Summary
➡ The text discusses the making of a movie where the production team made unusual choices, such as changing the actors’ hair colors and using real tarantulas in a scene. The film, which was based on a Ray Bradbury story, underwent several changes, including script rewrites and reshoots, leading to a fallout between Bradbury and the director. Despite these challenges, the movie was completed, but it did not perform well at the box office. The text also compares this film to another, discussing their different approaches to storytelling, cinematography, and the use of villains.
➡ The text discusses a carnival adventure where two boys sneak in at night, encountering various strange and supernatural events. One boy, Jim Nightshade, hopes to age himself by riding a carousel in reverse, driven by his longing for his absent father. The text also explores the idea of the carnival existing in a different dimension, and the boys’ adventurous spirits being symbolized by their open windows at night. The story also includes a confrontation between an older man, Charles Holloway, and a character named Mr. Dark, and a mysterious hall of mirrors.
➡ The text discusses a movie with impressive cinematography and a few creepy scenes. The movie includes a parade with child-sized coffins and characters wearing horrifying masks. The text also mentions a final showdown in a rap battle and ends with a discussion about the scariest Disney movies. The authors express their interest in visiting a fair and experiencing scary carnival rides. They also mention a comic related to the Satanic Panic phenomenon.
➡ The speaker discusses their Twilight Zone podcast, “Time Enough Podcast,” which is currently in its fifth season. They mention some behind-the-scenes drama between writers Ray Bradbury and Rod Sterling. The speaker also promotes Conspiracy Cards from Paranoid American, a set of over 200 cards featuring conspiracy theorists, cult leaders, and more. Lastly, they share some of their personal thoughts and feelings, possibly through a rap or poem.
➡ The text discusses a movie viewing experience and analysis. The movie, ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’, is a Disney horror film that the speaker feels didn’t quite hit the mark. They discuss how Disney seemed to struggle with creating a horror movie, resulting in a film that had unsettling scenes but lacked a grand payoff or jump scares. The speaker also compares the movie to other horror films and shows, and discusses the filming locations and the characters in the movie.
➡ A mysterious carnival, run by a man named Mr. Dark, arrives in a small town and hypnotizes the locals by offering them their deepest desires. However, those who accept these offers become part of the carnival’s freak show and are taken along as the carnival moves to the next town. The story is compared to Stephen King’s “Needful Things,” where a devil-like character runs an antique shop and traps people by offering them items that appeal to their personal desires. The article also discusses the origins of the story, its connections to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and the philosophical discussions within the narrative.
➡ A man wishes to win the lottery and ends up winning a smaller amount than he hoped for at a carnival, leading to questions about his soul being possessed by the carnival. A teacher becomes young and blind, which confuses the audience as it wasn’t part of her wish. The movie’s exposition is criticized for being heavy-handed and confusing, with the characters’ backstories being explained by other characters. The discussion also touches on the evolution of movie editing from the 70s and 80s to the 90s and 2000s, highlighting the impact of digital editing on pacing and overall film quality.
➡ The speaker shares a story about visiting a camera shop, reminiscing about his past as a serious photographer and the high cost of film today. He also discusses the appeal of retro-style photography and his past experience with a specific type of camera. The speaker then transitions to discussing a movie, critiquing its quality and the director’s choices. He also talks about the concept of ‘autumn people’, referring to people in the later stages of their life, and how they are portrayed in the film.
➡ The movie discusses a mysterious carnival that visits a town, draining the life force from its inhabitants before moving on to the next location. The townspeople who fall victim to the carnival become part of it but don’t contribute anything significant. The carnival seems to feed on people’s fear and pain, which is described as delicious to them. The movie also explores themes of transformation, time reversal, and psychic vampirism.
➡ The text discusses the dark and thrilling aspects of carnivals, comparing them to Disneyland and highlighting the lack of regulation and safety. It also mentions the excitement and fear that come with riding potentially dangerous rides. The text further explores the character of Mr. Dark, who runs a carnival, and Tom Fury, a character who sells lightning rods and knows about ancient Egyptian magic. The actor who played Tom Fury, Royal Dano, is also mentioned for his extensive filmography and his role as the voice of President Lincoln in Disney’s Hall of Presidents.
➡ The text discusses a movie where two kids, Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, encounter a mysterious carnival that comes to their town. The carnival is run by a man named Mr. Dark, who throws flyers into the air to announce its arrival. The kids explore the carnival, including a booth run by a woman referred to as the Spider Lady. The text also mentions an old wives’ tale about cats sucking the breath out of babies, and speculates about the backstory of Jim’s absent father, who sends him strange gifts from Africa.
➡ The text discusses a TV show called Carnival, which is similar to a movie the speaker watched. The speaker also delves into the concept of the ‘witching hour’, traditionally believed to be at 3am, and its significance in various contexts, including Christian beliefs, physiological changes in the body, and legal curfews. The speaker also mentions a phenomenon called ‘homicidal sleepwalking’, where people have committed crimes while sleepwalking and have been acquitted. The text ends with a reference to a scene from a movie where kids sneak a peek at an exotic dance show.
Transcript
Nemo fails to survive A barracuda in Latin, nobody means no one. Snow White never took another breath. Her prince, the angel of death has come. Occult Disney. We go from real to real this day. As above, so below. I called Disney. Please enjoy the show. Disney. Right this way. And step on up to the Occult Disney podcast. Take a ride in the 1983 carnival horror fantasy Dark. Re. Jumble those words. Something wicked this way comes. I don’t really know how to do a barker, I guess, especially without me screaming and my neighbors being like, what is this? Right up.
Step right up. This is the 1930s. Reid Ackman, 1982. Yeah, I didn’t have the cojones to step it up to that, I guess, is my thing. It’s also. It’s. It’s eight in the morning. Who wants to scream at eight in the morning, you know? Well, it’s seven at night for me, which is kind of when the Dark Carnival slowly starts to open its. Its tent. That’s right. You. You’re in. You’re in barking territory there where I. Maybe I’m not. Although, to be fair, there’s probably nobody around. I could probably start screaming, it wouldn’t matter. But in your remote Japanese, you know, countryside, right? So.
Well, I live in this cul de sac, right? And it just like clears out during the work. There’s like, nobody here from, you know, 9 to 5 most of the time. So. So I. I was surprised. I thought you were going to introduce this movie the classical way, which is the Disney reenactment of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent Jay’s upbringing, right? This. This movie is about Insane Clown Posse and how they came together. Oh, right. Okay. This is the dawning of. Of the posse. I got you. Well, we got some insane clowns. We got some little people, you know, and you got the dark Carnival.
That’s scene. No vomit scene though, is there? That’s. That’s a quote from John Waters. That’s by me. Yeah, I think that’s in his book Shock Value or something. But there’s a quote, he’s like, every good movie has. Well, I’m going to quote him directly, so I’ll use the, the unfortunate phrase. But every good movie has a midget and a vomit scene. Is the John Waters quote. This one does have a. Yeah. And we get. We get halfway there. So because I remember Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, you get two of both. So I’m like, oh, that must be one of the best movies ever, you know? So.
Yeah, this is Matt here. Thomas has been rapping already. We’re rapping about it, but not. Not insane clown rapping about it. It seems it’s Malinko style. Yeah. I assume that this is your first viewing or did you catch it on cable at some time? Maybe you’re watching. I did. I definitely saw it on cable. But you know what? I. Somehow in my mind, I’ve always conflated this movie with Needful Things. Whenever. Whenever someone brought up this way, something wicked this way comes, I would always think of the Needful Things movie. And on re watching it, I know I’ve seen both over my past.
But it’s kind of the same movie. It’s kind of the same aspect if you just replace carnival with antique shop. There you go. Except for Needful Things has a little bit more gore in it. Well, Stephen King has quoted the book as being a major influence on him. Repurposed, you know, repurposed. A lot of elements from the books stretch there. Like folxes are influenced by Rolexes. They’re actually. I mean, there’s a large trail to follow on this movie. Just when I was doing my end on researching. I’d seen it before, but I’d forgotten about the 2004 South park where Walmart comes to town.
And it’s. It’s kind of based on this movie. So instead of a carnival, it’s a Walmart where they want to sell you things. There’s a handful of tropes that I’ve. I saw in this watching. I was like, man, I’ve seen this exact thing play out so many times in other movies and TV shows. So I try to note the ones that came up. Even I couldn’t even remember where else I’d seen it. But I know I’ve seen some of these steens over and over again. Yeah. So just how my enjoyment level in the movie. I didn’t have cable growing up and I.
This probably was, you know, siloed into the Disney Channel or something. I. Or would they show this? I don’t even know. It has, you know, they say hell in it, Which. That’s hardcore for 80s Disney. Right? Yeah. Parents, just be warned. Protect your children’s ears for this episode. You’ve already said it twice now. That’s crazy. I know. Bloody hell there. That’s. That’s bad in England. Apparently it sounds worse to the Brits than it does to us when you say it that way. I’m pretty sure it’s my first time seeing it, is my point. Maybe it’s because I watched one hour last night and then finished it this morning.
Just because I’m on a. I got a busy schedule this week. But yeah, I wasn’t really digging at the first hour. And then this morning I put in the last 30 minutes. Okay, now I’m into this because now Jonathan Price starts endlessly ranting, which is fun. You know, a few effects start to kick in. I was like, okay, now. Now I’m a little more down with this. But it might have just been, you know, late night. Like I have to get through it last night as well. I don’t know. What’s your take? I like. I mean, re watching it.
I. Some of my notes were just like, wow, this is one of the better written Disney movies I’ve ever seen. Which makes sense because it was written by Ray Bradbury. It wasn’t written really by like a normal Disney sort of source. Wasn’t a re. They didn’t like a reimagine it. It was kind of based exactly on his writing. Right. Although there. Well, I’ll do a bit of the production spiel. It seems he wrote this several times. He was actually. It started as a screenplay in the late 50s for. Was it Gene Kelly? I think it was Gene Kelly, yes.
He was going to. He’s going to make this Gene Kelly. So I guess Gene Kelly was going to be the 50s version of Mr. Dark. The project didn’t happen, so he took a screenplay, wrote it into the novel Something Wicked this way comes in 1960, 62. Met the director Jack Clayton, I think. Let me double check his name because I have not memorized all of this. Met him in the early 70s. They were. Peter Douglas, Kirk Douglas’s kid signed on. Kirk Douglas was going to be the barker at one point. I think he was busy when they actually made the movie.
Christopher Lee was in talks to be the barker or the carnival guy. See now, like, I wish you you weren’t telling me all of this because now I’m just imagining what could have been. And it’s not. It’ not like that is definitely overshadowing what was. In some ways, Christopher Lee was just. They were cheap. So like, yeah, because Jonathan Price had not. Like he hadn’t done Brazil yet. He certainly hadn’t done his Bond movie yet. So he was. Someone in the room too was like, look, guys, we’re, we’re Disney. It doesn’t need to be that scary.
We don’t need to spend Christopher Lee money just to cap his knees off. Like halfway through, we’ve got Robards. What more do we need? Well, they got Pam Greer. That was great. I mean, she doesn’t have much to do in this, but. Except be wonderfully creepy. But. And they did have. And I had to look his name up, but Royal Dano, which is one of the cooler names that I’ve come across. He’s the guy that plays Tom Fury. The guy that’s kind of like selling folk magic lightning rods to the kids. But that was a pretty awesome role.
I was actually shocked that he hadn’t done more Disney animated voiceovers. I could have sworn that I was picking his voice out from, I don’t know, old Fox and the Hound or something. I’m just kind of throwing one out there. But it sounded like he would have been in one of those movies. But yeah, once I did like Tom Fury. Once it’s got into production though, they made some of the same mistakes they did with the Watcher in the Woods. So one, they cast the kids and then decided to. So here, here’s where we start, like actually kind of terrorizing the actors a little bit.
So they’re like, ah, let’s switch the roles. But Kubrick style. Do you think they’re doing this with intent? They’re like, oh, we’re gonna add this unsettling tone to the movie by just messing up the production. Part one, maybe. Part two, definitely. Or screwing up the kids in this case. So they just like made the them switch their hair color. So the dark haired kid is actually the blonde and the blonde is the dark haired kid. And they just had to dye their hair the entire time. Wait, what? They had to change hair colors for the whole movie for some reason because it was like, I’m doing bad with names today.
Holloway is the blonde, right? Nightshade, of course. I guess Nightshade has to be the dark hair. Jim. Will Holloway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they had them do that. And then the Tarantula scene, they dumped 200 tarantulas on the kids. Because tarantulas don’t bite. Right. I mean, I, I would assume that some could. Maybe. Anyway, maybe these were the nice tarantulas. They didn’t get bitten, but they did get 200 tarantulas. And they said the hair started to irritate them. Which if I’m. If I. At the point where I have to claim I’m being irritated by tarantula hair, that sounds nightmarish.
So also it’s interesting the types of things where they’re like, no, we need to go full practical on this. Like, we need actual spiders. And then they’re like, oh, but two kids on a chimney. Like, let’s bring out the horrible green screen. Like, let’s get that out now. Like. And that sequence was originally going to be a Mr. Dark’s like astral hand or something was going to come through the house instead of the spiders. But they, they were going to do something mechanical. It didn’t work. They were going to do early CGI when the carnival comes to town by having this dust actually, you know, turn into the carnival, which is done a little more like, I guess suggestively.
I don’t mean it that way, but it’s. It’s a little more inferred in the movie where there. It was going to be a direct, like, trippy effect in the. When before. I guess they started looking at the budget more closely. Again, unlike the movie we just watched, which had that crazy Terminator, cybernetic Mothman creature that, that bounced out. Right. Watch her in the woods. I didn’t recognize any animation in that movie whatsoever. Whereas this one, it has at least as much animation as, say, the Lizzie McGuire Movie. Because there’s a scene where a woman breaks out of a glass coffin.
And that’s all like fully animated. It’s basically Fantasia style kind of animation. And then anytime the dust comes up. And I might have noticed one other scene in there, but technically this one fits the regular motif of occult Disney more so than the others. Yeah, at some point, yeah, it was gonna have more animation, but. But here’s where they double down on the watchers and the wood hijinks. They finished the movie. Again, they aren’t happy with it. I don’t think it’s a critical drubbing this time. I think it’s Disney just being very unsure of themselves. So the.
They commission a rewrite of the script again, which Bradbury doesn’t do. And the director knew what’s happening, so they Have a falling out because apparently they’ve been buddies for the past 10 years and that pissed Bradbury off. Then they kick the director off again, bring in like the editor to finish the film. They do reshoot several months later. So if you may or may not have noticed that there are some shots where the boys are noticeably older because that those shots were done like six months later. So if it was, I wouldn’t be able to tell.
I mean, yeah, yeah, but they in, you know, they spent an extra 4. 4 million doing that. So budget 16 million goes up to 20 million. Movie makes 9 million. So this, this mode of business was not doing well for Disney. I mean, I don’t think anyone really says 80s cinematic Disney was a, was a box office success anyway. But yeah, this one did even worse than Watcher. I mean it made more money, but the budget was much bigger too. So. So more people saw it, I guess, but they lost more money on it. Oh, and also this one was trying to leverage the fact that it was Ray Bradbury to begin with.
So it’s a little bit of a bait and switch to. It would be weirder if the movie poster and all the trailers were like, something wicked. This way comes the Disney adaptation of Ray Bradbury Asterisk. Actually we fired him and his friend of 10 years and hired the editor to finish it. Like that has a different ring to it. Right? Yeah, I mean it’s still, it’s. As far as book adaptations go, this one is. Seems to be pretty reasonably close. I didn’t get a lot of that like disjointed feel that normally you get when it bounces around.
Like on a, on a scale from Emperor’s New Groove to, you know, this, I guess, where it’s like abundantly clear that there’s a whole bunch of different weird, unresolved things and that they’ll hyper focus on something. Like in this movie, they kind of beat you over the head with everything that’s gonna happen. And then as it’s happening, it’s like, look, it’s happening. Look, look, look. So I guess we’ll point some of that out. But it, it definitely felt more cohesive. If anything, it like they lead you to every single conclusion in this movie and then they like explain all the exposition.
They do it all. And yeah, this one does have a proper buildup, which is nice. Like I said I was once we get to last 30 minutes, I’m like, okay, I am grooving with this now. You know, I’m surprised to hear that. I don’t know, I didn’t get bored really of the movie as it built up because it’s. It just legitimately felt like good storytelling even if maybe the practical effects and some of the heavy handedness was present. I think it’s just time and place. You know, it’s late at night. I’m like I must watch this, you know.
So this morning. Yeah, because this morning I had to watch the last 30 minutes. I had an hour to do it so I could kind of chill out. Right. And not be too concerned and not, not be concerned about falling asleep while watching it because it’s not after midnight, you know. Well, this one was a little bit of a pleasure for me I guess because sometimes I have to really, really try and like re watch a movie a couple times until it clicks with my occult Disney lens. But this one was sort of made as a sci fi creepy occult movie to begin with anyways.
I like Watching the Woods. Watching the woods was too. So I don’t know. These. The dark nizzies have been way easier and more enjoyable to watch through a cult Disney lens versus just watching it cinematically. That, that’s probably true. And when I finished it, it’s more. I did, you know, go scrubbing through the first hour just to make sure I didn’t like take a nap through something, you know. So I made sure that I at least gotten the whole movie into chat about something. Yeah. Watch in the Woods. Like both these movies by the way, have one.
I do like the cinematography in these. They. They actually were pretty on point with most of the cinematography in these. And that’s the thing. I like the vibe and Watch from the woods. And then without the alternate ending, the movie like you said, just ends right where. Yeah. So this one is more satisfying in the end but it doesn’t quite. There are a few creepy moments earlier the atmospherics. And Watcher in the Woods I still think is kind of cool. This, this one doesn’t quite get as gothic, I guess. Yeah, I mean like I was trying to wonder how I could compare those two movies.
Like which one is scarier, Watcher in the woods or something wicked this way comes. I think having like we said, Watch in the woods had no villain. Where this has a extremely clear villain. So does that make it scarier? I don’t, not necessarily, but makes it more malicious which makes it more gripping. I guess he started ranting, you know, that that would have been cool. And watch her. I mean, you know, let. Let the old lady go. Still not scary really. So I would say Neither out of the two. Which is scarier. No, that’s the answer.
Well, that’s why I switched to. This one’s more malicious because we have a ranting villain, which is fantastic. And this one is a little bit, I guess, more real in that, like, the dad is talent. Like, the people have some pretty tragic backstories and the things that they desire and stuff. Again, needful things. I think maybe did a slightly better job of this movie. Like, that’s the non Disney version of this one. But it. But there is a scene where a kid has blood dripping down on his face, which I guess is technically scarier than anything that happens in Watcher in the Woods.
Yeah. Before I start recording, I was telling you about what I’ll continue calling my synchro viewing. My parents are visiting me in Japan, and as of their hotel last night, and I was thinking about putting this on. I was like, I’ll need to sit there on my iPad, taking notes. I’ll probably pause it a few times, which will be annoying. So on the same flash drive as this movie was Muppets Haunted Mansion. So he put that on instead. And the whole thing is Gonzo going to, you know, become great by going to the Haunted Mansion. Another creepy ranter.
Kind of a Mr. Dark there. But the thing is, he’s like, I’m afraid of nothing. You know, and at the end, he’s afraid of, you know, being alone and growing old without his friends. Right. And you see this, like, super creepy geriatric gonzo puppet, which is fantastic. But, like, that’s. That’s the same thing here with Robards, you know? Yeah, I. I don’t think that this movie necessarily broke any new ground. But, yeah, I. I might even have a reason to give it praise other than it seems like a legitimately good story. And again, that’s way more to do about Ray Bradbury, I think, than Disney.
I don’t care how many times they rewrote it or reshot it or had anything in production. Even though I didn’t go back and compare the script with the original story by Bradbury. But I have to assume, maybe incorrectly, that some of those awesome rants and some of the weird existential questions that they kind of pose rhetorically, that probably came from Ray Bradbury more than anyone in the Disney writing room. Yeah, good writer. You can hear their voice. I just watched the original Plan of the Apes again, which Rod Serling wrote the original few drafts for. Very much changed by the time you get to the final movie, but especially in the first 30 minutes.
You’re like rather sterling. Must have wrote those lines. It’s just they’re so sterling sounding. Whereas yeah, some things in here. I’m wondering if one of the reasons this wasn’t particularly successful at the box office. I’m trying to figure out when Ray Bradbury Theater came on television because it might be one of those things. Here we go. It start. Oh, it started airing in 85. So a few years after this actually. I was wondering if he was competing with himself was the point. Like I can just stay home and watch Bradbury stories because this movie’s 1983. Right.
So that’s 1985 is the star of the show. So there’s a. There is a few. This. That would not be a factor is my point. Have you seen much of that show, by the way? No, I don’t think I’ve seen any of that. Okay. I’ve got the DVD set and it’s a pretty good 80s anthology show, you know, creepy anthology, I guess that entails from the Dark side are kind of my favorites. So I didn’t see much of Tales from the Crypt because it was on HBO and I didn’t have cable, so. And yeah, I don’t even know if I’ve seen Tales in the Dark side.
Mine was Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, the new series more so than the old series. And then there was a Showtime version that I’m blanking on the name that it was their answer to Twilight Zone. Creep show. Is it. It was not Creep Show. Creep is a movie. So I don’t. Maybe it didn’t have a TV series. It’ll come to me at like 3am in the middle of the night tonight I’ll be like, oh, that was the name of it because there’s also like outer. Oh, okay, the 60s version. Then they had a later one.
Okay. I grew up on all the later the 80s versions and 90s versions of this stuff and then re encountered the old versions. Like just when you were describing that there almost was a 50s or 60s version of this movie with, you know, Christopher Lee and all these other characters like that sounds like it would have been a million times better than what Disney put together. Not that. Not that it’s even that bad. It’s just, you know, it’s a Disney horror movie. What do you want? Well, in the 50s it was going to be Gene Kelly.
This one could have been Christopher Lee. They were too cheap, which is fun. But. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mixed reviews I guess for Dark Disney then. But it’s fascinating to look at. Because it’s weird watching Disney doing something that they’re just not equipped to do. Like they clearly have no idea how to make a horror movie. So they just watched a bunch and tried to reverse engineers what these movies feel like. That’s a, that’s actually a really interesting observation. Yeah. That this is us being able to experience Disney sort of fumbling around in the dark trying to reverse engineer horror movies when it’s.
Everything that they’ve done up to this point has been the opposite. Right. They take grim fairy tales and they trim off all the scary bits so that they can sell more toys out of it. Versus this part where you almost. It almost seems like they started with that. That Disney feel like a G rated Happy Meal friendly premise. And then they were like, all right, well, how can we just add enough to consider it scary instead of starting with truly horrible scenes or like, I don’t know, it misses the part that would really scare you. Deep down, it makes some unsettling feelings.
Just like Watcher in the Woods. The most unsettling part of the whole movie, outside of the alternate ending, is just the camera work. Right. It’s just someone in the woods and some heavy breathing and the camera kind of shaking and it’s just playing on your expectation, like, oh, this is like Jason. Oh, this is like another horror movie that I’ve seen. At some point someone’s gonna get stabbed in the face, but it just never happens and there’s no payoff. And I. It’s almost like Disney was like, maybe they won’t notice. Like maybe no one will notice that we never actually have a big bad.
We’ll just kind of do all the other things. So this, this movie has some of that in that it has a lot of unsettling kind of feeling scenes. But yeah, there’s no like grand payoff at any point. No jump scares. At least I guess watching the woods did have a jump scare. Yeah. Although I was. Well one. They had a nice goopy corpse when, when Mr. Dark dies at the end, I was like, okay, that’s. That’s a nice goopy corpse. Not, not as good as Brian Blessed in Space 1999, which is my favorite smoldering corpse right now.
I still am pretty partial to Indiana Jones opening up the Covenant. Okay. Oh, that is a good. Oh, you know, they’re melting, aren’t they? That’s great. But yeah, do look up the Death Southern Dominion. That’s the space 1999 episode where at the end, Brian Bless just turned. He’s Sitting in his, you know, space seat or whatever on the ship and just turns into a smoldering corpse. It’s fantastic. One of my favorite corpses. But at the end of this, this is me being snarky. But they go and they’re like, everything’s great now. They’re going through the completely empty town.
I’m like, did everyone else just maybe die at the carnival or something? Is the population of the town now three plus a dog? I think the actual explanation is just it’s really early in the morning. But, yeah, kind of. But also, they didn’t do a great job in the movie itself of making the town look populated. Every time you see the city streets, they’re completely barren. There’s like one car anywhere, which I understand is because it’s a freaking set and they didn’t necessarily need to build out an entire city. It doesn’t have that feel. It very much feels like a play almost.
The pacing, the set design, all of that feels way more theatrical than cinematic. That makes sense. Yeah. As far as filming, by the way, they did most of it in California, but they did some exteriors in Vermont, apparently. So they did a little bit of location shooting, I guess, just to, you know, color the thing. I mean, that town at the end, that had to be, you know, the back lot, but maybe some of the woods or something. I’m not sure. I’m not sure which shots were Vermont, I guess, is my point. Well, we’re. We’re over 20 minutes, and maybe it’s time to give a little synopsis of what the movie is and what happens in it, and we can start picking it apart.
So something wicked this way comes, and I’m just gonna throw this off the top of my head, so feel free to flesh this out even more. But it’s essentially a story about a small town. We’ve got two kids, Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, which, again, pretty awesome name. And they are both kind of best friends. Growing up together, you get a little bit of insight about their families, the teacher in the town, some of the shopkeepers, some of the bar owners. So you kind of understand these very specific characters. A carnival comes to town, and the carnival sort of entices these people with exactly the things that they’ve been seeking.
We’ll get into more detail on this. But the exact things they’re seeking, once they come across, you know, what was like, their deepest desires, somehow they get hypnotized into becoming part of the freak show of this carnival. And I’m assuming the implication Is that as this carnival moves on to the next town, that they go with it. So if you get somehow hypnotized or mind controlled by this carnival, then now you’re part of the carnival and it keeps going. And which is weird, is this the first stop? Because when they show up in town, they don’t have any of these people.
They have to mind control all of them. The guy’s name that runs the whole carnival is Mr. Dark, which is one of these, like, beating you over the head things. Hold on. I have to read his introduction when he meets the father. And the. Which is. My name is Dark. I’m looking for two young boys. Like, that’s a bad introduction. Well, it’s Disney. I mean, it’s. Again, I’m just coming in with snark, but sorry to interrupt. Please go ahead. Mr. Dark runs the carnival. He is trying to find young boys to, I don’t know, the Disney movie.
So fill in the blank on your own. And the end. That’s. That’s kind of the entire premise. And again, I guess I’ll summarize Needful Things in similar way. But Needful Things is about similarly, a small town, a bunch of people has some unresolved issues going on. And I believe it’s a new antique shop opens up. And whoever enters that shop, the guy running it, who’s the devil. But in both cases, I think Mr. Dark is like Lucifer or Baffle Matter Devil or something. He’s like some evil entity. And even in Needful Things, the guy that runs the antique shop is kind of the devil.
And he just happens to have some item that links to some nostalgia or whatever your thing is, whatever your kink is, he’s got a specific item for it. And then once you accept that item now you get indebted to him. And that’s sort of the same premise, right? You swap a carnival for an antique shot. Have you seen the movie? Am I just throwing this out there? This. That sounds like I saw it on TV in the early 90s. Okay. I, I mostly, I’m actually thinking of the Friday the 13th TV show, which I guess kind of has a similar present, you know, premise, except that the good guys run the antique store, right? And they get cursed objects.
So. Another anthology. Yeah, I might have read the book because I, you know, as many people do in high school, you end up reading, like 10 Stephen King books, and I can’t remember if that’s one of the ones I read or not. I mean, honestly, it’s. I would recommend if someone likes the theme of this movie, but they feel like it was missing that bite. Like, oh, man, what if someone just added a little bit of hot sauce to this thing? That’s the movie. Go watch Needful Things as your. Your proxy to the same premise. There we go.
So maybe I should have been watching that. But hey, I got a podcast to do. I don’t want to be comparing Stephen King, the Ray Bradbury either. I don’t. I don’t feel like it’s an equal comparison. No, not really. But when it comes to movie form, you know, a great book. Great books don’t make great movies and vice versa. I mean, the Godfather book is terrible whether there’s a few other examples, but yeah, the book is apparently unreadable, whereas the movie is considered one of the greatest ever. So, you know, it doesn’t always. It’s Translates. Interesting.
Yeah. But also, we’re talking about Disney taking over. What? Imagine if Stanley Kubrick had decided to do something wicked this way comes. Like, there’s. There’s definitely a million ways that this could have been legitimately creepy. So I don’t know if. If you’re an 8 year old in 1983 and your grandparents won’t take you to anything else cool. This isn’t the worst thing. Like, you. You’ll get a little bit of those Halloween kind of spooky vibes from it. Now, you were mentioning Mr. Dark being like the devil proxy, and I got this vibe of, oh, he’s a lesser demon.
He didn’t seem. I mean, maybe because he turns into a smoldering corpse at the end, but I felt like he was kind of like, Disney can’t show you the real devil. They always show you the lesser devil. Right? Well, don’t they have a devil movie? But they. Yeah, I guess I saw him as like a lesser dude, maybe because of this whole like, autumn people thing. I guess we should start getting into the autumn people, which. It’s like reverse Brigadoon. They show up to your town because they. They were here. What did they say? 1891 was their previous visit, which is 40 years.
Because this move, this movie takes place roughly 1930s, based on a whole bunch of different, like, background props and stuff. They don’t overtly say it, but it’s basically 1930s that this all takes place pre. It’s Pre World War II. Yeah. Actually, this is a bit on Wiki about Ray Bradbury’s inspiration for the book, which is kind of interesting. It says one of the events in Ray Bradbury’s childhood that inspired him to become a writer was an encounter with a carnival magician named Mr. Electrico who commanded him to live forever. He made the 91 pretty good. The 12 year old Bradbury intrigued at the concept of eternal life revisited.
Mr. Elect Electric Psych Electric co. It’s kind of hard to say who spurred his passion for life by heralding him as the reincarnation of a friend lost in World War I. After that memorable day, Bradbury began writing non stop. When he was doing this book, you know, at one point he made him the villain instead of the. The hero of his life because I guess it makes for a better novel. But. And then the premise of this movie, I guess some of that autobiographical aspect of him dealing with the after effects of war but that gets rewound to like the Civil War.
So any talk of war or any tragedy seems like it’s implicating the Civil War in this case. Yeah, I guess we’re looking at 12 year old Bradbury. That would make this specifically 1932. So it does. It does sound more autobiographical. It almost sounds like this is Ray Bradbury’s version of when he met the carnival barker Mr. Electro. Can you just command electrical forever? Live forever. You can do it. They might not follow your command though. What? What? Or else what? You die? I mean that’s kind of. I won’t do what you tell me. You could go about it that way, I’m sure.
I have a couple other notes here too. I guess it’s. It’s worth pointing out that the whole name for this movie Something Wicked this Way comes as a Shakespeare quote from Macbeth. And it’s exactly cited. This Macbeth is interesting in that it’s about still a thing that kids read today in some high schools I guess in college and stuff. But it’s still somewhat relevant today. And it’s had many different adaptations but it has encoded some of the most original thinking on actual spells and blood magic and true occultism. Like the real deep, you know, guts of occult Disney.
That’s sort of what this entire movie name comes from. And the whole quo is by pricking of my thumb something wicked this way comes. And these are the witches that are predicting Macbeth is on his way now and he’s already gone mad. Yeah. Which I Robart gets to mumble at some point near the end I believe so. Well they go back and forth but they do this weird dueling banjos thing where one of them cites Shakespeare and then the next one cites A Christmas Carol and then the other guy just starts making up his own Quotes, I think.
But it’s almost like a rap battle, like a philosophical rap battle. But they ask and they say some pretty interesting things, which will be fun to pontificate about a little bit. Okay, well, I actually had to rewind about three times to make sure I got the quote right. With, seems they destroy people by granting their dearest wishes, as has been the way of the devil since God created the world. But this one is a weird version of that, because in needful things, in order to get the item from the shopkeeper, you almost have to agree that there’s like some exchange taking place.
And usually it’s that you’re going to do some favor. You’re going to get some other item for the shop or whatever. So there’s a very direct transactional nature to it. But in this movie, you just kind of learn about what these people want and then you just see them get it. There’s never a point when they’re enticed by something. Like, for example, one of the guys is talking about how he just wishes he could win the lottery one day. They play numbers, which is an interesting tangent in its own right. 1930s numbers is run by the mob, I believe.
We’re not talking about state lottery at this point. We’re talking about, like enough. Like you’re funding the black market, essentially. But the guy’s running numbers and he’s like, man, I wish I could hit. He says a hundred thousand, but he never makes any money on it. And then he plays a lottery while the carnival’s in town and he wins a thousand dollars from it. But it doesn’t seem like he really got a hundred. Like he didn’t get his wish fulfilled. And he also didn’t necessarily do anything. He just bought a lottery ticket the same way that he ever does.
So it seems a little bit non sequitur that now somehow his soul has been possessed by this carnival. Because they way under delivered, they gave him like 100th of what his actual desire was. And he never actually had to enter any sort of contract in order to get to it. Well, the teacher as well, she becomes young and blind. It’s like, wait, that wasn’t part of the deal. Or why is that part of the deal? And that’s also sort of a joke because they. And this is part of the movie, beating you over the head and exposition.
So as the movie’s opening, I want to say in the first, if not in the first minute, definitely in the first couple minutes. And they show this teacher, which I immediately recognize from Green Acres and a few other like classic shows. But she kind of has one of these faces like she’s a super tomboy. Kind of look like her, just be like she’s a gomer pile a little bit. Like her just being in the shot is kind of has a comedic effect to it. Like she has like a, like a funny look to her. But then they explain, this used to be the most beautiful woman in town.
And I had to look it up. Like, this doesn’t sound like that’s accurate. I’m not throwing any shade at her. I think the. She’s an awesome actress and the role that they placed her in. And then just to say that she’s. But when they do the transformation, it’s supposed to be her regressing back to, I don’t know, 20, 30 years earlier. But it’s just like it goes from, I don’t know, like Edna the Teacher and the Simpsons into, you know, fill in the blank of whatever hot supermodel of the 90s was. So just imagine Edna regressing into like Pam Anderson or something.
If we’re staying with early 90s references, yeah, sure. But the, yeah, the whole blind thing, I, I should note that the. You mentioned the first few minutes where I guess they thought it was incoherent, added that voiceover and post in that, you know, see, without that particular line of saying they, you know, she used to be the most beautiful person in town. That transformation would have had made no sense whatsoever. Because it’s not like she ever says something. Just said the first guy, she doesn’t say, oh, I wish I could be beautiful again. I wish I could be in my 30s or my 20s again.
And no one prompts her with that. No one like entices her with this promise. She’s just looking in the mirror and then regresses back to whatever this other, this look that she had was. And that’s it again, there’s like almost no stakes to it. It just happened immediately. And then you. I was left wondering exactly, is this really her or did she shape shift into someone completely different? Right. I guess sometimes exposition does help, even if they beat you over the head with it. Yeah. And yes, yes. But you know, when you have to just have somebody, some guy come and explain everything, that’s usually a bad sign.
Dune. Same problem, right? If the cable version has this insane like low quality animation intro that they add onto the TV version that just, just because honestly, if you’re going to watch the 1984 Dune, you just, just read the book first. And then watch the movie and you know you can work it out. You were not going to work it out just by watching that movie. So that’s the opposite of this, I guess, just so I can close my eyes and start blindly firing shots in all directions. I’d say one of the best examples of horrible exposition would just be the intro to Star wars where it’s like, you sign, you know, you, you got the ticket, you’re in the theater, the lights come down, the music’s playing.
Now read a short story. Like, come on guys. Like the whole point of being here so I don’t have to read a freaking book. The dead speak. There’s. There’s some exposition we needed. Where did he come from? Go play Fortnite was the answer. Apparently I do. Like, I don’t, I don’t remember if this is a Quentin Tarantino thing. I, I saw this at some point where there. Someone was pointing out attack the way that I think Quentin Tarantino does his style of exposition. And it’s always to have another character explain the backstory of a different character.
That when a character explains their own backstory, it’s kind of cheesy. If you have a narrator do it, it’s kind of cheesy. But if someone else in the story is like, oh, there goes so and so. Did you hear about them, like them giving the exposition, it somehow just gets an extra pass. It’s. It’s done slightly more tactfully because it’s not as direct. Yeah, take a Christopher Walken scene in pop fiction, right? That, that’s perfect. It’s just five minutes of exposition, pointless exposition. And it’s one of the best scenes in the movie. Right? Because it’s just this guy explaining about this other guy.
And I mean, after watching so many damn movies for this series and other ones, I’ve started to appreciate that. And this might be sacrilege. So go ahead and start sending the hate mail or open up the email and get ready for it. But the. Even a bad 90s or 2000s movie, if all things being equal and you get rid of the bell curve outliers, right? We’re talking just strict bell curve bad 90s and 2000s movies seem to be better than mediocre 70s and 80s movies, just because this, the cinematic sort of takes on everything, like just standards and writing and hero myth cycle and all these things, they just become almost ubiquitous.
The later and later things go on where it almost seems like they had a really trial. They were still trailblazing, I guess in the 70s and early 80s for a lot of these movies. I think it’s greatly about pacing, which means it’s about editing. Because starting in the 90s, you can start to digitally edit. You don’t have to. Yeah, that’s a really good point. You don’t have to put the film in the cutting machine anymore. So especially I’m thinking exploitation films, a low budget exploitation films. If you don’t have a genius editor, I mean, you’re going to get a slog of a movie even if there’s like cool stuff and a good acting, good effects, but the pace.
That’s kind of what happened to the black hole. I think the, the editing just killed that movie because the pacing just, it was so that you’re good actors, good sets, cool robots, but it’s still a slog. How does that happen, you know? Yeah, good point. So, yeah, I feel like the editing room does because I, you know, I’ve done a few. I’m. I haven’t really made films, but I made some music videos and you know, I get on my iPad and I was using Imovie or whatever and doing it on the train. You know, I don’t have to go into an editing bay to do that.
Oh, editing bay. I worked in editing bay in Disney. Yeah. So now was it digital at that time? I mean, 100. Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So just imagine after you have big reels of film, you’re trying to like, you know, get this one, get that one. That’s a. Well, here I’m wearing my smile T shirt. The Beach Boys. One of the reasons that did not come out in the 60s was the music was made completely modular and trying to edit all of that with tape was impossible. So come 2004, his band was like, we can put this in Pro Tools and just order it.
You know, it’s easy. Now, although we did have, where I worked in the Royal Disney post production facility, they did have a massive archive room. Like huge, huge rolls of these like huge metal that had actual film reels on it. And there was an entire like central part of the building where they digitized stuff. But they had all this, this massive gear. It’s almost like mainframe style, but it was used for processing analog into digital. And no one, you. I mean it had all been processed for probably a decade before I even showed up. But they left that room fully intact and all the lights and all the stuff on.
Because anytime anyone was doing a tour through the building, that’s like the showstopper room. Because no one’s really excited that you’ve got a room full of, like, 15 max, right? But they walk into this other room in these, like, huge, massive, with blinking lights and, like, spinning gears and stuff. Stuff. It added, like, an ambiance. But one of the secrets was, like, no one ever uses any of that for any reason. It’s just there to kind of look cool. I went to a camera shop a few days ago because my daughter’s getting a passport. She needs to get her passport.
And you. You have to get a professional. And we actually tried to do in the machine, and then the passport people were like, no, that picture sucks. Go get a professional. So we went to the camera store. Seems like a racket, but whatever. So while they’re doing that, I’m looking around. I. You know, I used to be a pretty serious photographer. I actually started university as a photojournalism major. But, yeah, I was looking. Oh, my God. Why are cameras are this expensive now? Film. Film was like 20 bucks for a roll of film. I mean, back in the day, we were paying, what, four or five bucks for a roll of film.
But that’s because it’s so niche now, right? Like, almost nobody’s using this stuff. So it’s just it. If you want to still do it, it costs money, you know? And they make film now, too, because I also have a camera store. It’s pretty popular here. We go in there and they’ve. They’ve got things called, like, vampire film. And what it is is that it just simulates really horrible film stock. But you pay, like, through the night. You pay, like, $250 or $3 per photo if you do the math on, like, the film reel. And it’s. It’s weird.
Like, you actually end up paying more for something that aesthetically didn’t look good at the time, but now it adds, like, a retro flair to it. So. So it’s weird. It’s like the whole. I used to do the hipster camera thing, you know, Lomo. Lomo. So they were made Soviet pocket cameras, right? And they just. They vignette, like, almost everything you can shoot. You can double, triple, or more exposure. You can basically shoot as many. You have to manually advance the film. So if you just keep shooting on the same piece of film, you can do crazy double exposures.
The colors, it usually look kind of whack on them. So, yeah, lomo’s tons of fun. This sounds like silly hipster stuff. Just use it to do all your photos. Well, now I do. But, yeah, this was like 2006, I think when I, When I was doing that, so. But it did, I mean, it did have a cool look. There’s one, you know, about 2017. That’s when I was like, oh, these iPhone filters are close enough now. You know, I don’t really need Lomo anymore. I still have one undeveloped roll of film though. I should develop that someday.
It’s probably freaky and expired now. If this movie had been shot using like some kind of a styling so that it had like a retro or a washed out look and it didn’t look like a straight to TV, 1980s kind of quality, I don’t know. I think that it would have added to the ambiance of this. Yeah, I mean, this guy direct, I mean, obviously. Well, one, he didn’t do the final version, did he? But let’s see what Jack Clayton made. Turn of the Screw. Oh, the Innocence. That’s a pretty serious early horror film. Or 1961.
He turned down Alien. That was stupid. Well, I think I. We wanted Ridley Scott to make Alien, I guess, or. What year was alien? 79. Okay. So he turned that down and then was like, I’m not going to make that mistake again. Let me go ahead and. And jump onto this. Something wicked this way comes. This thing’s gonna be a killer in the box office. Oh, he made the 1974 Great Gatsby, which I consider to be one of the most boring films ever made. So that’s not cool. Memento Mori, honestly. Yeah. The Innocence is probably his best film and that’s not one that people think of very often, you know, so he did these Henry James adaptations which were okay, but.
Yeah. So, you know, we don’t have like. I mean. Sorry, sorry. Jack Clayton. I’m not, I’m not going to give him the autura status, I guess, is what I’m saying. He doesn’t have like a director voice that I can really smell here. And I want to jump back a little bit because you mentioned the autumn people and I think that that’s worth discussing a little bit. Oh, I’ve been trying to turn back into that for. And keep talking about film and crap, so. Well, you said the autumn people and the autumn people is kind of. Well, it literally.
They come in the autumn. Right. They even the kids mentioned there couldn’t really be a carnival come in October. Right. I guess the carnivals don’t happen in October. I don’t, I don’t know what the rules for when the carnival is supposed to come through town because I assume that if it’s going through by train. Then it kind of differs. Like they’ll. They’ll be running year round. It’s not like you would just want to take off an entire quarter of the year and not make money. But again, Illinois. So maybe it’s a weather thing. Like summer is really the only time it’s like reasonable to do it or anything.
It doesn’t look like it’s all that cold at any point. No one’s, you know, they’re. Everyone’s wearing just normal clothing out for parades and stuff. I’m grasping at straws here. I. I think they’re just trying to say our town is po dunk and crappy. They keep saying no one ever visits and stuff. Yeah, well, I do believe that part, but. So not only does the carnival come during autumn, but the reference to autumn people. And I think this makes way more sense when Mr. Dark is going on his rants with Charles Willard, who is the. The dad of not Willard, but Will Holloway.
Charles Holloway, which is Will Holloway’s dad. But his dad is kind of like a grandpa because he’s super old. Like I would assume that he’s late 60s, early 70s or something. I looked up Jason. Jason Robart’s actually actual age for his. When he was 61, which he’s not. He must have partied pretty hard. They. They lay again, the exposition thing. They lay it on real thick that he is just const. Constantly thinking about how close he’s basically on door death’s doorstop. He’s like even telling his son constantly, like, I might not be around here much longer.
He’s like, dad, stop talking about death. So you get the feeling that he’s. He’s laying it on thick that he’s super old. But that going to the autumn people. Autumn people also might refer to someone that would prey on those that are in the autumn of their lifetime. Right. They’re in like the final months of September of their year. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And. And I guess they do this a little more directly where Ms. Mr. Dark meets him in a library at the end. And because he’s the one guy, I guess, that hasn’t been tempted enough.
And this, it gets a little confusing because again, those two examples I already gave the guy that wins the lottery and the teacher that just looks into a mirror and gets younger. It’s not like they ever had to accept any sort of premise. Right. So I don’t know why this guy doesn’t just magically get younger. Exactly. Like the school teacher just magically got younger. With no intervention. But. But Mr. Dark is trying to kind of egg him into, okay, just accept this deal. And he opens up a book, and he’s like, how young do you want to go? 30? And then he doesn’t respond.
And he’s like, page out of this book, and he starts counting it one by one. And he’s like, 31, 32. And he stops about every five years. And he explains why each of these years is still not, like, a horrible way to go back. It’s like 35. 35. You could still run up a flight of stairs without getting winded. And then he gets to 39, and he’s like, you sure? 30? And he rips it, and he’s like, all right, now you’re old. Now you’re screwed. Sorry. So I guess according to 40 used to be old. Yeah.
Once you hit 40, you are now an autumn person. Like the. The autumn people are coming after you once you hit 40. And you might want to sell your soul to trim off another 10 years. I guess. I. I hear your asking. With the carnival comes. It’s just the carnies. So I guess they maybe are like vampires, right? Like, they’re taking everyone off into the ether and feeding off their energy. And maybe when they’re gone, they come back for more, you know, because it’s been a little while since the carnival was in town. So based on this movie alone.
Let’s ignore that. There’s like a. Like a book and a screenplay. It’s based on everything. But what do you think that. Is this the first stop on the carnival? Do they completely expend the people that they take over by the time they get to the next town, so that it’s perpetually. They always. That’s what I’m saying. Yeah. Okay, so they suck all the life force out of them before they get to the next town and have to repeat the process. Yeah, that’s kind of where I was gone. That’s like a reverse Brigadoon, you know? So they only show up when they need more souls.
Seems. Do they go to other towns? Is it just this town? Is it? You know, that’s never made clear if they’re actually traveling or it’s just the spot. Yeah, good point. And it’s sort of weird, too, because they don’t really do anything interesting. Once you fall victim to this carnival, that’s kind of it. You just become part of the carnival, but you don’t do anything for them. You don’t see a pretty hip parade, the murder parade. They throw pretty Hip parade. I wrote down. What was it? I had a good note for that. Supernatural Death Posse is out and about.
Yeah. And there’s a little bit of humor, I think, to it. So I was thinking of the Prisoner TV show during that parade scene. You know, just that kind of ominous group of surreal looking people. You know, it had a very Twilight Zone, Outer Limit, original style feel where it’s like there’s just people acting differently. And that’s the spooky part. But. But again, there’s a humor aspect to it because the town’s barber, who has this huge handlebar mustache and a big bushy beard and everything, he gets turned into the bearded lady. And there’s a scene when they’re going on this parade and the shot is from inside his old barber shop because he’s now lost his mind to this dark carnival.
But there’s a huge sign that’s, you know, like beard trimmings, two bucks as he walks by his own barber shop. That’s kind of like showing him being taken over. And then the other one is that the guy that runs the cigar shop, he dress. They dress him up like an Indian, but the Indian is the exact same outfit and headdress and everything as the wooden Indian outside his cigar shop. So that one almost felt like, like, you know, a little dose of Euro medicine. But he got converted into the same sort of thing that he was using to exploit.
Yeah, that scene also, for some reason, made me think of Disneyland because they got the. The Country Bear as a cigar store Indian. At least still in Tokyo. I don’t know if they kept that one in America, but still in Tokyo, lots of cigars are still in Tokyo. And cigar. I mean, I remember growing up the cigar shop was where you went to get candy and comic books. It was one of the same. I do love how people are just handing around cigars in this movie. You want a cigar? Here you go. I got. Got five in my pocket.
And. And the guy that wins the lottery, right? He wins the lottery. And there was this very specific phrase that, I don’t know, maybe just the thing of its time, but they keep describing these crappy cigars that they have to smoke because they’re, you know, poor people in this tiny town. And it’s like, oh, man, one day we’re gonna get these. A Cuban cigar rolled on the fat thighs of some Cuban hottie. Like that’s. That’s the reference is that your cigars are rolled on the thighs of some Cuban, you know, chick. And they’re talking about that earlier in the movie and then when he wins the lottery, another guy’s like, hey, sir, you want, you want one of these cigars to celebrate? It was rolled on the thighs of a hot Cuban lady.
You know what I mean? He’s like, oh my God, this is my day. He’s smoking this cigar and then the Ferris wheel stops and they’re like, oh, you’re gonna have to get into this booth with this lady. I’m just imagining just like some old dude just blasting Cuban cigars, blowing smoke all over the place, you know? Like, was that her fantasy? Is that how they her into the carnival? She was like, I wish some old guy would just start blowing Cuban cigar smoke into my face. I couldn’t think of anything. I want more. There’s so many weird turns of the phrase in here, which is that Bradbury? I don’t know what’s.
Oh, another one. That’s bizarre. Is the ain’t right to teach boys to swim. It’s like, why I don’t get that. Is that old timey logic that I don’t get. There’s a lot of old timey stuff in here, which I kind of like. I kind of like some of these weird old timey phrases. Is. Now here’s something that is scary in the movie. Freaking Robert. The, the, the, the ginger boy. He creeped me out. He’s the one who throws the rock in the mirror. Cougar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then kind of runs away. So, so who, so that’s another one.
Is, is Mr. Cougar a kid that turns into an adult through the magic of the carnival? Or is he a very simple minded adult that they use the magic to turn him back into a little kid? I, I couldn’t figure that out after watching this. Maybe that’s why he’s so extra creepy, you know, and he doesn’t talk so that much. He has a Children of the Corn vibe to him. Yes, that’s it. That’s it. You put the nail on the head there. Yeah. Village of the damn children of the corn, that sort of thing. And he also gives me like a Lenny feel like if this were Of Mice and Men.
He’s kind of like a Lenny. A more malicious one, I guess. Lenny. Well, he seems. Lenny’s like accidentally seems to do horrible things. This boy seems to like want to watch the world burn, I guess. But he’s also just kind of at the command of Mr. Dark. True. I mean, yeah, I guess once you have been transformed, you are now just part of the darkness. Of the carnival. So the wickedness of her keeping it to the. The title. There is a. I guess an interesting theme in this whole movie is that the fact that they come after the autumn people.
The carnival does. They’re coming after anyone that is kind of a weak spirit to feed on them a little bit. But that Mr. Dark also directly references that they’re essentially eating people’s fear and pain, and it’s like, delicious to them. And he talks about a diet of all these horrible things that happen to people, which. I don’t know. I feel that’s like a very interesting occult theme. That’s basically psychic vampirism. Right. This is loose energy. Right. Which. I don’t know. I do. I need my pain. Is it like Captain Kirk says in Star Trek 5? I don’t know.
Yeah, well. And I think this is just Disney revealing what’s actually happening behind every other Disney movie up to this point where they just don’t tell you that this is kind of what. It’s just loose drainage. Star Trek 5 is kind of the same story, isn’t it? Okay. Except for the trying to go meet God part. But, yeah, yeah, we have the cult leader guy in that movie, you know, like the Mr. Dark here inexplicably turning people into his employ or psychic employee or whatever. There’s so many references here, right? It. Like the clown. And it is kind of Mr.
Dark, in this case, doctor sleep. I guess I’m just gonna do all Stephen King because Stephen King just loves sucking the life out of children, I’m assuming. But Bradbury. And Bradbury, but. And doctor Sleep. That one is basically where they take steam out of people, but they have to scare it out of them. I mean, we’re. This is Monsters, Inc. All over again, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except they don’t. They don’t start laughing at the end of doctor Sleep, do they? And the. The. Another thing, too, is that the way that they show that Mr. Cougar as this old man, young kid thing is he gets on a carousel, but the carousel spins backwards super fast.
And I was just like, this is just Superman 1. This is just the Superman movie when he has to go back and save Lois Lane by reversing time. And that movie came out two years before this one. So there is a very real chance that someone was like, hey, let’s. Let’s. Let’s go ahead and repurpose that a little bit. Again, I don’t know if that was in the original Ray Bradbury story about specifically going in reverse really fast. Now, my notes on that are time reverses when you move the carousel backward. I serious don’t know if that was a joke or not.
Okay. I don’t even know I wrote that now, but it was confusing, I guess was the point. So, yeah, the actual quote that Mr. Dark has is lonely beds, lost loves. That is our diet. I’m paraphrasing that a little bit, but he’s basically tells him straight out, like, our diet is feeding off of your fear and misfortune. And he’s the royal we. But also on speaking on behalf of the. The carnival itself. This dark carnival. Yeah, I mean, you could put them in like, I guess, archon territory or something. Another quote from that same scene. We can smell young boys a thousand miles away.
Like, all right, Disney, the mask is slipping a little bit. Go ahead and fix that. That. Yeah, I wrote his introduction. Then, like, kind of stopped writing quotes for the most part because I can’t. I can’t keep up with the ranting I did write. Do you want to be the ruler of the rides? That was kind of fun. Crappy carnival rides, you know, this could be Disneyland. To be ruler of the ride, you know, give me some cool rides, not the tilt a whirl. And I guess it’s worth just saying though that carnivals are. And I’m not afraid of clowns.
And I guess carnival and circus are starkly different things. Maybe. At least, at least now, well, the carnival is often outside of the circus, right? Fair point. Yeah, fair point, fair point. But I do remember that carnivals being pretty terrifying places to be at just because you get a opposite of Disney World or Disneyland, where at least in Disney World or Disneyland, maybe kids get snatched. But I don’t know, you look around and be like, all right, there’s enough safeguards in place here. This is corporate friendly enough here that it doesn’t seem like anyone might murder me at any given second and I’ll just disappear.
But I have always gotten that feeling from any state fairgrounds I’ve ever gone to. I always feel like this ride could kill me. No one would care. Like, someone could actually kidnap me. No one would care. It’s really dark here. It’s not well lit. The people running these rides maybe don’t care at all about my well being, which is kind of exuded by a lot of videos that you might see on like these carnival rides and stuff. Stuff. But again, I guess the scariest part of carnivals is the lack of regulation. And I say that somewhat as a libertarian and I realize It’s a hypocritical.
But man, maybe like FDA and carnival rides is. Is where we do need some sort of oversight. Yeah. I mean the whole part of the excitement is not knowing if your tilta worlds. You’re gonna fly off suddenly because the bolt went kind of. That’s part of the excitement kind of. Although that one is way more real because like if you go onto a roller coaster anywhere Disney or, or out a carnival ride. But really the fun part is that your body is telling you you’re about to die. Like whatever you’re doing right now is very dangerous.
You might die from this. And that’s what gives you the thrill. It doesn’t necessarily require an extra. Oh my God. That doesn’t look like it’s screwed in properly like that. That’s a psychological edge because you don’t quite. Yeah. You know that Disney’s probably not going, you know, Disney’s probably not going to kill you. Unless it’s the, the Roger Rabbit ride in Disneyland. And then let talk about it. Oh, I, I’ve. I have only written the Japanese one, which is fantastic. Well, we talked about this. But that’s one of the most gruesome deaths that’s ever happened on Disney property.
Was the, the in Disneyland, California. Yes, yes, that has come up. Someone got their entire leg desleaved and then the rest of their body like. Desleaved. Yeah. What’s more disturbing than the. Well, that’s the most disturbing. But this carnival or, or Pleasure island in Pinocchio, that’s, you know, Pleasure island by a wide, wide factor. Yeah. I mean the donkey scene, the donkey transformation is more disturbing than anything in this movie. And, and they don’t explicitly really say what bad happens to the people. I mean, you definitely assume that something bad is happening to them. But let’s say it’s me, right.
Worst case scenario is I put on a dress and do a parade. That’s kind of the worst case scenario of what happens in something wicked this way comes. Worst case scenario in Pinocchio is you just never. Like you’re no longer a human and you’re doing manual labor as an animal under duress and probably starved and getting whipped for the rest of your life. It’s. It’s not even the competition. Well, I guess the real horror would start when the carnival. When the storm happens and does not end. Mr. Dark, as happens in this movie. But the storm comes, the carnival’s gone.
I guess all the people go with them. And now you’re in this weird like, you know, Interdimensional hellscape of a carnival with the carnies, maybe the autumn people. What if you’re a Juggalo, though, man? That might be your thing. Well, yeah, yeah, but not in 1980 or 1932. Let’s keep it specific to the movie. So. And you’re. Maybe you’re wasting away like Mr. Dark does. Like, the regular people are just being vampired, you know, I think there were Juggalos in 1930s. They might not have gone by that name and they wouldn’t have had the. The. The, like, convenient category to fall behind.
But I absolutely think that that whole feeling of being a jugalo is something timeless, like that’s an aggregor, like an archetype that young. Just. They’re working at other carnivals. They were already with the carnival, probably, so they weren’t here in this town for this one. Is Mr. Dark a jugalo? I, I. You’re gonna have to answer that. You’re. You’re deeper in the posse than I am. I would say if he’s down with the clown, then he’s a juggalo. I guess he is, because he runs the carnival, so he must. What the hell do I know? Unless he hates the clown.
He’s like, you damn clown. Why are you in my carnival? Which he should be able to get rid of him because he’s the, you know, like, supernatural leader of this car. There are no clowns in this movie, which seems like they could have. That’s a. That’s a freebie to add a little. Yeah, right. I don’t know, man. They left some stuff on the table here. Well, they have a little bit of collo music. Or was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They got a little bit of carnival music going. They do, yeah, they do. Brass Band Beethoven. That was kind of weird.
Just a funeral dirge on my subtitles. That’s Brass Band Beethoven. My favorite character by far, I already mentioned is Tom Fury. Who is this? It’s. He’s almost a Civil War shaman. He’s a. He’s like a white hillbilly that I’m gonna assume fought for the Confederates in. In the Civil War. Just based on his whole vibe, but now he sells lightning rods. But he knows all about ancient Egyptian magic and. And sort of like folk magic. And he wears his old, like, Civil War hat, but he just talks to the kids and gets all the kids, like, jazzed up about occultism.
So I don’t know. He was like, a really cool character to have in this. I can ruin him for you. I’m looking up. Yeah. Twilight Zone episode is in season three. It’s called Still Valley, where in a. In a way, in the backwoods in Kentucky or whatever, they meet a. They meet a witch man. And that. That is the Civil War shaman that kind of outdoes Tom Fury, so I will doubt that again, he had to operate within the limits he was given. This guy, the guy that played him, Royal Dano, he has a massive, massive IMD filmography.
He’s been in, like, damn near every single Wild west movie. But also, interestingly enough, he is the voice in the hall of Presidents as President Lincoln. Oh, so that means he’s early 60s, too, because the Disney version is just Lincoln, so I assume. Well, I don’t know that’s the case, but correct. And he was also the. The. The audio animatronic Lincoln for the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln attraction, which was the 1964 World’s Fair, which then got brought to Disneyland in 65. So technically, it started as a World’s Fair thing, and he nailed the role of Lincoln and Animatronic Lincoln so well that they.
It became a permanent fixture. I did recently read, like, when they first did the animatronics for the World’s Fair, they had to delay it by a few weeks. They were working. Lincoln would do his speech and then start glitching, like, at the end of the speech. So he’d make his Gettysburg Address wherever he doesn’t end his. So they, like, wouldn’t let people see that. I think they should let people in. That’s cool. That. I think that’s also a Simpsons episode. Oh, yeah, yeah. Itchy and Scratchy Land. All the robots glitch out. Yeah. So. But I mean, specifically with Abraham Lincoln, I could have sworn I’ve seen that somewhere.
And he was also in Twin Peaks. Oh, the actor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The actor was in Twin Peaks. Yeah. Although think of the credits for that show. The credits go on for, like, three minutes because they have to show you, like, 80 names. Yeah. There’s so many people in that show. Because I’m like, who was he in Twin Peaks? I’m like, oh, come on. I don’t. I. Of course I don’t remember who he was in Twin Peaks. He also mentions how cats suck in baby’s breath, which is one of those really creepy old wives tales that I remember growing up hearing about.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one and that I had credit to it. But. What did you say? I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one? Yeah. Never. Oh, man. There’s. There’s a number of other 1980s movies, horror movies, that. That reference this one of them, I think, was the Gate, although I might just be connecting dots here, but that there’s a very real premise that if you let a cat get near a child or a baby in particular while they’re sleeping, that the cat will suck its breath out and it’ll die. And I think that this is one of those early explanations to sids, like Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or any other number of ways that a baby just expires by the time you put it to bed and you come back and check on it.
And a lot of people would end up blaming the cat. So there’s probably a lot of cats out there that got taken out because someone was like, it stole my baby’s breath. Oh, okay. I think the cat slept in my room when I was a kid a lot, so my parents don’t know about that habit. They’re like. They’ll stand on your chest or, like, if you’re going to sleep or laying down and, like, get up and, like, sniff your. Your face a little bit, and it kind of feels like they’re trying to steal your soul. They might actually be.
Cats are just tiny lions, aren’t they? Sure. Anything else in your notes you want to hit? Because they’re definitely deep avenues in this. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, I feel like we’re missing something scattered just because, like, the way that the movie the. They’ll touch on something, and then it won’t really get explained or fleshed out until later on. So I had to keep going back and, like, revising some of this. So one of the interesting bits here is that that Will Holloway is the main character, more or less. Like he’s the. The main protagonist out of the two kids.
And if this is a Disney movie and it’s kind of gotten all the scary stuff shaved off, it’s because it’s sort of for a kid audience. So I assume that that means that the kids are usually the main protagonist, regardless of play time or screen time or anything. So Will Holloway, who kind of looks like the kid from Christmas story mixed with McAu Culkin, is the wish master. Dyed his hair. So, like, that’s. That, honestly, is one of the creepier aspects of this movie that I didn’t know about that. But. So he. He’s one of the main characters, and his best friend is Jim Nightshade.
And there’s this whole premise where Will Holloway’s dad Feels inadequate because he’s so damn old. And then Jim Nightshade’s dad is this, like, early 30s virulent guy. He’s out in Africa doing these expeditions, and he’s like, my dad, you sent me a letter that says I’m gonna get a yellow and green parrot, and he’s gonna send me a shrunken head, and he’s gonna send me a necklace full of human teeth. And he’s gonna. And I was just like, oh, I don’t think this kid realizes that whoever’s sending him these things, like, that’s your dad, dude. Like, that’s your dad’s head.
Those are your dad’s teeth. You just don’t realize it yet. And they. They kind of play into this too. I. Because I get the very strong impression that his dad’s not coming back. His dad is either dead, his dad. By all description, the. The dates don’t line up because it wouldn’t have been the 30s. It would have been, like the 50s or 60s. But this sounds like Michael Rockefeller, the guy that goes to Papua New guinea and never comes back home because he gets eaten by the exact same tribe that he was going to sort of investigate.
And if that’s not what it’s about, there’s only a small handful of reasons that you personally would be in Africa in the 1930s. Sending your kids shrunken heads and human teeth necklaces, and that’s that you’re working for the Smithsonian to just take over other cultures and erase, you know, any. Any sort of contributions that they might have had to modern culture. Just get those out of here. Or he is privately wealthy under who knows what terms, and he’s just out there spending his own money doing this out of pure malicious, sadistic, I guess, like, morbid curiosity, because who goes out of the country and, like, starts sending your kid human teeth necklaces? I don’t know, but he’s not coming back.
Yeah, this is on the wiki. The wiki plot description. So who knows who wrote that? But it lists. It is heavily implied that his father walked out on them. So, you know, it might have just been Mom. Of course Mom’s trying to cover up. Why is she sending shrunken heads? But Mom’s catfishing the little kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Teeth Mom. Okay, new theory. Mom killed dad, and mom is sending him, like, fingers and, like, nail clippings, and he’s like, my dad loves me. Look, he sent me his finger. Or. Or Dad’s been kidnapped, and there’s actually a blue velvet situation.
Going on in this town. Tom Fury is really Frank Booth. So in, in this town it sounds more and more like needful things as we go here. But so in this town down, you’ve got cross dressing, mind control slaves, you’ve got people running mob games of numbers. You’ve basically got mothers killing fathers, right? Jim Nightshade, you’re naming your kid after literal poison. It almost sounds like this town was waiting for this carnival to come. Like the this didn’t happen. That was the carnival did that, I guess, but the production did it to their kids. That was a standard carnival ride in the 1930s.
I don’t know if you looked that up, but that was just one of the most popular attractions. It was called Spider ride. And you would just go inside the tent and they would just throw spiders at you right next to the room where they were incubating babies. There’s also a really strange scene at the very beginning of the movie. And it’s. And it’s. I think it starts with the two kids on that really bad green screen roof where they’re like hugging on a chimney and they’re doing something. I can’t remember what the hell they’re doing up there, but it’s like a windy day.
And as they’re kind of like figuring out what they want to do, a flyer just flies out of nowhere into his hand. And it’s like, oh, there’s a carnival coming. And then the next scene they show is outside on the city street and you can see Mr. Dark in the far background with his back turn. He hasn’t had a cameo yet in the movie, but he’s got his big top hat on and a big black coat. You just see some random dude just throwing flyers into the air. There’s no one else on the street street, and there’s like seven or eight flyers just flying around.
So it would have been weird. Like you like the carnival comes to town and the guy running the carnival just is standing in the middle of the street just throwing flyers into the air. And that’s the way that, I mean, he’s supposed to be a barker, but I don’t know. And he wasn’t barking at that point. It. It seemed like that was intentionally added there, but it was such a tiny little detail that if you didn’t look for it, you wouldn’t have even noticed that he was there throwing those in the air. Well, he’s on the wind, right? I assume the carnival comes into town and leaves town like a tornado.
Yeah. And they make some references to, like, blowing back away into dust and stuff. So it’s as if the wind, like, literally brings them in. See, since I watched Muppets Haunted Mansion for this, I kept thinking of Pam Greer as the bride because that’s the character in the Haunted Mansion. But when you look at the list, she is listed as the Dust witch. See, it does make a little bit of sense on there. And when the kids go to the carnival, they see coming in at night, the first thing they see is this huge train car that says the Temple of Temptation.
And the first thing that they do is they break into this lady’s sort of cabin, right? They into her little booth and that she’s the spider lady. She kind of is wearing this veil that kind of references spider webs, I think, in a way. And as they’re poking around, she commands this spider to sort of. I don’t know if attack is the right word, but just appear. And they’re like, oh, my God, it’s a spider. And they run out. Yeah, well, they’ll meet some more spiders later, won’t they? Have you ever seen or heard of the TV show Carnival? It was HBO, early 2000s.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I actually have it on disc here. No, I’ve dead one on disk there. Okay. Same makers, I think, or something. But yeah, yeah, yeah, that, that one, I always, that was always on my two watch list. And I guess this many years down the line, we’ll. We’ll see when I watch it. But yeah, it kind of feels like Carnival. Is this carnival like it. It’s this carnival that goes town to town, sucking people’s, like the autumn people’s life. And, and there’s one like, I think the coolest CGI scene in this whole movie, aside from the lady that bust out of that class coffin.
It’s all animated. There’s a scene where Mr. Dark shows the kids his arm. And his arm has this moving kaleidoscope tattoo on it. And it looks really good for, for whatever, whatever technique they use to do it. It looked phenomenal. And there’s a character in the carnival series that has almost that exact same ability where he has this, these tattoos that almost turn into Rorschach tests where that, as you look at it, they like, shift around and kind of tell you a story. I thought that was kind of a, a cool nod. And I don’t know how much carnival was based on this premise, but it seems more than just coincidence.
I, I, from what I know, I would agree. I’m actually looking through the Legacy part information on something Wicked this Way Comes which doesn’t mention it but maybe they should have. I don’t know. So here’s the deepest dive that I did based on this movie because they make a few different references to the witching hour and I think they, they cite it at 3:00. I, I actually think I wrote this down as a. I was just looking at that note. Oh 3am is the souls midnight which I think is a great time to try the wild method to for lucid dreaming but whatever.
Well and, and I did a. I, I guess a little bit of a deep dive on this because I hadn’t heard. I’ve heard of the witching hour but I didn’t realize that there was an exact time of 3am that this was and it kind of true and there’s even some physiological evidence to back up this specific period of time and a whole bunch of other kind of like like non secular versions of this too. So for example the phrase witching hour itself shelf dates to like 1775. There was a poem called Night and Ode by Reverend Matthew West.
And the reason here’s a few reasons why they might call this the witching hour. One of them is that Christians believe that Christ died on the cross around 3pm in the middle of the day. So if you invert that by making it nighttime. Well now you’ve got the night version of the crucifixion. I guess that’s one that’s like the Christian aspect of it. Also if you’re walking around the middle of the afternoon being it’s a witching hour. Now it’s weird you get away with that at three in the morning. If you were graveyard shift maybe so, so that’s.
So 3pm Is the holy hour. And that because Satan and all the demons of hell and the lesser demons, maybe Mr. Dark they exist to pervert and invert anything that is holy. So by nature that would be 3:00am the opposite of 3:00pm and I guess the Christian thinking is that this is when demonic activity is the most heightened. Heightened. There’s your dreams or demonic activity which some more hardcore versions of the church would probably agree with that. Well and, and speaking of the church of 1535 there’s an actual. I don’t know if it’s a papal decree, but there was.
The Catholic Church prohibited any activities whatsoever between 3 and 4 in the morning because of emerging concerns of witchcraft in Europe. So there was, it was on the books. This wasn’t just like an old wives tale. There was Actually laws being set that like oh, you don’t do anything at 3am like enough. No one’s doing anything good at 3am so just keep your ass inside. Apparitions and an extra sensory perception is commonly reported more between the hours of 2am and 4am which would put 3am at the exact midpoint peak of those. So more evidence also during the night late around witching hour.
Not just like lucid dreaming or anything or you were saying wild. But not only at 3am but also if you are going to sleep. This is when symptom if you’ve got a cough or if you’re sick at all, your symptoms are actually going to increase around this exact time because this is when your body starts sending white blood cells around like fight off whatever you’re going through. So your fever, your fever will raise. You might be coughing hard, you might have problems breathing a little bit more at this exact moment be just because your body’s going through like repair cycle.
So if, if you’re with an old person and I guess one of the the premises in this movie is that the witching hour this 3am time like that’s most likely when you’re going to die and if you die in your sleep because there it comes up in context of Charles Holloway, right Will’s old ass dad. So the. That’s the idea is that he might go. He might die high during this 3am time period. And, and that actually again it, it corresponds with how the body works. Also in the investment market the last hour of stock trading is between is at three and then the bond market or the bond market closes at 3 and then the stocks at 4.
But that’s almost this inversion of the witching hour. And then finally Washington D.C. they actually wrote in not the witching hour but they had something called the switching hour which had to be a direct play on this. But the switching hour was that they would assign curfews because they noticed that the police noticed that the average DUI and violent attacks were happening around 2am and 3am and so they, they try to switch when you were allowed to be out in curfew. You switching hour. Finally a whole different tangent that I’ll. I’ll keep somewhat limited here but related to this whole concept of the witching hour and weird thing happened at 3am A subset of somnambulism, which is a fancy word for sleepwalking.
But there is an entire section on Wikipedia that has terrified me and it’s titled homicidal sleepwalking. And this Is a real thing. And there are a list of legal precedents when people. People have killed their partners and said that it happened while they were sleepwalking and got off on it. So there is legal precedent that you can murder someone if you can prove that you were sleepwalking while it happened and you are not guilty of the crime? Is that what the Blade Runner is trying to say? I can think of a number of movies that kind of played out.
Oh, sorry. I don’t mean the movie Blade Runner, but the Blade Runner. Oscar Pastorius, the South African runner who killed his girlfriend in his sleep. Allegedly. That’s. That’s what I’m saying. That’s a. That’s a high profile case of that. Hey, I’m a sleepwalker sometimes, so I don’t know. I do remember in the military that was a big deal that if someone was found sleepwalking, almost everyone that I saw that. And this is in during training and basic and stuff. But if you got caught sleepwalking, you were out like you got washed out. They didn’t want people sleepwalking walking.
Oh, I would never have made in the military. What do you know? I don’t do it that often, but. But it’s happened. You wanted to get out. Maybe. Maybe they don’t do it during drafts, but if you wanted to get out, you could just start, you know, fake sleepwalking. How the hell are they gonna prove that you weren’t really asleep? I don’t know. Maybe you don’t want to push that button. But I don’t think I need to be worried about getting drafted anymore. Maybe another Simpsons reference. This is one of those things that I’ve seen in so many different movies and TV shows that I can’t even pinpoint what the origin was.
But it seems that something wicked this way comes. There’s a certain point when the kids are sneaking around the carnival and they see the exotic dancing lady tent, and it’s just a line full of dads that are, like, waiting to get in. You hear, you know, like, belly dancing music. But there’s a hole in the tent, and you see them, like, get down and look through it. And then there’s a shot just seeing this eyeball looking through this creepy carnival tent, watching a bunch of, like, sweaty dads. The correct term, by the way I said in the movie is erotic exotic dancers.
Okay, yeah, but that scene with the two kids peeking through a hole to look at dancing ladies, I’ve seen that so many times. I don’t know if this is the Source. Or if this is just playing again, off that same motif. But it’s one of my favorites. Like, if you’re gonna sneak into a carnival with your friend at any point, you better be catching a little shot of the peep show at some point. That dude. EQD show. Yeah. Another random observation here. This one was like, the barber. I didn’t understand this at all. He becomes the bearded lady, but his interaction with the supernatural is that he talks to, I think, like a fortune teller.
And she’s like, I see the colors red, white, and blue. And he’s a barber, and he’s got a red, white, and blue pole outside of his shop. And as soon as she says that, he’s like, it’s a miracle. And it’s like, what’s a miracle, dude? That. That she guessed that you were a barber, that you lived in America and just listed off, like, three colors. And now you’re fat. Now you turn into a bearded lady because you were impressed that she said red, white, and blue. That would be the worst way to lose your soul is being fat by being like, oh, my God, it’s a miracle.
You guessed my favorite color. Like, and you’re wearing, like, a green shirt. Dirt. I think I’m sensing the color green. You’re like, oh, my God, take my soul. I’m in. Some people are easily sold on things. Let’s see what else. Okay, this one. I. I haven’t fleshed this idea out more. And I don’t know if we’re gonna revisit this movie for any reason at any point, but when the kids get caught sneaking into the carnival at night, night, and Jim wants to ride the. The carousel the opposite way, he wants to ride it forwards because he assumes that if Mr.
Cougar goes from old man to young kid by going backwards, then he can go. Jim Nightshade can go from being a young kid to an older gym Nightshade, and then go and find his dad or something like that. Like, his whole. He’s got the biggest daddy issues you’ve ever seen. Worse than any stripper that you’ll ever come across. Jim Nightshade is like that times 10. So he’s just always about his dad. But when they get caught, Mr. Dark has Mr. Cougar adult version, kind of like lifting them up by their shirts. And he makes this line, and it was so such a specific line.
And he has these weird monologues that come up later, but he says, Put them down, Mr. Cougar. Bring them back to earth again. And I Realized that maybe it was just a play on like how high away from the ground they were. But it almost sounds like maybe they infiltrated some sort of astral realm. Like they, they entered a different dimension by sneaking into the carnival at night and seeing this magic happen. That they were no longer actually on Earth and he was literally tell him, okay, bring them back to Earth. Like get them out of this, this mystical supernatural realm.
Well, yeah, that, like I said, that’s kind of why I assuming happens when the carnival leaves. That it exists in some, some weird between space or something is at least what I’d like to think. The mirror universe. I don’t know. There’s another one that kind of slipped through. But Will Holloway’s mom at one point makes this, this statement. She’s like, why do boys keep their windows open at night? And he responds and he says warm blood, mom. And she’s like oh, that’s right. You know what I mean? But, but this I, I, maybe I read into a little bit too much, but this is in the context of him and his friends sneaking out at night, going to this unknown dark carnival which could potentially kill them or steal their souls.
But also Jim Nightshade, his dad, is this like adventure, at least the story that they’ve built up around him to you know, quell the fact that his mom killed him, but that he’s on this adventure in Africa or whatever and that he’s like this warm blooded American that’s like always out for conquest West. So the fact that the boys sleep with their windows open, it’s almost like they are the most receptive, the most eager and available to like just jump out the window going on an adventure at any point, which they are literally doing throughout this entire movie.
They’re just constantly sneaking out at night and going to this carnival. So I don’t, I thought that was an interesting aspect of not. It’s not just about why you letting you know the air out of the house, but it’s like why are you such an adventurous spirit? Why are you so damn unpredictable? Why do you keep your window open? I sleep with my windows open. Are you ready to go on an adventure at any given moment? Sure. Although you can’t really enter or exit the house through my windows easily. So I’m on the second floor and this is not a good idea.
Oh. So something I, maybe we should touch on for a second is they make a point that Holloway was born a minute before midnight Night Day before Halloween, whereas Night Shade is born a minute into Halloween. So I Don’t know if that is just, you know, charming poeticness or has some. Maybe the next day would actually have a little more going for it, you know. And on in that same point where they’re like bringing out some of these weird details, they also start asking some interesting rhetorical questions. So I’ll repeat those, but then we’ll answer them because I.
One of my favorite things to answer rhetorical questions because like don’t tell me that this wasn’t meant to be answered. So as Tom Fury gets kidnapped by Mr. Dark towards the end of the movie and they’ve got him in like this MK Ultra Electro shock therapy chair and there’s almost a Frankenstein aspect to it because he’s like, are you ready to meet your. Your bride? And it’s just like, oh, is this gonna turn into a Frankenstein’s bride Frankenstein kind of thing. Like they had all the set ready for that. But then Tom Fury being the badass Civil War shaman that he is, which is one of my favorite archetypes now, Civil War shaman.
But the guy is, is going off, Mr. Dark is going off on all these rants and he says lightning reveals our dark corners, the rain washes away our dust. And he’s trying to ask him when is this storm going to come? Tom Fury. And Tom Fury is just throwing out these zen ass questions, these, he’s like, what color is lightning? Where does thunder go when it dies? Like I don’t know. I kind of like these, these weird philosophical questions being thrown out in the middle in the climax of a Disney non horror movie. But the chance that anyone left this theater, like where does thunder go when it dies? Right, it goes to the land of dead thunder.
I don’t know. That’s the, that’s not a good answer at all. And when, when Mr. Dark is trying to coax Tom Fury into giving him the answer of when is the storm coming? Which I guess they Dark Carnival supernatural, but they can’t tell when the weather shifts. But he starts enticing him with a beautiful bride and the references that he gives are more beautiful than pocahontas, which was 17, or Helen of Troy, which was about 12, based on Greek, you know, sort of rights at the time. Time. So he’s basically trying to ENTICE this like 60 year old civil War shaman with the promise of a 12 year old child bride.
I don’t know, more Disney stuff. Just Disney being Disney. Right. And then there’s another kind of face off where Mr. Dark is fighting again or kind of having a rap battle In a library with Charles Holloway, the old, you know, the grandpa dad. And Grandpa dad tells them we had devils. Or he’s talking to Will at this point and he’s like, we had devils for breakfast, lunch and supper in our house. And all I can think of is like, man, this is just the dad transferring generational trauma just unnecessarily onto the kid. Like, the kid’s living in this blissful life where his friend’s dad is apparently some African adventure.
And there’s this carnival coming in the town. You can go from old to young, like anything’s possible. And then grandpa dad comes up and it’s just like, our dad used to beat us. Us. And it’s like, damn, dude, why, why do you gotta make it so dark for no real reason? If anything, Will was looking to be uplifted. And you kind of like did the opposite. You’re just like, man, it was bad in my day too. Buzzkill. Yeah. But we have to talk about the hall of mirrors a bit because we talked about last week. It’d be weird if we didn’t talk about this week because we get another extended hall of Mirror scene.
Did you want to. Did you have any other than this? Here’s the calling card. Yeah, yeah. It’s impossible to do a horror scene or a horror mo movie in a carnival and not feature the hall of mirrors. And that whole premise that it’s like an insider reference to, hey, look at how good my cinematography is where I can show mirrors without revealing the camera. And also I’m a master of bending light and, you know, transforming minds. And it looked cool. So mission accomplished in that, like I said, if, if nothing else with these dark Disney movies, they, they.
The cinematography seems to be pretty soft, solid. Like, like you said, this could be cool if they color time, they’re putting on old timey looking film, but whatever. If, if they leaned into it being more experimental and not just. Yeah, like, like a product of the times, then there was one genuinely creepy scene in this movie. And not scary, but just like the, the creepiest all coming together and some really unexpected sort of effects. And it’s, it’s the, the day after everyone initially gets kind of brainwashed. So now you see the barber as the bearded lady and you see the guy that ran the cigar shop is now dressed up as like a Native American and the guy that ran the sports bar is now a kid wearing a sports jersey.
They really hit you over the head on that one. Like, you know, you know, the second this guy shows up, like oh, he’s gonna turn back into a young kid. Like I don’t even know what this movie’s about that they’re clearly setting it up for that. But during this little parade through town, they also are parading through these little child sized coffins. And even the two kids are like, are those kid sized coffins? Like what. What the hell is going on here? That was a little bit creepy. But the creepiest part is that there’s these guys wearing these weird body horror masks.
Like they straight up came out of a legitimate 80s horror movie that just looks like weird melted flesh. And there’s multiple there. I saw at least two or three of these weird masks. Masks. And they’re completely out of context. There’s no other reference in the rest of this movie to like truly creepy looking stuff. But they look like burn victims with like sunken like eye sockets and just like a weird. It almost remind me of like a Beetlejuice costume where they like stretch their faces out and stuff. Like like a true body horror. And I don’t know why there wasn’t more of that in the rest of this movie.
That would have elevated it. You got a carnival? Why not? You know? Dark carnival. Yeah. This again. Icp. This was like the ICP taking effect. I guess we should start winding this one down for today. We want to wind it down. I’ve got more. I’ve. I got one more thing. I don’t. You got one more thing? Well. Oh well. Yeah. So this was the final like showdown in the rap battle. And this is Mr. Dark kind of talking about Mr. Holay and like cutting at him and he said, says all that time living only through other men’s lives, dreaming only other men’s dreams.
What a waste. In that he spent all this time reading books and like, I guess he. He works at the library. So he’s kind of like, aha, book bookworm. You know, I’m out here actually stealing people’s souls and stealing their dreams. And you’re just reading about their dreams. But then Holloway claps back and he’s like, yo, yo mc. But he’s basically is. Sometimes a man can learn more from another man’s dreams than he can learn from his own. Which I don’t know. Like it sounds cool to be objectively true, but I don’t know if that’s objectively true.
Can you really learn more from other people’s dreams? Maybe, but you would still have to have your own frame of reference, which means you’d at least have to have your own crappier dream in order to relate to someone else’s better dream. And people don’t like it when you describe their dreams to. You know, I don’t. I kind of don’t either. I understand it. It’s like you’re. You’re gonna sit here and spend 15 minutes talking to me about something that didn’t actually happen. Happen. Another plane of air, man. Well, tell me once we’re in that plane, tell me all about it.
But yeah, I guess, I guess this is basically the end of Disney’s horror experiment because next time’s return to Oz, which probably terrified more children, but was not technically, I guess I, I saw that as a kid. I haven’t seen it since. But I’m already expecting that to be the creepiest out of all these dark Disney movies. I think that might end up being the case. We will see. Because same here, I maybe saw in the late 80s and not since, but I often hear it cited as. Yeah, that one flipped me out. You know, I would love to.
To figure out what is the scariest Disney movie of all time. Not Touchstone, like actual Buena Vista Pictures. Dis Disney. Yeah, it’s been a little while since we watched the Black Cauldron, but that wasn’t so much. I mean it didn’t have jump scares or anything, so. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think that was scary as much as it was kind of cool. Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, I’m talking about like actual, like, wow, that’s probably Pinocchio. Yeah. No, 100 new Stromboli. The scene where he gets thrown in Strombolis. Again, another carney. Right. I think that Stromboli being a carny makes him a little bit scary.
Have you been on that ride, by the way? I think it’s just in Tokyo and California. That is a flip out ride. Just. It’s insanely aggressive. Like you get a half scene of Pinocchio singing and dancing and then we just go to Stromboli Darkness and there’s things. The same thing with the Snow White ride. It just starts with the witch turning and screaming at you. There’s no music. It’s just screaming and it’s. It’s crazy. It’s like, really, you want to put your kid. I mean, they do have a warning on the outside. So is. Was that one done by Yoko Ono? It sounds like it.
Or the B52 is doing rock Lobster. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I’m scared enough. I’m scared enough. And honestly, both of these movies that we Just watched recently they do. They had me looking up when is the fair coming to my area? It doesn’t come till February or March in Florida apparently. Too bad they don’t really do them around here. I legitimately want to go on one of the scary carnival rides now. Like the weird haunted house ones where all the buzz SC and stuff like I legitimately might. It might be worth sitting two hours in traffic to get a crappy parking spot in the mud just to do that.
Well, I did my summers when I was growing up Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and you go down to Ocean City and on the boardwalks they have a couple fantastic, you know, dumb horror rides. So I’ll you know, shout out to the the Roboth Beach Haunted Mansion. It’s actually, I think it is just called the Haunted Mansion which seems like they shouldn’t be able to do that, but whatever. The room of eyeballs going up and down with mirrors. That, that all that always creeps you out. Me at least it doesn’t take much if you’re already at the carnival.
I’m already a little bit scared for my safety Anyways, what’s going on in your universe then? I guess we should do that thing. Yeah, I guess. On theme with this one, the closest project that I got related to this whole dark Disney series is Satanic Panic Comic dot com. If you go there, you can sign up. If you’re listening to this in the future, hopefully it’s already pointing you to a place where you can grab that comic. But it’s been three or four years of pretty earnest research into the origins of the Satanic panic, which I originally thought was isolated and maybe the 70s, 80s, 90s.
But over the course of working on this comic I’ve learned that Satanic panic has in was imported from the Europeans and the Puritans. Since day one. There’s never been even one year that has gone by in America when there wasn’t some sort of active satanic panic going on. Whether it was the the Salem witch trials, Whether it was 80s and 90s McGruff, watch out for child kidnappers behind any corner corner. Or if it’s like more current 2016, 2018 ish Comet, ping pong, pizza parlors, all of that kind of has been playing the same sort of tune.
And I got a whole book that breaks down all the origins and all the fun little nooks and crannies of that so satanicpanic comic.com Kids, if you look at the Internet, avert your eyes. Everything is there to deceive you and turn you into a Satan greatness. Well, and I mean these are based on those old chick tracks. And I have to say that my all time favorite chick track, aside from the first one that I ever came across which was out about a biker, I think it was. I can’t remember the name of it off top of my head.
But all my other favorite chick tracks are all Halloween related. And I love the idea that there might be someone this Halloween passing out these actual Halloween chick tracks about how trick or treating will send you straight to hell. So I don’t know, I love that particular aspect of it. I just wanted to test my aggressive impression really. So let’s wanna see if I do it. Yeah, I guess the thing I do that fits this most is my Twilight Zone podcast which is called Time Enough Podcast. We are in the middle of season five, so we’ve done almost the complete original show.
Spoiler warning, the Ray Bradbury episode is not one of the best better ones. Actually it’s weird because him and Sterling, like Bradberry wanted to work on Twilight Zone, but he kind of felt like Sterling was stealing some of his ideas for Twilight Zone episodes and then they had some trouble working together and ended up doing one episode. See I could see that because if you knew someone that was a fantastic writer, now I’d be scared of like them taking an idea because they could actually run with it and turn it into something versus most other people.
Like yeah, fine, take my idea. You’re just going to make crap out of it anyway. But Rod Sterling, he’d be like, maybe I’ll be a little more. One of the regular other writers was Richard Matheson, who’s pretty much in the same sci fi batting classes as Ray Bradbury. Maybe like one step under but he wrote. I mean he wrote like Omega man and what dreams may come and stuff. So you know, lots of pretty top rate stuff there too. But yeah, yeah, Twilight Zone, always fun to do. Come check it out. That’s me for today day.
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