Nightbooks

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Cronenberged with Candy

In this episode we discussed the film Nightbooks, from 2021.

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com, and you can buy their new book here!

**Transcript: **

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, and today we’re talking about the film Nightbooks from 2021. Enjoy!

Ren: Good afternoon, Adam!

Adam: Afternoon, Ren!

Ren: Hi. Hello. I just want to tell our listeners that you’re wearing a very nice shirt today.

Adam: Oh thank you, yes, it’s like a child’s play mat. Antonia bought it for me about a year ago. It’s a very lime green shirt with a car track and cars, I don’t know how to drive, so I can’t comment on that. The cars don’t look like they’re doing a great job of driving, because some of them are on the track, and some of them are off the track and pointing in different directions. I know enough about the road to say that that is probably a recipe for disaster. It looks a bit like one of those mats that kids have where you drive the toy cars along them.

Ren: You drive them around, yes.

Adam: There’s municipal buildings and such.

Ren: So today we’re talking about Nightbooks, which is a film that was released last September on Netflix, and I’m not advocating for Netflix, I think probably most people know why Netflix are terrible, but maybe you can find it on DVD at your local charity shop.

Adam: Oh, that would be nice! They’re ten-a-penny now. I think at Cat Rescue they were 10 for a pound.

Ren: Yes, their value is absolutely plummeting. I don’t even know if they make them anymore.

Adam: Possibly only Criterion, and their special editions for people who still want DVDS.

Ren: I still watch DVDs, but then I’m 33.

Adam: Well, I’m 35. I had a birthday the other day.

Ren: Happy birthday!

Adam: But 35, that’s not on. I think that during the pandemic, those two years felt really drawn out and purgatorial, and now they feel really compressed in retrospect. It’s kind of the worst of both worlds. At the time it felt like it lasted ages, but now it’s like ‘those two years went by!’ so I still feel like I should be 32 going on 33, being 35 doesn’t feel right. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it soon enough.

Ren: So just kind of chose this as a recent children’s horror film that exists, and sometimes we like to talk about recent things.

Adam: Yes, we don’t always, I know there’s a lot of millennial nostalgia in this, which I think might make up part of the discussion here, because Nightbooks is not without its millennial nostalgia. I feel like Nightbooks is made by people who are very aware that there are millennial parents who want to show their young children the kind of things that they liked when they were young. So there’s some cross-generational discourse going on with this one.

But yes, it’s pretty bang up to date, and I think we both thought that it was pretty okay! It’s a decent enough film.

Ren: It’s not bad! We both damn it with faint praise.

It stars Winslow Fegley as Alex, the main kid, Lidya Jewett as Yazmin, the other kid, and Krysten Ritter as Natacha, the witch. Krysten Ritter’s known for Jessica Jones, which I never watched.

(Clip from Jessica Jones)

So, it’s set at Halloween. Or is it?

Adam: Yes! Oh, wait — is it set at Halloween, or is it set at Alex’s birthday, and his birthday is Halloween themed? Or is it that he happens to have been born at Halloween.

Ren: Yes, it’s one of those options.

Adam: It’s in the Autumnal months —

Ren: — and it’s a spooky, creepy themed party. And there’s this kid, Alex, and he’s upset about something, and he overhears his parents discussing him and they say ‘Maybe it would be easier if he was a bit more, I don’t know, normal’. And his room is covered with horror paraphernalia, and he packs a rucksack and leaves the apartment, and gets in the lift. The lift opens on a dark flickering fluorescent lit floor, and there’s a red-lit apartment with the door open, and The Lost Boys playing on a TV, which is his favourite movie. So he approaches it, and seems to be in a trance. There’s a plate of pie —

Adam: — pumpkin pie!

Ren: Pumpkin pie and then he collapses and wakes up in this old-fashioned room, he doesn’t know where he is, and he tries to jump out of a window, but is just propelled right back into the room. And then a witch appears, and tells him that the apartment lures children in, but that she only keeps them if they’re useful to her. She says ‘Are you useful to me?’ and he says ‘Erm, I write scary stories!’ and she says that he has to write a new scary story every night and read it to her, or else he’ll be killed. And that’s the premise of the film.

Adam: (voiceover) This is also the premise of 1001 Nights.

So there’s a little bit of set-up, but we get into it quite quickly. And the editing is a bit choppy at first? It lurches around at unpredictable intervals. Maybe it’s just me. But I thought at the start it did that, and then it settled down. I felt like the film took a while to get into its groove. I enjoyed the second half significantly more than the first half.

Ren: Me too. I was also a little disappointed that the child-luring apartment didn’t get more of a personality. I don’t know, I’d have liked to see a montage of it luring more children, or something.

Adam: That’s a good point actually, because if we think of something like Monster House there’s a big emphasis on the house itself luring children. And the set designs are really lush here, particularly in the second half, there’s a Hansel and Gretel style witch’s cottage later which is really good. I mean, the apartment does have really nice wallpaper in.

Ren: I really liked the wallpaper.

Adam: It’s really nice wallpaper, it’s not quite Overlook Hotel creepy wallpaper, it’s quite nice. I was thinking, there’s a term that Evolution of Horror used when they reviewed Midsommer, I think the guest described Midsommer as Instagram horror. I think there is an aspect of that to Midsommer, it’s quite instagrammable.

Ren: Well, Natacha the witch is very stylish.

Adam: Oh yeah, Krysten Ritter gets to wear some incredible outfits!

Ren: She has this amazing raincoat at one point —

Adam: — Oh my God, the raincoat is glorious!

Ren: — It’s translucent pink, and then it has these geometric shoulders that are standing out, it’s so good.

Adam: I’m glad you mentioned the raincoat, the raincoat was definitely a highlight. It’s almost like it has shoulder pads, like what an anime villain in Sailor Moon might wear if they were wearing a raincoat.

Ren: Yes, it’s absolutely like something you would see on Drag Race as well.

Adam: Yeah, that occurred to me too! I really liked Ritter’s performance, she is giving this quite campy performance, I’d say. She’s not exactly chewing the scenery, but she is throwing a lot of shade.

Ren: It’s interesting, I wasn’t really sold on her performance.

Adam: Oh, how so?

Ren: I didn’t really think she had the menace… the menace to sell the premise, so to speak. I mean she’s kind of impatient and snappish and petulant, but I didn’t really believe she had the depths of sadism that we’re meant to believe when we see her cabinet of children turned into little child figureines.

Adam: That’s a good point, I guess if you compare her to the wicked stepmother witch in Burton’s Hansel and Gretel, for instance, because this in parts explicitly modelled on Hansel and Gretel, there’s no bones about it, that witch is wholly evil.

But we do learn more, obviously, about Natacha’s backstory which might explain that.

Ren: Yes, we’re going all over the place in terms of plot, but that’s fine.

Adam: Spoiler - spoiler alert!

Ren: Yes, spoiler — but we do learn that she’s one of the children that the house swallowed, in the end. And I think that does make sense for her character, which is quite childish.

Adam: Oh yeah, so. It’s not an un-scary film because there are some monster designs that are quite gruesome and ghoulish, there’s some jump scares and it’s not without peril — we know that children have died here and that is a possibility — so it has its scary moments, and I think if you’re a kid watching it it might be pretty scary. But I think it might suffer a bit from what I’ve described as ‘a post-ironic lack of seriousness’.

I also write reviews of Legendary Pink Dots albums for kittysneezes.com, and there’s a podcast associated with kittysneezes called Rite Gud, which Raquel S. Benedict hosts and they had an episode a few months back that had a lot of internet traction where Raquel identified a trend, I don’t think she came up with the name but she called it squeecore. It was a kind of critique of a lot of modern sci-fi writing, basically.

I’ve written down some of the traits of squeecore, and one of them is snarkiness — like, early 2000s blogger humour. It’s basically banter in place of actual jokes, people saying snarky things instead of actual jokes or things that are really funny. This is sometimes seen as something that comes out of Joss Whedon —

Ren: I was about to say, is this related to the whole Whedonisation of sci-fi —

Adam: Yes, absolutely. And another one is lampshading one’s own deconstructions, so doing this semi-serious drawing attention to your own referencing but also I know-that you know-that I know that this is lazy, but I’m acknowledging it’s lazy, so it’s okay. And this whole semi-serious scariness, like it is kind of scary, but it’s also playing at being scary, and it has all the signifiers of “scary” films. It’s not wholly committing to being scary or wholly committing to being funny, it’s just kind of hedging its bets halfway between the two.

Ren: Yeah, I noticed that at the end. At the end they find the original witch, Natacha isn’t the original witch, she’s just harvesting magic from the original witch who actually ate children. She was a hardcore child-eating witch.

Adam: Oh these witches, they’re not like the witches of the old days, these snowflake witches!

Ren: So she’s keeping this original witch sedated with stories, this is where the stories come in, she has to keep having horrible stories to keep her asleep. But they awake this original witch, and she’s chasing after the kids and they try to escape in the witch and the witch appears from the top of the lift and vomits candy silly string all over the kids, and it’s quite scary.

Adam: It looks quite like gunge, as well.

Ren: Oh gunge, good old gunge.

Adam: Get Your Own Back style gunge.

Ren: And then Alex says something like ‘This is the worst lift ever!’ or something.

Adam: Yeah yeah, and that’s not a joke — it’s banter.

Ren: I thought that maybe they were thinking ‘Oh, this is getting a bit scary for kids at this point, let’s put a semi-joke in it there’.

Adam: Yeah, and I do get it. Because we were discussing last time with Watership Down, which wasn’t intended for children. And me, you and Catherine were in the odd position, which doesn’t often happen, particularly for horror fans, of saying that the BBFC should have been more harsh. ‘What were the BBFC doing, giving this a U?’. So I think it would be a bit perverse to say that children’s horror should be as scary as possible — ‘I was traumatised as a kid, they should be too!’. So I get why as a screenwriter you would do that, and undercut these things with jokes, but it does mean that the tone is quite wobbly.

Ren: I would agree.

Adam: And especially combined with the pacing issues early on, which do resolve in the second half, but I think it took me a while to get into the film, and I don’t think that was just me. I just think that the film doesn’t know what it’s doing at first.

Ren: Yes, because it sets things up so quickly, gets right into it, and then it does get a bit wobbly. It sort of turns into an Alien for kids bit for a while —

Adam: — Oh yeah, I guess it does!

Ren: So, the other kid, is called Yazmin and she’s kept around by Natacha to cook and clean and tend to the greenhouse and such, and I thought she was very good, Lidya Jewett, I thought she was a very good young actor and she did quite a lot to sell the emotional bits of the story —

Adam: Very good point, she is having to do pretty much all of the emotional lifting. Alex’s character is meant to be like a little R.L. Stein, I guess, he’s a little tortured artist! He only cares about the stories, darnit!

Ren: Although, he’s decided he doesn’t do that anymore!

Adam: True, although lets be honest, it doesn’t take him long to get back into it. We very quickly get a montage of his process, pacing around and talking to himself.

Ren: Yes, he’s our little R.L. Stein, our lil Stephen King.

Adam: And I think Winslow Begley’s good, but I think Lidya Jewett is asked to do a lot more with her performance.

Ren: Yeah, and I think she really rises to it. What were we talkign about? Oh yeah, the Alien bit. So they have this greenhouse for making Natacha’s potions, and there’s these creatures called Shredders that come out of pods, it’s very Alien, they have knife-legs and they go for the face.

(Clip from the film of a Shredder bursting out of a pod and Alex screaming, accompanied by squelching and snipping noises)

There’s this whole middle portion of the film of them trying not to disturb these things, and then disturbing these things, and being chased by them, and one of them creeps into Alex’s backpack and destroys his notebook of stories, which is a plot point because he’s been struggling to write any new stories and has just been reading out his old stories to Natacha.

Adam: The set design here looks great. They’ve got ultra-violet paint on these synthetic plants. A really simple idea, but I’ve not seen it done before. A little bit like the garden in Coraline, I guess, but in live action. It’s a simple idea, ultra-violet paint on synthetic plants, but it’s a memorable image. So I do think the set design here is really strong. I do agree that the apartment is a bit nice, almost, but this garden and later the candy house look pretty special. So I did enjoy some of the aesthetics in this film.

Ren: Actually I have a very good Texture of the Week from this film.

Adam: Oh, okay! I don’t think I have anything to make sound with around here!

Ren: taps something to the mic

Adam and Ren: (discordantly) Texture! Tex-texture… of!… the week!

Adam: That’s very nice.

Ren: It’s a nautilus shell! I’m tapping a paintbrush on a nautilus shell.

Adam: Oh, that’s lovely. Like something from a Brian Eno album.

Ren: So this is one of those things that has a stand-out texture to me. And that is — well, they’re trying to escape the apartment. They find notes written in the back of some of the books in the library, by one of the kids who was held there before about her plans to escape, and they call her Unicorn Girl.

They’re leafing through the books trying to find more of her notes, and they find a bit where she’s saying she’s going to make a sleeping potion to put the witch to sleep, and she just needs to find the last ingredient to mask the smell of the sleeping potion. So they come up with this whole plan about how they’re going to trick Natacha into telling them what this ingredient is, because she’s always correcting Alex when he’s reading out his stories, going ‘Everyone knows that’s not how that works’, so he writes a story and deliberately gets the ingredient wrong so that she’ll go, ’Oh, everyone knows it’s actually cinnaroot that masks smells’.

Adam: Which is another childlike trait.

Ren: Yes, she can’t help one-upping, and showing off that she’s right.

(Clip from Nightbooks: Alex reading from one of his stories. Alex: ‘— Their skin is deathly white, some of their clothes date back decades. They push him on a swing, higher and higher —‘ Natacha: ‘Stupid. Everyone knows that ghosts don’t have actual physical hands, so they couldn’t push him on a swing. Amateur.’ )

So they do this, get this potion and manage to get her sleep, and escape out this backdoor, into this forest, and they’re like ‘Wow, we actually escaped, amazing’ and then they start to realise that something’s not quite right about the forest, and Yazmin goes to a tree and peels off the bark to reveal the wallpaper from the apartment underneath the bark. It’s a good texture!

Adam: Yeah, yeah, that was a good texture. So mine is from just a little bit after that. Basically you’ve already mentioned that the original witch is revived, but because she’s presumably left for decades in the candy house, she’s got crusted candy growing out of her head!

Ren: Yes, she’s all (deep voice effect) Cronenberged with candy.

Adam: Yes! (deep voice) Cronenberged with candy. And then when she’s defeated it means you get this wonderful montage of boiling sugar.

Ren: Yes, they shove her into the oven in traditional Hansel and Gretel style, and then there’s all the bubbling boiling sugar of her candy skin. It’s pretty grisly!

Adam: I really liked that, it’s pretty pleasing.

Ren: And she’s also been kept asleep in this kind of bathtub, and when she’s waking up and getting out of it there’s all these bone-crunching and cracking sound effects, they really go to town.

Adam: I really love that kind of stuff, it’s just a shame that it comes very late in the film. The last half an hour I was really taken with it.

Ren: Yeah, me too. We’ve talked about a rendition of the Hansel and Gretel cottage quite recently with Burton’s Hansel and Gretel, which was particularly gushing and gungy.

Adam: Gloopy.

Ren: This one is very gelatinous. They’re entranced — in the wood that’s still the apartment, they’re drawn towards the cottage, and Yazmin has this big round aquamarine jelly that’s filled with cream or something. It’s interesting.

Adam: I think David Yarovesky, did you see the film Brightburn?

Ren: No.

Adam: I didn’t either, but it’s a kind of evil superman version of the story. The superman origin story but the kid’s evil but good. It’s an adult horror film but instead of Damien you have superman. So this is a director who’s made two films for adults and then a kids’ film, which is perhaps why it has its scary moments. A bit like Nicolas Roeg doing The Witches, which is a kids film but feels quite odd and adult and scary in places. And obviously the film’s citations are largely for films that would be given R certificates, or at least 15 over here.

In terms of plot, I don’t think the film is very indebted to Lost Boys, but as you say Lost Boys is the film that is used to lure Alex into the apartment, and we also have a cover of Cry Little Sister, which is iconically used in Lost Boys twice on the soundtrack here.

Adam (voiceover):Editors note: By Chvrches, no less.

(Clip of Cry Little Sister by Chvrches)

Have you seen Lost Boys?

Ren: I haven’t.

Adam: Antonia got me to watch it in the first lockdown, and I loved it. We could cover it, I think there is an argument to be made that it is a children’s horror film in the same way that Gremlins is, in that it’s a film that didn’t have an all-ages certificate, but a lot of kids watched it. I remember Lost Boys coming out and Stuart, my best friend in primary being very keen on it, because his parents were goths. I remember thinking ‘sounds too rich for my blood!’. But Lost Boys is a very interesting film, because it’s one of those 80s films where you’re not sure who the target audience is.

Ren: The vampire film that I watched during the first lockdown was Interview with the Vampire. Which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Adam: I’ve never seen that!

Ren: It’s really good! You can’t really claim that it’s a children’s horror except it has young whatshername — err…. ah…

Adam: Natalie Portman!

Ren: No, but close!

Adam: Winona Ryder!

Ren: No, but similar — elfin features, blonde….

Adam: Christina Ricci!

Ren: No, you’re really close though! Oh God.

Adam: Tom Cruise… Kirsten Dunst!

Ren: Yes! Kirsten Dunst! Young Kirsten Dunst as a child vampire who keeps eating her piano teachers. It’s an enjoyable film.

Adam: Alex also has a poster for my favourite ever film, Braindead, on his wall!

Ren: Oh really, I didn’t catch that!

Adam: Yes, well, it’s the American version — Dead Alive.

Ren: My goodness, that’s quite strong stuff for an 11 year-old.

Adam: Yeah, I might show an 11 year-old the zombie baby in the park scene, but probably not all of it.

Ren: It’s great, I love it —

Adam: — Oh yes, it’s glorious, but not really a kids’ horror.

Ren: Yes. And then the style that it changes to when Alex tells his stories is a vaguely German Expressionist red and white and red with cardboard cut-out sets and white face-paint kind of deal.

Adam: It’s early Tim Burton-ish. It reminded me a bit, and this is a bit of a deep cut, of Obayashi’s style, and he’s the guy who directed Hausu, or House.

Ren: Oh yeah.

Adam: It reminded me a bit in how it’s all very deliberately fake looking, and a bit stilted and awkward. But I thought they were quite cool.

Ren: Yeah, I enjoyed the interludes of cutting to his stories, they were quite fun. They all had a title card and a Treehouse of Horror sting that came up.

Adam: That’s the thing, there were lots of likeable parts to the film, and good ideas. I think my reservations are largely about tone, that it just doesn’t seem to quite cohere in the way that it moves from genuinely scary, to silly, slightly gross-out humour. There’s a horrible joke involving an invisible cat.

Ren: It’s so disgusting. We didn’t need that.

Adam: I did not enjoy that.

Ren: I was watching that thinking, ‘Oh poor Adam, he’s going to really hate this’.

Adam: I really did hate it. Really horrible. So yeah, I thought it didn’t quite cohere, somehow, it doesn’t quite work together as a film but the individual parts are quite good, and there are some striking visuals.

And I can see that they’re really going for an inter-generational audience. I can imagine that there are lots of parents who watch Stranger Things with their kids, which isn’t exactly a children’s horror but I can imagine that happens quite a lot. And I just feel like this is very clearly going for a millennial parent and zoomer kid audience.

And maybe there’s something about inter-generational trauma, at a stretch?

Ren: Yes, well, I did have that as a note. I don’t know where we’re really meant to land on Natacha. I don’t know if the film really knows. We learn that she was one of the children kidnapped by the apartment and the original witch, and there was the quite harrowing detail that the original witch ate her companions and Natacha had to clean out the oven.

Adam: Oh yeah, I wrote that down too. Genuinely nasty.

Ren: Yeah, that’s pretty upsetting! But she does manage to escape, and it turns out that she is the Unicorn Girl who was writing these instructions about how she’s going to escape, and she does manage to, but it’s been so long that her parents have moved house and she can’t find them, so she just goes back to the apartment and becomes the witch herself. So there is the suggestion of a cycle of abuse narrative there, but she doesn’t really have any redemption. She just carries on being the witch.

Adam: I don’t know if it was meant to be like, hey kids, millennials may seem bad, but it’s the older generation who are really to blame —

Ren: — those boomer witches who eat children —

Adam: Yeah, the boomer witches ate children! Us millennial witches just harm our children by not being self-actualised enough!

Ren: Yeah, we can’t help our arrested development.

Adam: Maybe that’s what it was going for.

Ren: Because Alex and Yazmin do end up escaping, they push the original witch into the oven and her candy skin bubbles and boils, and luckily the apartment is in the same place. Because it’s meant to move all over the world, I don’t know —

Adam: — Yeah, it’s a bit thinly sketched that, just like ‘yeah, the apartment moves’.

Ren: But it hasn’t moved since Alex has been there, or at least it has returned to the same location, so Alex is reunited with his parents, and Yazmin is reunited with hers, and they take the cat with them who started as an antagonist but became an ally.

Adam: A siamese cat?

Ren: Yeah.

Adam: Or a sphinx.

Ren: A hairless cat. And that’s all fine, but because all of Alex’s stories couldn’t have a happy ending because the witch had to be kept asleep with unhappy stories, the film has an unhappy ending, which is Natacha still in her apartment with her knick-knack cabinet full of children.

Adam: It feels a bit like another film that he shouldn’t be watching, which is Nightmare on Elm Street. It seems like it’s a happy ending, but Freddy Kruger is the evil car now! Have you seen Nightmare on Elm Street, because that’s literally how it ends. And I guess opens it up for a sequel if they want to do one.

Ren: Yep, yep. I definitely enjoyed the last half hour of it. I thought that was good kids horror. I liked the premise, I wish they’d done a bit more with the idea of the monster apartment.

Adam: Yeah, a bit more fleshed-out.

Ren: It definitely got a bit woobly around the middle in terms of pacing, and tone —

Adam: — and the gross-out humour.

Ren: Yes, which we really didn’t need. And again, I thought that Lydia Jewett in particular did a very good job. We actually hear the story of how Yazmin got lured into the apartment, and that was with the smell of Doro Watt, which is an Ethiopian chicken stew which she used to make with her late grandma. Which was quite affecting, and also crunchy specificity as Tim Clare always says. This is a complete tangent, but have you ever had Ethiopian food?

Adam: I don’t think I have. Presumably you have?

Ren: Yes, I would highly recommend it if you have the chance. I’ve been to this place a couple of times in Manchester, there’s lots of vegetarian and vegan options and you get this big dish of curries and stews on injera, which is this kind of spongey flatbread. It’s delicious! I mean, that might lure me in to the monster apartment. Really good Ethiopian food.

Adam: I will bear that in mind, thank you.

Ren: I think that’s all?

Adam: I think that’s all! Not every kid’s horror is Watership Down.

Ren: But good to see a recent offering in the genre.

Adam: Yes, and hopefully there will be more children’s horror out soon, and not just on Netflix.

Ren: Thank you for listening, you can review the podcast on itunes or apple podcasts. We got a review recently that said ‘This podcast is alright!’, so thank you.

Adam: Like Nightbooks, we’re the Nightbooks of podcasts.

Ren: Yeah, I think that’s fair. I’ll take that. You can email us at [e-mail], and neither of us want to be on twitter very much anymore, so we might come up with a solution to that, maybe porting posts from Instagram, but we’ll keep you updated.

Our artwork’s by Letty Wilson, and I just got a new book by Letty through my door today, which is the first part of their epic fairies doing crimes webcomic Owl People, and it looks absolutely gorgeous. So I do recommend checking that out. Our intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, our outro music is by Joe Kelly. Do you have a sing-off for us Adam?

Adam: Yeah, uh, try not to get Kronenberged with candy, creepy kids.

Ren: Yeah, it’s unpleasant. Try to avoid that if you can.

Adam: Bye!

Ren: See you next time creepy kids!

(outro music plays)