Burton's Hansel and Gretel & Selick's Slow Bob In The Lower Dimensions

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

If You Think I'm Tasty, And You Want My Body - Come On, Take A Bite!

In this episode we talked about the short films Hansel and Gretel from 1983 and Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions from 1991.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new 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

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 looser more off-the-cuff episode about the early Tim Burton short Hansel and Gretel, and the Henry Sellick short Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi Adam!

Adam Hoy-hoy-hoy - hello!

Ren So, we had a bit of a mix-up —

Adam No, don’t tell them!

Ren — We’re completely prepared and know what we’re doing!

Adam Absolutely. As ever.

Ren And what we’re doing is talking about some short animations.

Adam Yes, some early Tim Burton and early Henry Selick. So we haven’t talked about Burton since 2018, back when we had a regular recording schedule and… before everything became terrible — well, things were already terrible, but before things became chaotically and overwhelmingly terrible all the time. Back in the salad days.

We already talked about Beetlejuice, which is 15 rated, I’d forgotten that! I recently showed it to George and Matilda, and there’s a few swears —

Ren It’s a little bit scary, there’s some scary puppets.

Adam Yeah, and Beetlejuice himself spends a lot of time harassing and generally behaving inappropriately, so it’s probably good it’s a 15. And as you say there are some scary bits, there’s a fair amount of — not gore, per se, but mangliness.

Ren Yeah, it’s a bit gnarly.

Adam George seemed to mostly find it funny. He was very amused by how the two protagonists who become the friendly ghosts get offed by a dog. They’re in their car balanced on the edge of a plank of wood like a see-saw, and the dog steps off the end. George was very keen on that, he enjoyed the dog’s moxie.

Ren And was it then, or was it a different episode when we talked about a few of Burton’s shorts as well?

Adam Yes, we talked about Vincent, and a bit about Frankenweenie as well.

Ren Yes, because it had Shelley Duval in it, didn’t it?

Adam Ah, that’s why. Because you love Shelley Duval. But yes, Vincent was his first animation. He’d done some stuff as a kid, but Vincent was his first stand-alone short film, which was made at Disney with Vincent Price narrating.

Ren I watched a little YouTube video about early Burton and it said that he was hired to work on a Disney film, but he was too creepy for it.

Adam Yes, he worked on The Fox and the Hound, which is where he met Henry Selick who was also animating on it and then I think they worked together on The Black Cauldron.

I think we watched the same video actually, it said that Burton did a lot of character design stuff for The Black Cauldron and it wasn’t used. I was quite surprised by that, because The Black Cauldron is notorious as one of the scariest Disney movies.

Ren Is it? I haven’t heard of it!

Adam Haven’t you? I think we both must have been either too young by a couple of years, or too scaredy.

Ren Possibly both.

Adam I haven’t seen it either, but we’ll have to do a future episode on it. Not least because it’s one of the first Sierra adventure games film-to-game translation. Circa King’s Quest so presumably it’s hard as nails and you die at any given opportunity Adventure Game of the Black Cauldron.

Maybe this is our opportunity to branch out into Twitch streaming, that’s where it’s at these days.

Ren I do keep seeing the Goosebumps game on the Switch store and thinking ‘Hmm, maybe’.

Adam Is that like a completely new one, or is it a remastered version of the old FMV game?

Ren It’s a new one, I think.

Adam We could probably do a whole episode on it, because there’s a Goosebumps board game that someone bought me as an adult.

Ren Well, we’d have to do that with Ava.

Adam Ah yeah, that’s true. Listeners, if you haven’t listened to the Deptford Mice episodes that Ava was on, they’re well worth a listen.

Ren Yeah, she joined us for our Deptford Mice epic, and The Witches and also… what’s that Halloween cartoon, Over the Garden Wall. So we’ve had a batch of Ava on here. Since then she’s been doing podcasts with Shut up and Sit Down, so she’s well into the podcasting now — but we gave her her start!

Anyway, what were we talking about?

Adam Yes, so if you want to go back and hear our thoughts on Vincent and Frankenweenie you can go back to one of our earliest episodes in February 2018. But those two animations are a lot more seen than the two we’re going to talk about today, one of which was almost considered lost.

So this was Burton’s 1983 adaptation of Hansel and Gretel for the Disney Channel, only broadcast once, and I first saw this at a Tim Burton retrospective exhibition in Prague a few years back.

Ren Oh wow!

Adam Yeah, it was amazing. I think it was the same exhibition that played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Oogie Boogie was there, a lot of the models from The Nightmare before Christmas and Corpse Bride, and a lot of his drawings, which was all very exciting. But what really caught my attention was this screen playing Hansel and Gretel on a loop.

I’d never heard of it before, but I sat and watched the whole thing and I was captivated by it. It was so strange, and so obviously Burton in terms of the art direction and the objects and what the set looked like, but also a lot more stagey, and low-budget. And I think since then some enterprising soul has uploaded it to YouTube, which is presumably the version you’ve watched.

Ren Yes.

Adam It’s very much ripped from video, so someone obviously recorded it when it showed on the Disney Channel.

Ren So you’re one of not very many people who have seen a high definition version of this — well, high definition as it goes —

Adam Yes, you say ‘high defintion’, but yeah, it was made for TV and it looks like a made-for-TV film. But I suppose I have seen this in slightly better quality. But yes, it was introduced on this Halloween special in 1983 by Vincent Prince, who obviously also narrated Vincent and inspires the main character in Vincent. And he remained friends with Burton til his death — obviously his last real performance is in Edward Scissorhands as Edward’s father and creator.

Ren It’s been a long time since I’ve watched Edward Scissorhands.

Adam Well, we should definitely talk about it at some point. I think as early Burton goes it might be the one that holds up the best.

So Hansel and Gretel was filmed on a budget of $116,000, and was filmed on 16mm, rather than on video. It’s mostly live-action, a very small amount of stop-motion but more just puppetry than stop-motion. There’s a great hand puppet sequence, and in some regards it’s a pretty straight-forward adaptation of Hansel and Gretel — not in terms of how it looks, which is wild — but in terms of the story, this is your brother and sister with a cruel stepmother who wants to get rid of them. They get lost in the woods but are able to find their way back by leaving a trail of stones or breadcrumbs, but then they get lost in the woods again and in this version the stepmother dispatches a robotic duck to eat the stones. I don’t think the robotic duck is in the original fairytale, but you know. So they got lost, and find their way to this gingerbread house — well, I say gingerbread house —

Ren Hmm, yes.

Adam So what do you think this house is made of?

Ren Um, like maoams? Stretchy sweeties. Maybe those horrible chewing gums you used to get in the ‘90s that had a liquid centre. Something sticky and tacky on the outside, and gushing on the inside.

Adam It’s kind of like the offal equivalent for sweets. You know how for meat you have the offal that’s all the gristle and offcuts, it’s like that but for sweets.

Ren Yes, absolutely. Something only a child would want to eat.

Adam Oh yeah, it looks absolutely abject and repellent. It’s horrible. In fact, let’s get in early with Texture of the Week. I’ve got Antonia’s electric guitar here that I’m sure is not tuned, so let’s try an E minor.

Adam and Ren (discordantly) Texture! Texture! Of! Of the! Week! Week!

Ren Y eah, so I haven’t prepared anything because I haven’t prepared anything, so I’m going to go with the gushing sweetie house, where Hansel and Gretel turn up and stick their fingers into it and it just starts leaking gunge.

Adam Yeah, the perennial 80s and 90s TV favourite, gunge. Chemical gloop used to punish parents and teachers alike. I have considered doing a really pretentious academic article about this —

Ren — About gunge?

Adam — Mostly about gunge, yeah. Doing a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading about this being about the mother’s body and fear of damaging the mother’s body. But I don’t know, basically, it’s just really wrong and it’s hard to put your finger on why it’s so wrong, but this weird, semi-permeable membrane of a sweetie gingerbread house is not okay!

Ren It’s not okay! The colours are really lurid as well. The closest thing it reminds me of is when I was at university and studying Faust and we watched this horrible filmed theatre version of Faust, where everyone was wearing these clashing clothes and melting make-up, and looked totally demented, and it was a really uncomfortable experience. And that’s what this reminded me of!

Adam A high recommendation indeed! And it’s hard to know if what leaks from the house is paint? I’m a little worried because the kids do seem to be putting it in their mouths, so I hope that this was actually non-poisonous and non-toxic. Because it certainly doesn’t look non-poisonous and non-toxic. It looks like if you had a cartoon and you had to have a river of poisonous sludge, what it would like if this was an episode of Captain Planet this would be the stuff you really shouldn’t put near your mouth.

Ren And I think we’re becoming aware that child actors weren’t always treated with the utmost care in the 80s and 90s, so I hope they weren’t poisoned by this miscellaneous gunge.

So it’s worth saying, this has quite a small cast: Andy Lee as Hansel and Alison Hong as Gretel, and then Jim Ishida is the father and Michael Yama as the stepmother and the wicked witch, in a dual role. I guess these characters often mirror each other in fairy tales, so it makes sense that they’re played by — well, the same guy here, in drag.

Do you think that was to give a pantomime vibe? I guess pantomime is more of a British phenomena than an American one.

Ren It does give a pantomime vibe —

(Clip from Hansel and Gretel: Dramatic piano chords play and Michael Yama as the stepmother says: ‘So, you’d take their side against mine! Am I their mother or aren’t I? Who besides me would teach them their table manners! Will you have animals for children?!)

I don’t know if it’s related, because Burton was obviously going through a period of being inspired by Japanese culture at this point—

Adam Yes, it’s an entirely East Asian cast, or East Asian-American cast.

Ren Yes, so I don’t know if he was inspired by Japanese forms of theatre — like Kabuki.

Adam Yes, the witch costume is quite Kabuki-like, with the white face make-up, so that did occur to me. So maybe this is the point where Kabuki and pantomime aesthetically crossover.

Ren Because I think they also have men playing all the roles in traditional Japanese theatre.*

Adam Okay, that makes sense then. That’s probably a good educated guess there.

Ren Yeah, what do you make of the Japanese influence on this?

Adam Well, I guess Burton is one of the first massively successful geek directors, which I guess is also true of Peter Jackson, or Edgar Wright, or maybe even Zack Snyder as well. And that means that he’s very willing to indulge his own idiosyncratic interests. So I don’t know if there’s much more to this than Burton being like, ‘Yeah, I can have Kung Fu in this! And a robot like in a mecha anime!’.*

I don’t think it damages it. You notice it, and go ‘huh, there’s a lot of references to Japanese culture in here!’. I do like that it ends up with Hansel and Gretel having a Kung Fu fight with the witch, and the witch is using cookie cutters as some kind of intimidating weapon — like, nunchucks or something.

Ren Yes, they’re throwing stars or something, what are those actually called? (typing noises) Shuriken! They’re cookie shuriken.

(Ambient clip of the film featuring just fight noises and piano music)

Ren So that was quite cool.

Adam Yeah, there’s some neat ideas. But did you find it a bit slow?

Ren Oh yeah. Definitely the first half is pretty slow to get going.

Adam It probably didn’t need to be half an hour long, realistically. Because there’s not much of a plot and the viewer’s likely to know the plot already. So if you’re going to watch this, what you’re really in it for is the set design. What did you make of the set design and the general look of it?

Ren I mean, I think it’s remarkably consistent, right, that it’s early Burton but you look at it and think ‘Burton’. So he had a very strong aesthetic from the beginning that’s very obvious.

Adam Yes, it has that combination of staid camera angles and crooked shapes. Those German expressionist angles. And it also has the combination of blacks and pastel colours, I suppose.

Ren Swirly spirals and jaggedy things.

Adam Jaggedy things and spirals. Candy cane motifs.

Ren Twisty trees. You can’t really look at it now and imagine how it looked in 1983 because Burton’s aesthetic is so familiar, but it must have been pretty interesting.

Adam Yeah, it must have been pretty striking if you hadn’t really seen anything like this before. It looks a little like filmed theatre, we’ve got these very emptied out sets. It looks quite flat, but that’s okay, it’s a fairy-tale, it doesn’t need to be a wholly lived-in world. And some of the objets d’art crop up again. The one I noticed was the robot duck that is sent up by the stepmother to eat up the trail of stones, and that turns up again in The Nightmare Before Christmas as one of the badly thought-through presents that Jack Skellington delivers as Sandy Claws.

Ren So the father in this one is a toymaker, mostly it seems so they can get these creatures in. The film starts with us seeing all the little toys and moving things.

Adam A little showcase. Which is great, they look wonderful. There’s one of those wall clocks which is Burton’s version of one of those cat wall clocks with the moving eyes.

Ren Oh yeah. So I think the most memorable part of this short for sure is the clown puppet.

Adam Yes, probably the best object in the film. This clown-like puppet that is then reprised as a gingerbread man. They are different, but they look similar.

Ren So when the witch gets hold of Hansel and Gretel she separates them, and Hansel gets sucked into the bed and down into a cellar, where he’s a visited by a gingerbread clown who demands to be eaten.

Adam Through the medium of Rod Stewart.

Ren Wha — oh yeah! yeah! So bizarre.

Adam Yes, so instead of ‘Do you think I’m sexy’ it’s ‘If you think I’m tasty, come on eat my body’ or something like that.

(Clip from the film. Gingerbread clown: ‘If you think I’m tasty, and you want my body, come on, take a bite!’ Hansel: ‘I’m not eating anymore, you’re disgusting!’ Gingerbread clown: ‘I said, take another bite!’)

Ren I definitely took a few screenshots of this clown because it looks… well, it’s a spectacle to behold.

Adam It’s a real horror.

Ren It’s a horror.

Adam The clown was definitely the thing that was giving children who watched the Disney channel nightmares back in 1983.

Ren Absolutely, and then this film disappeared from existence so they just thought that they dreamt it.

Adam It’s a bit like me watching This Morning with Richard Not Judy*

Which everybody who’s not British, and probably even if you are has never heard of. A ridiculous comedy programme that was broadcast of, at all times, at 12 noon on Sundays, with Stewart Lee and Richard Herring and was a weird spoof of morning chat shows. But it had this hellish character called ‘The Curious Orange’ which is a disembodied orange head that asks curious questions and gets increasingly mouldy over the course of the series until it starts screaming. I was convinced I had dreamt that for a good decade until I met other people at uni who had seem that. Throughout my teens I thought, ‘nah, that can’t be real’.

Ren Yeah, you can imagine rationalising to yourself ‘There couldn’t really be a gingerbread clown that sung Rod Stewart to a kid’ —

Adam — With razor-sharp crooked teeth —

Ren — On the Disney channel, that’s impossible.

Adam It was acceptable in the 80s.

Ren As that song was talking about.

Adam Specifically about this version of Hansel and Gretel. So, it has a happy ending. Well, not for the witch, who gets cooked in her own oven. I did appreciate that her oven has a ‘roast child’ setting.

Ren Yeah, that’s handy isn’t it.

Adam She’s like ‘Arg, I set it for a five-storey cake! I should have set it for roast child!’

But yes, they’re reunited with their father, and then this toy swan inexplicably spews out gold coins.

Ren It does, doesn’t it.

Adam Is that just a metaphor for this being the father’s most successful toy yet? That it’s a real money-maker? Because if the father had the power to make toys that generate real money, he probably should have done that earlier.

Ren It would have saved a lot of bother.

Adam It’s a definite curio, isn’t it?

Ren Absolutely.

Adam If you enjoy early Burton, if you grew up watching Edward Scissorhands or Beetlejuice or Peewee’s Big Adventure it’s definitely worth looking up on YouTube. If only because, as you said, it cements Burton’s style so early. He’s in his early ‘20s doing this, and he has the signature style he’s going to have for the rest of his career.

Ren Yep, definitely worth a look for Burton fans if you haven’t seen it already.

Adam So the other film we’re going to talk about, that I have to admit I like rather more, I think Hansel and Gretel is fascinating but this I really love, is Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions.

So this was made back when Henry Selick was doing idents for MTV.

Ren Idents?

Adam Those little stabs where you see the logo. He made a bunch of those back in the ‘80s, and he wasn’t the only animator to do them, the Czech animator Jan Svankmejer made some —

Ren Really?

Adam Yeah! The short films Flora and Meat Love, both 30-second odd films were made for and commissioned by MTV and would have been show in-between music videos. So when MTV started, I guess they reached out to a bunch of different animators to do these short promo things. And Henry Selick did some that were just the MTV logo, but then there’s one that included the character of Slow Bob, which then got expanded into a stand-alone pilot.

This was a pilot for a proposed series in which this character of Slow Bob, who looks a bit like Henry from Eraserhead with this wild shock of hair, and seems to live in this loft flat in an apartment building alone. The idea seems to have been that he would visit these other dimensions, and in these dimensions he was a hero, basically, and saves the day. He spends his everyday living life just sleeping on the ceiling like a big spider, and then sometimes he’s summoned into other dimensions to save the day.

So I don’t know if this was exactly for children. It’s always easy to make that assumption with ‘oh it’s animated, it’s got to be for children’ and that’s not always the case. I mentioned Jan Švankmajer and he would never really have seen his films as being for children. But with Selick who’s best known for The Nightmare before Christmas, and James and the Giant Peach and Coraline —

Ren (laughs inexplicably) *

Adam But I guess MTV was more going for a teenage audience. So was this the first time that you’ve seen Slow Bob?

Ren Yeah, it was!

Adam So what did you think of it?

Ren I really enjoyed it! It’s absolutely bonkers, I loved it. Sorry, I’m just watching it in the background with no sound on. When you first see Slow Bob he’s hanging on the ceiling being fed cola through a straw by a lizard?

(Clip of Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. Lizards saying croakily: ‘Wake up Slow Bob! Wake up!’)

And then he crawls into a pentangle of lizards —

Adam — Yeah, I don’t know if the lizards are his caretakers, maybe? Because the lizards, as you said, are feeding him this cola and they say ‘Wake up Slow Bob’. So the lizards are summoners, maybe, because they seem to cast this spell to transport Slow Bob to the Lower Dimensions.

Ren But yeah, it’s fascinating. It’s really delightful. I loved the mixture of live-action and stop-motion and puppets —

Adam — And cut-out animation.

Ren Yeah, when he goes to the lower dimensions there are photographs that are being menaced by scissors — photographs of people that are being cut, and are trying to run away. So Slow Bob tricks the scissors by putting a photograph of himself — the photos are black and white but the animation is colour — over a road sign, so that the scissors will fly at him and break their blades.

Adam It’s a bit like that Loony Tunes gag with the tunnel in the mountainside that’s actually just a drawing. But yeah, it’s a genius deconstruction of animation. Each photo has two frames, so they have a very stop-start animation style. For instance there’s a little baby with a teddy bear, and the scissors cruelly snip off the bear, and it cuts to the baby sitting down and crying. And I guess I love stuff where the medium of animation is really put to the foreground and emphasised. So I really like the way that these objects, like the scissors are cutting up the photos, and that effects how the photo people feel.

Ren Yeah, and at the end he comes back to his empty attic and there’s a conjoined twin puppet who have been watching through the keyhole, and they come and paint him with yellow paint.

(Clip from Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions. Tense music and brushstroke sounds).

And that’s kind of the end?

Adam Yeah, I guess that’s the frame narrative. If we imagine that this is a full series, this would be the frame narrative of Slow Bob living in his apartment alongside these conjoined twins and I assume other neighbours would be introduced. And there’s a dynamic there where the twins seem to want to torment or bully Slow Bob, so it starts out from their perspective, we get this point-of-view shot of them creeping down the corridor and up to the loft where Slow Bob is sleeping. And it’s got some lovely stop-motion there.

Weirdly it reminds me of early CD-ROM games for Windows and Macs. Something about the visuals reminds me of those games. Obviously most people know Myst and those old puzzle games, but there were a bunch of more experimental games, such as one that the band The Residents did called Bad Day on the Midway. And I mention The Residents because they did the music for this!

Ren Oh yes, of course!

(Clip of the music from Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions)

So what happened? Why didn’t we get the full series, why are we not living in that timeline?

Adam Sadly, I don’t know! The music does crop up again on the Residents album Demons Dance Alone, actually. There’s a clip at the end after Bob has been painted and is back in his attic room, he’s been given this watch by the queen of the lower dimensions, and you see her on the watch and she says:

(Clip of the short. Queen of the Lower Dimensions: ‘Over here, Bob! Over here! Time’s up for now Bob, watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out.)

And that’s right near the start of the Demons Dance Alone album. And there’s some other connections here because The Residents also did some of the music for PeeWee’s Playhouse, the PeeWee Herman TV show that then Devo ended up doing the music for. And I do wonder then if that’s when The Residents met Paul Reubens as Pee-Wee, because of course Tim Burton did Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Maybe this is just the fanboy in me, but imagining Pee-Wee Herman, The Residents, Tim Burton and Henry Selick all hanging out obviously makes me quite happy.

So I don’t know. Selick’s obviously a perfectionist, which is why his films look so good, but they do tend to take a long time in production. This is not the only Selick project where funding hasn’t materialised or been shut down. It’s been a long time since Coraline, and James and the Giant Peach was a long time before that. Monkeybone, which is a fascinating but very flawed film — it’s mostly very flawed I think because Selick was taken off it. The art direction’s great, it looks gorgeous, but it’s got this silly asinine frat-boy humour. But according to Rose McGowan that was the guy who was bought in after Selick, because he was taken off the project, presumably because it had gone over budget and was taking too long. Stop-motion is a very time-consuming and labour-intensive medium, and I can imagine if you’re a Disney executive or something you might not get the results you want in the time you want them.

I might be wrong, and interestingly, the copy of Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions seems to have been uploaded by Heather Selick, who I think might be Henry Selick’s wife? So that was uploaded directly by her and I’d love to know more about the project, obviously. I’m really glad this exists, it’s a wonderful five minutes of animation but I can’t help wishing there was more of it.

Ren Well, we’re still holding out for that Henry Selick Grim Fandango film, right?

Adam Ahh that would be so good! He would be the perfect person to adapt Grim Fandango. But actually he has this project that seems to be in a fairly late stage at this point with Key & Peele, the comedians.

Ren Oh right!

Adam ‘Wendell and Wild’, so I’m looking forward to that. Because Coraline was 2009, and while I cannot cope with the fact that that was over ten years ago, to be honest, that’s ridiculous, it still remains one of my favourite films of all time. I think I’m holding out for it to be our hundredth episode special, or something.

Ren Yeah, we need to do something special for Coraline.

Adam So yes, I will admit to wishing there was a bit more Henry Selick out there. And I do feel for him as well, because for ages The Nightmare Before Christmas has just been thought of as a Tim Burton film, and fair enough Burton did the character designs and worked on the screenplay, but I think it was mostly a marketing decision that he’d become quite a hot property off the back of Beetlejuice and Batman and clearly selling it as ’Tim Burton’s Nightmare before Christmas’ was a good marketing decision —

Ren — But rough for Selick.

Adam Yeah, rough for Selick whose direction on it is extraordinary. I mean, I love The Nightmare before Christmas but the things that make it are the animation — like Jack Skellington’s movements that are so balletic, and that’s all Selick. You get the same kind of movements in James and the Giant Peach and Coraline. I feel like he’s never quite been given his due, never quite been given the backing he deserved for being such a remarkable animator.

But the stuff that’s out there is wonderful, and like with Hansel and Gretel, if you’re a Selick fan and love Coraline or The Nightmare Before Christmas as much as we do, you’ll love Slow Bob.

Ren Yes, absolutely take five minutes to watch Slow Bob.

Adam Well, that’s probably about it. They’re short films, so there’s not loads and loads to say about them, but I’m glad you enjoyed them.

Ren Yeah, it was good.

Adam So what book is it we’re going to go on and talk about in the New Year?

Ren Wilder Girls. Some fairly serious teen epidemic business. Which is possibly why I struggled with it on a re-read, because the first time I read it was pre-pandemic.

Adam Yes, so probably felt a bit closer to home.

Ren But I think that’ll be our next one.

Adam And then at some point in January, excitingly, we’ll have an interview with Catherine Lester, who has recently published Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema.

Ren Ooho! So that’s exciting.

Adam So look that up, I’ve started reading the first chapter and it’s an excellent read. It’s academic but it’s not off-putting. She’s written this to be read, she obviously loves children’s horror, and the cover has Gizmo which is very cute.

Ren So yeah, we do have more episodes in the pipeline.

Adam Yep, Catherine’s going to be on and she’s going to talk about her book and also (garbled noise).

Ren I don’t know if we should keep that as a surprise, what we’re going to talk about?

Adam Oh alright, I’ll put a sound distortion on it. So yes, sorry it has been rather slow the last year in particular but I’m sure you all understand.

Ren Yes, we’ve all been somewhat in the same… (searches for appropriate metaphor, gives up) giant arc?

Adam Yes, I was just saying to you before we started recording that there’s been this real uptick of interest in children’s horror in academia. I’m assuming it’s generational, that basically the people who are now in their early 30s are getting books out, and they grew up with the same stuff that we did.

Ren I think that’s exciting! Obviously we think it’s a cool area to talk about.

Adam Yeah, it’s lovely to see it finally get some proper attention.

Ren Cool. Well, that was fun. Well, for the usual stuff — our artwork is by Letty Wilson, our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, our outro is by Joe Kelly. You can contact us on twitter at @stillscaredpod or email us at [e-mail], and it’s always lovely to hear from people who listen.

Adam And Maki has some new music out?

Ren Yes, she has new music out on her bandcamp and it’s very good!

Adam And Joe has been releasing music under the name Wendy Miasma.

Ren Yes, I saw! So that’s Maki Yamazaki and Wendy Miasma on Bandcamp to support the very talented musicians who have provided music for our podcast.

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

Adam I do! Time’s up for now creepy kids, watch out, watch out, watch out.

Ren See you next time, spooky kids! Goodbye!

Adam Bye!

(outro music plays)

• Kabuki is indeed all-male, but I have to throw in a recommendation for The Takarazuka Revue, a Japanese all-women theatre troupe founded in the early 20th century and still going today.

• Kung fu is Chinese, not Japanese. However, the East Asian influences on the film are painted pretty broadly, so I think this point stands.

• ‘The show that everyone’s calling Tuhumwrunja!’

• I temporarily forgot what Coraline was and thought that Adam was inventing a film as a bit. God, I’m glad that I never have to go on live TV.