"But Miss, They Like Being Dead."

In this episode we talked about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell.

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 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

Credits:

'Fair Charlotte' as sung by Eugene Jemison for Folkways Record (1954) archived by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (2004)

creepy music box.wav by Modification1089

Transcript

Ren Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books films and TV. Today we’re talking about Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell. Enjoy!

Ren Hi Adaaam

Adam Hello Ren!

Ren Welcome to the podcast that everyone is calling SSTCH!

Adam Is that your Claim of the Week? Nobody’s calling it that!

Ren They might be! To themselves! How would we know?

Adam Okay, if I hear people on the street making that noise I’ll assume it’s viral marketing for our podcast.

Ren Sussstchhh. So we promised creepy dolls at the end of the last episode and we’re delivering on that promise with Frozen Charlotte by Alex Bell, a Young Adult horror novel from 2015. Here are the creepy dolls!

Adam That’s not that end of the episode! There ya go, promise fulfilled.

Ren Yeah, yeah. It says: ‘warning, not for younger readers’ on the back, because it’s quite grisly.

Adam It is! I’m quite tempted to donate this to my school library after we’ve done the episode because I like it well enough but I’m not going to re-read it, and I do think that some of the kids will really enjoy it. But at the same time… I don’t know, there are some quite violent bits in it.

Ren It’s quite nasty! It was my pick, I hadn’t read it before but I had read the sequel, or the prequel, Charlotte Says because that came up in the Young Adult Horror section of my reading app, and I thought: ‘Oh, that’s actually quite scary, we should do it on the podcast'. But then I thought we should probably do the first one first, but the first one isn’t as scary as the prequel, so I’m a little bit disappointed.

Adam What period is the prequel set in?

Ren So the prequel’s set in the early twentieth century, like 1910, with the schoolgirls who have the creepy dolls.

Adam On the Isle of Skye?

Ren On the Isle of Skye, yes.

Adam Because that’s where the first chapter of this book is set.

Ren Yeah. It goes back and expands on the schoolgirls who originally had these Frozen Charlotte dolls. And I think it was scarier because — not to denigrate this book before we’ve even started talking about it — but I think it was scarier because there was more connection with the dolls, with the girls being the right age to play with the dolls and seeing firsthand the thrall that they are in to the dolls, whereas in this one it is at more of a remove.

Adam That makes complete sense to me. So in the prequel the dolls are more integrated into the girls’ lives, whereas in Frozen Charlotte the dolls do seem quite alien. They have this presence in the house but a lot of them are sealed up in a glass cabinet, and bits of dolls worn as a necklace around one of the character’s necks, fused into the architecture of the house and into a burnt tree in the garden.

So there are a lot of dolls, and also the main character Sophie, is an amateur photographer and there are several sequences in the book where she takes photos and there are phantasmagorical dolls revealed with all their little doll hands at the windows outside. But there is very little of anyone playing with the dolls.

Ren Yeah, and you get the voices of the dolls being like (creepy doll-voice sound effect) “Hehe let’s play a game!” but the main protagonists are like fifteen, so they’re not of an age where they’re going to be…

Adam Well, no, they’re playing Truth or Dare, the game that should be banned! I don’t know about you, Ren, did you ever play a game of Truth or Dare that filled you with joy and pleasant memories as a kid? Because I don’t know that anything positive has ever come out of Truth or Dare. I only have negative troublesome memories of Truth or Dare.

Ren The teenage bullying facilitation game.

Adam That’s literally what it is. It’s upsettingly so in this book, and any memory I have of Truth or Dare from childhood is wholly negative. So.

Ren So the creepy dolls, the frozen charlottes are based on a real kind of small china doll that was popular in the Victorian era, these one-piece, cheap, usually naked dolls with painted-on faces. You can do an image search if you want, you can see they are a bit creepy-looking. And they were inspired by a ballad about a girl called Charlotte who refuses to wear a cloak in the coach to a ball, and freezes to death.

And the lyrics to this ballad appear at the top of each chapter in this book.

Adam I really liked that. I didn’t know that so I liked to follow the ballad along, it’s a good through-line and it’s creepy. I quite like quotes at the start of chapters anyway, so that really worked for me.

Ren I think it’s a good starting point for a creepy story, for sure. And the question this book poses is: what if these dolls, but evil?

We start at a school in Skye 1910, a recently blinded girl who has been making ‘ridiculous accusations’ about how the accident happened saying that the Frozen Charlottes were involved. Her school friends are playing with the dolls, holding a little funeral for them and when the schoolteacher tells them to stop being ghoulish, they say “But miss, they like being dead. They told us”.

And then we move to our protagonist Sophie, in the present day, in a cafe with her friend Jay, who pulls out a ouija board app on his phone. He asks her who they should commune with, and she says ‘Rebecca Craig’, her dead cousin who lived in Scotland, and whose family she is about to go and stay with while her parents are on holiday.

So they ask questions, and the app spells out creepy phrases like: ‘Black sand’, ‘Daddy says never open the gate’ and then it repeats ‘Charlotte is cold’ until Jay asks it when he will die, and it says: ’Tonight’. The app plays the Fair Charlotte melody.

(One voice singing with minimal instrumentation: ‘Young Charlotte lived by the mountainside, In a lonely, dreary spot; No other dwelling for three miles round, Except her father’s cot. And yet on many a winter’s eve, Young swains would gather there, For her father kept a social abode, And she was very fair.)

The planchette spins around wildly, counts down to zero and all the lights go out in the cafe. Someone screams horribly and Sophie thinks she sees someone standing on a cafe table, and feels a cold hand around her own.

When the lights come on, Jay’s phone is broken and they see that it was a waitress screaming, who’s been horribly burnt by the deep fat fryer, which I hate, really don’t like this.

Adam No, I forget — did you watch Twin Peaks: The Return?

Ren No, and it sounds like I’m not going to!

Adam To be fair I know you always a bit iffy about Twin Peaks anyway, I know you’re a bit hit or miss with Lynch, which I understand. But there’s a memorable deep fat fryer incident towards the end of the series.

Ren No no no. Hate it.

Adam Be safe with deep fat fryers.

Ren Things to add to the ban list: Truth or Dare, deep fat fryers. We can keep going as the episode progresses.

Adam We’re going to have GB news complaining about us soon: “The woke brigade, the woke podcast Still Scared wants to ban, the classic character-building game Truth or Dare—“

Ren — “The delicious chip-making appliance”

Adam But yeah, I found this opening scene very effective. I think it’s one of the best set-pieces in the book. It is quite disturbing, and you could say it’s lamp-shading but I like the fact that they address the fact that they just do this ouija board here, in a cafe. We don’t need a dark spooky house, we can just do it here, in the afternoon, on an app.

Have I talked on this podcast about when I went out on a seance with some ghost hunters?

Ren I don’t think so!

Adam So when I was lecturing at Suffolk I was in charge of professional practice, and people would get in touch with the uni to see if students would help make them promotional films, and I’d generally take them up on their offers, it was an opportunity for local businesses and usually it would be something a bit boring, like the local manilla folder or box factory association.

But this time it was some ghost hunters, and I thought: “I should probably check these people out to make sure they’re — I’m not really sure what I mean by legit when it comes to ghost hunters, but at the very least that they believe they’re legit. And that the students are going to be okay working with them. And they said: “Why don’t you co