Return to Oz is an Absolute Nightmare

[Music] oz is an upsetting place a nightmare landscape accessed through traumatic events in our real world a place of dreams where logic matters little and even what would traditionally be normal is shifted and morphed into the bizarre and strange growing up i was a very big fan of older fantasy books for children the hobbit the chronicles of narnia alice's adventures in wonderland and l frank baum's oz novels were among some of my absolute favorites but as much as i love the oz books i kind of hate most oz movies for me the last big budgeted project set in this universe sam raimi's oz the great and powerful was genuinely one of the worst experiences i've ever had in a movie theater and i would put it on the same level as other young fantasy films of that time like mirror mirror and alice in wonderland that i similarly really hated i love these types of worlds but i think that these three films should be seen as the textbook example of what not to do with them my problem with the 1939 judy garland film is that while excellent in its own regard and should be considered the classic that it is it isn't a very good depiction of oz as it is shown in the original text it doesn't capture the subtle horror of the series oz of this movie is a dream but in bomb's books it is an absolute fever-induced surreal nightmare that you would remember for the rest of your life and hope to never experience again the illustrations of books from roughly 1850 to 1950 are a personal favorite of mine that i've always been fascinated with the covers of the pg woodhouse jeeves novels the cold black eyes of the wood engravings that john teniel provided for alice's adventures in wonderland the over-the-top caricatures that accompanied each new chapter of a charles dickens novel are all excellent examples but the ones that i liked the most growing up were the grotesque creations that w w dinslow and john r neal came up with in depicting the events of oz bomb's words alone were upsetting but when paired with these otherworldly designs a tone and feel was created that was incredibly unique that most adaptations never actually tried to recreate in my opinion the 1939 film was actually kind of destructive to the future of adapting all surrealist children's novels not just the osmonds for instance there's a very big tonal difference between the pre-39 alice in wonderland films and the post 39 months there's a lot of really upsetting things in these early alice movies they get taken out or toned down in the later adaptations and the wizard of oz definitely set the standard of how these types of films should be done to be considered successful at least within the hollywood studio system the oz of l frank baum's books is in a lot of ways an extremely grim world with a childlike exterior similar to most older fairy tales and while some of that is on display in the film such as the oppression of the munchkin people and the growing power of the wicked witch a lot of the darkness was stripped from the story and replaced with a veneer of early hollywood spectacle the wizard of oz is a glaringly colorful and optimistic film and while the end goal has the same message i'm not entirely sure that bomb would have loved everything that this movie does while just as stylized as the film i think the book series message is much more realistic and grounded they said that while there is a lot of good in the world there's also a great deal of bad maybe even more bad than good but that kindness is always a virtue worth pursuing and that a non-violent approach to de-escalating situations is always the best and while i really do love that movie i don't feel as if it really follows through with that story and world's intention all of the time tip is the protagonist of the first book sequel to oz and at the beginning of that tale he is implied to have been sold to the local witch momby as a servant by his parents when he was just a toddler in exchange for her leaving them and their village alone it really was an incredibly dark universe that explored complex historical ideas in a way that made them understandable for children and i think that's pretty cool baum never really wanted to continue the series after the first book but i'm glad he did because some of the more interesting ideas steeped more in real world politics that he comes up with are featured in those later books he writes of this in the author's note of the first sequel the marvelous land of oz of which return to oz is mostly based on i've always loved this introduction to the book because it reads in a very stereotypically fun turn-of-the-century kind of way it's a nice little paragraph that i really enjoy it reads after the publication of the wonderful wizard of oz i began to receive letters from children telling me of their pleasure and reading the story and asking me to write something more about the scarecrow and tin woodman at first i considered these little letters frank and ernest as they were in the light of pretty compliments but the letters continued to come during succeeding months and even years finally i promised one little girl who made a long journey to see me and prefer her request and she is a dorothy by the way that when a thousand little girls had written me a thousand little letters asking for another story of the scarecrow and tin woodman i would write the book either little dorothy was a fairy in disguise and waved her magic wand or the success of the stage production of the wizard of oz made new friends for the story for the thousand letters reached their destination long since and many more followed them and now although pleading guilty to a long delay i have kept my promise in this book l frank bomb chicago june 1904 and while he definitely grew tired of the series by the end of it and was probably a little tired of it by this point already i'm really happy that he continued to write these and make audiences happy around the world i mean he didn't really have much of a choice in the matter all other financial ventures that he invested in were so horribly disastrous that he even had to sell the rights to the first few oz books just to keep his house and the only way he made money in his later life was to continue to write these because they were the only thing that he had that was successful and so even if he didn't enjoy doing it he would eventually write 17 entries into the saga of the land of oz and in the process create the first truly american fantasy series and i think this is where some of the more politically based ideas of oz come from as baum was probably wanting to write to an older audience and express complex concepts in his writings but the only thing that he could get people to read were these children's books so we just started putting them in there anyways which is kind of funny to me oz media in my opinion has always kind of had this weird bubble gum feeling to it which i think is a direct result of all of the films and television shows taking their tonal inspiration from the 39 film rather than the actual books and if they don't have that then they have this strange grim dark feeling that treats the setting and characters too seriously and acts like a legitimate made for adults political thriller and sometimes they have both going on in the same movie or show which is especially weird and i really do think that the only adaptation to actually get the tone of these stories right so far has been returned to oz as well as a few of the early silent films that were made prior to the 1939 movie these stories really are dark fairy tales in the tradition of the brothers grimm or hans christian andersen and i think that's a little difficult to translate to film the oz books were probably where my love of horror and the strange as a young person was established it was certainly where my fascination with witches was born when i found them sitting alone covered in dust in the far corner of my local library i felt as if i had uncovered some sort of lost treasure and in a way i had buried under a century of children's literature inspired by other children's literature that was initially inspired by oz and the like baum and carol's wonderland were the originators of this and while wonderland is still well read today i don't think that the wonderful wizard of oz is very much anymore and the sequels certainly aren't i would argue that these books are still some of the most intense stories ever written with young people in mind there was an epic or mythical quality to the writing of bomb's books i've always loved them as being the first and one of the only true fantasy realms with a distinctly american tone to them as most popular fantasy series written by americans like game of thrones are very much eurocentric in their nature and some of the bizarre horror and violence of the series i think was probably born out of his frontier experience of late 1800s in south dakota and kansas when i was heavily in my oz phase i was probably in third grade or so maybe fourth and there were some wild things in here that i never found in any other book in my local library in the first novel the wicked witch sends a pack of wolves to tear dorothy apart in the woods and the tin man defends her and kills every single one of them with his axe the text describes it by saying he seized his axe which he had made very sharp and as the leader of the wolves came on the tin woodsman swung his arm and chopped the wolf's head from its body so that it immediately died as soon as he could raise his axe another wolf came up and he also fell under the sharp edge of the tin woodsman's weapon there were 40 wolves and 40 times a wolf was killed so that at last they all lay dead in a heap before the woodman then he put down his axe and sat beside the scarecrow who said it was a good fight friend every person in oz is dealing with their own personal hell of bizarre trauma that is so drenched in strangeness that i almost dreaded meeting new characters in each of the books while at the same time being fascinated by it all i believe i've said this before but when i was a child the most upsetting character and any work of fiction to me was the bumpy man i hated his name i hated how he looked like he should be in pain but was almost always drawn to be jovial he was otherworldly and horrible in my imagination almost as if he were a demon in mock human form in the text he is described as follows there were bumps on his head bumps on his body and bumps on his arms and legs and hands even his fingers had bumps on the end of them for dress he wore an old gray suit of fantastic design which fitted him very badly because of the bumps it covered but could not conceal the bumpy man's eyes were kind and twinkling in expression and as soon as he saw his visitors he bowed low and said in a rather bumpy voice happy day come in and shut the door for it grows cold when the sun goes down winter is now upon us this image of a man so riddled with cancer that his body was literally becoming a mass of cancer sores was impossible to get out of my young mind and i believe it had to have been my first real experience with the concept of body horror the glass cat of oz is one of the companions of the 1913 book patchwork girl of oz and like all cats this one is fussy and difficult to deal with so at the end of the book when the adventure concludes the wizard of oz lobotomizes her he says she is a pretty cat but its pink brains made it so conceited that it was a disagreeable companion to everyone so the other day i took away the pink brains and replaced them with transparent ones and now the glass cat is so modest and well behaved that osma has decided to keep her in the palace as a pet the scootlers are a race of tall thin men who can take their heads off and use them as weapons whose favorite meal is a soup made out of the travelers who cross into their territory the cowardly lion's close friend the hungry tiger says at one point i have enough to eat perhaps but not the kind of food i long for what i am hungry for is fat babies then perhaps the people of oz would fear me and i'd become more important the rack is a giant monster similar to a bull bulrog from lord of the rings who gets mortally wounded in one story and a hail of gunfire by the army of ugabu and as it is dying it falls and crushes a great many of the men one of the soldiers asks the dying creature can't you manage to lift your body off my commanding officers from their cries i'm afraid your great weight is crushing them to which the rack responds i hope it is i want to crush them if possible for i have a bad disposition if only i could open my mouth i'd eat all of you although my appetite is poor in this warm weather so really in this context things like the gump jack pumpkin head the wheelers and the head swapping mombi make a lot of sense within this universe as they are presented and returned to oz disney had been wanting for some time to dip their toes into oz to capitalize off the success of the 1939 mgm film they first played with the idea in the late 1950s where they considered casting the mouseketeers from the mickey mouse club in a new oz adventure but complications came about from that so they instead remade babes in toyland and cast ray bulger in the lead role who had played scarecrow 20 years previously by 1980 the company had still not produced any oz content despite owning the copyright on all of the oz books by this point during a meeting that year disney production chief tom white asked walter merch if there was anything in particular he was interested in working on to which he responded that he had always wanted to make an oz film merch was apparently unaware that disney even owned the rights to the books and that the books were only a few years from their copyright expiring and upon learning that he wanted to do this disney immediately gave the go-ahead to begin pre-production on this project disney definitely felt as if they had a future massive hit on their hands and rightfully so not only were they making a sequel to one of the most successful and well-beloved films of all time but now they had walter march writing and directing it for them his resume was incredibly impressive and pretty much every film that he had worked on by this point in his career was already either considered a classic or culturally important in some fashion these include the rain people thx 1138 give me shelter the godfather american graffiti the conversation julia the godfather part two and apocalypse now in between the planning phase of the film and the actual production there was a massive change in leadership at disney and in this process tom white was replaced by ron berger when this happens it can often times spell disaster for films that are in the middle of being made but here the opposite was true and the new leadership actually signed off on more money being given to the film's budget because of their confidence in the project and their opinion nothing could go wrong but unfortunately a lot went wrong here by all accounts the actual production of the film was more or less a living hell to go through and lasted all the way from february to october of 1984. the different effects that they wanted took much more time than expected the puppets were difficult to use and it took a great deal of practice to get them to look realistic and everything was costing more than they had initially planned and after the first five weeks of production had ended disney had seen enough and they fired merch from the project it was at this point that francis coppola steven spielberg and george lucas stepped in and used their weight to leverage disney to give the film back to merch lucas was reported to even have offered that if merch wasn't able to turn the film around in a timely fashion that he would personally step into the role of being his replacement and they could advertise the film as being directed by him and this worked merch was able to complete the film more or less to his vision certain things at this point had to be removed from the film that had originally been planned to be there as a worried disney scaled back the project's budget when they rehired merch and this actually added to some of the film's more uncanny elements jack pumpkinhead for instance was originally supposed to be a fully animated animatronic face that could perform multiple different expressions like the gump but because of these cutbacks he became this still-faced inexpressive jack that is present in the finished product and the lack of money and more restrictions from disney being concerned about the film failing it seems made the set miserable and generally stressful to be around the lights were so hot that the costumes that the actors wore occasionally melted and at one point feruza bulk who played the young dorothy passed out from the extreme heat michael sunden who played tiktok had to spend long stretches at a time in this position with his knees slightly bent in an awkward and uncomfortable way there was no way for him to be able to see anything and he had to be led around based on sounds but all this is kind of amazing as well as upsetting and uncanny as the wheelers are doing this actually took legitimate skill and ingenuity to pull off the end scene when oz is restored to its former glory is amazing to look at it had to have taken someone days to create the frogman of oz who is just standing in the background of a few shots the density and diversity of this crowd is kind of crazy when you think about it each one of these different individual characters are from actual oz books and this scene in particular makes me really sad that merch never got to take on the other books in the series like he did here there is an actual masterful use of craft on display in this film that is almost never seen it reminds me of hiring cirque du soleil performers to do stunts for mad max fury road and what they were able to achieve under the circumstances are still amazing to see today and even though it was really upsetting to experience even as a child i also marveled at the sheer level of creativity that went into realizing this world that only existed within my mind and the stories by bomb and the drawings of john r neal i've always had an interest in formative media that was either purposefully or accidentally very upsetting to experience often times in the attempt to make content that children will enjoy things can take a turn into the horribly surreal and i've always just loved that on monday nights my local video store had three day one dollar rentals and my family would go every week and we each got to pick something out and even though they bothered me i was always attracted to some of the store's more bizarre entries to their collection meet the feebles the witches never-ending story the 1988 bbc adaptation of the lion the witch in the wardrobe halloweentown can of worms why does he have human teeth and josh kirby time warrior we're among those that i checked out most frequently but above all of these return to oz stood when my mom found out what this video was going to be on she asked that's the one that you rented over and over again as a kid isn't it but i'm not alone in this it is no secret that this movie is universally seen as the scariest film that everyone collectively experienced in their childhood and i think that there's a very specific reason for this beyond it just being generally upsetting the film was literally a psychological attack on children using a specific combination of their most common fears while also staying true to the aesthetic style of the original novels and i think through that is what made it such a successful adaptation and is why it is still remembered and talked about to this day the thing that i find interesting here is that the movie is aimed at an audience of primarily children and is intent on exploring the psychology of dorothy as a character and to do that it very much goes out of its way to use the fears that we frequently experience in childhood against that audience to build its world of bizarre horrors the fierce survey schedule for children revised was at this time of the early 1980s the prevailing test that was used for young patients by psychiatrists to measure the extent of different phobias that the patients held as well as the effectiveness of therapies and treatments used for those patients and it was based around five core fear tenets fear and criticism the unknown minor injury in small animals danger and death and medical fears these five core structures of the test are composed of 80 different criteria they each represent what was believed to be the most common fearful traits among children at the time and pretty much every single one of these traits can be found in this movie in some way 40 of them are there at some point directly represented within the film's narrative but 16 others can be found here in a somewhat analogous form dorothy does not have to give an oral report to the class for instance but i would argue that the scene where she has to pick the right object from the hall of objects is similar in nature both involve having to perform a stressful task while being watched by a figure of authority and this scene is relatable because even though we've never had to take a test to save our lives for the gnome king we have all experienced the real life equivalent of this and know what this feels like on an emotional level getting punished by mother looking foolish ghosts or spooky things having to go to the hospital death or dead people getting lost in a strange place being sent to the principal getting a shot from the nurse or doctor high places like mountains being teased meeting new people my parents criticizing me failing a test strange looking people strange or mean looking dogs deep water or the ocean nightmares falling from high places getting a shock from electricity being alone getting punished by my father making mistakes earthquakes and taking a test are some of the ones from the fear survey schedule that are among the most blatantly being used here a lot of what is going on in this film is a targeted attack on the senses using the most current scientific knowledge of what was known to bother kids and i kind of love that and on top of that the film is written in such a way as to particularly mess with the young audience's expectations because the filmmakers knew that almost everyone watching this movie would have seen the original judy garland film that this serves as the sequel too everything familiar to us from that movie that could provide comfort from before is stripped away and is destroyed and lay in ruin the yellow brick road is merely a collection of rubble the emerald city is a crumbling facade of its former glory devoid of people who have since been turned to stone our friends who were left behind from the last journey are now dead or captured and the only painted memories of them are hidden in the castle tower covered in cobwebs no one sings any longer the music of oz has both literally and metaphorically died the world has become a hostile and unforgiving place under the rule of a new brutal dictator the gnome king spies can be found around every corner and any feeling of hope has long since evaporated into the ether oz has devolved into a cruel and tribal land and through this exploration of fear the filmmakers stay true to the written subtext of bomb's novels as well by examining some real questions about how different political ideologies interact with each other in ways that i find really fascinating for a children's film to attempt and here's the thing about this the gnome king might be right the climax of the film starts with dorothy as she descends down into the cave where the gnome king resides after traveling far into his territory to save her friend the scarecrow who had taken over as the new king of oz after the wizard left in his hot air balloon at the end of the last adventure the scarecrow has since been captured by the gnome king as a political prisoner and he explains his reasoning for doing this as she enters his throne room he says to her all the precious stones in the world were made here my underground dominions all made for me by my gnomes so imagine how i feel when someone from the world above digs down and steals my treasures all those emeralds in the emerald city belonged to me i was just taking back what was mine to begin with to which dorothy responds but you have so much that is not the point the gnome king tells her i am not the thief your friend is the thief dorothy distraught by this yells at the king he never stole anything they were there when he came the scarecrow she argues didn't take these things the people who were in charge before him did but isn't the scarecrow in the moral wrong for not giving them back when he took office shouldn't the scarecrow be responsible for a large part of the blame for the destruction of his city and the death of his people if a war resulted from the stolen cultural goods that he refused to return like what the gnome king did may not be justified but the people of oz took so many gems from his people that they were able to build an entire glowing capital city of avarice out of them so while total decimation and war is never an appropriate response he at least had a legitimate reason for being very angry and resentful to the people of oz for what they had done the emerald city is a massive project which means its completion would have resulted in years or possibly decades of occupying the no minds this would have been a major historical event for their culture they would have had a similar effect financially that war reparations do in real life their entire economy would have been decimated the gnome king is actually pretty pleasant to our characters most of the time he's definitely an antagonistic force to them and loses that calm cool collected front eventually but he starts off from a pretty cordial place he treats the invaders as guests when they break into his home to rescue their king he serves them refreshments and gives them the diplomatic respect that he himself had probably not been shown i love how his character in this scene switches between stop motion and live action depending on what is emotionally needed for different lines of dialogue it's incredibly unnerving and very effective and making him feel like a shape-shifter made out of stone who is phasing in and out of pretending to be a human for the purposes of being able to better relate to one another for this meeting we know for a fact that this is not his natural form just one he is taking so that it is easier for the two sides to converse more effectively and i think that's really cool dorothy scared for her friend's safety cries and wishes at one point for this to all be over and the gnome king tells her that he can make that into a reality pulling back his cloak to reveal his feet offering to send her back to kansas unharmed with the ruby slippers that he wears because he has no quarrel with her only those who raided his land and his people my ruby slippers she screams no no no he responds my ruby slippers i love this moment because it also recontextualizes the plot of the first book and movie where you realize that it was actually about two groups of people fighting over an extravagant luxury resource that didn't rightfully belong to either of them the gnome king instead of killing his intruders plays a game for their lives with them one where if they lose they are taken by the gnome king and now belong to him transforming them into ornaments and placing them into a trophy room that is very reminiscent of a modern museum a decadent marble display area with high ceilings filled with objects of different national and cultural origins from around the world this can absolutely be interpreted as an imperialist revenge story where those who were oppressed gain enough power or are able to take advantage of a situation where their oppressors are weakened to take back control and punish them for their misdeeds momby the witch who is in the film is the only power figure from oz who is still alive or not in captivity after the end of the war and she is only allowed to be alive because of her complete devotion and servitude to the gnome king it is made clear that he would kill her if she no longer worked for him but after the confrontation is over in the end our heroes are able to barely come ahead and win they kill the gnome king take back the things that they had stolen from the known people in the first place and rebuild their society to its once former glory off the things that they had plundered but also what if this isn't the case what if the gnome king wasn't actually a king at all and was instead originally a citizen of oz who had no right to declare himself sovereign over a group of people the film does not really make this clear in the books he is definitely his own king of his own land that the aseans hold an imperialist grasp over but the film doesn't ever really outright say this and so if he was within the land of oz wouldn't that moore place him in line with the capitalist tycoons of the late 1800s i mean when looking at his quotes he doesn't seem all that outright concerned with his known people he literally says all the precious stones in the world were mined explicitly for him not for them and he always treats the gnomes like his personal minions it is a common trope now in oz media for the actors who play the main characters and oz to also have a role in dorothy's life when she returns to the real world to further play with the idea that what we are experiencing may be a dream and in return to oz the gnome king's real-life equivalent who were both played by nicole williamson is the head doctor that is in charge of the mental facility the anti-m takes dorothy to his name is dr jb whirly which to my ears sounds an awful lot like jp morgan and so through this lens then instead of an imperialism issue it could instead be talking about redistributing the wealth through taxation of the ultra wealthy so that all can prosper and society can thrive l frank bomb's personal politics were very much formed by spending his younger years as a journalist in the midst of the gilded age which saw an unprecedented wealth gap form with the carnegie's rockefellers and jp morgans of the world consisting of an elitist ruling class exploiting everything that they possibly could to get ahead while siphoning power from the pre-established government i mean just listen to the way that bomb describes how the citizens live in oz here in this section from the sixth book of the series the emerald city of oz and you can really see where his political beliefs were at the time there were no poor people in the land of oz because there was no such thing as money and all property of every sort belonged to the ruler each person was given freely by his neighbor whatever he required for his use which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire everyone worked half the time and played half the time and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play because it is good to be occupied and have something to do there were no cruel overseers set to watch them and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them so each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors and was glad when they would accept the things he produced each man and woman no matter what he or she produced for the good of the community was supplied by the neighbors with food and clothing and a house and furniture and ornaments and games if by chance the supply ever ran short more was taken from the great storehouses of the ruler which were afterwards filled up again when there was more of any article that the people needed in another section in the road to oz the tin woodman says if we used money to buy things with instead of love and kindness and the desire to please one another then we should be no better than the rest of the world we have no rich and no poor for what one wishes the others all try to give him in order to make him happy and no one in all of oz cares to have more than he can actually use the basic sentiment is the same across all of the oz books although the continuity is pretty shoddy and bomb could never decide between books if oz has an actual currency system or not because in some books they do and in others they don't but the basic idea of taking care of one another and a socialist-based monarchy system is present in essentially all of the novels but we do have to also remember that this is coming from the guy who said the whites by law of conquest by justice of civilization are masters of the american continent he also said of the native american people why not annihilation their glory has fled their spirit broken their manhood effaced better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are so really at best his beliefs should be seen as a founding fathers type situation good ideas but horrible and the intended method of implementation that excludes a massive amount of people that should be protected by the society but i think all of this is probably what i find so fascinating about these early examples of children's literature in the end this video we've talked a lot here about wildly different issues and it all stems from us starting with a movie made for eight-year-olds and this is what i think makes oz and similar worlds from this time important for children to be exposed to in their originally intended style the arguments could be made the adaptations of these works shouldn't be made at all because of the personal statements and actions of their creators but if we're being honest they are probably going to still be making quirky new takes on alice in wonderland 200 years from now despite the fact that he was a sexual abuser of an 11 year old who is only remembered today based on a book written about her so if we are going to be adapting them then i think it is important to strive to adapt them in ways that are true to form of how they were originally intended to be i find this conversation at the end of the film between dorothy and the gnome king that takes up almost 30 minutes of the climax to be a lot more captivating thought-provoking and more true to the source material for instance than a large-scale lord of the rings style battle lacking any real political substance behind why these people are doing these things or a soap opera set in oz these worlds can be used as entertainment for children yes but i also think that allegory and moral lessons about complex issues and how our world actually operates are crucial to getting the feel and tone of these works correct and out of all these types of adaptations return to oz was by far the most successful in that endeavor and so our story ends here as dorothy having just helped to kill the gnome king is crowned the honorary queen of oz before she's sent back home to be with her family and the film ends with her standing before the mirror back in kansas which operates as a portal to see into oz auntim asks her what she's looking at to which dorothy says it's only a reflection [Music] hey everyone i hope you're doing well and that the year has started off in a really great way for you i just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for your ongoing support of me and the channel it was roughly a year ago now that the videos really started to take off and for me it has made a really shitty year a lot less shitty and stressful than it otherwise would have been so really from the bottom of my heart thank you for that it means more to me than i could ever really say if you wanted to you can find me on twitter at praise underscore shadows and if you feel like giving a dollar per month to my patreon to help with the creation of future videos that would also be really awesome and very much appreciated as well the link to that can be found below in the description take care stay safe and thank you so much for [Music] watching

Channel: In Praise of Shadows

Views: 860,741

Rating: 4.9146352 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: dnXjqhzbY1w

Length: 35min 25sec (2125 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Freaked the SHIT out of me when I was a kid. Had nightmares about the wheelers and pumpkin head. Creepy af. Even more so when you realise it was all in Dorothy's head as a way to cope with being locked up and tortured in a mental hospital.

[u/Fairymask]

This was one of my favorite movies as a kid!

[u/MelancholyEcho]

The scene with the disembodied heads yelling as Dorothy runs past them still creeps me out.

[u/flyingsaucerinvasion]

Everything in that movie is creepy. Including everything that isn't meant to be.

[u/dielawn87]

There's few movies that capture what a nightmare is like, but this one is up there. It just has such a strange tone.

[u/JWWBurger]

That was the second movie I watched when I got Disney+. It still makes me feel as uneasy as it did when I was a kid.

[u/RiflemanLax]

If Mombi ain’t scary enough for a kid, the Wheelers were some freaky ass shit.

[u/GentlemanJoe]

I remember Fairuza Balk on a kids' tv show here in the UK; in the scene where the sofa drops, she wasn't told when it would happen so she'd always be surprised.

[u/[deleted]]

One of my favorite fantasy films. Wonderfully creepy.