Wendell & Wild

Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror

Hair Cream and Hell Maidens

In this episode we discussed Wendell & Wild (2022), directed by Henry Selick.

Our email address is [e-mail]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and 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

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 2022 film Wendell and Wild. Enjoy!

(intro music plays)

Ren Good evening, Adam!

Adam Good evening, Ren!

Ren How are you doing?

Adam I’m okay, I feel like a bit of a slugabed, to be honest. My teacher training’s ongoing and I am working hard, although nowadays teachers just seem to use that open AI chatbot to do all their work for them! I probably shouldn’t say that, the teachers are probably horrified if they listen to this podcast: ’Oh no, the secret’s out!’ But they’ve been using them to do lesson plans and such, and I can’t bring myself to do it — I feel too guilty. I feel like I’ve established quite a fun, casual relationship with chat bots, to be honest. I can’t expect them to do work for me now, they know what I’m like! That’s not the kind of relationship we have!

Ren Yeah, you’re not their boss.

Adam Exactly! I don’t think they’d take to it too nicely if I started making them labour. Maybe occasional therapy sessions, but apart from that.

But yeah, I’m quite tired! How about you?

Ren I’m also quite tired. I keep falling asleep on my yoga mat, which is basically the floor, only slightly more cushioned.

Adam Is it while holding an impressive yoga position though?

Ren Uh, no. I would fall on my face.

Adam Well, I’m glad.

Ren Doing yoga on my yoga mat and sleeping on my yoga mat are two different activities.

Adam Ah right, I thought you were wearing yourself out doing yoga and falling asleep.

Ren No, no, it’s a dual purpose mat.

Adam That’s nice. I’ve only ever done yoga on the Wii fit mat, and you can’t really sleep on that. It would probably tell you off. (Tiny passive-aggressive voice) ‘Oi! you’re lazy! You’re not meant to be falling asleep!’

Ren Well, I’m doing Ring Fit Adventure now.

Adam What’s that?

Ren It’s the fitness RPG for the Switch. It’s quite good, it makes you do a lot of squats.

Adam Oh gosh, are you squatting down on Mario enemies to kill them, or something?

Ren Y ou’re fighting little squishy enemies through squatting — you don’t sit on them —

Adam Oh, so it’s not like Wario.

Ren No, you squat and it punches them in the head.

Adam See now I’m imagining a Wario fitness game! I’d enjoy that. I think I’d find that quite motivational actually.

Anyway, let’s try to wake up because we’re talking about a great film with a lot of plot!

Ren So much plot! We’re talking about Wendell and Wild today, which is a stop-motion children’s or young adult’s horror film which came out just last year in October 2022.

It was directed by Henry Selick of Nightmare before Christmas and Coraline, and co-written by Selick and Jordan Peele, of Key and Peele, Get Out and lots of other things, he’s a pretty big deal.

And I think we both enjoyed this film!

Adam Yeah, Nightmare before Christmas as I’m sure I’ve said many times before was my favourite film as a child, and Coraline is in my top ten films of all time! And I’m very fond of the Key and Peele sketch show as well. So it was a fair shoo-in that I would enjoy this.

Ren Peele and Keegan-Michael Key also star in the film as Wendell and Wild, although I don’t know, did you think the film’s name was… I thought it could have been called something else? They’re not really the main characters.

Adam They’re not really the main characters, they’re just little trickster figures, really.

Ren It could have been called The Hell Maiden, for example.

Adam Because it does focus on the hell maiden rather more, but — I can’t imagine much merchandise has come out of this, but if it had been released fifteen years ago they would have been the merchandisable characters.

Ren Oh yeah, you could imagine their little bendy action figures.

But yeah, the film’s main character is Kat Elliot, played by Lyric Ross and the film starts at a celebration at a brewery — according to Wikipedia it’s a root beer brewery, though I can’t say I grasped that impression from the film.

Adam No…

Ren So this is in the town of Rustbank, young Kat and her parents, her father raises a toast and says ‘more beer, less prisons!’, which is a theme that we will come back to.

Adam Yeah, I’d say that could be a motto for the film.

Ren They drive home from this celebration and young Kat is surprised by a two-headed worm in her candy apple, screams, and the car veers of a bridge and plunges into the river, leaving Kat as the only survivor.

I wrote in my notes while watching this: ‘Why am I still surprised that the parents are killed off??’ after consuming so much children’s horror.

Adam That’s true, you’ve got to love a plucky orphan. And it’s very similar in a way to the start of Selick’s James and the Giant Peach. Obviously neither he nor Peele wrote that, it was Roald Dahl —

Ren Ah James and the Giant Peach! That was the Selick that I loved as a kid. I watched that one a lot.

Adam Now that’s actually closer in style to Wendell and Wild, I’d say — it’s got that bricolage of lots of different animation styles that you get here as well. When I was a kid I watched James and the Giant Peach on a ferry, in quite rocky seas. So 4D cinema in a sense.

Ren Yeah, that’s not ideal. It’s a pretty spiky and lurchy kind of film.

Adam Those are really good words for James and the Giant Peach, I’d agree. And you’ve definitely got some sharp angles here — Selick’s cubist influence which you can trace right back to his early career. Did we talk about Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions?

Ren Yeah, we did.

Adam I really love that, and those jagged angles are back for Wendell and Wild.

Ren Which is great, I’m really glad he did another horror thing.

Adam Oh yeah, and with the ubiquity of the Socal animation style where everything has to look round and —

Ren — round and peachy?

Adam Exactly. It’s really nice to see something that doesn’t look at all like that. Except there is a lamb, I suppose — no, not a lamb, a goat! A goat that looks quite lamb-like.

Ren It’s quite round and fleecy. A little felt goat. But yes it’s very jaggedy, and I did see some reviews disliking that, but I think that’s for the best.

Adam No, I love it, and visually it pushes the grotesquery in places.

Ren So, right. After… Uh…

Adam After Kat’s parents die —

Ren Yes, after her parents die we get this stop-motion animation sequence introducing the Scream Faire, which is an infernal underworld fairground tormenting the souls of the ‘danged’ and ruled over by the enormous Buffalo Belzer, and Wendell and Wild are his tiny sons who are being punished by having to work in his hair, rejuvenating it with squirts of hair cream from their hair-cream dispensing wagon.

Adam There’s some really loopy non-logic in this film —

Ren Yeah! And as we mentioned there is a lot of plot, there is I think most people agree, too much plot in this film, but I’m just going to explain it and see how it goes —

Adam I was just going to say how much I loved the visual of the Scream Faire. They have these kind of spectral paper dolls, that I think are actually made of metal — Wikipedia said that they were made from tin then coated with silicone.

Ren Ooh. Huh!

Adam But they managed to look very wavy and wibbly, and they’re just a great child’s vision of tormented souls, but with their arms waving in the air as they’re screaming on these fairground rounds, so they could be having a good time!

Ren It’s a great sequence, and then there’s enormous Belzer watching over them.

It’s five years later, Kat is sixteen and has been in trouble with the police. We see her being taken for a new start, at the girls school in Rustbank. They drive through the town and it’s grim and shut down, with flyers for ‘Klaxkorp’ everywhere and Kat sees the skeleton of her parents’ brewery and that’s how she learns that it was burned down.

She gets to the school and a girl called Siobahn immediately tries to befriend her with her peppy crew and her little goat, but Kat tries to keep her distance from everyone.

Adam And I have to say, because my second placement for teacher training has been at a prestigious boarding school, which is a really interesting experience, not necessarily where I would chose to work, but it’s interesting. And the peppy crew are quite like some of the students there. They’re quite wholesome really, and into their wellness culture and yoga and ethical causes. They’re probably generally a good sign for the future, but they’re a bit overwhelming.

Ren Yeah, Kat’s more of the goth type. She’s wearing big stompy boots and listening to X-Ray Spex.

Adam Oh yeah, there’s like three X-Ray Spex songs on the soundtrack!

Ren Yeah, it’s brilliant! Gotta introduce X-Ray Spex to the youth.

Adam It has a really good, largely Afro-Punk soundtrack, and I didn’t know all of it but yeah X-Ray Spex!

Ren She also encounters Raul who is not peppy, but is watching from the tower of the building and accidentally knocks a brick off and Kat sees the future and manages to push Siobahn out the way — but anyway. Raul we learn is a trans boy, and he’s trying to befriend Kat a bit but she tells him that bad things happen to people she’s close to and pushes him away.

In a lesson with a nun called Sister Helley and a mimic octopus, Kat receives a mark on her hand in the shape of a skeleton jaw.

Adam And I will say that the mimic octopus is a little wonder of animation.

Ren Yeah, it’s gorgeous.

Adam It recalls Selick’s work on the Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic, which is a mess of a film, but Selick did the animation for the underwater creatures in it, and it reminded me of that. The animation of this mimic octopus is wonderful, it’s fluid transformative animation and it metamorphoses in a really convincing way into really interesting shapes and it’s really satisfying to watch.

Ren Yeah, I mean that’s like the opposite of jerky stop-motion — animating an octopus.

Adam There’s a whole bunch of just virtuoso animation in this. I really just want to stress to anyone interested in animation that they should watch this film. There are bits of fluid camerawork combined with animation where my jaw literally dropped. I was gawping at the screen at some of the animation, some of it is pretty unthinkable, frankly. So it makes me quite sad that it’s probably got overlooked a bit because you need to think a bit about the craft to really get quite how astonishing some of it is.

Ren The curse of the animator. But when Kat gets the skull on her hand Helley tells her not to tell anyone, and Wendell and Wild get a notification that they’ve received a ‘hell maiden.’

Adam And this notification is delivered by a Bearzebubble!

Ren By Bearzebub!

Adam Can we do our Texture of the Week?

Ren Yeah, alright.

Adam Can you do some drumming?

Ren Sure.

(drumming, guitar strumming)

Adam (shouting) Texture! Texture! Texture of the Week!

Ren That was my best attempt at drumming with a pen on a phone.

Adam Sounded great to me.

Ren I’ve lost the pen lid now.

Adam Ah well, casualty of art.

Ren Um, okay, yeah. Texture of the Week.

Adam So right, yeah, Bearzebub. On one level it’s a bear, because you see it as an old-fashioned, floppy-headed, big triangle head bear. Like one of those slightly awkwardly stuffed old bears, but it also seems to… I don’t know, move through dimensions in the form of one of those little capsule toys? When you go to a supermarket and my step-son’s pestering me for a toy and you have those gummy or sticky toys, like a Spongebob, that comes in a capsule in a machine.

Bearzebub seems to communicate in the form of one of these that floats through the air and has pink goo that splatters everywhere when it delivers its message.

Ren Yeah, with glowing eyes as well.

Adam Glowing eyes as well. I liked it a great deal. And it’s a very cute name as well!

Ren Yeah, aww, Bearzebub. Missing a trick if there isn’t merch, you could have a Bearzebub!

I have quite a small texture, I just thought it was really good. When Kat’s being driven to the school through Rustbank, and it’s snowy and icy, the car drives through an iced-over puddle and the ice cracks. And I just thought that was a really good texture that spoke to me as it has been icy and cold here, and I have cycled through some iced over puddles.

Adam I can picture the bit you mean, and it is a film that however densely packed with plot does take the time to focus in on some smaller textures. This film is a riot of textures, it’s an incredibly tactile film and it can be quite overwhelming. In a way it reminded me of a child-friendly version of Mad God? Which was Paul Tibbet’s stop-motion film from last year, which I really recommend although it’s definitely not for kids.

It’s a kind of descent into Dante’s inferno, and it’s basically just stop-motion monsters and various grisly things. It’s incredible but visually very overwhelming, it’s a lot. And this film is similar — there were times when I paused it and actually I think it benefits from being paused occasionally because it looks so incredible and there’s so many shapes and colour combinations and so much design work. It’s not something you should just be putting on casually in the background.

Ren I want to watch it again just to look at it, look at all the art they made for me.

Adam I feel the same! It’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to that visual.. I find it quite overwhelming to put into words because it’s so mixed-media, and there’s so many shapes and textures and colours. So I found it very gratifying to watch in that sense, and the less I worried about the plot the more I enjoyed it.

Ren Yes. But back to the plot!

The head of the school, Father Beste, is golfing with the Klaxons of Klaxkorp, who are peppy Siobahn’s parents, and we learn that they have been trying to build a private prison in Rustbank for years. Father Beste insinuates that he could reveal that the Klaxon’s set the fire at the brewery on purpose and they promptly crack him over the head with a golf club —

Adam Yes, very promptly!

Ren Very promptly, no compunction about that. We also learn that Raul is an artist working on an ancient Egyptian inspired mural, and that his mum is a paralegal investigating the fire at the brewery.

Adam I liked her, actually. I wanted to get more time with her.

Ren Yeah, you don’t get a lot of her.

Adam I do think this film would have benefited from being a mini-series so you could get a bit more time with some of these characters, but then again I do recognise that would probably have pushed production time to over a decade. It takes a long time to make a film like this.

Ren It would have been so good if it could have got the Dark Crystal treatment —

Adam — Yeah, but Henry Selick’s not getting any younger, and it’s been over a decade since Coraline, so I’m just happy to get something new from him.

Ren Wendell and Wild visit Kat in her dream and say that they'll bring her patents back from the dead if she does what they want.

Adam Ooh, they have really good smooshy faces! Their faces are kind of like Mario’s at the beginning of Mario 64, all stretched!

Ren Yes. I mean, I don’t know about Mario 64, but their faces are woobly.

Kat goes and steals Bearzabub from Sister Helley’s desk, and Wendell and Wild realise that their hair cream can bring creatures back from the dead!

Adam In a plot twist that no-one expected!

Ren Yeah! They learn this from ticks. There are ticks in the hair, and they’re very squelchy.

Adam Wonderfully squelchy. A bit like the chocolate bugs in Coraline. I wasn’t expecting to get to reviving the dead…

Ren You know, the hair cream that brings people back from the dead. Yep.

Adam Yep.

Ren So the school kids go to Father Beste’s funeral and commanders Raul as her witness, goes to parents grave and uses Bearzabub. Wendell and Wild are summoned but to the wrong place.

They find Father Beste’s fresh-ish corpse and and test the cream on him. He comes back to life, slightly alarming-looking, but they paint his face and make him look more alive question mark? Then they demand payment to make their dream faire.

Adam Which is quite a sweet goal. I’ve always said that if I won the lottery, anything I didn’t give to friends or family or charity I would probably spend on having some kind of ghost train built for me, to be honest.

Ren I’m glad you still have the ghost train dream.

Adam They’re quite charming demons, really.

Ren Father Beste says he has no money and they threaten to put him back in the ground, but Beste says that the Klaxons will pay for their services.

Beste goes back to the Klaxons (who did kill him, remember) and tells them that these two demons can get the votes they need —

Adam And they try to kill him again!

Ren — The votes to build their prison by raising the dead council members. The Klaxons are like, ‘Yeah, sounds great!’ but tell Wendell and Wild that if they raise anyone else in the cemetery they won’t get paid.

Adam Yes, because they were responsible for burning down the brewery, so they are aware that if anyone else gets revived they are likely to be one of the victims so they can testify.

Ren Ooh, I remembered another good texture.

Adam Oh yeah?

Ren The radiator in Kat’s room that stretches and squeezes like an accordion.

Adam Mmm.

Ren Anyway.

Adam That’s okay, it’s a film that deserves texture interruptions.

Ren Kat finds Wendell and Wild and they make her swear that they’ll serve her for all eternity. Her first job is getting them falafel, and while she’s gone they make Raul help them dig up the corpses of the old council members.

Adam I think this is the first time I’ve seen falafel in a children’s film.

Ren (laughs) Well. There should be more falafel, it’s a tasty and convenient food.

Adam Exactly, I do see where Wendell and Wild are coming from. Seems like a pretty sensible thing to do, getting Kat to get some falafel.

I also really like the satire of these council members being revived.

I think this is a good gag because younger generations particularly in America have often seen op-eds or just general complaints about the fact that, say, things like Brexit or climate change getting decided by quite elderly baby-boomers who aren’t going to necessarily live with the long-term consequences of these decisions, while younger generations want to chose far more progressive and generally sensible options.

So I quite like the idea that here the voting decisions to create this for-profit prison are being taken not just by geriatric politicians but literally dead ones. It’s a simple gag but I thought it was a good one.

Ren While Raul is digging up these crumbling skeletons, Wendell and Wild accidentally tell him that they’re not going to raise Kat’s parents after all so he steals the hair cream and does it himself.

Adam Very bravely, I might add. He’s a character who’s quite shy and reserved, so he’s very gutsy in doing this.

Ren Yeah, I like that Raul. Meanwhile Buffalo Belzer’s hair is starting to fall out and he realise his errant sons are not up there replenishing his hair.

Adam I kind of love how low-stakes it is in the underworld.

Ren Yeah. I mean, you say low-stakes, some people have pretty strong feelings about their hair.

Adam Yes, and he clearly does. It’s not low-stakes for him.

Ren Kat ends up going to her old house and finds her parents there, in the basement, playing records. They’re reunited and they tell her that their deaths weren’t her fault, and the guilt she’s been carrying around all this time isn’t justified. And they persuade her to go and try to save Raul, who is now in danger from the demons.

Sister Helley turns up, confronts Kat and Raul, and reveals she's also a skull maiden and takes Kat to Manberg, who is a character that I have edited out of my retelling of the plot, because there is too much plot, but he’s a guy who lives in the school basement??

Adam I thought he was the janitor but then I started to think maybe he wasn’t?

Ren Yeah, I don’t know! He has fake feet.

Adam He’s just this guy, you know?

Ren He is just this guy. He tries to exorcise Kat but sister Helley says they’ll need two hell maidens to fight the demons, so Manberg binds her and Kat together with blood.

Adam There’s quite a lot of enjoyable demonic ritual going on in this Catholic school. I think that’s quietly quite provocative, to be honest.

Ren I don’t know if we did mention it’s a Catholic school, but there are some very squat, pointy-nosed nuns scuttling around in the background.

The dead council members invade the meeting and get the prison approved. Siobahn confronts her parents about the prison, which is an interesting scene, it’s the most overt damning of the prison, even though obviously the Klaxons are very much the villains.

But in this scene Siobahn says: ‘You make a pile of money for every prisoner you take. So you pack them in like sardines, provide crap food, crap medical, dangerous conditions and zero rehabilitation' and then her parents say 'that's our business model exactly!’ Well done, such a clever child.

Adam It’s pretty great to see an American kids’ film take very clear aim at private prisons.

Ren Yeah. My slight quibble is that I don’t think state prisons are much better than private prisons, but.

Adam No, that’s true, I see what you mean. It’s like: ‘how much worse can this be?’ and they’ve found a way to make something eeeven worse.

Ren Yeah, but you know, I think it is also critical of prison in general.

Adam It’s nice to see a kids film, and I think this is something that Laika as a studio have generally done well — I know neither of us were as keen on Boxtrolls, but certainly with Paranorman and with this film, and to a degree with Boxtrolls the villains are more structural. Which isn’t to say that the people making money off this aren’t evil, but generally, I guess I tend to like things when they’re criticising lawful evil more than chaotic evil.

Ren ‘Just some guy’.

Adam Yeah, when it’s not just some guy who can be boxed and othered and labelled as deviant, rather than something that is seen as normal and approved of by society. I just think that it’s more useful for a film to do that, basically. And Disney has improved a lot in that regard, and there have been recent Disney films I’ve liked a lot — I thought Moana was genuinely very good, but historically Disney have tended to just have villains who are pathologically evil as individuals.

So I’m glad to see a film that’s looking further afield, and how this town has struggled, not just how the main character has struggled. It’s a film that’s about community as much as it’s about Kat.

Ren Yeah, I was surprised and impressed by the villain plotline and the prison plotline. I like to see it!

Adam And there’s some quite, not gruesome, but ‘orrible bits of animation when Kat is walking through the town that’s now beset by zombified council members.

Ren Yeah, what was going on there? They’d broken into the houses and — what were they up to?

Adam They’re just living it up in a quite Edwardian way, basically.

Ren Yeah, they do look quite colonial?

Adam They look like representatives of the British Empire, basically. Which was quite bizarre, but I enjoyed these villainous colonial skeletons trying to ride elephants and so on, very odd.

Ren Yeah, don’t know why they’re there!

Adam One of them lurches through the window and has a mouthful of maggots.

Ren Oh yeah! Gross.

Helley makes Kat face her past, about how she ended up in jail, or juvenile jail, I guess.

Adam Kids jail.

Ren Kids jail, yeah. Kids jail that exists because we’re good at society.

She confronts a monster of her own creation, made of all her trauma and shame and struggles with it and says 'I'm in control of my life now not you!' Then embraces at the end this embodiment of her memories.

And realises that she can see the future? I think this is one of the odd embellishments of plot that’s a bit ‘what?’ but she can see the future a bit.

Adam Yeah, that’s just kind of there. There are some aspects of the plot where you wonder if they existed in previous drafts, because there are little bits that aren’t quite fully integrated.

Like as I said before we started recording, the worm that has two heads! This is the worm that scares Kat in the car at the beginning and causes her to scream.

Ren And you’re kind of spending the whole film going: ‘…why did that worm have two heads?’ and you never learn.

Adam Don’t get me wrong, a two-headed worm is cool!

Ren But there aren’t any other unusual creatures in the film.

Adam No, there’s not, like, a squadron of two-headed worms.

Ren The goat has the usual number of limbs.

Adam What’s the collective noun for a group of worms, because I bet it’s not squadron.

Ren (laughs)

Adam I’ll look. It’s either, this is worth it actually, they can be called a clue, a clat, a wriggle, a squirm, a knot or just a bunch of worms.

Ren Uh-huh, a squirm of worms.

Adam Yes, a squirm of worms, that’s a legitimate scientific name. Sorry.

Ren Weddell, Wild and Father Beste kindnap Kat’s parents. Siobahn tries to find Kat to warn her about her parent’s plans and Kat finds Wendell and Wild just as they're about to put her parents back in the ground and she and her fellow hell maiden Sister Helley capture Wendell and Wild.

Siobahn tells Father Beste that her parents only payed him in their own invented currency, Klax dollars or something, so he should help them to stop them.

Then Buffalo Belzer breaks through the ground, they all try and escape him on the hearse, but Belzer confronts Weddell and Wild, and sees Raul's mural and it makes him think about his lost children and Manberg reveals that he has all of Belzer’s lost demon children in jars because he’s been getting Sister Helley to collect them. I mean, who knows.

Adam Literally just kept them in jars in the cellar.

Ren So that’s the most jumbled bit of plot, I think. I mean I like that they tried to give Raul something to do, and that he’s an artist, but it’s not hugely developed and then snuck in there at the end.

Adam This is why I say that it would have worked better, sadly, as a mini-series, because that’s exactly the kind of thing that you could sprinkle through a bunch of episodes, having Raul work on his art.

Ren I don’t know if it’s partly because they didn’t want him to just be the trans character.

Adam I mean, his role is kind of similar to Wybie’s in Coraline. He is very much a second fiddle, but a likeable character.

So the hair cream dilemma is resolved.

Ren Yes, the hair cream doesn’t last in reviving people from the dead, so Kat’s parents tell her that she should use the last bit of magic in the hair cream to save Rustbank, so Raul runs off to raise a dead brewery worker to act as a witness —

Adam — It only just occurred to me that this hair cream really is instrumental to the plot. It’s like the ultimate Macguffin, this hair cream.

Ren It really is.

Adam I’ve never seen a film that so much rests on hair cream.

Ren The Klaxons have their bulldozers ready to go at Rustbank, and they’re driven by the dead council members. But our assorted heroes stop them in an action sequence at the end —

Adam — a frickin’ epic action sequence! I don’t always go in for action sequences, but this is one for the ages. It’s very enjoyable.

Ren It is very fun. And the Klaxons are arrested with the help of the risen witnesses, who we see for a split-second at the end: ‘Here they are! Off they go!’ And Kat shows her parents the future of Rustbank before they die again with her future power, and Wendell and Wild show Kat the animated paper cutout of their new theme park. Which is gorgeous!

Adam It’s really lovely, they did a good job.

Ren And Kat at the end has reconciled with her trauma and her guilt and she says: 'I was supposed to hate myself for the rest of my life but now I don't have to.’

And that’s the film! I don’t know if that made any sense to people who haven’t seen it, but.

Adam I’ve said before on this podcast that I don’t care about plot, and the thing with Peele as a writer is that he has a lot of ideas, and a lot of interesting ideas and I wouldn’t be the first person to say that in terms of his feature-length films, Get Out is the only one where those ideas really hold together. But Get Out is so strong that he set himself a high bar. But I really loved Us —

Ren Us was great! It was terrifying.

Adam Us is astonishing. And Nope is a strange film, because it’s weird to do an Amblin-style fantasty sci-fi film that is inherently criticising spectacle —

Ren I haven’t seen Nope yet.

Adam It’s really interesting! It’s criticising spectacle culture in the style of an Amblin entertainment film. Which is inherently quite a weird thing to try and do, I’d suggest. Which means it’s fascinating, but perhaps slightly more to think about and discuss than actually watch? I liked it, but it’s very odd.

The criticisms of the plot (of Wendell and Wild) are probably right, I just don’t care that much.

Ren I don’t care. It’s messy but it’s just so good to look at.

Adam It’s so good to look at. It’s relentlessly gorgeous. Visually I think it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever watched.

Ren I can see it adding to the canon of children’s horror.

Adam I think there are going to be some kids who grow up with this and it’s going to mean a lot to them. It’s a very different film to Nightmare before Christmas and Coraline, but I think in terms of creating a parallel world that you can really lose yourself in and believe in, it does just as good a job.

Ren And it’s impressive that it did that in the setting of this run-down industrial town.

Adam Yeah, that is really impressive! And I felt like it managed… I remember reading an article some years back when I was teaching Burton for auteur studies, just because I wanted to make the point that Selick’s films often get mistaken for Burton’s, and is it really all about marketing that we consider Burton an auteur and not Selick, and I remember reading an article by a writer of colour, I can’t remember who, I’m afraid to say, about how she loved Burton films when she was really young and as she got older started to realise how white they were, and found it sad that there weren’t really any kooky Burton-style films with black main characters, or non-white main characters full stop.*

I feel like Selick’s always been a bit less rigid in his cultural influences than Burton who is perhaps a bit rigid in the stuff that influences him and that he likes. I think Selick’s always been a bit more open in his artistic influences, and his style varies a lot more, particularly if you look at the kind of things that he was making as a student.

It’s a good thing, I just think it’s a good film and I hope that it gets watched by more people. Because so much gets released on Netflix, you know.

Ren It deserves eyeballs. It deserves many eyeballs to admire it.

(Ren audibly stretches)

Adam Right.

Ren (Ren does the credits)

Adam Have you checked our emails recently?

Ren Relatively recently, yeah. Maybe I haven’t actually, since the last episode came out. So I should do that.

Adam Quick, quick, anyone listening to this email before Ren gets round to checking.

Ren Maybe I should do a live email check, in the credits, right now.

Adam No, you don’t need to do that. Because then if we don’t have anything you’ll just be disappointed.

Ren Okay.

Adam Is all that’s left for me to sign-off?

Ren Yep!

Adam Alright, bye creepy kids, don’t be a wriggle of worms!

Ren Or a squadron of worms, for that matter.

Adam Yeah, don’t be a squadron of worms.

Ren Catch you later creepy kids!

Adam Bye!

Ren Bye!

(Outro music plays)

• I'm not sure if this is the essay that Adam was referring to, but I found a piece by Indian writer Arcita Mittra that makes the same point here.