Skinamarink (aka Can We Sleep Downstairs Tonight?)

The thing that hurt me the most about Kyle Edward Ball's Skinamarink (2022) was how young its central characters were. Going in, this was something I was totally unprepared for. I'd known that the experimental Canadian horror was about two children who wake up in the dark of the night to find that their father has mysteriously absconded, as have all the windows and doors of their increasingly disorientating abode, but I'd had it it in mind that the nippers in question would be at least 10 or 11. Young enough that the sudden parental abandonment would horrify, but old enough that they wouldn't feel completely defenceless. But no, they're 4 and 6. Painfully callow beings to be caught up in so freakishly nightmarish a scenario. The imperilled pair, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) and her smaller brother Kevin (Lucas Paul), have relatively little to say about their predicament, with most of their dialogue coming in hushed whispers so scarcely intelligible that subtitles are deployed throughout - but whenever they do open their mouths, the emotive impact is considerable. Every last peep out of them, every plaintive, half-hopeful plea of "Dad?" had me squirming, heightening my awareness of what tiny, terrified little tots these were. If children in jeopardy are a major sticking point for you, in particular children who've neither the vocabulary or the mental capacity to articulate the level of jeopardy they're in, then Skinamarink might not be your picture. 

Actually, the very first thing that had come to mind upon reading the synopsis for Skinamarink was the 1991 track "No Idea" by Earth Leakage Trip, an evocation that continued to niggle all throughout my viewing. Prominently sampled in "No Idea" is the 1975 children's record Happy Monsters, which tells the story of another pair of alliteratively-named children, Bobby and Betty, who seem to have crossed over into a parallel universe where the most mundane of architectural details become indicators of something profoundly askew. In their case, the doors and windows have not disappeared altogether, but are rearranged and out of place; on "No Idea", Bobby's observation that, "The doors are where the windows should be...and the windows are where the doors should be..." is looped and slowed to make him sound high as a kite (the track belonged to the "toytown techno" movement of the early 1990s, which proposed that childhood fantasy and rave drug culture were gateways to a common euphoria). Punctuating Bobby's stupefaction are the startled cries of Heather O'Rourke, as lifted from the 1982 film Poltergeist, interjecting that she cannot see where her mother has gone. The children are alone in a world in which the order has mysteriously shifted, and there is at once something tremendously terrifying and exhilarating in that prospect of slipping past the boundaries of parental control and into the dark unknown (the young ravers of 1991 certainly knew it). Ball's picture is grounded by a similar fascination, with the parents gone, the darkness looming and the familiar gradually giving way to the uncanny. Like "No Idea", it offers a beguiling journey into childhood nostalgia, but one that feels troubled and distorted, so as to emphasise the more sinister implications that were potentially omnipresent all along. The film's title is derived from a popular pre-school nonsense song, and the material comforts of juvenility are all around - the television glow and the cartoon entertainments therein are our guiding light, and the carpet is adorned with a variety of Fisher-Price toys - but these too become a part of the disturbance as the experience goes on, and the world is turned (literally, by the film's end) upside down. Ball also offers a fiendish inversion upon the expected conclusion of any nostalgic voyage, that you can never go home again, by stranding us in a predicament that is its exact opposite - apparently we could go home again, only for the home itself to turn against us and threaten to keep us from finding our way back to the present.

Skinamarink is not for everyone. It requires a lot of patience and, honestly, a love of the mundane. You have to love staring at the shadows on the walls and into the ill-lit spaces in which something might be stirring but relatively little ever reveals itself. You have to be willing to settle for atmospheric clout over narrative clarity. You must have a fascination for low-fidelity, and for the various specks and glitches that characterise "analog horror", the predominantly online media movement from which Skinamarink originates (Ball cut his film-making teeth with the YouTube channel "Bitesized Nightmares", creating shorts based on real dreams as recounted by internet commenters). If you have a particular weakness for hauntology, logophobia or VHS distortion (all those things that I lap up), then odds are that you'll be in your element. 

Despite its aggressively niche form, Skinamarink evokes what must be a near-universal childhood experience - waking up in the early hours to find that your house in the darkness becomes a very different place. It might not have literally turned upside down, but its entire character has been reversed, so that it's no longer a venue of safety, but a harbourer the unknown. Myself, I can recall a stretch from my childhood when my parents had a radio alarm clock with the most ungodly tone, which never seemed to rouse them but would never fail to get to me from the other end of the hallway. It got to the point where I had started to wake up well in advance of the alarm, and would lie awake in petrified anticipation of its imminent eruption. Everything about the scenario - the darkness, the stillness, the deceptive silence - was unbearable. I could not make out the clock on my own wall, nor did I particularly want to stare out into the void that engulfed my bedroom in the nocturnal hours, so I couldn't tell exactly how close we were to the tone's cacophonic assault. I simply knew that it was coming. And when it came, it was a choice between huddling under the duvet for however long it took for my parents to wake up and hit the snooze button (in which case it would strike again in 10 minutes) or braving a trip down that pitch black hallway to turn it off myself. Nine times out of ten, I was more afraid of the pitch blackness and whatever it might be concealing than I was the tone itself, so I lay there and endured it. Eventually, my parents changed the setting, so that the radio went off instead of the tone, and my sleep pattern improved dramatically.

Skinamarink could hardly be described as a found footage film, though it presents itself through the grain and crackle of a degraded tape, giving the impression that we are looking into some long-forgotten memory that could well be our own, and in which it becomes difficult to distinguish between what might be genuine movements in the shadows and what are mere blemishes on the image. The distortion is, we suppose, intended to represent the fuzziness and spottiness of memory, suggesting that Skinamarink might be interpreted as a document of irrational childhood fear and of a young mind's attempts to grapple with the incomprehensible. All the same, that the camera's perspective switches between that of Kevin and Kaylee and, more often still, does not show the perspective of either, makes it challenging to align the film's content with the subjective experience of any one character. For the most part, the camera takes a detached view, showing the corners of the house from various angles but rarely focussing on its subjects. Notably, we almost never get a clear view of any of the participants' faces (the single exception to this rule provides the film with one of its most unsettling images). What's seen of the children is mostly their feet, from the perspective of something that might be scrutinising them the carpet level, while chunks of their hushed dialogue feel overheard, by something that is not quite among them. At the same time, it was seldom my impression that we were seeing the action from the eye-view of the entity skulking around them, a la Steven Soderbergh's Presence (2024) - rather, it felt like a stylistic choice, to emphasise the vastness and the emptiness of the house, and the relative smallness and isolation of the children.

There is a certain timelessness to Skinamarink, in that it seems to exist out of time. An opening title card informs us that the events in question take place in 1995, and the protagonists accordingly use a VHS tape for their early-hours diversion, but the cartoons they watch are all from the 1930s, themselves artefacts of a bygone age that would have seemed alien in the film's own purported setting. Specifically, the cartoons are all from the public domain, which from a practical standpoint spared Ball from having to deal with copyright, but it also serves as another important aesthetic choice, imbuing the film's ambience with a surreal, otherworldly quality that feels evocative of a dream or an alternate reality. The television becomes a further space in which the familiar intersects with the unfamiliar - one cartoon, Chuck Jones' Prest-O Chang-O (1939), features an uncanny leporine character who is in actuality a primitive Bugs Bunny. The cartoons themselves do not feel arbitrary; a popular interpretation has it that they are windows into the nature of the children's predicament, and the unknown they are up against. It has been noted, for example, that one cartoon, The Cobweb Hotel (1936), is about a predatory being (a ghoulish spider) trapping unsuspecting prey (flies) under the thinly-veiled guise of hospitality. Another, Somewhere In Dreamland (1936), includes the sung refrain, "Somewhere in Dreamland tonight",  which could be taken as either an ironic dig at the film's insomnious aura, and at the inability to find escapism in dreaming, or an indication that the children have entered into a state of unreality - perhaps the sleeping and waking worlds have become blurred (there is a reference to Kevin sleepwalking at the start of the film). Then there's Bimbo's Initiation (1931), which shows the title character futilely attempting to escape a surreal house through an endless succession of doors. Of greatest interest to myself, however, was the Fleischer Studios short The Song of The Birds (1935), which is featured in two chunks, the first of which comes shortly after Kaylee asks a question that drastically challenges our understanding of the family's domestic situation: "Why is Mom crying?" So far as we can tell, the children's mother had already vacated the house before the father's mysterious disappearance; the children do not call out for her when discovering that they have been left alone. A little later, Kevin asks if their dad might have gone to the same place as their mom, and Kaylee insists that she no longer wants to talk about her mother. The initial mention of Mom takes us into The Song of The Birds, in which darkness is equated with mourning, as the animated birds prepare to bury one of their fallen, a juvenile bird shot by a boy's pellet gun. It is hard to shake the impression that the mother may be deceased, even with Kaylee's question appearing to place her within the present, and in the immediate vicinity. It could be that they are haunted by her memory, with the endless night representing their unprocessed trauma and grief. Still, what makes the inclusion of The Song of The Birds particularly intriguing is that we do actually see the short's redemptive ending (this is in contrast to say, The Cobweb Hotel, in which we are not shown the scenes in which the flies rise up against the spider). For the grieving birds, dawn eventually comes. The wounded bird is revived, and they make peace with their remorseful tormentor, who discards his gun and dispenses birdseed. Of course, this is glimpsed through distorted VHS flicker, in which the triumph of the birds is unmistakable, but the radiance of the new morn comes in a washed-out reddish hue, and the final image where the boy winks reassuringly at the camera is rendered too bright to see. 

The mother is clearly a touchy subject for the children, and Kaylee's discomfort at discussing her whereabouts is indicative of some lingering family discomfort. There are multiple sections of Skinamarink that seem highly suggestive of a subtext of domestic abuse, although how the mother fits in with this is not obvious - was she a victim, a perpetrator or both? The various theories put forth by viewers range from the mother walking out on the family, having a history of self-harm and potentially taking her own life, or being abused and ultimately murdered by the father. We are perhaps primed to distrust the father from the start of the film, when he is heard discussing an injury sustained by Kevin which he attributes to his falling down the stairs while sleepwalking (it is, though, unclear to whom the father would be speaking at this time of night, if not the mother). During the initial clip from The Song of The Birds, the children are disturbed by a loud banging sound, redolent of some violent altercation occurring elsewhere in the house, and turn to find that a chair has uprooted and positioned on the ceiling; the process of domestic upheaval is truly underway. The mother should not be there, and yet she continues to haunt the household, whether as a literal apparition or as a symbol of that unexpressed trauma. In one of the film's most infamous scenes Kaylee is summoned to the upstairs bedroom to find that her father has apparently returned, and sitting at the opposite end of the bed is her mother, with her back to Kaylee. In another scene we see a more intimate shot of a long-haired woman from behind, presumably the mother. Toward the end of the film a similar female figure is seen from the distance, appearing to dissolve away into the grainy backdrop. If we see the clips from The Song of The Birds as being somehow representative of the children's relationship with their ghostly mother, then we might consider the possibility that the mother is the one in mourning - that she is crying, as Kaylee puts it, for the plight of her children, much as the parent birds in the cartoon are weeping for their unresponsive young offspring, who is seemingly fated to be buried in darkness.

It is, we suspect, a darkness of the parents' own making. Some viewers have interpreted the scene where Kaylee encounters her mother and father in the bedroom, positioned with their backs to one another (although never visible at the same time), as an indicator of divorce - the mother's assurance that she and the father love Kaylee very much seems evocative of something a parent might be expected say in such a position - and the broader picture as an allegory for the emotional turmoil faced by children having to deal with such a significant reordering of their domestic arrangement. Divorce, however, seems too tame and ordinary a predicament to account for the genuine peril these children have to contend with. The mother's subsequent instruction to Kaylee to close her eyes suggest that something more sinister is unfolding. Kaylee complies (for this scene, the camera reflects her point of view, so the audience too is plunged into momentary darkness) and opens her eyes to find her mother gone, although she continues to talk to Kaylee, warning her that "there's someone here", before the sounds of crunching are heard. Is the mother undergoing some sort of terrifying transformation (suggesting that she is becoming the abuser), or is something else crunching her (suggesting that she is a victim of domestic abuse)? Soon after the bedroom encounter, Kaylee is removed from the equation; Kevin locates her in the basement with her eyes and mouth blanked out on her face, and is thereafter left on his own (until now, the children have drawn comfort and solidarity from one another, so their separation comes as a particularly grim turn of events). A strange disembodied voice starts to talk to Kevin from the darkness and admits to taking away Kaylee's mouth as a punishment. Curiously, it says nothing about her eyes, but we might implicitly link their removal to the mother's prior instruction that she keep them closed. We might see a similar connection when, in the film's most distressing development, the voice challenges Kevin to play a "game" that involves inserting a knife into his eye (he complies, and his inevitable reaction recalls that at the start of the film when he suffers his head injury). The entity prefers the children not to see, much as the mother prefers them not to see. There is a running theme of the children being required to look away, and to shut out whatever traumas are going on around them. In another scene, the voice commands Kevin to "sleep", followed by a thud in which he seemingly passes out on the floor.

The entity, a manifestation of what is unspeakable, has seemingly arrived to fill the void left by the parents. It is the new authority to which they must answer, claiming to have punished Kaylee because she persisted in asking for her mother and father. Yet there is a definite paradox in the character of the entity; it dispenses discipline when the children won't do as they are told, and its malevolent insistence on eliminating their vision echoes the more covertly sinister actions of the parents. But in various other respects it has the personality of a child. As Kevin sits on the floor fiddling with his Lego blocks, it repeatedly tells him that it wants to play (said with all the benignity of John Kramer), raising the possibility that its rearranging of the house amounts to some form of erratic play-pretence with what, from its perspective, are all just pieces of Lego at its disposal. The entity is a creative being that delights in subverting the established order, affixing chairs to the ceiling and toys to the wall. With its love of cartoons, and of taking disobedient children's mouths away, it also feels uncannily reminiscent of the omnipotent Anthony in the "It's A Good Life" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie (a remake of the classic episode from 1961), who punished one of his sisters for insubordination by removing her mouth and another by banishing her into the cartoon world (notably, Bimbo's Initiation is featured in both films). On that note, it also seems significant that both the victim and aggressor of The Song of The Birds are children; unlike the spider from The Cobweb Hotel, the pellet-firing boy seems less malevolent than he does misguided. He shoots at the birds because he sees it as a game; only the prospect of having mortally wounded the young bird manages to convince him otherwise. Alas, Kevin's injury does not bring out the same compassion in the entity, despite its assurances that it will protect him. Is it offer of protection another of its tricks, or does it reflect the parents' childish delusion that what the children cannot see and are prevented from acknowledging cannot hurt them

In The Song of The Birds, it is seemingly an act of divine intervention that saves the injured bird, when rain falls out of the sky and revives it. It is, nonetheless, the compassion of the boy that facilitates this - unable to shut out the birds' suffering any longer, he gets down on his knees and prays, calling on the assistance of a higher power. The happy outcome at the end of the cartoon was thus dependent on the mercy of the omnipotent, but also the final refusal of the boy to turn a blind eye to the trauma happening outside of his window and his resolve to address it. His willingness to throw the gun he had wielded so childishly aside and to become a caregiver to the birds, nourishing them with birdseed, suggests that he has undergone a growth and maturation that is ultimately redemptive. Such an outcome is unattainable in Skinamarink, where the omnipotent have no mercy, those who refuse to turn a blind eye are literally blinded, and growth and maturation is cruelly denied the children within. Shortly after his eye injury, Kevin discovers the will to try phoning the emergency services, and his resolve does appear to momentarily conquer the obstacles - despite the phone lines being down earlier, he is able to get through to an operator this time. The operator praises him for being a brave boy, suggesting that he is undergoing a redemptive growth of his own, only for the entity to ultimately thwart him by transforming the telephone into a toy one, specifically a Chatter Telephone, an anthropomorphised rotary phone manufactured by Fisher-Price. The message is clear - Kevin cannot be allowed to grow up and will stay imprisoned in helplessness of youth. The Chatter Telephone is another detail that seems to defy any clear sense of time, for it has remained a popular childhood icon since its creation in 1961. Even if you never had one growing up, odds are that you are familiar with the toy from its appearance in Toy Story 3 (2010).

What amuses me about the Chatter Telephone's appearance in Skinamarink is how deftly it plays into what was everyone's first instinct on seeing the trailer for Toy Story 3 - that something with a face that uncanny was not to be trusted. I distinctly remember the build-up to the Pixar sequel and what a common assumption it was that Chatter Telephone would be one of the villains. In part because his line, "You and your friends ain't ever getting out of here", was taken out of context in the marketing and sounded like an unambiguous threat, but moreover because his appearance just didn't seem that friendly. What a surprise it was when the film arrived and it turned out we'd all misjudged the little ringer on wheels. His method of communicating (exclusively through his receiver without moving his lips) while inspired, gave off a somewhat sinister vibe, but he was 100% on the level and gave Woody some helpful pointers on evading Lotso's clutches. In Skinamarink the toy (another manifestation of the entity) serves a very different purpose - not only does it signify Kevin's entrapment in this permanent childhood nightmare, it later plays a fiendish trick on him, when Kevin sees the eyes of the phone in the darkness, accompanied by the sounds of snarling, and shines his flash light on it. The monster he'd imagined skulking in the shadows is revealed to be a run of the mill toy...which subsequently reveals itself to be more terrifying in the light than in the darkness. Its eyes shift, its mouth contorts, and it emits a piercing noise about as comforting as that alarm clock tone I described earlier. Kevin apparently decides it was more palatable as a pair of predatory eyes in the shadows, and takes the flash light off of it.

(Spoilers follow) 

The Toy Story connection feels more pertinent than perhaps first meets the eye, for the fate that awaits Kevin seems hauntingly reminiscent of the problem facing Woody and co, destined never to grow old and to stay mired within the realm of childhood as their owners inevitably move on and abandon them. Kevin is reduced to the status of a toy. In the film's third act, he is summoned upstairs by the voice and, in a manoeuvre that would certainly appeal to the denizens of the strange parallel world from Happy Monsters, the floor is now where the ceiling should be and the ceiling is where the floor should be. Kevin is prompted to keep moving through his inverted environs, until we come across a mountain of toys, mostly the Lego blocks he was playing with earlier, suspended on the ceiling. Onscreen text would appear to indicate that 572 days have now passed, a punchline recycled from Ball's 2020 short Heck (the evolutionary ancestor of Skinamarink), which reveals that its protagonist has been stranded in a similar inertia for "18694 sleeps" (in his case, that's more than 51 years, dependent on what length of time a "sleep" is meant to imply). Does this mean that it has been 572 days since the darkness first descended on the children, or is that specifically how long Kevin has been stuck there on the ceiling with the other pieces of misplaced Lego? Either way, how many days' worth of time had already elapsed before Kaylee was taken out of the picture? Have the children aged at all within that time? Is it safe assume that we've arrived in 1997 by now, or has it been that same night in 1995 for all eternity? Kevin's entrapment in that endless corridor, which seems to stretch out into infinity (and beyond) implies that he is suspended in some kind of limbo; he has been tidied away with the other toys, with the entity having seemingly grown bored with him as a plaything. Stifled and helpless, he has no means of progressing, no way of conquering the childhood demons that have become the be-all and end-all of his entire universe. This is the epitome of his abandonment, with the upturned dollhouse in the toy collection echoing the house's disruption and suggesting that the process of domestic upheaval that was triggered by the family's unspoken turmoil is now complete.

Soon after, we are presented with a sequence that is (for my money) all the more disturbing, centring on the framed still photographs that adorn the walls of the house, all of which are of children. They might pass for perfectly ordinary family photos, but for the fact that the children's facial features have been obscured, recalling the subjugation of Kaylee, and in some cases their heads are missing altogether. A natural assumption would be that the images depict Kaylee and Kevin at even earlier points in their short lives; their modification could be indicative of a temporal disconnection, as Kevin's memory of his former life erodes and he is fractured off into an inertia that exists without past or future. Alternatively, it might be suggestive of the historic traumas that have assured the destruction of Kaylee and Kevin across a longer period of time. A more terrifying possibility still is that the pictured children are not Kaylee and Kevin at all, but other victims of this same process, indicating that the story we've seen is in no way unique. Another way of putting it is that this house is, in an allegorical sense, made out of gingerbread, and these children were already eaten by the witch that lurks within - for, in Ball's own words, "If people pay attention, they see it's basically a Hansel and Gretel story."

 

In the most familiar version of the classic German tale, Hansel and Gretel fall into the clutches of a witch after being abandoned in the wilderness by their father, though he does so reluctantly, at the insistence of the children's vicious stepmother. The children ultimately defeat the witch and return to their father to find that the stepmother has been conveniently disposed of in their absence; the vanquishing of the witch implicitly precipitates that of the stepmother, suggesting that, for all intents and purposes, the two are one and the same. If we are to read Skinamarink as a retelling of this story, we might take that as a clue that the children's mother is dead before the picture begins and, furthermore, that the "mother" Kaylee encounters in the bedroom is not really her lingering spectre, but an imposter, in likelihood another of the entity's deceptions. We would, however, do well to keep in mind that in the earliest editions of the story presented by the Brothers Grimm, it was the children's biological mother who expelled them from the home. This was later superseded by the narrative of the wicked stepmother, which proved more enduring - for it is easier to attribute corruption and abandonment to an interloping evil than to reckon with the possibility of it arising from within, among those we'd trust to love and protect us. The narrative is a smokescreen, much like the mother's insistence that Kaylee keep her eyes closed, designed to shield us from some unpalatable reality. And how easily does it really sit with us that, even in the most oft-told version of the story, the biological father bends to the will of the stepmother and abandons the children, even if they are reconciled at the end? Is there such a world of difference between a parent who promises protection and leaves his children to die in the woods and a witch who promises gingerbread and lights up a cooking pot?

The prospect of the witch and parents being parallels of one another, if not outright the same, makes the film's closing implication particularly unsettling. In the final sequence, we return to what is presumably Kevin's perspective once more, scanning the grainy blackness until our gaze falls upon the outline of a figure standing above us. The figure looks vaguely human, and like an adult, but it is hard to tell, not least because its facial features are (of course) obscured. We can just about discern its lips moving, and the words that come out are the predictable ones - we are told to go to sleep. The film thus leaves us at a point of delicious ambiguity; it is unclear if it signals the end of the nightmare, with Kevin (and by extension, ourselves) awakening from a bad dream to the parental reassurance that nothing wrong is really happening (as hollow as such reassurances might sound), or our continued entrapment, as our captor subdues us to a bad reality that is basically inescapable. Exacerbating our unease is that we cannot be certain if we are in the presence of one of Kevin's parents, be it his mother or his father, or the entity. Kevin, for his part, does not seem sure either. He asks the figure to identify itself, and receives no answer. In practice it might make little difference. If we've escaped the witch but have only dubious guardians to run to, aren't we merely headed back to square one?

The Three Children (aka Beware The Friendly Stranger - But He's Not What You Think)

When it comes to public information films combining haunted landscapes, imperilled children and uncanny foes, it's hard to imagine a concoction more impactful than Lonely Water (1973), but The Three Children, a little-seen gem from 1946, could give it a decent run for its money. Some twenty-seven years before Donald Pleasence's aquatic spectre took to haunting the airwaves of tea-time television, post-war cinemagoers might have been threatened by another dark shape with a penchant for unwary youngsters. The film's title sounds beguilingly reminiscent of a fairy tale, and indeed, its basic trajectory recalls that of Little Red Riding Hood or Hansel and Gretel, where children who've ventured from the safety of home are tasked with navigating some forbidding wilderness and resisting the advances of affable strangers representing the most unspeakable kinds of dangers. It offers, though, an especially grisly sting in its tail, regarding both the nature of that wilderness and those most unspeakable of dangers. Although presented in an authoritative newsreel style, the narrative of The Three Children has the distinct vibe of a campfire story being shared by a puckish scout eager to unsettle a few of his fellow young campers before the witching hour sets in.

We are introduced to the titular children, who have been discharged from their houses on various missions, but who are linked by the same morbid destiny. Tommy has been sent out to collect a paper for his father, Susan is excited to be going to a party, and Bobby has been left to play out on his tricycle while his parents are having a lie down (hmm, is that all that they're doing?). The three encounter one another and enjoy a carefree romp upon a green, but as they enter a wooded area they're greeted by a strange gentleman who indicates their divergence into some dark unknown. The children are initially unnerved by his presence, but his kindly demeanour swiftly wins their trust. He asks if he might accompany them to where they're headed, and they accept; as they proceed, however, it becomes apparent from both the visuals and the narration that these children are most definitely going the stranger's way, never to resume their innocent errands again. The film cunningly evokes one parental nightmare, the fear of child abduction, only to reveal that quite another is taking place below the surface. These three children, the narrator tells us, are THE three children. The three children killed on the roads every day!

No context is given for that grim statistic, so I couldn't tell you if it applied to children in Britain as a whole, in the London area, or just in Wanstead and Woodford, whose road safety committee produced the film and presumably intended it for exhibition in local cinemas. There is some mystery surrounding the film's creation - it is unknown who the BFU cited in the credits were, although Josephine Botting, writing for the BFI media release Short Sharp Shocks Vol. 2, speculates that they were likely the Blackheath Film Unit, who made a variety of safety shorts in the late 1940s. Despite its extensive immersion in a child's eye-view of the world, filled with excitement, time for idle play and no shortage of dark mystery, children were evidently not the intended recipients of The Three Children; the closing tagline "Child safety is YOUR responsibility" makes it clear where the blame for the implicit tragedies should be apportioned. The absence of adult oversight is a common factor in all three scenarios, with the children's parents at most lurking upon the narrative sidelines to wish them well on their adventures. Tommy's father is seen standing at the doorway as Tommy sets out on his ill-fated errand, while Susan's mother lavishes her with affection as she is putting on her party dress, but as soon as the children have set foot outside they are left to find their own way. However well-intentioned these adults might be, they share in their offspring's naivety as to what lies beyond their doors, fatally overestimating their capacity to handle those unforeseen perils and setting them up for disaster. (Meanwhile, Bobby's parents, who come off as the most outright negligent, prioritising their own relaxation above their son's wellbeing, are not seen at all.) The strange gentleman who crosses their paths is that most sinister of figures - the adult who will happily take charge of impressionable children wherever parental supervision has failed them. In this case that figure just so happens to be Death itself. 

Given the symbolic nature of the threat he presents, there are multiple ways of interpreting what is going on in that climactic encounter. It could be that the children are, unbeknownst to themselves, already dead when they meet with one another upon the green, with the gentleman being the reaper who's come to meet their ghosts and to lead them into the great beyond. Lending credence to this reading is that none of the people roaming the background of the green take any notice of the three protagonists. The sequence in question might also be an entirely allegorical one, with the gentleman representing the impending risk of death on the road, and the children's inability to recognise the danger they are in indicating the precise moment at which their fates are each sealed. Whether the murky, desolate wood they venture into is a literal a gateway to the netherworld, or a reflection of how critically far they are from the security of home, it has a dream-like aura that stands in direct contrast to the grounded urban sequences that established the characters. As the gentleman leads them into the distant horizon, they are taken ever further from the safety of civilisation, becoming increasingly smaller and uncannier figures that are seemingly claimed by the uncultivated landscape. While alarming, there is something eerily hypnotic about this set-piece; we feel that we've slipped suddenly from the mundane streets of East London and into a hidden fantasy realm, as enigmatic as it is chilling. It seems so disconnected from where our story began that it perfectly disguises the fiendish twist - that the familiar urban world is where the danger in question always lay. The narrator's final denouement brings us back down to earth with a vigorous thud, as the closing shot of Bobby's mangled tricycle illustrates in the starkest possible terms what has actually transpired. 

The Three Children is a stellar example of how a road safety message can be delivered without any onscreen violence, with that forlornly spinning tricycle wheel being as close as we get to the gruesome reality (the spinning notably stops before the fade-out, further emphasising that time has run out for its callow owner). Perhaps the most distressing implication is in the declaration that the demise of Tommy, Susan and Bobby should be seen as representative of a process that repeats itself every day, suggesting a cyclic nature to their macabre story. Being left to envision the individual fates that would have befallen each child is upsetting enough in itself, but is exacerbated by us also being left to envision the gentleman showing up each day like clockwork to the claim the souls of three children, who might as well be Tommy, Susan and Bobby all over again, headed for some important or exciting business that will never be. Their journey appears to stretch out into infinity, with the narrator stipulating that their only recourse is to keep moving onward through a darkening terrain. No bright future lies before them, only the grimness of inevitability. 

Treehouse of Horror '98: Hell Toupee (aka Union of The Snake)

For as down as I tend to be on The Simpsons' tenth season, and on Mike Scully's whole era as showrunner, I'll admit that their Halloween offering for 1998, "Treehouse of Horror IX" (AABF01), doesn't hold up too badly. The first two segments, "Hell Toupee" and "Terror of Tiny Toon", are solid pieces that reap ample pleasures from the kinds of macabre "What if?" scenarios that only the Halloween episodes could allow. What if Homer's yearning for a full head of hair caused him to become possessed by a vengeful villain serial killing from beyond the grave? What if Bart and Lisa were placed in the same reality as Itchy and Scratchy and had to contend with being on the receiving end of their cartoon brutality? The third segment, "Starship Poopers" (what if the Simpsons and the Rigellians were competing for custody of Maggie and went on The Jerry Springer Show?), holds up less well than the others, being the one that most screams "product of its time", but Kodos and Kang are at least on typically strong form. What is largely absent, and very much missed, is the genuine spookiness that characterised many of those earlier installments, when a trip inside the Treehouse of Horror meant getting to revel in Simpsons uncanniness as its own art form. This is something that peaked around "Treehouse of Horror VI"; after that, it seemed that the Halloween episodes were putting emphasis on being funny and outlandish but not necessarily creepy. The only part of "IX" to really embrace that former ideal is the opening sequence, which takes us through the familiar intro, but with everything going morbidly wrong. As they touch down on the driveway, Bart and Lisa each trip and suffer neck-breaking injuries, while Homer fails to outrun a conspicuously crazed Marge as she pulls into the garage. It's such an obvious way to open a Halloween installment that it seems strange that it took them until the ninth attempt to make it happen, but is definitely all the more impactful for having taken that long to brew. The family rushing home to watch themselves (I guess?) on television is a sequence we'd seen play out for almost a decade and knew beat for beat; the image of Marge nearly running Homer down week after week had come to feel safe, warm and familiar. To see it take such a twisted turn after all this time is one heck of a jarring experience - particularly the misplaced shot of Marge and Maggie doing their synchronised horn beep, normally a tender moment of bonding between parent and child, here recontextualised to make it plain that their ramming of Homer is no accident. The cherry on top is in cutting to the couch to find it occupied by Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees (the former voiced by Robert Englund), baffled by the family's failure to appear. Best Halloween couch gag ever - not least because, at the time, Freddy vs. Jason was still five years away, so this might have been the closest the world had gotten yet to the epic crossover promised at the end of Jason Goes To Hell: The Final Friday (not actually the final Friday).

The episode itself is never quite able to live up to the glory of that opening sequence, but you do see momentary flickers of that sublime eeriness skulking in its deepest nooks and crannies. In "Hell Toupee", some of the most unsettling moments occur at the lowest possible key. A Krusty doll (presumably not set to Evil) makes an appearance as Bart is in danger of being bludgeoned with a mallet, offering both sympathy and mockery with its cry of: "Stop it, you're killing me!" Wiggum berates Lou for not alerting him sooner to Apu's mangled remains inside the Squishee Machine he's already dispensed and sampled a beverage from, only to continue slurping nonchalantly at his straw, a gag that's a lot more disturbing than first meets the eye. On the surface it plays like a gag about a typically lackadaisical Wiggum, but it also evokes an idea central to the "Nightmare Cafeteria" segment from "Treehouse of Horror V", regarding the supposedly addictive nature of cannibalism.

According to the episode's Wikipedia page, "Hell Toupee" is a parody of an episode of Amazing Stories from 1986, which was also called "Hell Toupee", and also about a malevolent toupee that transforms anyone who dons it into a relentless killer. This, though, isn't exactly supported by the DVD commentary, which gives conflicting testimony on the consciousness of the allusion. David X Cohen, who wrote the "Starship Poopers" segment, claims that "Hell Toupee" was initially conceived as a placeholder title, and that he was surprised that it wasn't changed, on the basis that Amazing Stories had long beaten them to the punch. Ron Hauge, who worked as an executive producer on the episode, disputes Cohen's account, stating that the original title was "A High Price Toupee", that Cohen was actually very enthusiastic about the change to "Hell Toupee" and that nobody was thinking about Amazing Stories at the time: "Someone pointed out later, after it aired, that it had been the name of something, but that's not where we got it." While it's possible that Hauge is being deliberately disingenuous for legal reasons, straight-up copying the title of whatever they're spoofing does seem like an uncharacteristically lazy move for The Simpsons; you can usually count on them to come up with some sort of sly twist, even if it's as simple as tacking on an extra letter, eg: "The Shinning" or "Cape Feare". Maybe it's a case of "Hell Toupee" being such an irresistibly delicious pun that popular culture is going to keep recycling it over and over, with nobody having any particular claim to it (case in point - only last month we had it crop up as the name of a song in the new Spinal Tap movie). Besides, having watched the Amazing Stories episode...it really does strike me as the kind of thing that is beyond all parody. Although it shares its central conceit with the Simpsons segment, the two offer very different takes on the same idea. For one, in Amazing Stories the bald man possessed by the psychopathic hairpiece is only a minor character; we open with the critical murders (all lawyers) having already occurred, and the focus is on the attorney hired to defend him (played by Tony Kientz). It's also a far lighter, goofier and all-around more ridiculous affair than the Simpsons segment (yes, exactly). A condemned offender is once again the source of the cursed hair, which she'd sold to a wig-maker to fund her (ineffective) legal defence, but she herself is not a character - the villain, for all intents and purposes, is the toupee, which spends much of the narrative crawling about in search of its next victim like some form of demonic guinea pig. By contrast, the Simpsons' take is darker and grungier, more closely parodying the schlocky thrillers about supernatural serial killers that might have haunted your late night cable viewings back in the day - something along the lines of The First Power (1990), Ghost In The Machine (1993) or Hideaway (1995). 

It's also a scenario that feels perfectly suited to The Simpsons. We'd already observed in "Simpson and Delilah" the difference that a full head of hair can make for Homer's self-perception. What if, instead of giving him the confidence to scale the top of the power plant ladder, his new look brought out some very dark urges inside him indeed, effectively transforming him into a different person? In this case, the hair comes from a less reputable source than Dimoxinil - Snake, who is arrested for smoking inside the Kwik-E-Mart and sentenced to the electric chair under the three strikes law. Before his (televised) execution, he vows revenge on the three witnesses to whom Chief Wiggum attributes the open-and-shut conviction: Apu, Moe and Bart. And then when Homer inherits the deceased Snake's hair via a transplant procedure, the witnesses start being offed in a series of gruesome and mysterious murders, until Bart is the last one standing and deduces that he's next. 

"Hell Toupee" does not, admittedly, have the most novel of premises. Bart squirming in terror at the prospect of a pathologically vindictive criminal being on his tail is not something you had to wait until the Halloween specials to see. And even then, we were only three years removed from a Treehouse of Horror segment about another Springfieldian embarking on an undead killing spree as revenge for mistreatment, with Bart as one of his targets. What differentiates "Hell Toupee" from "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" is that the emphasis here is not on Bart's quest for survival, but on Homer's unwitting alliance with the malign force that threatens his son. That too was a major theme of "Nightmare", where you didn't have to squint terribly hard to see the adults as the story's real evil, ignoring Willie in his moment of need and addressing the problem of their children being violently slaughtered in their sleep by pretending that it wasn't happening. There was the sense that (as in the slasher picture it was homaging) the negligence of the parents and the monstrousness of the killer were really two sides of the same coin. "Toupee" has a similar idea, but with Homer taking an active role in the carnage, so that the would-be protector and ruthless persecutor become physically one and the same. The alliance is similar to that proposed by Freddy Krueger to Jesse Walsh in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985) - Homer has the body and Snake has the brain. Or the hair, as it were. Its influence becomes so pervasive that even when Homer's actions are not being directly dictated by Snake's hair he still ends up doing Snake's bidding, barricading himself inside Bart's bedroom with his son and a murder weapon to hand.

Like many fictional serial killers, supernatural or otherwise, Snake bumps off his victims according to a specific order (in this case, the order in which Wiggum identified them as suspects) and a certain sardonic methodology (Apu and Moe both die in ways pertaining to their trade, with Apu being fed into the aforementioned Squishee machine and Moe's heart being removed with a corkscrew; with Bart I guess Snake was running low on inspiration and settled for simply going at him with a mallet). What makes the trajectory unsettling is the knowledge that, as we watch the threat get progressively closer to Bart, the malign force itself has spent much of the segment right next to him, on the head of someone he trusts. Compared to "Nightmare", where the viewer's understanding of the situation was in sync with Bart and Lisa's, "Toupee" leans heavily on dramatic irony, with the viewer knowing what's going on long before the characters have figured it out. The script's wittiest moment occurs toward the end, when Lisa is about to verbalise that Snake's hair must be controlling Homer, only for Marge to abruptly cut her off and point out that the exposition dump is redundant. 

Those 90s supernatural killer pictures were certainly ripe for parody, and "Hell Toupee" does a decent job in nailing the obligatory dingy tone, although I do have this one lingering doubt - was Snake really the best character to use as the villain? No duh, you might be thinking, for on the one hand, Snake would appear to have it all - the checkered history, the luxuriant head of hair, the California Surfer Dude accent that exudes the kind of swagger and attitude that oughtn't come naturally to Homer. But looking at some of the other regular characters who were successfully recast as Halloween villains, I can't help but feel that he lacks that extra mind-blowing factor that makes you feel like you're seeing those familiar faces in a whole new, entirely valid light. Such castings were never arbitrary. Willie as Freddy Krueger? Shockingly good. On the whole, Willie's a benign character who takes more abuse than he dishes out, but he's got that distinctly uncouth, grimy nature that translates perfectly into Freddy's brand of monstrous sleaze. Krusty as Chucky/Talky Tina? Oh heck yeah. What's creepier than a clown doll with a gaping, vacant smile, the soul of a scuzzbag and the voice of a chain-smoker? Burns as Dracula? He's practically inhuman, why not go all the way with that idea? Ned Flanders as the Devil? A no-brainer. Not only is it a total subversion of who he is in the series proper (as Ned drolly puts it, "It's always the one you least suspect"), there's something enormously hilarious, sinister and convincing about the Devil using Ned's gentle, polite tones to conceal his nefarious agenda. With Snake, though, the gap between who he is in the series proper and who he is in this particular segment feels a whole lot thinner. He comes off less as assuming a role that serves as a playful extension of his regular self than as a version of his regular self played curiously straight. This is Snake if he was capable of acting on his character's threatening overtones - if, instead of holding Springfieldians at gun point, he killed them without inhibition, remorse or indeed humor. The correct tonal balance just isn't struck.

Snake's an interesting case, because although he was introduced way back in the Season 2 episode "The War of The Simpsons" (as Otto's funky friend), the writers hadn't started to use him as a major villain until relatively recently. If you look at the kinds of roles he played in the earlier seasons, he very rarely had much to do with the Simpsons themselves. Sure, you had episodes like "Separate Vocations" and "The Springfield Connection" where he was used as a momentary threat, but he was predominantly more of a joke character than anything. His purpose was to be a humorous representative of Springfield's criminal element, showing up wherever gags were required about crime sprees and jailbreaks, with Apu and Chief Wiggum as his recurring nemeses. I'm not 100% sure, but I think "Realty Bites" of Season 9 might have been the first instance of him coming into any kind of sustained conflict with a Simpson. Even then, they kept his antagonism light - though he beat the shit out of Homer in "Realty Bites" he was unable to do any actual damage, while in "All Singing, All Dancing" he was only ever a fake-out threat. There is, I think, a telling tidbit about Snake shared on the commentary to the Season 5 episode "Homer and Apu", which climaxes with Apu being shot while saving James Woods from an armed robber who is bizarrely not our hero. David Mirkin queries why they bothered with this nondescript robber when they had an established character who should have worked perfectly aptly in the role. The answer given is that some of the writers took issue with the idea of Snake seriously hurting anyone, so they brought in a one-off rando to do the dirty deed in his place. They laugh at the absurdity of wanting to maintain purity in a character like Snake and comment that they probably wouldn't worry about that so much now, presumably alluding to the more imposing turn he'd taken during Scully's era. Nevertheless, they capture how there was traditionally always an element of play pretence to Snake's villainy. He was a caricature of a habitual criminal, and there was something almost endearing about his lawlessness, and how, as Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood deftly sum it up in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, he appeared to be his own "one-man crime wave". You might argue that removing that safety barrier and allowing Snake to kill and not merely threaten was a logical means of expanding on his menace in a Halloween show, much like how removing the safety barrier that made Marge nearly running Homer over week after week seem cute and comical and depicting its more horrific implications made for an inspired opening sequence. To actually give the characters' actions consequences - because, of course, there are none in a Halloween show. There's merit to the idea, but it's hampered by a fundamental lack of twisted joy. Take the scene where Snake-Homer kills Apu. Sure, it's followed up by that beautifully disturbing moment with Wiggum sipping at the carcass-infused Squishee, but the killing itself is disconcertingly joke-free. On the one hand, I like the intensity of the sequence, and how legitimately threatening Snake becomes, but he could have afforded to ham it up a notch. Moe's murder goes down a little better, but there the gags come squarely from Moe's obtuseness, not from Snake himself. 

You know which character I think would have been really fun to have as a serial killer in a Treehouse of Horror segment? Hans Moleman. We already saw him sentenced to the chair in "The Springfield Connection", so why not revisit that here and make more of a thing of it? The man must have a tremendous axe to grind with countless Springfieldians, so imagine him getting to go absolutely rampant with his vengeance for seven minutes. The possibilities are endless! Except he doesn't have hair, does he? So maybe Snake was the most viable choice for this particular narrative. I just wish they'd allowed him to take a bit more glee in the part. The only point where he does get to realise a few of the comic possibilities is at the end, when Homer and Snake get into a back-and-forth over Bart's fate. ("I love my son!" "More than a lush head of hair?")

Truth be told, I actually feel a smidgeon of sympathy for Snake in this segment. Was he a monster before he became a supernatural killer? We know that he was certainly no angel - while he gets executed for something as ridiculous as lighting up in a no-smoking building, there is clearly meant to be some irony in this outcome when his two prior convictions were for torching an orphanage and blowing up a bus full of nuns. Still, we could give him the benefit of the doubt on both of those. Arson is no petty crime, but we don't know for a fact that there were any orphans inside the orphanage when he torched it. As for that bus full of nuns, he claims it was in self-defence, and perhaps it was. Either way, it's fair to say that he's not an innocent - the innocents, in this particular story, are Apu, Moe and Bart (yes, even Moe; having syphilis is not an automatic disqualification). Someone who is also decidedly not an innocent is Homer, even before he acquires Snake's hair. Neither is Wiggum, nor Barney, Lenny, Carl, the Old Sea Captain - really, all of the rest of Springfield. "Toupee" is filled with social critiques about the US justice system, via its jokes about the three strikes law and capital punishment, but what happens to Snake at the start of the story feels positively dystopian, like a glimpse into some horrifying future society where you can be sentenced to death for the smallest of offences, barbecued for public entertainment on World's Deadliest Executions^[1], then have your body carved up and your organs distributed among the very plebs who were getting off on your televised demise. Obviously, we only have seven minutes to tell a story, so some details must be expedited, but there's no indication that Snake was given a fair trial, or even a trial at all. We don't see Apu, Moe or Bart testify against him, nor are we given the impression that they would want to. Wiggum alone acted as judge, jury and executioner. Forget the supernatural slaughter-fest, that scenario is a big enough nightmare in itself. I can't really blame Snake for being pissed off and for aspiring to distribute some bad karma via those ill-gotten organs, though he takes it out on the wrong targets - the reluctant witnesses who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Still, the character whom Snake most forces to reckon with consequence is ultimately Homer. Where "Toupee" gets particularly clever is in its subtext about a society that brutalizes offenders inevitably becoming the very thing it sees itself as opposing, with innocence, as represented by Apu, Moe and Bart, doomed to be completely snuffed out. Homer is complicit in the grotesque execution ceremony, watching it from his living room and objecting only to the fact that crucifixions are reserved for sweeps; he later benefits from the process by taking Snake's hair and turning it into an extension of himself. It is this callousness and his willingness to get in on the exploitation that leads to his complicity in Snake's killing spree, degenerating him to the point that he almost bludgeons his own son, and is threatened with murder charges for two of his friends (although Wiggum agrees to drop one of those charges when it becomes too much of an effort to pronounce Nahasapeemapetilon). Homer realises that the only way to set himself free, and to save his son, is to sever himself from the hair, the token of his own capacity for callousness.

With the hair and Homer finally separated, "Toupee" mines a twist from the concept that was the big stupid hook of the Amazing Stories episode - the hairpiece becomes animate and lunges at Bart, but is ultimately destroyed by police gunfire. The segment ends with a variation on a stock Simpsons conclusion, where the characters downplay the uncomfortable reality of the matter by laughing uncontrollably at some idiotic joke, specifically at Wiggum's action hero quip of "Now that's what I call a bad hair day!". In this instance, Marge verbalises why the laughter is appropriate, pointing out that "two people are dead" (count again, Marge, three characters died in this segment), only for the pun to suddenly dawn on her and for her to agree that it's hilarious after all. And so the survivors laugh long and hard into the night. I'm not convinced that Snake has really been vanquished, however. A thought that keeps dancing away at the back of my head (and I am surprised that this wasn't brought up at the end) is that Snake's hair wasn't the only body part to be distributed among the townspeople. We don't know how far the man's malignant tissue has managed to spread. It was implied that Barney would get the liver, so does that mean Snake could strike again by taking control of him via that organ? Does it specifically need to enter into the brain, as the hair roots did, or could it find some other way to dictate influence eg: by altering the body chemistry? Treehouse of Horror segments tend to be entirely self-contained affairs and to not get follow-ups (seriously, has that ever happened?), but in this case the sequelisation practically writes itself. Clearly, there is an awful lot of Snake within this town; they won't be purged of his persisting presence with a bad pun and a belly laugh.

 

[1] You've probably heard the story about the lost Troy McClure cameo that would have been Phil Hartman's last, as the host of World's Deadliest Executions, but which was deemed inappropriate following Hartman's tragic death a few months prior and swapped out for a guest spot from Ed McMahon. It sounds convincing enough, only they don't bring it up on the DVD commentary, and Wikipedia has removed all reference to it, making me wonder if it was ever substantiated. The Simpsons Wiki still says it's true, but doesn't cite a source. A reviewer on The Simpsons Archive refers to a "wasted" final rendition from Hartman, but with no further context, and has Lionel Hutz down as the excised character (maybe they were familiar with the Amazing Stories episode and expected something closer to its plot). I'm not saying it's necessarily untrue, but I would like to see a more reliable source on the matter.