In this episode we discussed the 2006 animated film Monster House.

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

In this episode we recommend fundraisers to donate to in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. We recommended the Minnesota Freedom Fund, although they have now received a lot of donations and have linked to a spreadsheet of organisations that don’t have such a high profile. You can find that here.

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 talking about the 2006 animated film Monster House. Enjoy!

Ren: Hi Adam!

Adam: Hello.

Ren: How are you?

Adam: Uhh…

Ren: I say, tentatively.

Adam: Yeah, I’m not going to give a whole spiel. I’m sure I’ve got a blog for that. Hanging in there. I think everyone’s struggling at the moment, for all sorts of different reasons. But glad to be doing the podcast and discussing an interesting film.

Ren: Yes. I agree. There’s a lot going on, isn’t there? Personally, politically, globally, epidemiologically. But I’m glad to be here, today, talking to you. A bit of distraction.

And what we are talking about is Monster House, I know we said at the end of the last podcast that we were going to do Creeped Out, and we did want to do that, but I could not for the life of me find a platform where all of the episodes were available. So as Creeped Out didn’t work out we’re falling back on a film that’s on Netflix —

Adam: And on everything! It’s on every streaming site.

Ren: Because it came out in 2006!! I was so surprised when I realised that, I thought it was much more recent.

Adam: Oh, that’s interesting. I watched it upon release.

Ren: Huh, okay. I’d never even heard of this film and then I realised it came out in 2006, which was just a tremendously long time ago.

Adam: It really is.

Ren: And also, incidentally, happens to be the one year of my life that I have no specific memories from.

Adam: What, at all?

Ren: No, I can’t think of a single thing that happened to me in 2006.

Adam: Okay, so I was I think coming up to university, so I remember watching this with my girlfriend at the time, and now academic collaborator, Helena.

We both quite enjoyed it. Watching it in what was her family house’s guest bedroom, that had really horrible yellow walls that made me feel queasy and dizzy for some reason.

Ren: Wow, like actual ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ stuff.

Adam: Yeah, it had quite a profound effect on me, it genuinely made me feel physically unwell, being in that room for too long. I don’t know, maybe there was a carbon monoxide leak isolated in that room. But I do have quite strong memories of watching certain films in that room, but always feeling a bit ill.

But I remember both of us enjoying it at the time.

Ren: I did my GCSEs in 2005, so 2006 I would have been in the start of sixth form.

Adam: Surely you remember sixth form, right?

Ren: Yeah, I mean, I don’t have a complete black hole but I don’t remember anything memorable and specific that happened and I associate with 2006.

2006 just kind of happened.

Adam: Well, what you didn’t do that year is watch Monster House.

Ren: Yeah.

Adam: This is a fairly obscure film that has gained greater attention in recent years, or at least greater distribution, and I do wonder if that’s because the screenplay was primarily written by Dan Harmon, pre internet meme fame of Rick and Morty.

Ren: Not much of the Rick and Morty flavour to it, I think.

Adam: Yes, there’s certainly no post-ironic pickle content, which is nice. But he wasn’t the only person who worked on the screenplay. He co-wrote it with Rob Shrab and Pamela Pettler. And it was produced by Robert Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg.

So in terms of the animation, which I know you wanted to talk about, this was something of a follow-up to The Polar Express — that film in which Tom Hanks plays everyone.

I don’t think he’s in Monster House. I guess the house could have been modelled on Tom Hanks’ face. If so, I didn’t notice.

Ren: Subtle. But yeah, this has what I’ve heard referred to as a ’tupperware title’.

Adam: A tupperware title?

Ren: Yeah, like you label your tupperware. What’s inside the tupperware? It’s a house that’s a monster.

Adam: So not that it keeps things fresh inside but also pollutes the planet in the long-term.

It’s high concept. There’s a house — and it’s a monster! It’s a monster house. As the tagline says ‘there goes the neighbourhood’!!

Ren: Wahey.

It’s set in a upper-middle class American suburb, and our main character DJ lives opposite a spooky old house inhabited by an old man called Mr Nebbercracker who’s voiced by Steve Buscemi, but this time he’s not like ‘what is up fellow kids’, but instead is like ‘Get off my lawn kids!’ and he frightens all the local kids and confiscates any toys that fall on his lawn.

Adam I will note quickly that DJ’s real name is Daryl Jake. His parents aren’t the kind of parents who have just called their kid ‘DJ’ or ‘Laser’ or ‘USB’. That’s the handle he goes by.

Ren Speaking of his parents, they go away for the weekend, and his best friend Chowder — real name Charles?

Adam Yes, Charles ‘Chowder’. Maybe that is his real name.

Ren Maybe his parents really like clams. But yes, his best friend Chowder comes over with his brand-new basketball and the basketball inevitably bounces onto Mr Nebbercracker’s lawn, and DJ’s goaded into trying to get it.

As he comes up to the house, Mr Nebbercracker emerges, he’s a wild-eyed, crook-backed old white man and he shouts at the kids (echoing sound effect) ‘you want to be a dead person?’, and picks up DJ and shakes him, and then… keels over and dies.

Adam Yes, he seems to shake himself into a cardiac arrest.

Ren Yes, and as he’s taken away by the paramedics a key falls out of his pocket, and this really upsets the house, basically, and the rest of the film is kind of an epic struggle between the kids, and the house that is now definitively out to get them.

Adam: Nice.

Ren: And it’s CGI animated, as you mentioned, with some motion capture that was pioneered in The Polar Express, apparently.

Adam: Yes, in The Polar Express the motion capture was mostly used on Tom ‘the ham’ Hanks, and he’s got that recognisable genial ham face so it gives it this uncanny charge, whereas, obviously I know Buscemi but I don’t know Mitchell Musso or Spencer Locke.

I know Maggie Gyllenhaal, but Zee who she plays doesn’t really look like Maggie Gyllenhaal at all. So the motion capture is more evident in the movement of the characters, rather than in any facial similarity.

Ren: It definitely leans into the grotesque in some of the character designs. Very knobbly over-sized faces and hands, which makes Mr Nebbercracker genuinely quite frightening when he looms towards DJ and you see his red-rimmed eyes and flaring nostrils.

Adam: There’s an element of the Shrek to it. It’s not a Dreamworks movie, but it’s definitely leaning more towards the Dreamworks aesthetic than it is Pixar.

**Ren: ** Mmhmm. DJ’s babysitter Zee has a jerk-ass boyfriend called Bones, whose face is a particularly horrible gaunt plasticine-y nightmare.

Adam: Yeah, and very old! Presumably we’re meant to think this guy is in his early 20s. He looks like he could be pensioner age. He really is a ‘what’s up fellow kids’ character.

Ren: He’s taking on that mantle. And he terrorises DJ’s cuddly rabbit, which puts him eternally in my bad books. And made me actually quite annoyed when he wasn’t permanently swallowed by the house.

Adam: Yes, we’re skipping ahead a little but I do wonder if it was a producer’s decision.

Ren: It felt quite tacked-on.

Adam: Yeah, basically interspersed in the credits are some bits that show that characters that we thought were eaten by the monster house are actually fine. Which seemed like a bit of a shame.

Ren: We’ll get to the house eating people, but if we fit this into our evolving taxonomy of children’s horror, this is kind of set up as kids vs adults, at first.

Adam And kids not believing adults, like the Demon Headmaster.

Ren The kids vs adults gets subverted as the film goes on, with the revelation of the house’s true character, and such. It’s definitely Paranorman adjacent - but does better than Paranorman, in that Paranorman really fell down on having pretty lazily stereotyped characters, and I think Monster House does a bit better at that.

Adam I think Monster House also does better at having more genuine thrills and chills. One of my issues with Paranorman is that it plays out as a series of pastiche references to other older horror films, but it never really feels like a horror film itself. Whereas Monster House is genuinely quite scary.

In terms of what we’ve looked at previously, if anything it reminds me of William Sleator’s books, particularly Interstellar Pig, in as much as you’ve got this suburbia set-up, and then you’re introducing a supernatural element that lots of the adult characters don’t at first believe in.

It’s very much the kids striking out on their own, and on some level they very much are children, but they’re also aware that they’re having to step outside of childhood to get stuff done, and they’re a bit self-referential and weary about it, like: ‘alright, I guess we’d better step up to the plate’.

Ren As well as DJ and Chowder we have Jenny, who is a neighbourhood girl scout who gets drawn into the fight against the house.

I think most of the joy of this film is the novelty of the house being the monster, and seeing the ways that the house is made animate. It’s carpet acting like a tongue, its rotten-board teeth, the way it sucks things gloopily into its lawn. Its quite fun.

Adam: And it gives things a Southern Gothic flavour, I think. This idea of the house itself as a space that has taken on a lot of grief and bad feeling, and that these negative emotions are somehow stored within the house itself.

Ren: Like Hill House!

Adam: Yes, exactly like Hill House. It does feel like a Shirley Jackson story on some level. On some level Monster House, and we’ll get into this, is about grief and the grieving process and that you can’t just push these things away because they’ll find an out, and in this case it’s the house that ends up explosively repressing all of these bad feelings.

Ren: Yeah, so the mystery of the film is naturally, why this house is sentient and attacking people.

Adam ‘Why house bad?’, basically.

Ren Indeed. And what is the nature of Mr Nebbercracker’s relationship with the house. At the beginning it’s kind of set-up to seem that he’s the bad party, and he’s setting the house on the kids but that’s not in fact the full story.

The kids end up talking to a guy who reckons that a human soul must have become merged with the house, and the kids put this together with the neighbourhood rumours that Mr Nebbercracker killed his wife, and decide that the house must be inhabited by the vengeful soul of Mr Nebbercracker’s wife.

Adam Yeah, they’re taking this information largely from a character called Reginald ‘Skull’ Skullinski, who’s a local video gamer. Who does not seem like a reliable source of information in any way, shape or form. He clearly doesn’t even want to be talking to the kids, he’s too busy gaming, but because of his pro gamer achievements the kids really look up to it.

Ren So on this dubious recommendation they decide that they need to strike the heart of the house, and concoct an elaborate plan with a dummy laced with vast quantities of cough syrup.

Adam Trying to get the house to hallucinate so thoroughly that it implodes, presumably.

Ren Yeah, what was the cough syrup about?

Adam Is cough syrup explosive? You’d think that it wouldn’t be but… I can look this up, that’s why I have the internet.

Ren They’re trying to cure the house’s heartburn because it’s making it cranky? No, that’s not it.

Adam What does the house’s heart even look like? It’s not just a big heart, is it?

Ren It’s kind of just a yawning pit, right?

Adam That seems like a bit of a shame. I’m trying to think what would make a better heart.

Ren Like a big conglomerate of white goods?

Adam I can see that. Or, I don’t know, an inflatable mattress filled with blood.

Ren Urgh.

Adam But I don’t think we get to see the heart of the house. We do get to see the uvula of the house.

Ren Yes. So they’re trying to get this cough-syrup laden dummy into the house, but are foiled when the police come by. And I think we need to talk about the police scene and characters while we’re here. So there’s one black cop and one white cop, the white cop’s kind of stern but genial and the black cop’s the hapless rookie who’s trigger-happy and wants to solve every situation with violence. And is also the only black character in the film, as far as I remember.

Adam So this is Nick Cannon as police officer Lister, and Kevin James voicing police officer Landers, who has also appeared in the film Paul Blart Mall Cop from 2009.

Ren Wow, there you go. What did you think about it?

Adam I don’t know, it definitely sits uncomfortably, and obviously we’re recording this at a moment of state-stanctioned police brutality in America. White-on-black violence and brutality, as shored up by a white supremacist state and government.

This isn’t a film that spends lots of time giving us character depth, and I don’t know if the inept but well-meaning but trigger-happy black cop is a stereotype per-se, but this character is very clearly the only black character in the film, and there’s something here about equating whiteness with, I wouldn’t say reasonable use of authority, but the black cop is clearly the one who is inept and unable to handle his gun correctly.

Ren Yeah, I mean, he’s clearly meant to be a comic relief character, but the fact that it’s presenting the character as very gung-ho about violence… I don’t know.

Adam: When you’re seeing lots of white men using violence in a racist and disproportionate way… I can see the issue.

Ren: I’m not suggesting… I don’t think they thought about this very thoroughly, which is perhaps the issue. And as we mentioned this was made in 2006, which wasn’t a materially different time for the violence of policing, but was perhaps a different time in terms of widespread thinking about it.

Adam: I think that’s true. I think that pretty much any aspect of character development feels tacked-on in this film because it’s a film about the monster house. Like, right at the start of this podcast we discussed Boxtrolls, and both of us were quite upset by Boxtrolls, it’s fair to say. Partly because of high expectations, but also because the transphobia and trans-panic stuff in Boxtrolls is really structurally integral. It’s a main part of the narrative. Boxtrolls as a film couldn’t really exist without that. I do think the more problematic aspects of Monster House could be removed quite easily.

We’re kind of circling the drain, I think. Personally I think the best way to respond to systematic violence is through action and active allyship, rather than neurotic quibbling.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m very good at neurotic quibbling, but.

Ren: Yes. So, as well as neurotically quibbling on this podcast I have been donating to fundraisers. They’re so many resources going around.

Adam: Yes, we’ll put some links in the shownotes.

Ren: Obviously it’ll be a couple of links from recording this to when it comes out, but they’ll still be obviously plenty of organisations that need support, it’s not going to go away in that time.

Adam: But the cops don’t get to stick around for long, right, they get eaten by the house.

**Ren: ** The cops get eaten by the house. And then the kids also get eaten by the house. They get swallowed up into the belly of the house, and they find what they think is confirmation of their theory that Nebbercracker killed his wife when they see photos of them together.

Adam: And then some kind of… entombed corpse?

**Ren: ** Yeah, it’s really creepy! This was the scariest moment, where they go down into the basement and find this concrete-entombed body of his wife, Constance, that then cracks revealing the skeleton beneath. Which was a genuinely disturbing image that I was quite proud of them for.

Adam: Yeah, especially when there’s been so much muddling or blurring the lives between the metaphorical and the literal. So at this point in the film I was quite invested in the idea of the house as the body so trying to work this out was quite disturbing.

So, we’ve got the corpse of constance, and is the corpse in the belly of the house, then? Is she in some way part of the belly, eating the people? Is this some kind of cannibalistic corpse belly…thing? You know, because of the way that the literal and the metaphorical becomes blurred it doesn’t quite make sense. You can’t quite get to an exact meaning, but that makes it more disturbing.

Ren: You don’t know if when they crack the concrete around the skeleton, does that release something? It probably can’t be more malevolent at that point.

The kids get ensnared by slinkies that have been confiscated, and pipes, and then as you said Jenny has the idea to grab the house’s uvula, to make it vomit them out onto the front lawn. And we get the joke that I admit did make me laugh says that they should grab the house’s uvula and Chowder says ‘Oh, so it’s a girl house’.

Adam Oh Ren!

Ren I know! It’s so silly! It’s a very silly joke, and I shouldn’t have laughed, and yet I did. And now you will all know that I am a silly person.

Adam But I’m not.

Ren And that Adam is a sensible person.

Adam I made a face.

So they are vomited out.

Ren Yes. And here comes the twist, Nebercracker’s not dead, and he didn’t kill his wife. He comes back from the hospital and is like ‘what? eh?’ and tells them the story of how Constance was a circus fat lady, who he fell in love with and rescued from the freak show.

He was so in love with her that he built the house for her, but Constance was taunted by kids and neighbourhood trick or treaters, and ran away from the kids while the house was still under construction and tripped and fell into the foundations and got covered in cement.

Adam: It’s all a bit like a plotline from American Horror Story: Freak Show, to be honest. And a bit of a reductive portrayal of circuses and freak shows. I don’t want to get too academic-y, but there’s a lot of interesting academic writing about freak shows, it wasn’t as simple as performers were prisoners who were locked up in cages and had no autonomy over their roles or performances, they just sat around waiting to be rescued.

Without getting pro-freak show, it’s more complicated than that. But hey, this is a kids film and it’s going for a fairy-tale thing, and I did think it was nice that Constance was shown as desirable, and Nebbercracker clearly adored Constance. There is a bit of the white knight coming in to save her, but she is also shown as romantically desirable to Nebbercracker.

And that’s kind of nice, because in lots of kids films fat characters are just there to be the butt of the jokes, and that’s not really happening here.

Ren: Yeah, because talking about Paranorman as well, Norman’s best friend was the kid who was just the constant butt of fat jokes, and Paranorman came out in 2012, and Monster House came out, as we keep mentioning for some reason, in 2006 —

Adam: — I think you just can’t get over how long ago that was.

Ren: I can’t!

Adam: Wizard of Oz voice You’re a long way from Sixth Form.

Ren: I think this film felt in some ways more… uhh….

Adam: Less jerky?

Ren: Yeah!

Adam: It’s not as obnoxious as Paranorman, let’s be honest. Having said that, Constance does become a Monster House, so let’s not go to far in lauding this as the greatest portrayal of an overweight woman.

Ren: She does become a Monster House, it’s true. Which is a shame.

Adam: Well, I guess grief does terrible things to us all. And it is a good-looking monster house. This for me is where the animation really worked. The character designs are a bit… lumpen.

Ren: Quite lumpen, yeah.

Adam: They’re not great, but the house itself is pretty awesome! And once it starts getting all splintered floorboard teeth it looks great!

Ren: Shall we Texture of the Week, then?

Adam: Oh my gosh, yes! I’m not even in my own house, I’ve been at Antonia’s for most of lockdown, but give me a sec there’s some stuff over here.

**Ren: ** I’ll just assemble my instruments.

gentle shaker noises

Adam and Ren: Tex-tex-tex-texture-texture of the week! of the week!

Adam Cool, like rattling windows in a gale!

**Ren: ** So I have to give this film props for starting with a texture, it’s a very texture-heavy beginning sequence that I really enjoyed quite a lot. It starts up with a close-up of an autumn leaf, with the veins of the leaf, and it falls of a tree and you follow this leaf as it tumbles around in the wind and gets stuck in the wheels of a kids’ tricycle, and that’s the inciting incident to the kid being shouted at by Mr Nebbercracker. But I certainly enjoyed that early texture representation.

Adam:Old-timey film critics were always about the wind in the leaves. If you read Siegfried Kracauer, or other old film theorists, who wrote about the art of cinema, they were always going on about the damn leaves. It’s always like ‘only cinema can capture the movement of the wind through the leaves’. And this is normally trying to capture something of the way that live action cinema can preserve the ephemeral and the transient and the ‘beautiful moments of God’s creation’ permanently on screen - but here Monster House is saying, ‘yeah, well CGI can do it too!’. We may not be able to make very nice faces at this stage, but we can make a good leaf.

Ren: And they could! It’s a good crispy leaf.

Adam: Well, I guess then my texture will be the Monster House towards the end of the film when it’s been partially destroyed with some kind of —

Ren: — a digger.

Adam: I was thinking of Transformers… this is in my head, right, it’s kind of a digression but waiting for my bike to be fixed up at Halfords I went to some plastic hell-scape shop, like ’The Range’, that does homewares and other things, and I looked around the toy section and there was a Fireman Sam mecha.

Ren: I saw that in Home Bargains!

Adam: It’s not enough that Fireman Sam is not the humble CGI creation he once was, they’ve had to go full on mecha Fireman Sam of him transforming into a fire engine.

Ren: There’s mecha Postman Pat too.

Adam: Oh no, is there! What’s next, a mecha Clanger that can transform into some soup?

Ren: Yeah!

Adam: Okay, that does sound pretty good. And he’s got a very thin face, mecha Fireman Sam, I think the mecha transformation has taken it out of him.

Ren: Okay, objection noted.

Adam: But I am keen on mecha Monster House, particularly after it’s been dug out a bit and looks very toothsome and dilapidated.

Ren: I have an honourable mention also the house’s carpet tongue that rolls out of its mouth/front door and scoops people up into it’s rotting wooden jaws.

Adam: You’ve got to love a hairy tongue! As The Residents sing: ‘smelly tongues smell just as they look’.

Ren: Do they? Huh.

Adam: Good old smelly carpet tongue.

**Ren: ** It does look smelly!

Adam: But ultimately the poor house doesn’t get to be very sated because it gobbles down all these different people and a dog and then the house gets destroyed.

**Ren: ** Yes, Nebbercracker realises he has to destroy the house and let Constance go. It’s kind of ambiguous what this means, is it giving her peace?

Adam: ‘Destroy the Monster House you love!’

It’s like that Oscar Wilde poem isn’t it: ‘each man destroys the monster house he loves’.

Ren: It’s quite prophetic, that one.

Adam: There’s a whole bunch of dynamite.

Ren: You’ve got to have dynamite. It’s like the Demon Headmaster in the last one, they were always planting bombs everywhere.

Adam: According to Wiki, Constance’s ghost is released.

Ren: Oh, good. Cool. Good for her.

Adam: And DJ apologises to Nebbercracker for his loses.

Ren: The film ends with DJ and Mr Nebbercracker giving away the toys in the basement that have been stashed there all these years, and, unfortunately, with the horrible Jerk boyfriend, Bones, crawling out of the wreckage of the house.

Adam: And the two cops, and the dog, and anyone else who was eaten, I guess.

There is a video game of Monster House, released the same year for the PS2 and the Gamecube, and the DS.

Ren: I love the Gamecube.

Adam: You basically have to go through the house and destroy the house, and all the enemies are household objects. It sounds a bit like the forgotten rare game ‘Grabbed by the Ghoulies’, in which you also have to smash up a house. Not very edifying. But few video games are, if we’re honest.

Ren: Oh, but Adam, have you played Journey?

Adam: No, I haven’t, is that the desert-based windy walking simulator?

Ren: Yeah, yeah, it made me weep at the end. Because it was so beautiful and uplifting.

Adam: Oh gosh, okay, that’s something I ought to play. I’m afraid I’ve been mostly playing Pathologic 2. You spend most of your time trying to find eggs and then trading them with small children for paracetamol and antibiotics. So it’s been an appropriate game, I guess, to play during a pandemic, but I can’t say it’s a very happy game.

Ren: I have mostly been playing Animal Crossing.

Adam: Still on the Animal Crossing?

**Ren: ** I’m still on the Animal Crossing, and I have now my favourite villager Bob, who is a purple cat, and I’ve been giving him a pretty dress to wear almost every day.

Adam: Well I heard in Animal Crossing that if you write letters to the villagers they don’t even understand!

**Ren: ** …I don’t really write them letters, there doesn’t seem to be much point. The onscreen keyboard is horrible and I don’t use it voluntarily.

Adam: So you could literally write a letter saying ‘You’re a stinkyhead and I don’t like you’, and they’d be like ‘Ooh, I have a letter, how nice’.

Ren: Yes.

Adam: What other things do you spend your time doing in Animal Crossing?

Ren: Well, you plant flowers, you try and make nice flower colours by cross-breeding your flowers, you dig up fossils and try and make complete dinosaur skeletons in the museum…

Adam: It definitely sounds very wholesome.

Ren: It is. You’re also famously in debt to a racoon.

Adam: …What?

Ren: Tom Nook, the boss of Animal Crossing is a racoon land baron, who you are constantly in debt to as you try to upgrade your house and build structures for your island.

Adam: Okay, can you overthrow him?

Ren: I imagine, if Animal Crossing had an ending, it would probably be that you have to destroy your entire island to defeat the enormous galumphing spectre of Tom Nook who’s grown made with power and money, and you have to personally destroy all the things that you have painstakingly paid for by shaking trees.

Adam: Kind of like the ending to Monster House?

Ren: Well, funnily enough, yeah. And then you have to escape from the island and you can only chose one villager to save.

Adam: Before it explodes.

Ren: Before it explodes.

Adam: Wow! Well, clearly Animal Crossing needs to be covered in Still Scared soon. Any final observations?

Ren: No, I’m clearly just going off on Animal Crossing fantasies at this point.

Adam: You’re housed out.

Ren: All housed out.

I quite like this film. It’s quite good.

Adam: The kids are quite likeable characters, and it does have a very good monster house in it. It’s straightforward, but I basically recommend it.

Ren: And it showed me that definitely one thing happened in 2006, even if I didn’t experience it personally.

I’ve no idea what we’re going to do next!

Adam: There’s been the potential for a Residents podcast Still Scared crossover in the works. We’ve got Eerie Indiana, potentially. I’m sure we have lots of tricks up our sleeves.

Ren: It just remains to say, I hope all our listeners are as well as can be in this time.

Adam: Do what you can to uplift your community and show support, and be mindful of your own health and your own needs. These are difficult times.

Ren: It’s slightly absurd coming from a children’s horror podcast, but we’re all people and we’re all in this together.

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

Adam: Not really, just, if the call is coming from inside the house, listen. You know?

Ren: Catch you next time, spooky kids!

Adam: Bye!

Ren: Bye!