Three Little Tillys, All In A Row

In this episode we talked about season two of Creeped Out, co-created by Bede Blake and Robert Butler, first broadcast in 2019.

If you want to follow us on instagram we are stillscaredpodcast, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

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 series 2 of Creeped Out, co-created by Robert Butler and Bede Blake. Enjoy!

(Intro music plays)

Ren Hi Adam!

Adam Hello, I’m just going to have a refreshing glass of water!

Ren Sounds good! The awkward bit where we start the conversation again when we’ve already been chatting for half an hour — hello!

Adam Hello, yes, I haven’t spoken to you in 30 seconds.

Ren So, in our children’s horror… oh god, I slept really badly so if I’m a bit spacey that’s why.

Adam (keenly) Did you have horrifying dreams? Sorry, I sounded a bit too keen there. Did you have horrifying dreams? A suitably concerned voice.

Ren No, I just could not sleep.

Adam The weather’s been really muggy.

Ren It has been incredibly muggy. But let’s pretend I had horrifying dreams because that provides a segue into the topic —

Adam Of the relatively horrifying anthology show Creeped Out, which returned for a second season available on Netflix. It’s a co-production between CBBC and DHX — so it’s a UK and Canadian co-production but Netflix took an interest and it was released as a Netflix original series in the US.

Ren So we talked about series one back in 2018, series two came out in 2019 so it has been a while, but did it come on Netflix more recently?

Adam Yes, I believe it came on Netflix a bit more recently. It was shown on CBBC first. So hopefully it is still relatively new for listeners, or a nice surprise for listeners who don’t know it, because I think both of us are pretty keen.

Ren Yes, I’d say so.

Adam So it’s created by Bede Blake and Robert Butler, with inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories anthology series. We as ‘90s kids grew up with Are You Afraid of the Dark and Goosebumps, so this is for me at least very much in that kind of vein.

Ren Yeah, definitely. It’s a ten episode series, an anthology series so it’s all different stories and in season two half of the episodes have Canadian or American actors, and half of them have British actors. And the running order that they were originally shown in as completely different from how they are ordered on Netflix — which puts the five North American episodes first and then the five British episodes.

Adam I didn’t notice that, that’s really interesting!

Ren Yeah, so that’s how I watched it and then looked at the original running order and it was entirely different.

Adam Yes, so I started watching this series when it came out, so just before the pandemic. So I split my viewing, pre-pandemic and post-pandemic, though I re-watched it all. But I like the split of locations, it keeps things varied.

Ren Yes, and they are very varied in this series.

Adam That’s definitely the change for series one, because it very much continues in the same vein with this mix of children’s horror and science fiction, with some episodes leaning more into the sci-fi than others. There are times where it’s a bit like a kids’ version of Black Mirror.

Ren Yes, there’s definitely a strand of technology horror — there’s three episodes with that focus in season two.

Adam Some of which I think work better than others. I know you have four episodes that you want to talk about in particular, but I do want to briefly cover all of them. So I guess the technology episode that adheres most closely to a Black Mirror formula is Help, with a rogue AI very clearly modelled on Alexa, and the idea is that the kids take Alexa for granted and get her to do all the chores and speak very rudely to her.

She wants to teach them a lesson, not so much in respecting her but respecting each other, bringing the two siblings back together. It feels a bit rote at this point, we’ve seen a lot of rogue AI stories, going all the way back to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so it doesn’t feel totally new, I would say.

Ren Yeah. I’d agree, and I would say that some of the technology episodes have a more subtle message and this one hammers it home a bit more.

Adam I mean, I agree with some of its criticisms of convenience culture. One of the most self-destructive impulses — certainly in Western modernity is ‘Convenience or Death’ or ‘Convenience to Death’ — it doesn’t matter if it’s making the world a worse place or stripping natural resources or meaning other humans are treated in a really bad way — if it’s convenient it’s better! So I do agree with those criticisms, I just thought the plot was a bit Philip K. Dick by the numbers. But it was well-paced, it escalates nicely and it had a really nice ending shot of The Curious playing in the sprinklers. So The Curious is the masked child who bookends the episodes — so possibly this inter-dimensional child who wears a stony mask.

Ren Yeah, and is very playful and you see him in the vignettes at the beginning and the end, and he’s playing or investigating in the settings of the episodes.

Adam Like his name implies, he’s curious about things. And at the end of this one he’s playing in the garden sprinklers. Suggesting a more friendly relationship with technology. And it was just a nice shot of a kid playing in the sprinklers! So not bad, but not particularly memorable.

Another episode that I don’t think works so well, but it is more high concept, is Itchy.

Ren Yeah. Head-lice horror definitely seems like a great idea for children’s horror because they are a plague among children and most kids will have it at some point, or their school will have an outbreak.

Adam It’s a proper B-movie siege movie, this.

Ren And this one has a fairly interesting setting. It’s one of the British ones, and it’s on an island and these kids are at a military school, I think?

Adam Yes, I thought it was a military academy.

Ren Which is particular.

Adam There’s these gestures towards world-building in that these head lice have launched campaigns in the past, so I don’t know if this society has had to militarise in response to head lice, and kids are being trained up specifically to combat this.

Ren Huh, interesting!

Adam I really like how dynamic the filming and editing in this one is. Gareth Tunley’s direction is particularly lucid, and it’s quite funny because there’s quite a lot of orange and teal colour correction, which makes it look more like a high-budget action movie —

Ren — Shutter Island.

Adam Yeah, yeah. But it’s such an inherently silly idea that it’s hard to make creepy.

Ren It loses steam, I think, this one. It starts off creepy when you just have a glimpse of a kid manically scratching in the nurse’s office and then the door closes, but once a whole auditorium of people are going: ‘Argh, oh no!’

Adam ‘It itches! It itches!’

Ren It does feel a little silly.

Adam I appreciate that it is played completely straight, despite how silly the premise is. But I think it is a hard one to escalate, because it’s hard to know what their game plan is. The head lice make people itch a lot — but then what? They’re not sucking blood, they’re just going to temporarily incapacitate people and then what? It’s hard to say what their plan is. And these are meant to be very intelligent head lice, the main character can hear them chittering away, so they are meant to have some kind of plan, but it’s hard to work out precisely what it is. They do sabotage all of the head lice shampoo.

Ren They do. That’s quite a texture.

Adam Mmm. The really gloopy —

Ren — Gloopy orange shampoo with lots of little bite marks all leaking out over the shelves.

Adam I did think that was a contender. It wasn’t quite my Texture of the Week, but it was a good one. But yeah, it’s fun and oddly reminiscent of the Demon Headmaster reboot, in style.

Ren Mmhmm, yep.

Adam I don’t know if that’s just because of the militaristic activities. Well, because we’ve mentioned it I’ll say where my Texture of the Week comes from.

Wait a second, I’ll see if this makes any noise. (Rustling, clinking noises)

Ren and Adam Texture! Texture! Texture of the Week!

Ren That was me knocking two little cardboard boxes of soap together.

Adam That was me