Let's Get Hauntological

In this episode we discussed the recent anthology Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television, with two of its co-editors, Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar. The anthology features a chapter entitled Suburban Eerie: The Demon Headmaster (BBC1, 1996–8) and The Demon Headmaster (CBBC, 2019) as Neoliberal Folk Horror, by our own Adam Whybray, and is available to buy now here, or perhaps more practically to order to a library near you!

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Jo 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

Adam Hello and welcome to Still Scared Talking Children's Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films, and TV.

I'm Adam Whybray and my Co host is usually Ren Wednesday, but today is a special bonus episode in which I am talking to doctors Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar about their co-edited essay collection: Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television. I hope you enjoy this discussion about an essay collection I contributed to, but am in no way being reimbursed for until I get my special edition of the book in the post. Enjoy.

Adam Hello, this is Adam here for Still Scared: Talking Children's Horror. And this is a special bonus episode talking about an exciting new collection, Horrifying Children: Hauntology and the Legacy of Children's Television which intersects with a lot of my interests and Ren’s too, although Ren is having a very busy week of it and so deferred responsibilities over to me.

So apologies that you won't be hearing Ren’s chipper and occasionally dulcet tones, but I am joined here by two of the co-editors of the book alongside John Marland, Lauren Stephenson and Robert Edgar. Hello, Lauren and Robert!

Robert Hello.

Lauren Hello!

Adam So we've previously had the brilliant Catherine Lester on the show writer of Horror Films for Children, which was published a few years back, also by Bloomsbury.

And looking at the the blurb of your book, which reads: Horrifying Children examines weird and eerie children's television and literature via critical analysis, memoir and autoethnography, it notes that there has been an explosion of interest in the impact of children's television and literature of the late 20th century, in particular the Seventies, 80s and 90s.

So that obviously covers quite a lot of the kind of thing we talk about on this podcast and I was wondering what you felt was behind this kind of explosion of interest, and whether that explosion of interest is something you've noticed before you came to the project or not.

Robert Yeah, I can kick off with that one, if that's OK, Lauren.

Lauren Yeah, of course.

Robert Yeah. I do think there's something very interesting that's happened in recent years. And I think there's probably a number of different reasons why the 70s, 80s and 90s have come into view for people in particular. It was something we were well aware of prior to putting the collection together, and in the original conception a lot of it was focused around the 70s and early 80s. And then we moved into looking at 90s and realised, I think, that it was a much bigger time period than perhaps we'd first thought of.

But yeah, I I think there's there's a few things. I think partly it's perhaps people of a certain age looking back to to childhood. I think that's part of it. And it’s something we talk about in the introduction to the book, that kind of going in cycles and you can see that throughout children's television.

People of a particular age group reflect on childhood, and often the childhood is just out of memory or is kind of buried deep in memory. It's very much from early childhood, so that kind of fuzziness of memory I think is really important.

I think it's also significant that we're talking about pre-digital age largely. Where things aren't perhaps as easily accessed, and things drift into distant memory or we have to dredge things up from memory rather than being able to easily access everything.

And I think also something we touch on in the book is that there's been some real revelations about things that happened in ‘70s and ‘80s and the period that perhaps people once felt nostalgic for, suddenly we think of as actually genuinely being dark and dangerous and unpleasant and unsettling.

And it's causing us to revise our view of that period. So I think that some of the reasons there.

Adam Yeah, that that all makes perfect sense to me. Lauren, did you have any additional thoughts on that?

Lauren Yeah, I think that you can look to the rise in popularity of analogue horror here as well, as maybe an indicator of what's going on. I think while a lot of these texts are pre-digital, they've taken on a new resonance in digital spaces, people finding clips or memorabilia from these eras and they've become creepy pasta online, you know?

People circulate it around for people to unlock their own memories of those texts. You know, these things that are kind of buried and we've forgotten about for 20 years, and then all of a sudden you confronted with somebody's YouTube short that uses that material.

Or something that you've maybe not come across and you think what is this out of context? And I do think that indicates a growing fascination with a particular kind of analogue style of hauntological material, or kind of cursed material maybe if we wanted to go that far.

Adam Definitely. I don't think it's just an interest for Generation X's and Millennials. Certainly the discord I use for horror games by a brilliant horror creator called Yames, it's mostly zoomers on there and you know, they love analogue horror. In fact, it’s largely them who brought analogue horror to my attention.

And a lot of the games I've seen Zoomers really enjoy, some of which have been made by Millennials, are things like Baldi's Basics, which really tap into an edutainment aesthetic that was very much part of my childhood playing CD-ROM games as a kid. So I certainly think there's a kind of interest that's broader than just the obvious nostalgia.

So in terms of your own research histories, how do they link into the unsettling side of children's media?

Lauren I mean, I'm just a huge horror nerd, to be totally honest with you! So a lot of what I've done previously, research wise, is focused in on how horror intersects with social and political contexts. And I think that that comes through quite strongly in the collection, this idea that there's something about conceptions of childhood, conceptions of safety contemporarily that are then coming through in these bits of material.

But I also think we're both just very keen on the kind of the dark side of this stuff. I don’t know about you, Rob, — but exploring what fascinates us about this and why of all the things that could kind of stick with us over the years, this is the sort of stuff that we keep revisiting, you know?

Adam Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Rob?

Robert Yeah. No, absolutely. I’m with Lauren on that one, it is that real fascination with the dark material. And you know, like Lauren, I’m a huge horror fan. I’m not as expert in horror as Lauren is, I come at it from an uncanny fiction angle.

Myself and John, who couldn't be with us tonight, and another colleague, Alan Smith, had written a book about Thomas Hardy and folk horror. And another colleague of ours, Wayne Johnson and myself were working on the Routledge Companion to Folk Horror, which Lauren has a superb chapter in on on similar themes.

So we were a group of us at at the university, really immersed in this kind of research. And the Horrifying Children book was being developed alongside that. But it was really interesting to to see the amount of interest there was in the the Companion to Folk Horror around children's fiction, children's television and similar things: the resonance of the past, the analogue horror. It was a much bigger presence in that book than we thought it would be. So there's lots of it around.

Adam I mean, that makes sense to me. We've just recorded an episode on the Weirdstone of Brisingaman, the Alan Garner novel, And obviously The Owl Service is a kind of key example of both children's horror and folk horror that crops up again and again, certainly for people of a certain age. So did you watch the Owl Service when you were younger, Robert?

Robert Well, it's an interesting one that because I didn't watch it at the time — I'm not quite old enough to have seen it but I do remember it being around and being mentioned. But a few of us do have a book out under review at the moment about Alan Garner. So there's again more of this stuff around.

But I remember Alan Garner from these rather dusty books tucked away in the corner of school libraries. So it was a presence on television, but Garner and his work was evident elsewhere, which is interesting. So yeah, I watched The Owl Service for the first time, actually not that long ago, but but I knew all about it from other sources.

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