Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

In this episode we discussed the recent anthology Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television, with two of its co-editors, Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar. The anthology features a chapter entitled Suburban Eerie: The Demon Headmaster (BBC1, 1996–8) and The Demon Headmaster (CBBC, 2019) as Neoliberal Folk Horror, by our own Adam Whybray, and is available to buy now here, or perhaps more practically to order to a library near you!

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Adam Hello and welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films, and TV.

I'm Adam Whybray and my Co host is usually Ren Wednesday, but today is a special bonus episode in which I am talking to doctors Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar about their co-edited essay collection: Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television. I hope you enjoy this discussion about an essay collection I contributed to, but am in no way being reimbursed for until I get my special edition of the book in the post. Enjoy.

Adam Hello, this is Adam here for Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror. And this is a special bonus episode talking about an exciting new collection, Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television which intersects with a lot of my interests and Ren’s too, although Ren is having a very busy week of it and so deferred responsibilities over to me.

So apologies that you won't be hearing Ren’s chipper and occasionally dulcet tones, but I am joined here by two of the co-editors of the book alongside John Marland, Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar. Hello, Lauren and Robert!

Robert Hello.

Lauren Hello!

Adam So we've previously had the brilliant Catherine Lester on the show writer of Horror Films for Children, which was published a few years back, also by Bloomsbury.

And looking at the the blurb of your book, which reads: Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie children's television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography, it notes that there has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children's television and literature of the late 20th century, in particular the Seventies, 80s and 90s.

So that obviously covers quite a lot of the kind of thing we talk about on this podcast and I was wondering what you felt was behind this kind of explosion of interest, and whether that explosion of interest is something you've noticed before you came to the project or not.

Robert Yeah, I can kick off with that one, if that's OK, Lauren.

Lauren Yeah, of course.

Robert Yeah. I do think there's something very interesting that's happened in recent years. And I think there's probably a number of different reasons why the 70s, 80s and 90s have come into view for people in particular. It was something we were well aware of prior to putting the collection together, and in the original conception a lot of it was focused around the 70s and early 80s. And then we moved into looking at 90s and realised, I think, that it was a much bigger time period than perhaps we'd first thought of.

But yeah, I I think there's there's a few things. I think partly it's perhaps people of a certain age looking back to to childhood. I think that's part of it. And it’s something we talk about in the introduction to the book, that kind of going in cycles and you can see that throughout children's television.

People of a particular age group reflect on childhood, and often the childhood is just out of memory or is kind of buried deep in memory. It's very much from early childhood, so that kind of fuzziness of memory I think is really important.

I think it's also significant that we're talking about pre-digital age largely. Where things aren't perhaps as easily accessed, and things drift into distant memory or we have to dredge things up from memory rather than being able to easily access everything.

And I think also something we touch on in the book is that there's been some real revelations about things that happened in ‘70s and ‘80s and the period that perhaps people once felt nostalgic for, suddenly we think of as actually genuinely being dark and dangerous and unpleasant and unsettling.

And it's causing us to revise our view of that period. So I think that some of the reasons there.

Adam Yeah, that that all makes perfect sense to me. Lauren, did you have any additional thoughts on that?

Lauren Yeah, I think that you can look to the rise in popularity of analogue horror here as well, as maybe an indicator of what's going on. I think while a lot of these texts are pre-digital, they've taken on a new resonance in digital spaces, people finding clips or memorabilia from these eras and they've become creepy pasta online, you know?

People circulate it around for people to unlock their own memories of those texts. You know, these things that are kind of buried and we've forgotten about for 20 years, and then all of a sudden you confronted with somebody's YouTube short that uses that material.

Or something that you've maybe not come across and you think what is this out of context? And I do think that indicates a growing fascination with a particular kind of analogue style of hauntological material, or kind of cursed material maybe if we wanted to go that far.

Adam Definitely. I don't think it's just an interest for Generation X's and Millennials. Certainly the discord I use for horror games by a brilliant horror creator called Yames, it's mostly zoomers on there and you know, they love analogue horror. In fact, it’s largely them who brought analogue horror to my attention.

And a lot of the games I've seen Zoomers really enjoy, some of which have been made by Millennials, are things like Baldi's Basics, which really tap into an edutainment aesthetic that was very much part of my childhood playing CD-ROM games as a kid. So I certainly think there's a kind of interest that's broader than just the obvious nostalgia.

So in terms of your own research histories, how do they link into the unsettling side of children's media?

Lauren I mean, I'm just a huge horror nerd, to be totally honest with you! So a lot of what I've done previously, research wise, is focused in on how horror intersects with social and political contexts. And I think that that comes through quite strongly in the collection, this idea that there's something about conceptions of childhood, conceptions of safety contemporarily that are then coming through in these bits of material.

But I also think we're both just very keen on the kind of the dark side of this stuff. I don’t know about you, Rob, — but exploring what fascinates us about this and why of all the things that could kind of stick with us over the years, this is the sort of stuff that we keep revisiting, you know?

Adam Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Rob?

Robert Yeah. No, absolutely. I’m with Lauren on that one, it is that real fascination with the dark material. And you know, like Lauren, I’m a huge horror fan. I’m not as expert in horror as Lauren is, I come at it from an uncanny fiction angle.

Myself and John, who couldn't be with us tonight, and another colleague, Alan Smith, had written a book about Thomas Hardy and folk horror. And another colleague of ours, Wayne Johnson and myself were working on the Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, which Lauren has a superb chapter in on on similar themes.

So we were a group of us at at the university, really immersed in this kind of research. And the Horrifying Children book was being developed alongside that. But it was really interesting to to see the amount of interest there was in the the Companion to Folk Horror around children's fiction, children's television and similar things: the resonance of the past, the analogue horror. It was a much bigger presence in that book than we thought it would be. So there's lots of it around.

Adam I mean, that makes sense to me. We've just recorded an episode on the Weirdstone of Brisingaman, the Alan Garner novel, And obviously The Owl Service is a kind of key example of both children's horror and folk horror that crops up again and again, certainly for people of a certain age. So did you watch the Owl Service when you were younger, Robert?

Robert Well, it's an interesting one that because I didn't watch it at the time — I'm not quite old enough to have seen it but I do remember it being around and being mentioned. But a few of us do have a book out under review at the moment about Alan Garner. So there's again more of this stuff around.

But I remember Alan Garner from these rather dusty books tucked away in the corner of school libraries. So it was a presence on television, but Garner and his work was evident elsewhere, which is interesting. So yeah, I watched The Owl Service for the first time, actually not that long ago, but but I knew all about it from other sources.

Adam So what kind of things scared you when you were a child? I mean, I was a very scaredy child, as was Ren, so we've talked at length over the last six or seven years for all sorts of things that scared us. But what about you?

Lauren Oh, that's a tough one because I think I was desensitised quite early on, if I’m being totally honest! Yeah, I got my hands on all sorts of stuff I shouldn't have been watching as a child, so quite early on I was a bit hardened to some of it.

But there were moments I can remember. Mostly from really odd places, so not necessarily from children's horror specifically. But I can remember, for example, watching The Bodyguard for the first time. And there's a moment where Whitney Houston picks the phone up because she thinks she's talking to her son and it's her stalker, who just repeats the word ‘no’ down the phone in a really elongated voice a couple of times. And then you see the close up, the horror on her face that she's not talking to the person that she thought she was talking to. And for some reason, that always just really bothered me.

And it's those moments that come out of something that's not necessarily intended to be horror, that perhaps catch you more off guard. I think that's reflected in quite a lot of the work that we ended up looking at through this project — it's not necessarily the stuff that advertises itself as horror, or as horrific even — but it catches you and for some reason there's something about it that's just not quite right, you know?

So I'm happy to watch, you know Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but if you show me that scene from the Bodyguard, I am not happy.

Adam So I was quite a sheltered kid. More of my own direction than of my parents, I sheltered myself! So I wouldn't even sleep with the copy of The Witches in the room when I was a kid. And I'd get out a lot of Goosebumps from the library and look at the cover and they'd just be like, no, too rich for my blood. Put it back.

But yeah, I think a lot of the things that scared me, as you say, weren't necessarily things intended to be horrifying, I've noted that some of the texts covered in the collection, like, say, the Demon Headmaster or Wes Craven’s Stranger In Our House, are intended, on some level at least, to be frightening, while others like The Singing, Ringing Tree were not.

So did you face any difficulties as editors in navigating these differences in intentionality?

Lauren That's a really good question. Sorry, Rob, go ahead.

Robert No, I was just going to say the same thing. I think that is a really, really good question. I think the answer is no, we didn't really. I think partly because we came into it, as Lauren says, with this idea that the things that are unsettling are things that you find unsettling after the event.

The book’s very much about effect rather than it is about intention. Although obviously with some of those examples, like you say with Wes Craven etcetera, you can't avoid a horrifying intention. But the horrifying effect I think is is far more interesting.

And particularly as we move into Part 2 of the book, the ‘Memory, Process and Practise’, that's where that really comes to light. It's a bit of a transition in the middle of the book, but that's where where people start to talk about using some texts which are unsettling or disturbing to cope with trauma or to cope with horror, or as a mechanism for discussing other issues.

So there's a very, very broad use of of the unsettling and horrifying. But yeah, it was really about effect rather than it was intent.

Adam You’re nodding, Lauren, I take it that you agree with that!

Lauren Sorry, yes I do! There was a slight glitch and I thought maybe I'd cut somebody off if I spoke. So I thought it was best just to just to nod. But yeah, I do. I absolutely agree. And I think what's really interesting about some of the more reflective pieces in the book is that so much of this memory relies on the context within which you've watched these pieces as well.

So the texts on their own operate in their own sphere. But when you add to that the context of being home from school or the context of being concerned about a Cold War or the context about being frightened of a dark space, all of that stuff lends itself a unique perspective.

And that's one of the things that's so interesting about visual media, isn't it, that we could also sit in the same room at the same time and watch the same thing but we'd all experience it differently, essentially watching a different film for each of us. And so I think the context itself is really important. One of the really interesting things about the way people have reflected on that in the book is you see how horror is in the eye of the beholder, really. And that kind of troubles some of the more straightforward generic markers we might try and place around these texts as well.

Adam Yeah, I mean, I've yet to get to read the book, I'm very excited to do so, but looking through the contents tab list, I wanted to ask why was a cow killed on German children's television? Because I looked up the programme and it looked really cute! It had these animated cartoon characters and seemed educational and I thought, well, that that looks lovely.

Robert Yeah, I mean that's a really interesting chapter, it was really, really interesting for us to go through and to edit. But yeah, it's a piece of educational television, basically. Something that was shown to children to teach about where where food comes from. And it's utterly horrifying. It's utterly terrifying because it's a little peep into reality. It's couldn't be further away from children's programmes with lots of lovely, fluffy, anthropomorphized animals, it’s the polar opposite.
But it's horrifying because of all that, it just seems so out of place.

Lauren Yeah, it's quite ahead of its time really. It's quite an effective piece of eco criticism!

Adam Yeah, that's fascinating. I do wonder if some of the most kind of alarming moments are these. So we talked quite recently about this, I think one of us remembered these Roald Dahl books about train safety.

I was definitely given them in primary school, they were illustrated by Quentin Blake. And I think there's something about Roald Dahl in a completely non-fantastical kind of form. You know, I'd read lots of Roald Dahl, but then just seeing images of someone sticking their head out of the train and getting decapitated. It certainly worked on me! I think I was very safe around trains after that.

But in terms of ‘Scarred for Life’ and other anthologies and social media accounts on horrifying children's media, often the educational or instructive videos like Apaches, for instance, the film about dangerous farm equipment, crops up a lot.

Robert Yeah. I mean, public information films had a had a huge effect on me. And I know they're one thing that seems to have really ignited a new generation's imagination because they are so shocking. They are so terrifying. And you know, we have to go back to the spirit of dark and lonely water and you know the very obvious horror connections there. But it's some of the others, you’re right like Apache are really terrifying. And yeah, beautifully catalogued in in Scarred for life.

Lauren and I organised a conference about a year ago, I think it was, about about these topics and David and Steve from Scarred for Life came along and did their show, so we we got to see a lot of public information films with Bob hosting. So it's fascinating material.

Adam One of my one of my favourite episodes of Inside No. 9 in recent years, the Reese Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton BBC show was the Wise Owl episode, which is their could tribute to public information films, which I think is one of the best things they've done for years.

Robert Absolutely, I'd agree, it was terrifying —

Adam Really captured that eeriness. Yes. So in terms of individual chapters, obviously I haven't had a chance to read them, but please do tell me a bit more about the chapter entitled: An Adult Nightmare, Garbage Pail Kids and the Fear of the Queer Child by Max Hart. Because I didn't get to watch the Garbage Pail Kids as a child. I remember having OCD quite badly as a child and the Garbage Pail Kid card made me feel quite physically sick.

I totally remember seeing them and and being appalled by them. Like almost morally appalled that these things existed, I hated them. Whereas now as an adult who likes to process these feelings, I am probably going to force myself to watch the film at some point. I've seen a lot of images, but I haven't quite quite managed to yet, I will admit. But yeah, what's the the premise of that chapter? Because it's such a good title.

Lauren Max's chapter, if I remember rightly, is based on their wider PhD research, which looked into the ways in which the Garbage Pail Children were intended to be kind of analogous to a heteronormative fear of the queer child in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

And so the chapter builds on that premise by thinking about the ways in which the Garbage Pail Kids were intended to perpetuate fear-mongering about the queer child and perpetuate those homophobic discourses, but actually, over time, because of their resonances as characters with their intended child audience they actually became queer-coded in a potentially much more disruptive way, and in a way that kind of disrupted this discourse around the queer child as a feared concept.

And so it's a really interesting unpicking of the ways in which that attempted characterization and role for the Garbage Pail Kids was disrupted by their reception. So yeah, fantastic chapter. Really theoretically rich chapter. And I think lots of people will really find ground there that hasn't previously been covered and hasn't previously been discussed. It's a fantastic chapter, really good.

Adam It sounds great. Yeah. I'm really looking forward to reading it.

So I noticed that you aren't necessarily using the term children's horror. And if you ever listen to our podcast, me and Ren are pretty fast and loose with it. I'm a big fan of the Evolution of Horror podcast. I know that Mike, the host, often gets accused of being quite fast and loose of his definition of horror and I think we we are much the same. Like if it horrified us as kids, then, we count it. And a lot did for me.

But I noticed that there aren't many contemporary examples of what we might call children's horror written about in the book, and that may well be that the people writing are adults now and they are reflecting on things that they experienced or watched as children. But I wonder what if you have any thoughts on the continuation of the creepy and weird in children's media and where it's gone. What forms do you think it takes now?

Lauren That's a very good question and I think as one of those childless millennials that everybody's so afraid of in the press of recent, I'm probably not the best person to know, but I do think there's something really interesting in resurrection going on, with this idea of revisiting older programmes.

I think you've seen this perhaps more with teen TV as opposed to children's TV specifically. But I'm really fascinated by the fact that, for example, for years now they've been trying to get this Point Horror TV show off the ground and they did the Fear Street stuff a little while ago, Disney Plus have just done a Goosebumps reboot that's a little bit more like Riverdale for slightly more mature audience.

So I find it quite interesting that for me, from my very limited understanding of children's landscape now, that these texts that were once resolutely aimed at children — I mean Goosebumps in the 90s was absolutely a kids TV show, you know, it was for young children — so the fact that they've matured that content for a YA audience I find really interesting and quite telling. They've not rebooted it as a children's TV show, they've rebooted it as kind of One Tree Hill, but with possessed dummies, you know?

Adam Yeah, yeah, that that is interesting. I mean, I think Ren and I were really impressed by Creeped Out. I don't know if you've seen Creeped out, but both of us have a lot of time for it, which is almost Black Mirror for kids, basically. Which, you know, is a similar kind of anthology format, I guess to Goosebumps, of standalone episodes. Robert, have you any thoughts on the current landscape?

Robert Similarly, perhaps I'm a little outside the age range to appreciate a lot of what's going on at the moment. But I think as you've said there are still plenty of examples out there which do tap into the creepy quality to to certain texts. And I think children have a huge appetite for that — for the mysterious, the strange, the eerie, the otherworldly — in a way that that you don't necessarily recognise as being strange at the time but it hits you later. Which is another reason perhaps why the texts in the book have that quality to them.

But I think you see it all over the place. In things like Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, which is there for a family audience and is also deeply unsettling. It's deeply strange and odd. So yeah, I think it's still present and if anything it's it's coming back with with more force. Arguably reflecting the the world we're living in as things become more unsettling, the texts that parallel to the world that children are living in equally are unsettling. It becomes a coping mechanism.

Adam Oh yeah. I'd certainly say with the kids that I teach that there's a massive interest in horror manga, like particularly say Junji Ito, if you go into Waterstones now there's just Junji Ito collections everywhere and teenagers are lapping him up.

I definitely think that appetite for horror and horror games like, to be honest, watching my stepson play Roblox. I find a fair amount of Roblox pretty sort of phantasmagoricly horrifying. So yeah, I definitely don't think that that taste has disappeared. Children are still ghoulish.

Lauren Definitely. Yes, yes.

Adam Well, thank you both for you. Do you have any last things you want to say about the collection, I know it's sort of out around now?

Lauren Yeah we're waiting for the final word on when it'll be available, but we're really looking forward to seeing the final finished copy.

I think it's certain to provoke people to think about which bits of their own childhood media consumption have formulated the tastes, perhaps even informed the careers like it has done for Rob and I! So I really hope that people enjoy reflecting on on those formative experiences themselves and and where those early horrific media experiences came from, you know?

Robert Yeah, absolutely. I agree. It'd be really interesting to see what people make of it in terms of, as you say, provoking people's memories and making them think. I hope that's one of the things that people will take away from the the collection, that it's really varied in terms of the types of writing that are in there. But it's fabulous that pretty much all the writers in there are, in some way or another, reflecting on their own past. That autoethnographic bit of the book is coming through, which I think was really important to us an approach in methodology and it's really enhanced the collection.

Adam Thank you very much, both of you. As I've said, I'm really excited to read it. I'm sure I will be lending Ren my copy as well, if they don't get one themselves. So that is Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television. So definitely look out for that one. Order it to your library, university library or get your hands on it yourself.

Lauren Thank you very much for having us, Adam!

Adam Thanks both of you!

RobertThank you, bye.

Lauren Bye!