mice triology.

Ren: But before we go down the sewers with that rag-tag bag of mice and rats… I don’t know why they’re in bags.

Adam: That’s the characters, animated talking bags stuffed with rats and mice.

Ren: That might be less disturbing than the actual content of the books. But before we get to that, we’re just going to talk about some picture books!

Adam: Creepy picture books.

Ren: Because there’s a few, and they’re not really long enough to do episodes on, but it’s worth touching on the creepy content for younger readers.

Adam: I think if you’re an author of books for very young children then presumably you have to deal with the influence of fairy tales, that tend to be very dark indeed.

Ren: Yes, like the varying number of toes that are cut off in the Cinderella story. And the more modern ones that we’re talking about seem to draw on that tradition.

Adam: Often perhaps children getting lost in a forest or wilderness, or some space away from home, perhaps? The threat of being gobbled up, or eaten or cannibalised crops up a lot. And anthropomorphic animals.

So shall we start with the obvious, which I suppose is Maurice Sendak. I imagine many if not most children in Britain would come across Where the Wild Things Are at some point in their lives, and I imagine the same is tree of most of the English-speaking world. He was an American author, and the film, directed by Spike Jones was American.

Did you have it read to you as a kid?

Ren: It was around, I think both at home and at school. It definitely feels like a fixture of my childhood.

Adam: So the story’s pretty simple as I remember it: there’s a kid called Max who’s a bit of a terror, and he’s causing all sorts of mischief, romping around in his beastly playsuit and banging on a pot with a spoon, generally causing ruckus and he’s going to be sent to bed without any tea.

But instead he sails away to where the wild things are, who are these humongous lolloping creatures who like to have fun and party, but are also monsters.

So while pronouncing Max their king, they also make claims of eating him. But it becomes quite an affectionate relationship, they dance around and have a monstering good time and then Max sails back home and does get his tea after all, not ultimately punished for his bad behaviour, so will presumably grow up into a sociopathic monster.

Ren: And not the cute kind.

Adam: And that’s my very conservative reading of the book.

Ren: It has the memorable line: ‘we’ll eat you up, we love you so!’

Adam: As all parents say to their babies.

Ren: And I feel like I’ve read a Marina Warner book at some point about the discourse around children being adorable and eating children. But this is the wild, slightly maniac energy that this book has, and was why I was quite unhappy with the film version which was much less gleefully chompy.

Adam: And much more mopey monsters.

Ren: But Where the Wild Things Are is a very appealing fantasy of escaping the every day strictures of your parents and bedtimes, and disappearing to your own private, slightly dangerous, romping ground.

Adam: Not for me as a child, Ren. I didn’t really like it very much! Frankly, I thought Max was a very naughty boy and should go to bed on time. I found it quite a distressing book, I was very obsessive about getting to bed on time as a kid.

I think probably because my Mum had said something like ‘If you don’t get to sleep you won’t be able to get up in the morning’, and I literally believed that to be true.

Ren: Oh no.

Adam: For a good year as a child, believing that I would wake up into a frozen state, a kind of living coma. So the idea of not getting to sleep before midnight terrified me.

Ren: So if your bedroom had opened up into an undulating midnight ocean and faraway forest, you’d have said: ‘No thank you, I need to get to sleep’.

Adam: Yeah, basically. Whereas you’d have been like (scrappy gremlin voice) ‘Corrr! I’m all for it! Jungle here I come!’

I’m sure that wasn’t actually your voice.

Ren: I was a cartoon rat, as a child.

Adam: Oh no, that reminds me of another children’s horror, Philip Pullman’s ‘I was a rat’. Do you remember that? It was a TV adaptation when we were kids.

Ren: I don’t!

Adam: It’s about a rat-boy, a sideshow performer who was a rat and he escapes through the sewers. Peter used to say he found it very offensive, because he said it was prejudiced against people who look like rats, and he counted himself among them at the time.

Which did not stop him, I should add, from singing ‘I was a rat dun dun dun dun dun, I was a rat’ over and over again, so I don’t feel that his distaste for the programme could have stretched that far.

Ren: Speaking of rats… are they rats or are they mice? The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter.

Adam: Oh surely with all the negative associations they must be rats. I mean, it’s only rats that eat babies, right? Not mice. Mice wouldn’t do that.

Ren: Let’s go under the assumption that it’s rats. Poor rats.

Adam: So the Tale of Samuel Whiskers.

Ren: In which poor Tom Kitten goes poking about in an old house making mischief and finds himself in the attic, encased in pastry and being rolled into a roly-poly pudding.

Adam: By Mr Samuel Whiskers and his wife Annamaria.

Ren: And Beatrix Potter generally, is a fairly gentle read that even the most scared of children can palate, but this was quite disturbing.

Adam: Yeah, it’s one that I found disturbing as well, so you’re not alone in that. I don’t know, it might be similar to why When the Wind Blows is so disturbing, as in the book by Raymond Briggs which is a portrait of his parents dying in a nuclear war.

And it’s drawn in Raymond Briggs’ soft, watercolour painterly style, and there’s something about these very soft rotund people slowly dying of radiation sickness that makes it all the worse. Same with Grave of the Fireflies, there’s something particularly upsetting about seeing two cute Studio Ghibli children in a war.

So similarly with The Tale of Samuel Whiskers or the roly-poly pudding, it’s just very upsetting seeing one of Beatrix Potter’s incredibly cute, very nicely painted kittens being rolled up and hit with a big rolling pin, ready to be eaten by a couple of rats.

Ren: It feels like Tom Kitten has slipped into a harsher world.

Adam: Yes!

Ren: That I wasn’t quite prepared for, as a kid.

Adam: It’s odd, I looked it up on Wikipedia and I was expecting some kind of outcry but I can’t see anything. I thought there might have been protests, or some kind of critical response to such a dark turn in her work, but no.

Ren: Well, it’s not a small naked boy so no-one cares!

Adam: To which you are referring, I assume to Sendak’s In the Night Garden —

Ren: — Kitchen.

Adam: In the Night Kitchen. In the Night Garden is quite scary though, to be fair.

Ren: Yes, In the Night Kitchen is about a small boy falling out of his clothes, and his bed, and into a giant kitchen populated by cheerful rotund chefs who are making immense amounts of batter for everyone’s breakfast. And the small boy gets clumped in flour, and falls into a jug of milk and so on. But crucially he is naked while this happens.

Adam: Much to the distress of the American public at large, apparently. It’s been a much challenged and banned book in American schools and libraries.

Ren: But I mean it’s very charming, not frightening at all.

Adam: And you read it as a kid and you don’t go prancing around naked throwing yourself into vats of dough.

Ren: More’s the pity.

Adam: But Where the Wild Things are and In the Night Kitchen were apparently two parts of a trilogy, according to Sendak charting a child’s emotional development. So In the Night Kitchen is toddler stage, it’s this very lucid dream like stage, Where the Wild Things Are is pre-schooler, a little bit further along and the third in the trilogy is called Outside Over There and apparently is based on the pre-adolescent stage of development.

And interestingly the plot sounds quite similar to that of Labyrinth. It’s about a girl called Ida, in this, whose baby sister is stolen away by goblins and she has to go and rescue her.

Ren: Huh! I had never heard of that.

Adam: I hadn’t either, clearly obscured by the other two books but I might have to get hold of it.

Ren: So the other author we’re going to talk about is David McKee —

Adam: (mock jeering tone) Haha, are you scared of Elmer, Ren? The scary patchwork elephant?

Although to be fair, if you did see an elephant in the wild literally made of patchwork, all trembling in the breeze and partly flopsy just trying to stand itself up, maybe slightly sodden in the rain and the mud, that might be quite scary.

Ren: Yes. But as well as Elmer, David McKee is well known for a book called Not Now Bernard, from 1980. If you haven’t ever read it there are videos on youtube of people reading this story aloud —

Adam: — what, to horrified children?

Ren: The plot is that Bernard is a small boy who is trying to talk to his parents, but they’re too preoccupied with reading a newspaper or painting a wall or whatever, and tell him ’Not Now, Bernard’.

He tells them that there’s a monster in the garden who wants to eat him and just gets the same response. So the monster eats Bernard, and takes his place and Bernard’s parents are too preoccupied to notice.

Adam: And so continue to respond to the poor monster with ‘Not now, Bernard’.

Ren: Yep. And the image I always remember from this book is the very last one, of the monster tucked up in Bernard’s bed, trying to protest that it is a monster, and not Bernard, and realising that something’s gone terribly wrong.

Adam: I like that the book is not just a tragedy for the poor eaten Bernard, but also a tragedy for the poor monster.

Ren: Who was not expecting this at all.

Adam: Probably even less than Tom Kitten.

Just imagining the monster going (hardboiled action here voice) ‘I’ve made a huge mistake’.

Ren: It’s so simple, but so effectively haunting.

Adam: And very troubling as a kid, the idea that you could be disappeared or even killed, and your parents might not even notice.

Ren: Yeah! I had a recurring dream as a kid, possibly influenced by this book that my face had turned into a monster face and no-one told me.

Adam: It’s interesting that it’s the monster that undergoes this and not Bernard. Bernard’s just a side character, really. This is the existential crisis of a monster who finds himself treated as a boy.

So that was the only David McKee book apart from the Elmer books that I had read to me as kid, but you had one called Tusk Tusk, right?

Ren: Yes, which I didn’t realise until I looked it up just now was also by David McKee, just a couple of years before in 1978. Which is a parable about racism, featuring a world populated by black and white elephants that hate each other. It’s drawn in this very cute cute cartoon style, but the depiction of the violence between these two colours of elephants is a little unsettling.

The cover has a black and a white elephant marching away from each other, both of their eyes and mouths set in pretty angry, hate-filled expressions, and each of them are holding their trunks in their air, and the end of their trunks have transformed into the shape of a hand holding a gun. Which is quite disturbing.

Adam: Yeah, I hadn’t seen this one before and looked up pictures, and I found the hand-trunks a little disturbing. There’s one of them holding their trunks like fists at each other.

Ren: And it’s another one in which the ending isn’t really a neat resolution.

Adam: How does it end? There’s a war —

Ren: Yes, there’s a war between the black and the white elephants, but the peace-loving elephants from each side slip away into the forest and after several generations the warring elephants have killed each other off, but the descendants of the peace-loving elephants come out of the forest, and they’re grey.

So it’s like, oh right, that’s nice. But right at the end of the book it says ‘But recently the small-eared elephants and the big-eared elephants have been looking at each other suspiciously’.

Adam: That’s a pretty grim ending!

Ren: So this was David McKee’s —

Adam: — dark period. So the book he released after Not Now Bernard in ’83 is titled I Hate My Teddy Bear. Sadly, looking it up it doesn’t seem scary at all, but then Two Monsters after that. A story promoting tolerance and accepting differences of opinion, but does feature two quite scary-looking monsters.

Ren: And the most recent one we’re going to mention is The Wolves in the Walls from 2003, by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean.

Adam: Not Dave McKee.

Ren: It has this wonderfully ominous refrain at the beginning of the book where the little girl Lucy hears noises in the walls, and says to her mum and her dad and her brother, ‘Oh there’s wolves in the walls’, and they say, ‘Oh no, there can’t be wolves in the walls, because if the wolves come out of the walls, then it’s all over’. ‘What’s all over?’ says Lucy, and her mother says ‘It. Everyone knows that’. Which I just think is a brilliant vague apocalyptic threat that somehow everyone except her knows.

Adam: I think that should be the Claim of the Week.

(echoey sound effect) Claim of the Week!

Ren: If the wolves come out of the wolves, then it’s all over.

It has Dave McKean’s distinctive sculptural illustration style, where all the characters look a bit like marionettes.

Adam: That’s a nice way of putting it, it’s quite fragmentary and collage-y as well.

Ren: Yeah. It’s a good ‘un.

Adam: It is! We really must get round to talking about Coraline this year.

Ren: Well, it’s episode 100 Adam!

Adam: Oh yes, well maybe this year if we speed up a bit.

Any others you want to briefly mention?

Ren: Well, I asked friend of the show and theme tune composer Maki if there was anything she could think of, and she said she had a book of the ‘There was an old woman who swallowed a fly’, which was memorably body horror for small children, as this old woman’s body becomes increasingly distorted and engorged as she continues to consume unsuspecting animals until she died. We couldn’t find the exact edition that Maki was talking about, but you can imagine.

Adam: There was one that upset me a little bit, although my mum seems more upset by the recollection of it than me, called There’s a Hippopotamus On Our Roof Eating Cake, by Hazel Edwards. And actually, the story’s quite a cute one, it’s about a leaking groan-y roof and the girl discovers actually there’s a hippo on the roof that’s causing all this, and he’s eating cake.

It goes through the potential kinds of cake it is — is it a birthday cake, no. Is it a chocolate cake, no. It’s special cake. There’s a hippopotamus on our cake eating special cake. But there’s a bit in the story halfway through in which the little girl scribbles in one of her dad’s book, with pencils, and I can’t remember how it’s phrased but it said he was angry and he smacked her, and the illustration shows this really furious bearded man I guess looking like he’s about to smack or spank this kid, and I think that’s probably why my mum wasn’t a big fan of the book.

I really liked it as a kid, and looking at Hazel Edwards’ other books, she clearly kept going down the hippopotamus road. There’s: Hooray! There's a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Having a Birthday Party, there’s My Hippopotamus is on our Caravan Roof Getting Sunburnt, Hey Hippopotamus, Do Babies Eat Cake, Look, There's a Hippopotamus in the Playground Eating Cake, Guess What? There's A Hippopotamus on the Hospital Roof Eating Cake, Our Cake Eating Hippo Plays, and so on.

Ren: Sort of madlibs of ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘roof’ and ‘cake’.

Adam: You should look up illustrations from it, it’s a good hippo.

Ren: Right. So next time we meet we’ll be talking about more irredeemably horrible rats. Or are they?

Adam: We’re going to get ourselves into some kind of conflict with a rat-based information podcast.

Ren: I actually really like rats! I think they’re quite nice. But in children’s literature their name is mud.

Adam: Almost as defamed as wolves!

Maybe we just need to write some kids books about really awful kittens and seal pups just to turn the tables a bit. ‘There’s a Cute Kitten on my Roof Eating Rats’

Ren: Sounds quite factual, to be honest.

Adam: Much less based on superstitious propaganda than the wolf and rat-based stuff.

Ren: I’ll put the descriptions of the books we’ve talked about in the shownotes.

Hope you enjoyed this mini-episode and we’ll see you next time1

Adam: And let us know if you’re like, ‘I really like Still Scared but I really wish all their episodes were half an hour!’ We’ll accept it gracefully, I won’t then do a three hour episode just to spite you, I promise.

Ren: Feedback is appreciated. Til next time, spooky kids!

Adam: Ooh, you didn’t ask me for a sign-off, great.


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About this podcast

A podcast in which one film lecturer and one scaredy-cat discuss creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and tv.

by Ren Wednesday, Adam Whybray

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