The Strange Case of Laurie and Charles (Shirley Jackson)

Horror writer Shirley Jackson is most renowned for her short story "The Lottery", once aptly described by The Simpsons' Kent Brockman as "a chilling tale of conformity gone mad". Still, when I read her 1949 anthology The Lottery and Other Stories (partly on account of Brockman's recommendation), I found that I was less taken with the titular story, although it left more than its desired share of psychological scars, than I was the comparatively modest and less dramatic "Charles". First published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1948, this story presents a wry snapshot of contemporary family life centred around a child's first few weeks at kindergarten, narrated from the viewpoint of a parent who is apprehensive about him taking his first major steps into the wider world. It made such a strong impression, I suspect, on account of its amusing twist ending, which is, truth be told, far from the most shocking you'll ever encounter. In fact, I have met other readers who've complained that the twist is all-too easy to see coming, and that they figured it out well in advance of the protagonist. And fair enough, that was my experience too. But then I think that's more-or-less the point. In the early stages of the story we share the narrator's apprehension over what her son is witnessing, but as the story continues we grow increasingly disconnected from her suppositions, as our own intuition clues us in as to what is more likely going on. From then on, it becomes a matter of revelling in the dramatic irony as she edges ever closer to that uncomfortable sting in the tail.

Anyway, if you've never read "Charles" then I advise you to do so before reading any further. Spoilers will follow.

"Charles" is told from the perspective of a mother whose small child, Laurie, has recently started kindergarten and developed an apparent fascination with an ill-behaved classmate named Charles. Charles' belligerent attitude and hearty appetite for rebellion regularly bring him into conflict with adult authority; each lunchtime, Laurie returns home with a daily report of Charles' misdeeds and the entailing punishments he was forced to endure. In spite of Charles' penchant for lashing out violently at the other children, he seems to have amassed quite the following, with classmates lining up to play with him, even when instructed otherwise by their teacher, and dutifully staying behind to watch whenever Charles is kept after school. The narrator notices that Laurie's behaviour at home is becoming increasingly unruly and attributes this to the negative influence of Charles. She and her husband are troubled by Laurie's veneration of Charles, yet they come to share in his fascination with the unseen hell-raiser, to the extent that "Charles" becomes a catch-all metaphor for any kind of mishap or misdemeanour around their household. They are surprised, and incredulous, when Laurie's stories later indicate a shift in Charles' behaviour - he begins to help his teacher around the classroom and goes for days without causing trouble - although a relapse eventually occurs when Charles discovers the joys of curse words. The narrator attends her first PTA meeting where, tellingly, she is far more interested in learning more about Charles and his family than she is her own son. However, she is surprised when Charles and his barrage of bad behaviours are never raised. At the end, she manages to get Laurie's teacher aside and hears that Laurie had a difficult start adjusting to kindergarten, but that his recent behaviour has been more positive. The narrator starts to talk about her favourite subject, Charles, and how much he has evidently impacted her son. The teacher looks puzzled, and gives her the bad news: "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten." 

As I say, I don't believe that the reader truly shares in the narrator's (presumable) shock at the final implication (that Laurie was describing his own behaviours all along) as Jackson telegraphs it clearly enough in the preceding text. The parents are not exactly innocents, in spite of how guilelessly they swallow their son's daily reports, and they patently set themselves up for a humbling at multiple points throughout the story. The instant their fascination extends beyond Charles himself and onto the kind of parents who could have raised such an unruly monster, you can practically feel their superiority sneaking around and up behind them to bite them in the buttocks. The sweet irony at the centre of the story has less to do with Laurie convincing his parents of the existence of this phantom Charles than it does his inadvertently conning them into turning the cold eye of judgement upon themselves. The unspoken tension of the piece arises not from Laurie's obsession with Charles, but from the narrator's obsession with another phantom in the form of Charles' mother, about whom she is plainly drawing a number of unpleasant conclusions. The final line functions as a punchline, a joke at her expense, for her fixation has, ultimately, amounted to a tremendous self-own.

And, in spite of this, I have to admit that I do feel a certain degree of sympathy for the narrator. A question that persistently bothers me whenever I return to the story is, "Was she supposed to have figured it out on her own?"  To be totally fair to her, it's not as though the school have made any kind of effort to get in touch with her about her son's behaviour. She misses the first PTA meeting, thus enabling the myth of Charles to continue for a while longer, but she has a valid enough reason for doing so (her younger child was sick). When you're aware of the twist, then looking back through the story there a number of points where she seems to miss what is plainly right under her nose - the most glaring example being when she describes how Charles became "an institution in our family", and Laurie's exhibition of unruly behaviour at home, by filling his wagon with mud and pulling it though the kitchen, gets lost amid the ordinary chaos of family life (I note here that Jackson is perhaps not quite as on the nose as she could have been - while the baby actually "was" a Charles when she cried all afternoon, Laurie simply "did" a Charles). And yet, in her defence she's hardly alone in her willingness to accept her son's stories at face value, as her husband is every bit as clueless as she is. In fact, her husband has no interest in attending the PTA meetings at all, although he does ask the narrator to invite Charles' mother around for a cup of tea afterwards so that he can satisfy his morbid curiosity without leaving the comfort of his home. (Then again, "Charles" was written in the 1940s, and perhaps there was an expectation back then that attendance of PTA meetings was solely the mother's responsibility? On that note, the judgements of both parents are only ever explicitly projected onto Charles' mother - the possibility that Charles' father could be a negligent role model is never raised. Make of that what you will.)

I think the answer to my question is most implicit in the teacher's tactful remark: "We are all so interested in Laurie." The protagonist's main failing throughout the story is that she has simply not been all that interested in her own son. This is likewise underscored during Charles' apparent gravitation toward good behaviour - the narrator's husband asks her to find out at the PTA meeting "what happened to Charles", to which the narrator responds, "I'd like to know myself", an exchange that seems poignant when you know that they're actually inadvertently admitting just how poorly they understand their own son. The assumption that Laurie's insolent behaviour at home is due to the negative influence of Charles is appealing to them because it is convenient, in enabling them to project responsibility onto an outside factor. Their resulting fixation with Charles' mother is rooted in their eagerness for her to be held accountable for the disturbance. We can see how this fixation is further obstructing Laurie's efforts to relate to his parents his school experiences during an episode where he informs them that "Our teacher had a friend come to see her in school today", and both parents simultaneously respond, "Charles's mother?" (he was, in fact, referring to his gym teacher). Attending the PTA meeting is, likewise, treated less as an opportunity to understand how Laurie is functioning at school than it is to see Charles' mother get her much-anticipated comeuppance. The narrator is bothered when, during the meeting, nobody stands up and apologises for how her son has been acting - a statement which, unbeknownst to her, drips with the uncomfortable suggestion that the rest of the meeting is silently judging her and wondering why she is not making a similar display of contrition.

"Charles" is, on one level, a cautionary tale about the perils of judging others, for we never know when that judgement might ricochet awkwardly back on us. On another level, it is a humorous and down-to-earth account of a universal parental nightmare - the point at which your child ventures into the outside world and you no longer control who they will encounter or how their own interests and personality will develop. The narrator ends up having to confront the greater nightmare still that your child might even be the one who tempts others to the dark side. First and foremost, though, "Charles" is a story about the fear of and inevitability of change. At the start of the story, before the titular menace has entered the picture, the narrator is having to deal with the reality that the idealised version of Laurie, the "sweet-voiced nursery school tot" no longer exists, and that she is losing him to the wider world. There are two parallel stories unfolding along this theme - the first-hand account of how the narrator responds to the loss of that sweet-voiced tot and the more complicated creature who had taken his place, and the second-hand account of how Laurie copes with the disruptions to his own established routine. If we read between the lines, then it seems reasonable enough to conclude that Laurie's acting out at school is in response to the dramatic changes to his day-to-day life - his assumption of the "Charles" persona suggests both resistance to these changes and enjoyment at having a whole new set of boundaries to test. His eventual improvement suggests that he is beginning to settle. By this point, Laurie/Charles is ready to assume a new role, but not so ready that he cannot resist the occasional relapse.

This leads us into the story's other key question, which is why Laurie feels the need to draw a distinction between the boy he is at home and the child he becomes at school. After all, it's not as though there is a world of difference between Laurie and Charles - he is as contentious toward his parents' authority as his teachers and besides, I suspect that he is a mite too young to be terribly conscious of the kind of image he maintains in their eyes. The obvious answer is that Laurie would sooner avoid having to face additional repercussions from his parents for his behaviours at school, but at the same time is compelled to attempt to communicate with them what he is going through. Laurie's daily excitement in relating news of Charles' latest misdeeds makes it unclear if he actively enjoys the deception, or if he is reacting to how much further he is able to go over the line each day, as if awed by his own capacity for defiance. The story becomes doubly poignant if you read it from the perspective that Laurie, unable to understand his situation or why he is compelled to behave as he does, has been reaching out to his parents the entire time.

For Laurie's parents, the phantom Charles becomes emblematic of this unwelcome process of change. He is dreaded to the point that he basically becomes an incorporeal entity, a corrupting influence who permeates the family home and unleashes all manner of disturbances within - which, in reality, are the kind of banal, everyday mishaps one would expect to occur in a family home on any given weekend. The baby cries too much, the father knocks down some items with the telephone cord, and even Laurie's aforementioned adventure with the mud-filled wagon seems entirely devoid of genuine malice. This is the point in the story in which the narrator unwittingly reveals that Laurie could take on the role of Charles, but it is also the point in which she unwittingly exposes the source of their troubles as coming from inside their family unit and not the world outside. Charles may be an intruder in their domestic paradise, but Laurie's parents seem reluctant to let their adopted scapegoat go - when Laurie later brings reports of a quieter, more obedient Charles, his father suggests (somewhat ludicrously, given the age of the child) that "when you've got a Charles to deal with, this may mean he's only plotting". The reality is that Laurie, having made the initial shift from sweet-voiced tot to insolent hell-raiser, is on the cusp of yet another change - his time as Charles was merely a phase, one of several steps on his ongoing development as a person. This underscores one of the other great ironies of Jackson's story - that Laurie, ultimately, is more resilient and accepting of change than either of his parents; for all of his freshness, he does not share in any of their prejudices. Just as his parents would sooner their son remained frozen as a sweet-voiced tot for eternity, they are comfortable with "Charles" being forever pigeonholed as an incorrigible undesirable whose only talent is for spreading ruination, and the picture they accordingly paint of his mother alongside. Hence the other implicit meaning of the teacher's closing statement that, "We don't have any Charles in the kindergarten." Nobody is as two-dimensional as they assume.

Ray Bradbury Theater '89: A Sound of Thunder (aka Don't Go Thair)

Ray Bradbury and members of the anthropod kingdom make an exceedingly good combination. At the very least, the Bradbury works that have struck the deepest, most personal chords with myself tend to involve creepy-crawlies to some capacity. This includes the story featuring arguably the most notorious bug in Bradbury's canon, this one not a raving, humanoid lunatic who likes terrorising innocent leisure seekers with prophecies of genetic evil, but an unassuming, ostensibly passive creature whose true significance does not become apparent until the very end, having spent most of the story being upstaged by a larger, more commanding beast. I speak of course of "A Sound of Thunder", Bradbury's cautionary fable about the perils of undervaluing the smaller specimens of the animal kingdom and (for my money, anyway) the greatest story ever written on the subject of time travel. First published in Collier's magazine in 1952, "A Sound of Thunder" was later included in Bradbury's 1953 anthology The Golden Apples of The Sun, and on August 11th 1989 received its long overdue televisual treatment as part of the anthology series The Ray Bradbury Theater, directed by Costa Bones and taken from a script adapted by Bradbury himself.

Despite being one of Bradbury's most well-known and celebrated tales, it took until the third season of Ray Bradbury Theater for "A Sound of Thunder" to be realised on screen, possibly because it is a challenging story to stage. It requires a dinosaur, and a sufficiently intimidating one at that (it was not, strangely enough, the first episode of Ray Bradbury Theater to involve a T-Rex, although the titular animal in "Tyrannosaurus Rex" was a stop-motion creation in context, and could get away with looking a little fake). We need only look to The Twilight Zone episode "The Elevator" (also penned by Bradbury) for an example of a decent enough concept that was hampered by the limitations of its execution. By comparison, I think "A Sound of Thunder" copes pretty admirably with its own constraints. It goes without saying that, for a television budget in 1989, you're not going to get something that compares favourably with Jurassic Park. The T-Rex here is a jerky, rubbery creation (all the same, I could tell straight away that it was meant to be a T-Rex, which puts it well above the vaguely spider-shaped menace from "The Elevator"), and our protagonist's observation ("It could reach up and grab the moon!") seems more than little hyperbolic (more so than it would have done with a technical sophistication akin to Jurassic Park). But if you accept that as inevitable, then "A Sound of Thunder" is quite a rewarding piece of television - a whole lot of fun, and with a closing sting as deliciously, affectingly bitter as one would hope from such a classic - and powerful - twist.

 

"A Sound of Thunder" begins in the year 2055, following a presidential election in which an aspiring fascist dictator, Deutscher, was defeated by his democracy-upholding opponent, Keith. (We do not meet Deutscher first-hand in either version, but in the original story he is described by one character as "an anti-everything man...a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual". Uncanny, that.) A game hunter, Eckels (Kiel Martin, who sadly died the following year), has arrived at the offices of Time Safari Inc, a time travel service that enables patrons to visit prehistoric times and bag extinct animals. Eckels claims to have conquered every living animal species, and now wishes to travel to the Late Cretaceous period for the privilege of killing a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest predator to have walked the planet. He is warned by his safari guide, Travis (John Bach), to avoid interaction with the past environment, for even the most seemingly minor of alterations could have a catastrophic effect on the future. Time Safari carefully selects its targets, so as to only kill animals that would have died imminently anyway, and participants are required to stay upon a levitating path so as to avoid contact with the local terrain. Travis explains the gravitas of the situation to an incredulous Eckels, in a slightly abridged version of his speech in the original story:

 

"Step on a mouse, you annihilate one, a thousand, a million possible mice...For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of a fox, a lion starves. For want of a lion, infinite billions of lifeforms cease to exists. A caveman goes hunting, but you, friend, have stepped on all his lions. The caveman starves. From his loins might have sprung ten sons, from theirs a hundred. Kill this one man, you destroy a race of people, an entire history of life. Europe remains forever a dark forest. Step on a mouse, you leave your print like a grand canyon across eternity. SO STAY ON THE PATH!"

 

The safari ventures along the path, but when confronted by their pre-selected prey, a Tyrannosaurus Rex due to be crushed by a falling tree, Eckels, intimidated by the size of the creature, loses his nerve and backs away, accidentally straying from the path and trampling the grass below. In his stead, Travis and his men manage to bring down the T-Rex, which is finished off by the falling tree. Angered at Eckels both for endangering the group with his hesitation and wandering from the path, Travis forces him to physically remove the bullets from the T-Rex carcass before allowing him back onto the time machine. Eckels complies, and the group returns to 2055, but it's clearly not the same 2055 they departed from. Something feels distinctly off...

"A Sound of Thunder" is, for the most part, a faithful recreation of the original story, the most obvious alteration being that this particular version of Eckels is markedly more odious than his literary counterpart. The adaptation includes a scene, not present in the source material, where Travis surveys examples from Eckels' hunting repertoire and challenges him on having illegally killed an elephant - a scene likely incorporated to reflect the general decrease in sympathies toward trophy hunting between 1952 and 1989. When confronted with a T-Rex in the flesh, both versions of Eckels whimper that they are not used to feeling that they are in genuine danger, but TV Eckels goes a notch further, betraying that he was possibly not as skilled a hunter as he made out ("I always won...somebody'd get me out..."). I would hesitate to describe Eckels, as portrayed in the story, sympathetic (he does, after all, go back an awfully long way to murder a dinosaur, for no other purpose than to feed his own ego), but there he's imbued with a stronger sense of humanity - he discusses the outcome of the election amiably with the agent behind the desk (their exchange in the TV version is a lot more curt), and since we experience the story from his point of view, we end up identifying with his dismay at having blundered into a situation that he was totally ill-prepared for. In the adaptation, that dismay is still very evident, but Martin portrays with him a kind of smirking, borderline cartoonish buffoonery that seems intent on keeping the viewer at bay. Whatever pity we might feel for his vulnerability stems squarely from his patheticness, which is in spades. In both cases, Eckels is a victim of his own hubris, yet the outcome, while technically identical, seems to suit different ends. In the story, he's a tragically naive figure who bites off more than he can chew and lives to regret it (albeit not for long), while in the TV adaptation, his demise comes across as more obviously karmic in nature, a trigger-happy ninny with a superiority complex finally discovering how it feels being on the other end of a gun. TV Eckels is presented as so dense, in fact, that it's not altogether clear if he ever pieces together what he has done. Whereas in the story it is Eckels himself who makes the bombshell discovery - they have returned to a dystopian future where Deutscher is now in power - and locates the terrible root cause of this -  there's a dead butterfly stuck to his boot! - in the TV adaptation this is all accomplished by Travis, possibly as an indication of our shift in allegiances.

On that note, the elephant exchange is also useful in establishing the fundamental difference between Eckels' and Travis' respective outlooks on the venture. Travis is a rigidly conscientious man who understands and respects the complexities of nature and humankind's dependency on thus, and who endeavors to observe and abide by the responsibilities of time travel, whereas Eckels sees the world as his personal playground and has clearly never considered the impact of his actions beyond his own immediate gratification. But it does further call to mind the really pressing underlying question of Bradbury's story - namely, if Travis was really so conscientious, then surely he wouldn't be doing this in the first place? Time travel is clearly a risky business, for reasons he well understands, and the purpose of Time Safari Inc - to escort the obscenely wealthy to pre-history so that they can gun down a few long-extinct specimens at their leisure - seems way too frivolous to justify that risk. Which may well be the whole point. Travis explains to Eckels that the government feels uneasy about the practices of Time Safari (as it turns out, rightfully so), and that the franchise's continued existence is all down to its willingness to pay the grafts. By bringing those with more money than sense into the equation, the company was always begging for something, somewhere, to go spectacularly wrong. The bullet Travis puts in Eckels at the very end might signify the karmic retribution of a universe gnarled hopelessly out of whack, yet it seems to me that Travis is ultimately too complicit in the outcome for it not to also represent misplaced anger at his own enablement. What can I say, Travis and Eckels both deserve one another.

What is unsettling about the world the hunting party returns to is that it has not been warped beyond all recognition (a la the distorted timeline described in the cited warning from Travis), but instead plays like an eerie mirror version of the world they left behind. In the translation from page to screen, we inevitably lose the more subtle means through which Eckels detects that things are not quite right: "Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk...lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind." Human history has followed a similar enough trajectory for the people and the buildings they left to still be there, in some form, but the butterfly-shaped hole has left its mark on a deeper, more emotional level, one permeating the very core of human nature, so that they are plainly not the same. This is confirmed when Eckels notices the signage for Time Safari Inc (or Tyme Safari Inc, as it is now called), and registers that the English language has undergone a slight mutation. Same words, same alphabet, different spellings. The sign has the queasy contradiction of being perfectly readable, yet disconcertingly alien. In the TV episode, the sign is transplanted (mostly) faithfully from Bradbury's story, but there are other, more flagrant visual clues as to the disturbed nature of the present - not least the fascist iconography and the heavily armed guards who now patrol the offices. In the story, Eckels frantically addresses the same agent to whom he spoke at the beginning and learns that Deutscher has won the election (in contrast to his earlier sentiments, the agent seems ecstatic with this outcome, denouncing Keith as a weakling). In the TV episode, the implication is that Deutscher was already in charge and democracy has long been obliterated. Travis asks the agent (Michael McLeod) who won the election and receives the response, "What election? Deutscher is president. Leader of the fifteenth rule." The outcome is the same, but in the story there is a greater sense of the butterfly's destruction having created a domino effect whose full repercussions were only now being felt, on the day in the history that Eckels had originally left. The denizens of this new, revised 2055 still had the choice between Keith and Deutscher, but chose the latter. The notion that the untimely demise of a single butterfly could determine the outcome of something so far removed in the future seems unthinkable, yet Bradbury presents the scenario with such sombre conviction that it is immediately chilling. This feeling is successfully carried over into the adaptation, where the imagery of the inert butterfly spiralling downward from Travis' hold, all of the flight drained out of it, becomes the perfect visual metaphor for Travis and Eckels' respective futures, and for the darker prospects of the human race.

What perhaps doesn't translate so well is the significance of the title, which comes up twice in the story - the sound of thunder is first used to describe the noise made by the rampaging T-Rex, and then finally the last thing Eckels hears as Travis fires his gun at him. Since a roaring T-Rex and a firing gun do not, in the more literal world of the TV adaptation, sound anything alike, if you hadn't read the story then would you have made the thematic connection? The implication being that the dual sounds represent some kind of terrible echo across time, a further reinforcement of the interconnectivity of the two moments, and a grim, tyrannical announcement that actions beget consequences, sometimes in the form of monstrous chain reactions.

In spite of the obvious technical limitations, I consider this a successful adaptation. The prehistoric jungle and animatronic T-Rex look distinctly artificial, and yet they have the kind of pleasing, tangible presence that's all but gone extinct in the CGI era. And the searing, poetic power of Bradbury's story remains fundamentally intact. We have the haunting contrast between the two pivotal animal species - the ferocious, hulking beast that Eckels travelled to the past with the expressed intention of destroying, and the tiny, delicate and entirely benign insect he accidentally ends up making his prey. The butterfly may have been the incidental casualty, so small that its presence is not even registered until the very end of the story, yet it was the being upon whom the course of so much ecological and human development depended. "A Sound of Thunder" is foremost a cautionary tale about the importance of respecting all forms of life, no matter how seemingly insignificant, for they all have their role to play in the grander web of existence. Bradbury asserts that since everything is interconnected, nothing is to be underestimated, and that a single disrupted thread will result in reverberations felt far across the web. The fragility of life, in all its forms, is evoked at several points, in the imagery of the mighty T-Rex slowly expiring beneath the felled tree, the crushed butterfly falling lifelessly to the office floor, and finally Eckels' implied death at the hands of Travis. In addition to the ecological implications, it is a sobering reminder that absolutely nothing about our own being, either individually or as a culture, is to be taken for granted, for how much this had, at one time or another, hung completely within the balance, dependent on incidental factors that could so easily have gone the other way?

 Spot the inconsistency? Hard to say if it's intentional or not.

On a final note, "A Sound of Thunder" was later adapted into a theatrical feature film in 2005, directed by Peter Hyams. I have not seen it, and since I haven't heard a single positive thing about the film it will likely stay that way. On the one hand, I can see why somebody might be interested in bringing the story to the big screen - those prehistoric sequences would look great with a theatrical budget, particularly in the post-Jurassic Park age. But I do have this one strong, lingering doubt - as with a lot of short-form fiction, "A Sound of Thunder" succeeds, in part, due to its elegant brevity. Bradbury makes his point beautifully and succinctly, in less than eleven pages. Half-hour television anthologies are the ideal avenue for such adaptations, even if it means working with a smaller budget. I'm not sure what a feature film could add to extend the story - unless, contrary to the mechanics of the original, you have Eckels go back in time in an effort to fix his mistake, and continue to make a complete haemorrhage of human history. In which case...I think The Simpsons had already mined that scenario to its greatest potential when they did their own take on the Bradbury story in the "Time and Punishment" segment of "Treehouse of Horror V" (where Homer assumes the role of Eckels, kills a prehistoric mosquito, and returns to a dictatorship run by Ned Flanders). The Simpsons accomplished it all in roughly six minutes at that.

Treehouse of Horror '90: Bad Dream House (aka Well, We Warned You...)

One Simpsons episode you're going to be hearing a lot about at the moment is Season 2's "Treehouse of Horror" (episode 7F04), which is currently in the process of celebrating its 30th anniversary, having debuted on October 25th 1990, where it kickstarted one of the most cherished and enduring of Simpsons traditions - the annual Halloween special. When discussing this episode, it has become something of a cliche to reflect on the retroactive irony of the opening sequence, which has Marge speak directly to the viewer a la Edward Van Sloan in Frankenstein (1931), to warn them of the episode's off-colour content (only the second of the relatively small number of occasions in which a character has straight-up broken the fourth wall, the first being the epilogue to "Bart The General"). Although it was mercilessly parodied in succeeding installments, this was apparently a sincere insertion on behalf of the production team, who fretted that audiences might not be prepared for how much darker an experience this was to be than your regular Simpsons outing (particularly given the series' popularity with children) - the irony, of course, being that the original "Treehouse of Horror" feels so much tamer and more restrained than any of its successors. The mortality figure is zero (unless we count Marge as the lost Lenore), the writers not yet having discovered the single greatest pleasure of these regular non-canonical interludes - the freedom to slaughter recurring characters in a graphic bloodbath.

"Treehouse of Horror" is so muted a Halloween entertainment, by comparison, that it's easy to dismiss the episode as bland. Nathan Rabin of The AV Club does pretty much that, asserting that the horror-comic cocktail is "a highwire balancing act the first “Treehouse of Horrors” doesn’t entirely nail; the third segment in particular has the deadening air of the classroom while the two segments the precede it are relatively short on jokes and gags." His sentiments echo those expressed by Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood in I Can't Believe It's An Unofficial Simpsons Guide, who feel that "the first two segments work better than the third", and though they praise the episode as having "set a high standard for the Hallowe'en specials to come", also describe "Treehouse of Horror II" as a "marked improvement". I'll concede that "Treehouse of Horror" feels rougher around the edges than subsequent Halloween installments, but I don't think that has to do with the segments per se. I think the segments themselves are actually all very good (and I really like "The Raven", so there). The middle segment, "Hungry Are The Damned", admittedly lands less well for me than the other two (it has a lot of great moments, but the story frankly cheats), and yet no segment is a failure. No, I think the real issue with this episode has to do with the wraparound narrative, where Homer eavesdrops on Bart and Lisa telling these stories inside their treehouse, which is mostly dead weight. It's not entirely without merits - for one, it was solely responsible for putting the "Treehouse" in "Treehouse of Horror" (treehouses were not a recurring motif of the series, despite the name), Bart has that brilliantly inspired line about Friday The 13th, and it opens with Bart taking down one of the hoariest urban legends of all-time (if anybody tells you that When A Stranger Calls is a good movie - don't listen, they're nuts!). But it's here that the episode most obviously struggles with its experimental integration of realism and fantasy.

Wraparounds were a characteristic of early Treehouse of Horror installments that got jettisoned quite soon into their run. In their fledgling days, they were a necessary means of establishing that the stories existed outside of the series' regular continuity, but I suppose that by the time we got to number five they figured that this was by now common knowledge and that the wraparounds had outlived their usefulness (obviously, the Amusing Tombstones were next to go). The four that we got were a decidedly mixed bag, in which the evens fared much better than the odds (just like original Star Trek movies*). "Treehouse of Horror II" plants a wickedly inventive twist at the end of its framing story, and the Night Gallery parody in "Treehouse of Horror IV" is beautifully executed but, let's be honest, there is something incredibly hokey about the two where the family sit down to tell fantastical stories staring themselves. I mean, the vanity of it all. The original "Treehouse of Horror" in particular suffers from an obvious disconnect between the stories being told and the context in which they are related. Of the three segments, only one, "The Raven", takes advantage of the fact that these are supposedly stories being exchanged by a couple of children inside a treehouse, with Bart supplying regular interjections to Lisa's recital of the classic Edgar Allan Poe poem (in-universe, Lisa is doing the reciting, but from the viewer's perspective her voice transmutes eerily into that of James Earl Jones). The other two, though, feel only arbitrarily connected to the overarching setting. Compare this to "Treehouse of Horror II", where there is a far richer interplay between the segments and their connective tissue, and what happens in the family's fantasy lives actually reaps consequences in the "real" world (sometimes shockingly so). By contrast, "Treehouse of Horror" feels less confident, less assured. So perfunctory is the relationship between narrative and narrator that there are times when the supposed real-world context weighs uneasily upon the content of the stories. I'd say this is a problem in particular for "Hungry Are The Damned", which acquires an unintentionally sour note at the very end, when the rest of the family berates Lisa for falsely (though not unreasonably) accusing Rigellians Kodos and Kang of harbouring unsavoury intentions in taking them aboard their craft, and poisoning Earthling-Rigellian relations in the process. It follows that they would be upset, but keep in mind that this is supposedly a story being told by Bart, to Lisa. It kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth, don't it? (Admittedly, if we see "Hungry are The Damned" as the brainchild of ten-year-old logic, then it might explain why, technically speaking, the story is such a hole-filled mess, and the moral so damned sketchy.)

For me, the real draw of "Treehouse of Horror" would be the opening segment, "Bad Dream House", which wastes no time in introducing us to the darker, more demented rules of the Halloween specials - not least that the family are permitted to the occasional knife fight. The basic premise for the segment is derived from The Amityville Horror (1979), with our unsuspecting family moving into a cursed property where some malign force is intent on driving them out or goading them into murdering one another (either works), and "Bad Dream House" provides a brilliantly subversive overview of a wide variety of haunted house movie cliches in roughly six minutes. The only really obvious one missing is the family dog going berserk (I doubt I'll ever say this again, but maybe some input from Santa's Little Helper wouldn't have gone amiss here). Some details, such as the blood dripping from the walls, are transplanted wholesale from Amityville. There are also multiple nods to Poltergeist (1982), such as Bart being attacked by a barrage of floating inanimate objects, the misshapen tree outside Lisa's window as she is beckoned toward the butcher knife, and the vortex inside the kitchen. Elsewhere, there's a reference to The Exorcist (1973), with Maggie's head rotating, and a sequence where Homer gets to channel Jack Nicholson's character from The Shining (1980), four years before he was called upon to repeat the trick in "The Shinning" segment of "Treehouse of Horror V". Horror buffs will no doubt delight in picking out the familiar moments, but "Bad Dream House" does more than simply homage a few creepy classics. It's an engaging, bite-sized story in which we get to see the family react to the unknown and face off against an atypical kind of adversary (one who may actually be quite a familiar voice all along, by which I don't mean Harry Shearer), deconstructing a few inevitable story beats as they go. Humor throughout the segment largely derives from the relatively nonchalant way the family responds to paranormal phenomena - Marge, for example, on noting the blood running from the walls, observes that the kitchen "certainly could use a woman's touch". Homer, while releasing Bart from the grip of a levitating lamp cord, challenges his son to "talk yourself out of this one". Even the infamously intense sequence in which the family come close to hacking one another to death with various sharp instruments is shrugged off fairly casually, with the family readily snapping out of it and hastily apologising to one another. One of the best gags involves the vortex in the kitchen, which turns out to be entirely incidental to the story, providing merely an opportunity for the Simpsons to prove themselves undesirable neighbours (Homer tests out the powers of the vortex by feeding a piece of fruit into it, and receives a note from someone on the other side requesting that he stop throwing garbage into their dimension). There are also moments when the emotional realism of the early seasons seeps in in surprising ways - notably, the climax of the segment, which manifests in a verbal confrontation between Marge and the house, and is a legitimately affecting sequence, accompanied by a superb performance from Kavner. It's a rare instance where Marge completely loses her cool, but it feels entirely genuine, as though she's truly reached her breaking point, and it's followed by a moment where she stops to reflect on her surprise at her own anger. It's such an authentic, beautifully-observed moment, and yet we also have to consolidate it with the absurdity we are, after all, watching a woman argue with a possessed (and slightly nonplussed) house. In typical Marge fashion, she rounds off her ultimatum with a token of politeness ("We're all going to have to live together, so you'd better get used to it...please"). Halloween episodes perhaps aren't renowned for their deep character-building (after all, they have no bearing on the rest of the series, and are chiefly about cramming in as much demented fun as possible), but this is such a wonderfully on point sequence for Marge that I sincerely regret that it has no place within the official canon.

It's interesting that "Bad Dream House" and "Hungry Are The Damned" both arrive at effectively the same conclusion, with the monstrous entity (or entities) that has accommodated the family throughout the segment (whether wilfully or not) ultimately leaving them standing out in the cold because they are the more unpleasant beings. Both segments trade cleverly on our expectations regarding their chosen archetypal horror narratives, be they buildings with cursed histories or close encounters with visitors from unfamiliar civilisations. "Hungry Are The Damned" takes inspiration from the Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man" (another characteristic of classic era Treehouse of Horrors is that there'd typically be at least one segment ripping off an episode of The Twilight Zone - with the exception of "Treehouse of Horror V", which instead settles for ripping off an episode of Ray Bradbury Theater), and then directly subverts that story's infamous twist ending ("It's a cookbook!"), but you don't need to be familiar with the source to be instantly wary of the Rigellians' intentions. The script repeatedly drops anvil-sized hints that they might have an extremely sinister ulterior motive for wanting the family to indulge themselves. And while the final denouement - apparently, the aliens were benevolent all along - is hilariously executed, particularly as a counterpoint to the Twilight Zone episode it's spoofing, as a twist in itself I don't think it works. The Rigellians' disturbing obsession with seeing the family gain weight is not accounted for, their motivation for wanting to treat the Simpsons like gods remains a mystery, and when finally challenged they respond, somewhat spuriously, by throwing the humans' own gluttony back at them.** I'm also not clear on just how straight the segment means to play Lisa's final observation that, "There were monsters on that ship, and truly we were them." I don't know, I think that's severely undermined by Marge's preceding observation that, "For a superior race, they really rub it in." But I suppose my biggest issue with "Hungry With The Damned" is that I'm just not fond of it all coming down to Lisa's actions and having the rest of the family turn on her at the end (it's much worse for the fact that the story is supposedly Bart's construction, but I suspect I'd have a problem with it anyway). Not only is the "we were the real monsters" subtext conveyed which a much subtler hand in "Bad Dream House", but that ending involves the family being rejected together and finding unity in that. They may be undesirable monsters, but they are so together, and they have each other's backs.

Something that stands out as a potential indicator of the relative tameness of the initial "Treehouse of Horror" is that both "Bad Dream House" and "Hungry Are The Damned", despite being fictitious stories in-universe, end with a return to the regular status quo. The Halloween specials were not yet at the point where they were bold enough to end stories at truly bleak or disturbing places. Indeed, one of the factors that makes the twist ending to "Treehouse of Horror II" so deliciously subversive is that it actively, and startlingly, flies against the status quo. But perhaps that's only ostensibly true for "Bad Dream House", which ends with the family slinking off into the night, away from the site where their "dream" house once stood, with nothing left but one another and the clothes they stood up in. Where exactly are they going? Unlike "Hungry Are The Damned", there's no guarantee that they still have their house at Evergreen Terrace to return to. So this is a case of the Simpsons disappearing to an uncertain future. The ending is reminiscent of both The Amityville Horror and Poltergeist, each of which concludes with their respective households abandoning their cursed properties, although more so of the latter, which also involved the house being obliterated behind them. The house's big secret - it was built on Native American burial ground - is a characteristic shared with both the Cuesta Verde of Poltergeist and the Overlook Hotel of The Shining. This was a much more prominent plot point in the former picture, which climaxes with the skeletal corpses of the desecrated dead rising from the earth and reclaiming the once pristine suburban home, whereas in The Shining it was given as a seemingly incidental background detail (note that the same detail appears in "The Shinning" of "Treehouse of Horror V"), that nevertheless provided further context to the cursed history of the hotel. It is a prevalent horror image because its is a haunting reminder of America's violent history and the dark side of the American dream, an idea likewise evoked in the segment's very title "Bad Dream House". The "bad dream" in question resides in Homer's desire to acquire the American dream at a bargain price, and it is his refusal to relinquish that dream that exposes his family to danger. Naturally, the dream comes with a hidden cost, and one that Homer was perhaps aware of all along - when he angrily telephones his real estate agent to complain about not being informed of the Native American burial ground, he is reminded that it was mentioned five or six times. 

Although it is Homer who insists on staying throughout the segment, while Marge makes multiple attempts to convince the family to vacate the building, it is ironically Marge who takes the ultimate stand with the house and insists that they will not be driven out - in her case, she is motivated not by the prospect of saving a few thousand bucks, but by her indignation at the house's violent spurning of her family, which she ends up taking very personally. When the house fails to scare the Simpsons out upon arrival, it attacks the family during the night by turning them against one another, and to that end it is not surprising that Marge should prove the most resistant to the house's malevolent tactics, for she has traditionally always been the "emotional glue" that has enabled the family to function. The house, apparently, cannot goad her into joining into the knife fight with the others - we are led to believe that she is doing thus, because we see her reaching for the bread knife, but it turns out she is innocently preparing a sandwich (this, unlike the revelation that the Rigellians are actually nice guys, is a well-constructed twist - she does call out, "I'm in the kitchen, Homer!", in a suspiciously stilted manner, but not so stilted that it bothers me). When Marge finally stands her ground against the house, she asserts that, "My name is Marge Simpson! This is my family and we're not going anywhere!" Marge rallies behind her imperfect family against the disdain of the possessed house as she would any voice of external judgement.

The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist and The Shining all involve a family under attack from malign forces, with the pivotal question as to whether their unity can endure. For both the Lutzs and the Freelings it does, right down to the family dog, although their survival, both as individuals and as a unit, comes at the expense of having to abandon their material wealth and abort their American dream. In both cases, we have a family under siege from an external threat. (Things go slightly differently for the Torrances, for in Kubrick's film there is some ambiguity as to whether their misfortunes are wholly down to the negative influence of the Overlook or if there is already something intrinsically toxic about their particular family unit. There is at least one line of dialogue suggesting that Jack is susceptible to the cursed aura of the place because it appeals to some latent hostility he harbours toward his wife and son - Grady, another violent patriarch who resided there before him, informs him that he has "always been the caretaker".) The ending of "Bad Dream House" has the Simpsons find unity, albeit through a direct inversion on the way the Freelings achieved it - in spite of Marge's valiant attempts to convince the house that it has to accept them, the house still gets the final say in the matter, and permanently rejects the Simpsons, but at a grave cost to itself, for it does so by consigning itself to oblivion (I stated above that the mortality figure is zero, but I suppose the house technically dies). To ponder the significance of this, we might consider what it actually being rejected by the Freelings in Poltergeist, particularly in the film's final punchline, where the homeless family seeks refuge in a hotel, but only on the condition that the TV is ejected into the balcony outside, the family having apparently sworn off off the cyclops for life following their youngest daughter's abduction through one. In his book Horror Films of The 1980s, John Kenneth Muir, in addressing the well-known controversy as to whether the film is to be attributed more to the vision of director Tobe Hooper or executive producer Steven Spielberg, lauds Poltergeist as an indictment of the evils of corporate America and white bread suburbia, one that "[casts] blame on the middle class for the greed and business practices of corporations...Hardly the stuff of an artist who admires suburbia, benefits from mass merchandising and product placement, and whose vision of America is so close to 1950s sitcoms." (p.270) Devin Faraci, on Birth Movies Death, argues that the vision of suburbia presented in Hooper/Spielberg's film has not been hijacked by the malign presence, but rather is the malign presence: "These identical masses of homes are like rapidly metastasizing cancer cells (Cuesta Verde is about to expand yet again in the next phase of development), and they aren’t just eating at the land, they’re eating at the very values that made the American dream." The television is the most malign invader of them all, and Poltergeist plays none-too-subtly on parental fears regarding its detrimental influence on children, and on family life. ("The Shinning" in "Treehouse of Horror V" has precisely the opposite stance - in keeping with the episode's glorious middle figure salute to recent congressional efforts to curb television violence, it is the absence of a functional TV that causes the family unit to breakdown - as Wilson Bryan Key would certainly have agreed, the television is the greatest pacifier of them all). Still, the reservations about television expressed in Poltergeist are not limited to the moral panic of the Helen Lovejoys of the world. The television is the vessel through which corporate America exercises its powers, but bombarding of viewers with visions of ideal living - as Muir writes, "Liberty, freedom and ideals have become fuzzy, blurred (like the static-ridden picture) before the unblinkering eye of a TV that sells fast food, cars and other items twenty-four hours a day." For the Freelings, unity is achieved through a rejection of the various items that have been sold to them as components of the American Dream, so that in the end the family have nothing remaining but one another. They are forced to abandon their house, or else be dragged down with it into the depths of Hell (or wherever that vortex leads). "Bad Dream House" concludes with precisely the opposite scenario - the house rejects the family, and destroys itself, rather than be dragged into the domestic Hell propagated by the Simpsons.

At the end of the segment, Lisa muses that the house, "chose to destroy itself rather than live with us. You can't help but feel a little rejected." It's a much subtler and wittier punchline than her observation at the end of "Hungry Are The Damned" about the family being the real monsters, and it amounts to much the same thing. The family, after all, were the malign force in this scenario. They invaded a house that, by its own admission, desired to be left alone, above the spirits of the dead that wanted to be allowed to rest in peace, and adjacent to a vortex whose occupants did not wish to be pelted with fruit from their neighbouring dimension. Perhaps we shouldn't blame the house for its defensive actions. And yet I think we also feel Lisa's sorrow at being so brutally rejected by the house. Considering the segment in relation to Poltergeist's denouncement of television as the root of all evil, I can't help but think of the Simpsons here as a television family who, although wildly popular, were not universally welcomed on arrival, and I like to see Marge's stand against the house as a metaphorical plea to for acceptance among the moral guardians who decried The Simpsons as a negative influence in its early years. Marge stands proudly by her family, imperfections and all, and insists to their detractors that they aren't going anywhere. Here, her gambit does not pay off, for so great is the house's revulsion at co-existing with the family - and the house does make it clear that it is specifically life with the Simpsons that it is rejecting, not the possibility of life with any family at all. Notably, the house, the embodiment of external judgement of the family, is not the kind of pristine, outwardly respectable suburban home seen throughout Poltergeist. It incorporates a few of the visual characteristics of 112 Ocean Avenue, the setting of The Amityville Horror, such as the quarter circle windows that resemble beady eyes, but overall it's very much an old-fashioned spookhouse - as is noted in the episode's DVD commentary, it is not unlike the one inhabited by an another eccentric and much-misunderstood television family, The Addams Family. Perhaps the Addams would have been right at home there. After all, they're an old-school horror family. The Simpsons, meanwhile, are a reflection a more contemporary kind of family, laid bare in all of its ugly detail, and that's something this house was just not ready for.

* I kid. Actually I really like The Search For Spock.

** There's also that "Your wife is quite a dish line", implying that if our Rigellian friend Serak doesn't actually want to eat Marge, he wants to...fuck her? And why would Bart include such a detail about his own mother in his story, the Oedipal devil? Of course, Marge and Kang actually did the deed in "Treehouse of Horror IX", so perhaps we should take it as foreshadowing.

Jumpin' Jupiter (aka Jupiter Needs Jerkasses)

The Sylvester and Porky Trilogy of Terror was a unique and enjoyable although obviously short addition to the Looney Tunes roster. For several years, Scaredy Cat (1948) had been the sole entry, but in 1954 Chuck Jones revived it for a second installment, Claws For Alarm. The two shorts were effectively variations on the exact same story (Sylvester and Porky spend the night in some ominous location, where repeated attempts are made on their lives by a swarm of inexplicably bloodthirsty mice, of whose presence only Sylvester is aware) with radically different outcomes (although both involve unpleasant surprises for an ostensibly triumphant Sylvester). Claws For Alarm, though, was an inventive and distinguished enough remake not to suffer terribly by comparison. A third short, Jumpin' Jupiter, which dropped the killer mice altogether and pitted Sylvester and Porky against a new, extraterrestrial threat, followed soon after in 1955. Having let Scaredy Cat stand on its own for several years, I wonder if Jones was only now giving consideration to developing the Sylvester/Porky dynamic into its own ongoing series. To that end, Jumpin' Jupiter can only be deemed a failure - an attempt to expand the formula of fearful/alert Sylvester and oblivious/scornful Porky into a whole new set-up, that basically ends up confirming just how much the success of its two predecessors depended upon the specifics of their very narrow circumstances. Jumpin' Jupiter is the last of the trilogy, and certainly the least.

Having said that, the one innovation retained from Claws For Alarm - both revolve around Porky and Sylvester making an overnight stop while on the road - does make me regretful that there wasn't more life left in this series, if this is an indication of how they all would have been bookended. Although there is no direct continuity between the shorts, the idea that we are watching Porky and Sylvester on some continuous, increasingly fraught journey into disorientation, having taken the wrong turning a long way back, is certainly an appealing one. I'm intrigued to see more from Sylvester and Porky on The Road Trip From Hell. Truth be told, Jumpin' Jupiter is not, on its own, a bad short. It's an extremely good-looking cartoon (the celestial backgrounds are beautifully rendered), and the visual wit is as sharp as ever (there is one particularly good sequence where Sylvester comes close to accidentally smothering Porky by grabbing him from the outside of the tent). But the killer instinct of the preceding mouse shorts is very much missed.

As ingenious as those killer mice were, it was probably for the best that Jones retired them after Claws For Alarm, as I doubt the scenario offered infinite possibilities and Jones had probably already pushed his luck far enough in trying to repeat the trick once. In their place, Porky and Sylvester are menaced by an alien from the planet Jupiter (who bears a striking resemblance to the Instant Martians commonly allied with Marvin The Martian), who has travelled to Earth to collect samples of Earthling life, presumably for scientific purposes. He happens on a desert where Porky and Sylvester are camped out for the night, harvests the patch of ground they've pitched their tent upon and whisks them off into the depths of space. As before, Sylvester quickly realises that the situation is staggeringly wrong, while Porky remains entirely oblivious. It's a sinister scenario, for sure, and it takes us to a fairly unsettling conclusion, but what's missing throughout Jumpin' Jupiter that was all over Scaredy Cat and Claws For Alarm is that overwhelming sense of malevolence. Those shorts succeeded because the mice were genuinely scary. They were as understated as they were omnipresent, and their horror arose from the fact that you could never be totally certain where they were going to strike from next. Here, I don't detect any ill-will on the part of the antagonist, just a clinical coldness (which, honestly, could have been colder). Other than separating Sylvester and Porky from everything they knew and loved, there's no indication that he intends to harm them in any way. The most troubling narrative blind spot is that we never actually find out what's in store for Porky and Sylvester once they reach Jupiter (spoiler: they never even make it that far), but the alien responsible for the abduction process is not in himself all that intimidating. To the contrary, he seems bewildered by the terror he invokes in Sylvester and spends the latter half of the short with his back turned in the control room, attempting to make sense of his abductees' behaviours through a book penned by one Dr. Sig Mundfre Ud.

Since the antagonist is so uninterested in dishing out physical damage to his captives, a key element of the previous cartoons - Sylvester would endeavour to protect the ungrateful swine who would typically abuse him in return - here becomes redundant. Instead, Sylvester spends most of his screen time running and cowering from the alien terror (as it were). Nor does he do anything to attempt to reverse the course they're on. Which leads me to possibly my biggest quibble with Jumpin' Jupiter - whereas the previous shorts were clearly constructed to engender sympathy with Sylvester, here I'm not convinced that this one has any wider agenda than to have fun at the expense of a chicken-hearted cat. The tell-tale moment would be when Sylvester blanches, on noting that they are hurtling ever further from the Earth, panics, and then turns yellow upon realising that he's leapt straight into the arms of his alien abductor (with cowardice, I presume). The short, therefore, attaches much the same stigma to Sylvester's anxieties as does Porky. This is in contrast to the earlier cartoons, where, for as rampantly as Porky scorned Sylvester and branded him a coward, Sylvester's fear, and his willingness to sleep with one eye open (or not at all), was clearly the only thing keeping the two of them alive. Whether Porky realises it or not, Sylvester is an extraordinarily useful companion to have by his side. Not so here. Besides a predictably unsuccessful attempt to communicate the situation to Porky, Sylvester's contribution is so minimal, to be quite honest, the short could easily be rewritten as a solo Porky affair. At times, Jumpin' Jupiter does appear to be veering toward an interesting new idea - the suggestion that, with the right amount of paranoia and agitation, Porky and Sylvester could potentially pose a greater threat to one another (Porky explicitly threatens to kill Sylvester, if he does not stop clinging to him, and we have that aforementioned moment where Sylvester nearly suffocates Porky with the tent) - but this isn't explored either.

Where Jumpin' Jupiter does finally start to pick up is in the closing moments, and the ending is so inspired that I'm almost tempted to disregard every word I've said against it up until now. As the short irises out, we appear to be seguing into a direct inversion on the previous two shorts, where Sylvester and Porky were menaced by creatures significantly smaller than themselves, with the implication that they may soon be facing jeopardy of gargantuan proportions. Due to their abductor's negligence (and the general lack of gravity), Porky and Sylvester go adrift and end up being stranded on some other planet (which is unidentified, but it can only be Mars). Naturally, Porky fails to distinguish between the desert he was camping on and the Martian terrain, and has them resume their journey to (where else?) Albuquerque, believing that they'll make it there by evening. As they go, they drive past a pair of giant Martian avians, who exchange glances suggesting that they intend to create trouble for our protagonists. It's a memorable ending, but what's particularly harrowing is the moment preceding it, when Porky spies the Earth in the distant sky and remarks that it is a "funny looking planet", and that he has never noticed it before. Naturally, this is intended to illustrate how astoundingly oblivious Porky remains to their desolate situation, but there's something faintly poetic in it too, as if Porky is subconsciously acknowledging how little time he took to appreciate the world he's been stripped away from. Now inaccessible to Porky and Sylvester, the Earth hangs hauntingly in the distance, every lifeform and every landmark situated upon it too far away to be discerned. And there's despair in that disconnect. It's a funny looking planet indeed, but without it we are nothing but lost.

Claws For Alarm (aka They Stab It With Their Steely Knives But They Just Can't Kill The Beast)

Chuck Jones' 1948 short Scaredy Cat was a dark and disturbing tour de force that created gold through the unlikely pairing of a rightfully paranoid Sylvester and a hopelessly obtuse Porky. In spite of (or maybe because of) how beautifully their partnership had played out, it took Jones six years to revisit the formula and create a sequel that explored the further possibilities of the Sylvester/Porky dynamic. Claws For Alarm arrived in 1954, and was followed by a third and final installment, Jumpin' Jupiter, in 1955. The Sylvester and Porky Trilogy of Terror (as I am henceforth calling it) make up some of my very favourite Looney Tunes cartoons, because they manage to build and sustain a genuinely unsettling atmosphere amid all the usual zany antics (although Jumpin' Jupiter much less than the other two). They are little slices of nightmare fuel, and they are, to my eye, to be appreciated as much for their horror value as for their colourful mayhem.

It's easy to be dismissive of Claws For Alarm, because it sticks so closely to the formula of Scaredy Cat that it is essentially a remake, with Sylvester and Porky once again attempting to spend the night in a secluded venue and blundering into the lair of a swarm of discreetly homicidal mice. Sylvester very quickly cottons onto the unholy aura of the place, while Porky insists on remaining and endangering them both with his idiocy. Inevitably, the night gives way to an avalanche of tensions, with Porky just wanting a restful night's sleep and Sylvester desperately trying to ensure that the two of them live to see the morning. There are familiar story beats, such as Sylvester confirming his ostensible cowardice by overreacting to some perfectly harmless creature at the start of the short (a bat in the original, here a spider who casts a long shadow) and his every effort to foil the attempts on Porky's life being invariably misconstrued by his porcine master. Claws, though, is no lazy retread, but instead a credible attempt on Jones' part to revisit the scenario from a fresh new angle, exploring alternate ways of conveying the murid menace and, finally, yielding the opportunity to settle on a completely direction in which the long dark night could potentially have gone (that last point is very important, because the only area in which Scaredy Cat arguably faltered was in its rather baffling choice of final punchline). The short ends up having its own completely different look, tone and atmosphere, and while I wouldn't say that it strikes quite the same chord as its predecessor, it's still a well-made follow-up that captures that same crucial essence of ghastly desolation.

The circumstances of the protagonists' stay have been tweaked slightly. In Scaredy Cat, Porky had actually purchased the house, but here the characters are on a road trip and happen across a ghost town. Porky fails to grasp that the buildings are all abandoned ("I love how early people go to bed in these country towns") and figures that the ominously-named Dry Gulch Hotel is the perfect stopping point for overnight accommodation, unaware that it's really crawling with the stab-happy vermin. The inert and deserted town is suggestive of its own highly disturbing backstory, with implications potentially even more morbid than those of Scaredy Cat, where the fate of the previous residents was signified in the image of their cat being wheeled away to its doom. It leaves itself open to two possible interpretations - either the mice took up residence after the people moved out, or (and this does seem like the more compelling explanation) the town was emptied by a killing spree the mice went on some time ago. The possibility that these proficient killers are lurking in every local building, and not just the Dry Gulch, is not explored but we certainly feel as though we've only scratched the surface of the horrors that have befallen this quaint country town.

Animation budgets were already not what they were in 1948, and Claws For Alarm is unable to recreate the same dense, murky atmosphere as the house in Scaredy Cat, but what it comes up with in its place is every bit as inventive, in ways that seem practically designed to engineer an aesthetic that is the polar opposite of Scaredy Cat. Scaredy Cat was all about the ominous blackness of the house, and the parts that were so badly lit one could shudder at the mere thought of what they might be obscuring. Claws, on the other hand, is all about brightness and colour. The red and green walls of the Dry Gulch and even the purple shadows that are always cast across them have a gaudy, vibrant look that in practice turns out to be no more reassuring. In place of the deep, dark patches of nothing that filled up the property in Scaredy Cat, dread is created by the imposing, slightly surreal manner in which the shadows span the hotel interior - in particular, the two crossed lines that stretch above Porky's bed looking like the threads of a spider's web, or alternatively two blades waiting to drop. The walls, meanwhile, have the authentically vulgar look of the kind of cheap decor you might expect to encounter in a low-grade hotel, a stark veneer that barely conceals the plethora of horrors stirring underneath.

Although the mice in Claws obey much the same rules as the mice in Scaredy Cat, in that they remain offscreen for most of the short, emerging only periodically to attack the heroes and disappearing almost instantly, here Jones seems all the more determined to minimise their appearances, thus keeping their presence as incorporeal as possible. For the most part the mice are represented as pairs of terrible yellow-green eyes peering out from the ominous black voids dotted all over the hotel; greater emphasis is placed on the nooks and crannies aspect of the first film, where we felt certain that the mice were constantly present, observing and plotting their next move, even when they could be neither seen or heard. Occasionally, they appear in silhouette, such as when Porky and Sylvester first enter the hotel and the outlines of four mice are seen huddling together in a distinctly conspiratorial fashion. Elsewhere, there is a clever sight gag where Sylvester is forced out into the corridor by Porky and sees what appears to be a spindly ghost waltzing by, but when the "ghost" passes a window, the moonlight reveals the forms of several mice stacked atop one another beneath a bedsheet. (I'm actually not clear on why the mice disguise themselves as a ghost, other than to facilitate this gag, as it serves no obvious purpose in their murder scheme - unless it is simply a matter of giving Sylvester an additional scare, suggesting that they're sadistic as well as cut-throat). There is only one instance in the full cartoon where we see a mouse in plain view, which I'll admit I have very mixed feelings on. On the one hand, the creature looks sufficiently unfriendly (particularly if you hit the pause button at just the right moment and see the blood lust in its eyes, good gravy), but I also feel this is the one point where Claws succumbs to the sin of overstatement, however fleetingly. There were several instances in Scaredy Cat in which the mice were clearly seen, but their ill intentions weren't advertised so explicitly in their character designs. By comparison, they had a very generic cartoon mouse look, which gave them an eerie incongruity; seemingly ordinary mice with seriously sick inclinations. The mice in Claws are all the more mysterious (unlike their counterparts in Scaredy Cat, who appear to kill ritualistically, we don't get any insight into what motivates their butcherous behaviour), and I think they work better when they are allowed to remain incorporeal. This enables them to take on an almost supernatural air, causing them to feel less like a particularly troublesome rodent infestation than a malignant curse that devours everything that makes contact with it, a sensation borne out by the implications of the short's wickedly inspired ending.

It's in the ending that Claws For Alarm diverges most significantly from its predecessor. Whereas Scaredy Cat built to a cathartic, borderline heart-warming climax in which Sylvester escapes the mice but finding himself unable to abandon Porky, heads back into the house and confronts the rodents head-on, Claws For Alarm goes in more-or-less the opposite direction. Here, Sylvester eventually tires of Porky's obtuseness and is driven to violence against the very individual he's been striving to protect this whole time (I doubt that anybody could fault Sylvester for doing so). The following morning (if you're familiar with the original, then the fact that dawn comes at all and that Porky makes it through the night with relatively few disturbances plays like a gag in itself), Porky is so satisfied with his experience that he proposes they settle here for a few more days, at which point a sleep-deprived Sylvester decides to take control of the situation, knocking Porky senseless with the blunt end of a shotgun, hauling him onto the backseat of the car and hitting the gas pedal pronto. As the cursed town fades into the distance, Sylvester breathes a heavy sigh of relief, thinking that he's ditched those mice for good, but a final visual punchline reveals multiple pairs of eyes staring out at him from the dark cracks of the speedometer. In this version of the story, Sylvester tries fleeing his demons instead of facing them, and discovers that they won't be eluded that easily. The lack of a catharsis on the level of Scaredy Cat will inevitably prove unsatisfying for some, but Claws does manage to avoid the one false step in Scaredy Cat, ie: its closing gag, a transparent case of Jones not knowing how to end the short and resorting to a stock Looney Tunes punchline (confoundingly so, and to a point that threatens to undermine the masterfully-sustained horror of the preceding seven minutes). Claws For Alarm, on the other hand, produces an ending that is witty, logical and entirely true to the horror ambience. Naturally, there is a haunting symbolism in that final image, with the speedometer, charting Sylvester's acceleration away from the dreaded Dry Gulch, also concealing the horrors that are to come later on down the road, a discomforting reminder that the traumas of the night, one way or another, will be with our hero for a while yet. It's deliciously unnerving, and such is the power of those rancid green peepers, you can feel them bearing on you long after the fade-out.

Scaredy Cat (aka Pussycats Is The Cwaziest People)

When I reviewed the movie Mouse Hunt at the beginning of the year, I mentioned that villainous mice are something of a novelty in popular culture (as opposed to villainous rats). Clearly, I dropped the ball in saying nothing about this short, because if there's any particularly obvious precursor to Mouse Hunt, it's Scaredy Cat (1948), Chuck Jones' dark and demented contribution to the world of murine horror. Many of the same basic plot elements are there - a couple of sitting ducks move into a dark and secluded old house, unaware that they've set themselves up for a world of trouble from the voracious vermin that dwell within. Like the titular creature from Mouse Hunt, these rodents are to be underestimated at the protagonists' own peril, and the situation rapidly descends into a cut-throat battle of life and death. Jones, even more so than Mouse Hunt, has a ball bringing out the hair-raising possibilities of the scenario. The mice here are threatening because they are, for the most part, the unseen; an omnipresent menace that lurks within every hidden nook and cranny, constantly watching and conspiring against the central figures, but only periodically bringing their malevolence (which is considerable) to the surface.

Scaredy Cat was the first in a trilogy of horror-orientated cartoons helmed by Jones starring Porky Pig and Sylvester The Cat, who are envisioned here in a master-pet relationship. In Scaredy Cat, only Porky receives title billing, but it is Sylvester who is the main driving force throughout the cartoon, and the character with whom the viewer sympathises. Audiences were already familiar with the lisping tuxedo cat from the Tweety cartoons of Friz Frelang (although Scaredy Cat marked the first short in which he was identified as Sylvester), but this was first occasion that Jones had worked with the character, and his interpretation of Sylvester differed notably from Frelang's. The lisp never comes into play, for Sylvester is rendered completely mute in this trilogy, and he's less preoccupied with exercising his predatory inclinations than he is with his unwavering anxiety about becoming something else's prey. His sense of self-preservation is certainly greater than that of his co-star, for Porky remains stuck in oblivious mode throughout virtually the entire trilogy. Although Sylvester would sooner avoid trouble altogether, Porky has a tendency to drag them both right into it, necessitating that the cat save the unwitting Porky's bacon while Porky misconstrues his every action and unleashes no end of verbal (and sometimes physical) abuse on on him (you can see how Courage The Cowardly Dog also owed a huge debt to this series). It's a role which seems perfectly suited to Sylvester, who even in shorts that cast him in the predatory role, can't help but exude a perpetual victim status. Unlike Wile E. Coyote, who really is his own worst enemy, or Ralph Wolf, who has the luxury of being able to quit at the end of each day, Sylvester lives in a world that is very blatantly out to get him 24/7. A series of shorts specifically designed to explore the possibilities of him being pushed to his absolute tipping point seems like a valid and natural move for him. The Sylvester/Porky trilogy does an inspired job of enabling the viewer to get a glimpse of the world through Sylvester's paranoid eyes, and discover that it is every bit as brutal and hazardous as he believes it is.

That hazard, in the case of both Scaredy Cat and its first sequel, Claws For Alarm (1954), takes the form of legions of murderous murids who spend most of the time lurking in the shadows, sharpening their numerous blades and waiting for the perfect opportunity to strike. Make no mistake, Scaredy Cat is not your average cat and mouse cartoon, and not just because the usual dynamics of the predator/prey hierarchy are subverted. These mice aren't the lovable, plucky house pests endemic to the Golden Age of Animation. They are killers, implied to have slaughtered goodness-knows-how-many of the house's previous occupants (the short contains a particularly horrifying moment where Sylvester witnesses them hauling off the last of their most recent batch of victims, the household cat, and realises that he and Porky will be next on the chopping block). What motivates the mice in Claws For Alarm is unclear, but in Scaredy Cat they seem to be part of a sinister cult that murders ritualistically. And they're legitimately terrifying. Obviously, it's a daft scenario and Scaredy Cat, brimming with all the visual wit and energy one would expect from a Jones cartoon, plays itself predominantly for comic effect. Nevertheless, I don't think this short receives nearly enough credit for how well it succeeds as a horror. Jones clearly understood the rules of the horror game, and the sense of dread is maintained terrifically throughout (to the extent that the absurdity of the scenario only makes it all the more unsettling) - there's the cold, foreboding atmosphere of the house, with its many dark and unexplored corners, the stretches of eerie inertia, in which we know that danger is stirring just out of sight, and Jones' smartly minimalist approach to the horror itself; the mice are seen only sparingly, and we are shown only the surface details of their depraved agenda. The fear of the unknown becomes so overwhelming that we have no trouble identifying with Sylvester's plight of having to avoid facing the darkened kitchen alone, a fate we and he realise is tantamount to being banished to oblivion. (Note: the cartoons of yore had a very flippant attitude toward suicide, and Scaredy Cat contains a gag that may be testing to modern sensibilities, where Sylvester threatens to put a bullet in his brain instead of being forced into the kitchen - it does, however, play into the generally macabre feel of the short.)

Most fans would agree that Scaredy Cat is by far the stand-out of the trilogy, and I see little reason to dispute that, although I think Claws For Alarm is a very good and underrated short that, despite retreading much of the same ground as its predecessor, feels like a perfectly credible reinterpretation. (The third short, Jumpin' Jupiter (1955), which in place of killer mice has Porky and Sylvester abducted by aliens and whisked away to the titular planet, is easily the least of the bunch, for the scenario, while sinister, has none of the malevolence of the earlier cartoons.) Noteworthy is that the mice Porky and Sylvester are up against in Claws For Alarm are not the same ones they had previously encountered in Scaredy Cat. The mice in Claws are largely obscured from view, existing mainly as silhouettes and as beady yellow eyes peering out from various crevices - the one mouse who does appear, briefly, in plain sight is pointed and scrawny, and looks, for all the world, like a murine version of Wile E. Coyote. The mice in Scaredy Cat have a greater air of familiarity, for their character designs were transplanted directly from those of Hubie and Bertie, two mice who had pestered Porky in an earlier Jones short, Trap Happy Porky (1945). There's little overtly sinister about the mere designs of the mice in Scaredy Cat, but I would argue that that this, in a way, makes their homicidal leanings even more disturbing. They look, beguilingly, like generic cartoon mice, and yet they practice the most inexplicably ghastly of activities. It's almost like the animation equivalent of the seemingly ordinary boy next door who had various body parts concealed around his house. Cartoon mice, even at their most endearing, have a tendency, overwhelmingly, to be bastards (cartoon sciurines too), and Hubie and Bertie were certainly no exception (have you seen the short where they trick Claude Cat into thinking that he died during a feigned surgical operation?), but the chilling indifference which these particular mice carry out their grotesque misdeeds is on a whole other level of warped. It's made all the more troubling for the fact that the mice, like Sylvester himself, are mute and (with one glaring exception) nary make a peep throughout the short. Their menace is as unheard as it is unseen.

Also in the short's favour is that the narrative is genuinely unpredictable, and milks its chills from the most devilishly unexpected of places. There's a sequence where an incapacitated Sylvester is lowered beneath the kitchen floor and held captive by the mice (earlier on we saw a moment in which Porky narrowly avoided the same fate), only to emerge in a severely blanched state two hours and fifty minutes later. What Sylvester saw beneath the floorboards within that time is left entirely to our imaginations, but it was clearly nothing good. It's all incredibly unsettling, but the really unpleasant, blood-curdling part occurs seconds later, when Sylvester staggers upstairs to the sleeping Porky, and makes his only vocalisation of the short. Forget the lisp, though - Sylvester meows like a real cat. And it's freaky, a rattling disturbance following that extended period of silent, understated horror. There was another moment that honestly shocked me the first time I saw it, as a kid, because it absolutely did not play out as I was expecting. I refer to the truly game-changing part of the cartoon when Porky resolves to demonstrate to Sylvester that there's nothing in the kitchen by going in there himself. Given the formula the short had been following up until now, I fully expected Porky to find the kitchen empty, thus making Sylvester look even crazier from his perspective. But no. Instead, Porky walks directly into the very peril that Sylvester had tried to warn him of, and he suffers the horrifying consequences. The mice capture him, and start to march him away to one of their ritual executions.

Something that Scaredy Cat has that neither of its sequels even attempted to replicate is a dramatic climax in which Sylvester is ultimately validated not only in Porky's eyes, but also his own. Following such an intense build-up, this gives the viewer a catharsis, as Sylvester reaches an epiphany in which he realises that he was always more powerful than the thing that has been scaring him this entire time. When Porky is captured by the mice, Sylvester flees the building, but does not get far before he is stopped by his conscience, who will not allow him to abandon Porky. Among other things, his conscience reminds him, through a series of diagrams, of the relative sizes of a cat and a mouse. This gives Sylvester the resolve and the confidence to return to that dreaded house and attack the murid occupants with such ferocity that he sends the lot of them packing.

Scaredy Cat might have all the trappings of a horror-comic masterpiece, but there is arguably one tiny snag that keeps it from being totally perfect, and that is of course the ending. It's one of the reasons why I'm grateful for the existence of Claw For Alarm, as above all else, it was a welcome opportunity to revise the scenario with an ending more authentic to the horror genre. Here, the short chooses to surrender all menace in the last few seconds, closing with a non-sequitur that's going to be utterly baffling to modern audiences. This is a Sylvester short, and obviously a character as ill-fated as he cannot be allowed to have too triumphant an ending, even in one such as this where he is unambiguously the hero; as Porky thanks the faithful feline for saving his life, we discover that a single, hood-wearing mouse has stayed behind, and it proceeds to bonk Sylvester with a mallet. That in itself is a classic horror trope - the protagonists think they are safe, only to discover that their demons won't be so easily vanquished - only here it's followed up by the mouse removing his hood, and proclaiming that "Pussycats is the cwaziest people!" while laughing uproariously. Iris out. I'm sorry, what?

Naturally, this is an ending confused the heck out of me as a child, and my reaction today is much the same. Nowadays, I appreciate that it's a reference to contemporary comedian Lew Lehr, who at the time was well-known for his catchphrase, "Monkeys is the cwaziest people!" Scaredy Cat was not the first Looney Tunes cartoon to tip its hat to Lehr; in fact, it wasn't even the first to use that specific variation on Lehr's catchphrase (that honor goes to another Porky short, The Sour Puss). And that's all well and good, but why is it here? What's the relevance of the Lehr reference to a horror situation involving spooky houses and killer mice? Is there some other joke I'm not getting? Or is it a case of Jones not knowing how to end the cartoon, and opting to do something else totally unexpected that took us back, resolutely, into the realm of pure comedy? I remain divided as to the effectiveness of this closing gag; a case can certainly be made that its non-sequitur lunacy is entirely keeping with the short's unpredictable nature, and if nothing else it's sufficiently weird. But, as its multiple appearances in other Looney Tunes shorts demonstrate, it's also something of a stock punchline, one that defuses the menace of the mice and raises questions as to how we're ultimately supposed to interpret them. Are they just a bunch of goofballs messing around, after all? It is, at the least, an unforgettable ending, and perhaps that's befitting enough for a short that goes all-out on the discombobulation front.