LISTLESS: Halloween Special
finding yourself through horror
Happy October, LISTLESS readers. Because it’s our favorite time of the year, we got overwhelmed while trying to choose a horror topic for this month’s newsletter. So we’re kind of jamming a bunch of shit together here, and getting it in right under the wire.
Our hope was to dust off Molly’s old Buzzfeed quiz-making skills to explore the path that led to and cemented our love of the genre: can we recommend a film based on your (our) favorite episode of 90s television kid-horror?
Did we have ambitious dreams of each doing about ten of these so it might mimic an actual quiz? Yes. Did we also mismanage our time and go off on tangents so that the original plan simply wasn’t achievable? Hell fuckin yeah of course we did.
Anyway, we’ve mentioned Are You Afraid of the Dark? in almost every issue so far, so this topic should come as no surprise. Sometimes I (Emily) think it’s weird that I still watch a kid’s show because I just turned 38 but then I remember Disney adults exist. Could be worse, probably. Plus, these shows continue to influence both of us, our work and taste, as well as the work of so many other artists that we love. Let’s dive in.
[Emily]:
First off, we’ve got a Gary story. He’s our patriarch, our leader. I love how he’s got a romantic arc across the series, and I relate to how his dad’s weird small business influences so much of what he does. He gave us Sardo, okay? We’re in good hands.
In this tale, we’re introduced to Ross, a greedy kid with no friends except possibly Olson, the grumpy older man who owns a strange repair shop in the mall. It’s not really a friendship; he just constantly bothers this dude and tries to get a job there. The place is pitch-black except for some spotlights, not really the ideal working conditions for focusing on the tiny bits of machinery Olson specializes in—music boxes, pinball machines, and…honestly, I’m not really sure exactly what he does, because the other set pieces here include eerie unpainted ceramic figures and a life-size executioner with a mace. Eventually Olson takes a chance on Ross, allowing him to watch the store; however, he is NOT to touch the mysterious pinball game in the back!!!!!
So, of course, Ross is soon IN THE GAME. The mall merges with the forbidden pinball game, and Ross must save the princess, who looks identical to a girl he met right before he entered this strange reality.
Ross is stuck in a game, so if you liked this episode, you could go the video game route for your movie pick—like Stay Alive, which I actually don’t recommend unless your biggest fear is remembering the person you were in the mid-2000s. It is insanely slow, and there’s a character named October. They make Jimmi Simpson say some terrible things, which felt all the more terrible when I remembered that many people actually talked like that back then. Frankie Muniz is the best in it, but his character is called “Swink.” I paid money to watch this just so I could write this paragraph.
Instead, watch Brainscan, a slasher (sort of?) about a CD-ROM game. Edward Furlong1 orders it through Fangoria. The game fuses with his consciousness (or something), and introduces him to The Trickster, a guy who’s a cross between Freddy and maybe like, Drop Dead Fred. He likes Primus and eating bananas and hotdogs mixed together. It’s an interesting film because it’s not clear who the intended audience was supposed to be; it’s extremely AYAOTD?-like, but then there’s a graphic murder. I loved it!
Besides video games, and putting stuff like Saw aside for now, the escape room angle feels close to what dumb little Ross is going through. There have been a bunch of films about them over the last few years, coinciding with their recent popularity. I’ve never done one myself, but I did play a ton of Crimson Room and its offshoots on flash websites in 2005.
You might try Cube, which I just micro-dosed on PlutoTV. It’s tonally pretty cool and reminds me of other computer games I played in the late 90s/early 00s. People on Letterboxd seem kind of meh on Cube, but I was yelling at the TV. It’s pretty great for a low-budget thriller.
However, the escape element isn’t what appeals to me about this episode. It’s obviously my obsession: the fucking mall. So then we’ve got Dawn of the Dead, of course, plus Night of the Comet2, Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge, and likely many more I’m missing. Phantom of the Mall: Eric’s Revenge is absolutely worth watching. It’s got Cort (from LISTLESS’s fave Jason vehicle, Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives) dying on an escalator; sensual 80s silk-sheet sex scene dream sequences; pre-weasel Pauly Shore in a scene I will never forget3; and it’s paced slowly enough that you can get a good look at the old stores. Sam Goody! B. Dalton!
But even still, Chopping Mall is my favorite.
Chopping Mall is a slasher, only the killers are “security robots” who roam the mall after hours, tasked to “neutralize” thieves. Kind of like if Marty from Stop & Shop was evil. They immediately malfunction, or actually maybe they are functioning. This is technically their purpose. Perhaps they just don’t understand nuance. Cool that we’re living in a time where this could maybe happen, huh? I mean I like watching those videos of robots wearing cargo shorts and falling down as much as the next guy, but I do draw the line at murder. And I’m sure whoever is creating them would surely be rational about that as well.
Anyway, Chopping Mall really works for me because it does ride that line of camp, not taking itself seriously but still giving a shit about watchability. There’s a plot, which doesn’t always happen in this type of thing, plus fun kills, Barbara Crampton freaking the fuck out, lots of little horror-universe references to catch, and a sex party in a furniture store. Molly hates it for some reason.
There are other moments in “The Tale of the Pinball Wizard” that still make me uneasy. The men in suits that Ross encounters early on morph in my head with the suited androids from Halloween III: Season of the Witch. I was pretty young when I first saw Season of the Witch. It was on cable during the day, and for a long time I thought I’d imagined the whole thing. The scenes I’d half-remembered were Tom Atkins (who is a sweetheart irl!) sneaking around the warehouse, and this one shot of a man in a suit guarding the garage. That suited man was exactly, in my memory, one of these fuckers that Ross meets.
And they scared me, not when Ross yanks off one of their arms, but when they do this freaky synchronized dance in front of a puddle. It shows Ross they can be destroyed by water, but it’s unnerving and a strange detail that’s stuck with me forever. It’s also worth noting the beeping synth in almost all of these recommendations, and in the episode itself. The score of the show must pull a lot of inspiration from Carpenter, since so much of the tone is dictated by these unsettling sounds4.
I was at a VHS festival recently, and I found a copy of Grave Secrets, a TV movie my dad showed me as a kid. When I saw the VHS—a promo copy, which added to its strangeness—I gasped. I was scared to touch it. It held such weight in my memory, the story a Poltergeist type thing, based on true events. There is a scene in it where a cat gives birth to deformed kittens, and it’s haunted me since I was in elementary school. I bought it immediately.
I also had a conversation about this at the festival, about the mysterious horror media experienced in childhood, seconds of a scene witnessed late at night before a parent changes the channel, that kind of thing. I love how a story can build up around these fuzzy memories to fill in the blank narrative spaces. The misremembered images, sharpened in their ferocity by time. The idea that something can hold more terror and intrigue in the liminal space of memory than once it’s actually found is part of what draws me to the next story, and to my main recommendation for it.
Many of these AYAOTD? episodes retain their gauzy, unsettling nature when I view them now, but because they’ve been in my life for so long, and often revisited, it’s hard for me to discern whether I am still frightened of them because they are genuinely scary, or because they influenced and exposed my childhood fears, reinforcing the kind of existential terror I felt because of a string of deaths around me when I was younger. It’s frequently the subject of my work, that terror, cropping up even when I’m not specifically conjuring it. It’s DNA-level, maybe.
In the case of “The Tale of the 13th Floor,” I’m certain that the concept is scary on its face, since it’s a common childhood belief or fear, and in some cases, a hope: that one is adopted, or in its most extreme version, that one is an alien; that there’s no possible way I came from these people. And I know it’s likely got its roots in psychology, something to do with the uncleaving we all do from our family. My mom believed her parents were the aliens, and Molly believed something similar—that it wasn’t just her family that were aliens, that maybe everyone was, and it was all a prank on her, “a mean trick that would end poorly5.”
In the episode, Karin and her brother Billy play on the abandoned thirteenth floor of their apartment building. He’s great at sports, and she sucks. One day, one of the freakiest looking guys you could ever imagine shows up as an elevator operator.
A little digression here: my great aunt was an elevator operator at Howland Hughes6, the old department store in the city we grew up in. The malls I am so obsessed with forced it to close7, but I feel lucky I got to see it in its last few years. Man, they had this dark little restaurant in the bottom that made a great turkey club. Incredible. But still I was afraid of the place in a way that thrilled me, its abandoned floors full of mannequins, whatever ghosts roamed around after dark. My grandmother had been a clothing buyer there, my mom an employee in her college years, and my dad even snuck in a video store pop-up at one point (he was also Santa there once). But it was my great aunt’s job that stuck out, since there was nowhere else that I knew of that had an elevator operator. The sense that this was a relic, that the building itself was holding onto a past it was not yet ready to let go of, has been a particular interest of mine, and what happens in this AYAOTD? episode feeds into that same sort of exhilarating fear, one I’ve also written about, that a previously abandoned place could suddenly and miraculously come alive.
In “The Tale of the Thirteenth Floor,” the abandoned floor becomes a toy factory overnight. Karin soon receives an invitation to test some toys. They do not invite Billy; Karin refuses to go but he convinces her, and she agrees if he tags along.
Inextricably linked in my memory with this episode is Barry Levinson’s Toys, starring Robin Williams as the goofy heir to a toy factory, which he must save from his evil, military-minded uncle. While not a horror movie, the solid colors and shapes in Toys create an unreal and dreamlike feeling so similar to the episode. The toy company in the film exists in what looks like Windows XP Bliss. The movie is hard to track down now (I’m watching an Internet Archive link with occasional Portuguese subtitles, which appear only during songs) but I remember the marketing seemed extensive; I think I still have a promotional pin.
In the episode, Karin and Billy are put to the test by two weirdos in cool outfits.
They mess with some kind of “atmosphere” wheel (very Rocky Horror lab-scene set design) and Karin starts kicking Billy’s ass at a puzzle game. This is because Karin is really an alien. And she’s actually good at puzzles and games and sports—she just couldn’t keep up with Billy while she was sucking down Earth air. Now, under the right conditions, she’s thriving, and Billy is barely breathing, still trying to play the little Simon game.
Earlier in the episode, Karin has a dream that looks like this:
Her TV turns on and speaks to her, trying to convince her to go the the thirteenth floor. It doesn’t click for her when she sees the guy in person, but later on, when they’ve successfully escaped from the faceless, groping gray aliens, when she and Billy are safely back home, everything starts to become clear.
Her TV turns on again, and everything is explained. They’d accidentally left her on Earth as a baby and were there now to collect her. They ran out of “atmosphere” so had to go, but they’d be back to try again soon.
And then we get one of AYAOTD?’s best jump scares, as Billy turns to Karin, who is now in her true form.
Speaking of static-y TVs that reflect your true identity back to you in some crucial way, my main recommendation here is I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun’s gorgeous exploration of gender and existential horror through the lens of a children’s TV show. In the film, a kid named Owen meets an older student, Maddy, who shows him episodes of this mysterious show, a monster-of-the-week program centered around two psychic girls, called The Pink Opaque.
Besides sharing themes of identity with this episode, I Saw the TV Glow is also directly inspired by AYAOTD? itself (and Buffy, and The Adventures of Pete & Pete). This movie means a great deal to me personally, so please don’t tell me if you hated it. Thanks! And I won’t go too long about it here. Turns out it’s way easier to talk about killer robots than a piece of media that helped me understand my gender identity more fully.
I do want to mention something I brought up earlier: this idea that a film or show or image you saw as a kid can become myth. That it can become part of you, informing who you are while still becoming warped over time.
Not too much of a spoiler, but towards the end of the film, Owen rewatches The Pink Opaque as an adult, finding it childish and silly. What this shift in the reality of The Pink Opaque—and its psychic stars, now played by different actors—means in the world of this film, in Owen’s life, is complicated; there are so many different takes on this, and on how Owen moves throughout the rest of his life.
But man, on its surface, I find that rewatch moment so devastating. The thing you loved as a kid is actually dumb? No way. That was a moment that made my heart race—to have been so wrong about something, yikes, but then to see the span of your life stretched out before you: the version of you then, who you are now, and that big fucking gulf. And then it started to sink in for me. And then I understood why I was crying outside the theater. I thought I just liked TV shows.
Anyway, young you is probably fucking right about a lot of stuff, so go back and think about the horror that made you. Happy Halloween! <3
[Molly]:
Last week I rewatched Freddy vs. Jason–a movie that terrorized me during its release in 2003 and whose TV spot (though muted in a PiP box in the corner of the television) made ten-year-old me jump so hard that I punched myself in the mouth. At the time, horror movies had always been this big bad thing. A monolith of gore and death. I’d been a wimp about them, and so, for the most part, I’d stay away. If I kept my distance, it meant I wouldn’t have to acknowledge that we are all going to die one day. But there was also this allure to them that I could not ignore. Even though they gave me an empty sort of feeling, they also made me feel what I can only describe as “Homer eating a Ribwich.” So I often felt compelled to watch things I knew I shouldn’t have been watching.
The following year in 2004, I watched Bravo’s 100 Scariest Movie Moments (and every subsequent year after until they stopped airing it). The most terrifying scenes from movies that I had never seen. I felt safe watching because there were ‘00s celebrities as talking heads making jokes and saying they were scared too.
Number fifty on the list is Phyllis’s death scene in The Last House on the Left. Eleven-year-old me watched Phyllis’s intestines being pulled out of her body. That night, and for several nights after, I couldn’t sleep because my stomach hurt so bad.
It does seem strange to think about how terrified I was of all this stuff since I’ll pretty much watch anything now, and also Freddy vs. Jason is a comedy, right?
Anyway, FvJ reminded me of the existence of Brendan Fletcher, a Canadian mainstay I became briefly fixated on at least twice in my life.
He played Caitlin’s bully8 Eric in Caitlin’s Way, a very Canadian early ‘00s teen show set in Montana.
I sort of watched it when it originally aired but I got really into it as a teen when The N played reruns at six in the morning before school. There weren’t that many seasons so I’d know by the cold open which episode was on and more importantly, if Eric was going to be in it.
I told Emily the other day that I thought Eric might be the genesis of this preoccupation I have with fictional bullies. I did correct myself when I remembered Roger Klotz though. I won’t go too deep here since this will most likely be a future LISTLESS topic, but Emily and I are both fascinated by the inherent sexual tension between these fictional bullies and victims9. Eric and Caitlin. Roger Klotz and Doug. Saying things like, “I’ll pound you.”
Obviously, there are several types of bullies and victims with all sorts of different dynamics, but the most common I’ve seen is probably the Bully and the Wimp. One character is strong and big and mean and the other is weak and small and sensitive. Their juxtaposition causes conflict and character development (and a lot of fodder for fanfiction). It’s a trope that, for me, never gets old and automatically elevates whatever I’m watching.
There’s a case of the Bully and the Wimp in Season 1, Episode 11 of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, “The Tale of the Dark Music.” Well, two actually. The first of which subverts the trope.
It’s Eric’s night to tell a story. Not the Eric I was just talking about. This Eric:
Eric of the Midnight Society. He looks like the epitome of a Wimp. Even I want to beat him up. But, he’s also kind of an asshole. He reminds me of that cocky-looking smirking guy in the opening credits of Cheers. He picks on Frank a lot.
Frank, another member of the Midnight Society, looks like a classic Bully: strong and big and mean with a backwards hat and ripped sleeves. And for the most part, he fits the mold. But in this particular episode, he’s the Wimp. Eric lounges and eats popcorn while Frank comes running in from the woods. He’s scared, wants to know why Eric didn’t wait for him.
Eric ribs him and mocks him in a baby voice, accusing him in front of everyone that he’s scared of the dark.
In the story that Eric tells that night, teenage paperboy Andy, his single mom, and his absolute bitch of a little sister move into a suburban house after inheriting it from their dead uncle.
Andy’s mom spends the entirety of the episode fixing up the house, her sole purpose being to ask Andy, who is afraid of the dark, to go down into the basement to grab a ladder, throw the tarps in the wash, etc.
Though every chore assigned to him would take less than a minute, Andy takes his damn ass time, turns on the radio, and listens to nondescript instrumental rock. Unbeknownst to him—at least at first—his music triggers the presence of some evil entity that lives in the root cellar. It calls to Andy, beckoning him to come inside the small room. First, it appears to him as a pair of glowing red eyes. Next, a life-sized doll—a genuinely spine-chilling reveal that’s for sure a hall-of-fame AYAOTD? moment.
Then it takes shape as a carnival barker who turns into a Party City skeleton before grabbing hold of him.
Luckily for Andy, the entity only appears when music is playing, so when the music stops (the radio gets knocked down, the mom shuts the power off, etc.), each encounter is interrupted, and he’s shaken loose from the creature’s hypnotic spell.
While all of this is happening, Andy is also being tormented by Koda, the neighborhood bully: a long-haired metal teen who gives him a black eye and throws his bike in the path of an oncoming truck. His every appearance on screen, much like Roger Klotz, is accompanied by a sick guitar lick.
Fed up with Koda’s abuse, Andy hatches a plan to teach him a lesson. Aware now of the music’s power, he packs the basement with giant speakers, lures Koda into it, and traps him there. Andy turns the music on at full volume. The entity emerges.
And it fucking kills Koda. When Andy goes down to see if Koda has learned his lesson, he sees instead a shiny new bike. The entity says he’ll keep giving Andy anything he wants as long as he feeds it. Andy faces the camera and smiles as his sister calls from upstairs.
Back at the campfire, Eric assures us that Andy didn’t “feed his own sister to the thing.” But I’d like to think he kept luring other victims into the basement and became some sort of teenage Renfield to a root cellar Dracula.
Because the Bully/Wimp thing is subverted with Eric and Frank, I do wonder who Eric sees himself as, Andy or Koda. Especially considering Frank is the one scared of the dark, just like Andy. Either way, it may reveal something to the audience about his feelings towards Frank.
Eric’s story is absolutely rife with homoerotic subtext. Koda is immediately physical with Andy, seconds after meeting him.
And pretty much every time they see each other after that.
Koda’s dialogue, the framing…
Please look at this shot:
I believe Andy has reciprocal feelings towards Koda and that they manifest in his choice of music. Andy meets Koda before he ever even goes down into the basement and turns on the radio, and we’re never made aware of his music taste prior. I think Andy makes a deliberate choice to tune the radio to hard rock to feel some sense of closeness to Koda. Of course it’s entirely possible that Andy has always listened to the genre, and I shouldn’t assume someone’s music tastes from the way they look, but sometimes we have to read the language of cinema (or TV) to understand a text more deeply. And the polo shirt/haircut combo Andy’s got going on seems shorthand for a kid who listens to Top 40.
“Dark Music” has a video nasty counterpart in 1981’s Evilspeak. Replace Andy’s radio with Clint Howard’s computer and the root cellar monster with a 16th century devil-worshipping Richard Moll and you’ve got a pretty good dupe.
You could substitute any teenage revenge film here I guess, but this one’s got a male protagonist, a rare Final Boy. Just like Andy.
Plus, if you’re in the mood to see a bunch of puppy-killing bullies get ripped apart in a church by way of a crazed Clint Howard and some huge boars, here you go.
There’s a Bully/Wimp thing too.
The movie that aligns the most with “Dark Music” though is A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge.
In vibes, in feelings, in tone, in the strangest line readings you’ve ever heard...
Andy and the protagonist of Freddy’s Revenge, Jesse, are one and the same. You could swap one out for the other and both texts would have the exact same effect.
Andy’s got this tension-filled thing with Koda. Jesse’s got his own bully in Grady. Things are way more overt here though:
Andy is seduced by the monster in the basement. Jesse is seduced by Freddy Kreuger.
Both the entity and Freddy attempt to get the boys to kill for them.
“Dark Music” differs from Freddy’s Revenge in one key aspect though. The ending. “Dark Music” offers Andy what I consider to be a happy ending. He gives in to the entity’s seduction, takes charge of his life, gains control. He becomes his true self. Jesse gives in too when Freddy completely takes hold of his body, essentially becoming Freddy. But Jesse’s love interest Lisa saves him by kissing Freddy on the lips. The kiss causes Freddy to catch fire and melt. Jesse rips away at the char and ash and emerges from Freddy’s hollow corpse. If we’re reading into this, which we are, Jesse is “cured” of his queerness by “the love of a good woman”10. This ending sucks. Even without the deeper meaning, it’s just a boring ending. Jesse deserves more. Jesse deserves to have his looking-at-the-camera-and-smiling ending. His good-for-him ending.
We’re rooting for Andy. We’re rooting for Jesse. I’m not sure this is true for everyone, but we’re rooting for the monsters here too. The monster is the metaphor. And if the metaphor is self-actualization, we want the monster to win.
So, I don’t know, succumb to the thing calling out to you from your basement.
Cuz it’s probably cool actually.
Starring Kelli Maroney, who is also in Chopping Mall; she had the mall horror market cornered
I actually linked it here and then realized the link was from a porn site. So that should tell you something
Not played during an episode, but I need to include it because it scared us a lot! Nickelodeon did this Freestyle song? Or music video? Or promo? Did this make it into clubs???? I don’t know what it was, but anytime it aired we certainly obeyed
Quoting Molly from a text fyi
Here’s a bunch of beautiful stuff from there that sold at an estate sale and which I will stop thinking about because it pisses me off (also worth noting they sourced some items for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from HH)
It’s more complex than this because Caitlin gives it right back to him, but he’s a bully nonetheless
I’m talking on screen only here. I hate real bullies
Many sources are saying this
reading the words "Caitlin's Way" sent me into a full that's so raven vision of the past that i never could have predicted; important show alert. this rocks as always. I Saw the TV Glow supremacy