fairuza balk

Return to Oz (1985)

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My first obsession as a child was with Oz. The MGM musical has been a part of my life for so long that I can’t recall the first time I saw it, as its entrance into my life predates my earliest still-retained memories. I can recall the first time I saw any other Oz-related media, however, as I can still remember—even if distantly and vaguely—a Christmas that we spent at my grandparents’ cold New Jersey apartment when I was four years old. They had HBO, and in the early hours of the morning, with the scent of Community Coffee (which we always brought to my grandparents when travelling, as well as several containers of Tony Chachere’s, both of these being luxuries they couldn’t obtain in the north) and my grandmother’s Marlboro Reds in the air, I watched an episode of an animated series featuring Dorothy and company. This was a revelation to me, that there was more Oz to know, and I immediately started to devour as much of it as was available. I was reading by age five and although the early 20th century diction of the Oz books was somewhat difficult to parse, most of the versions available at my library were illustrated, and this was enough for the early years. But what affected me even more than the Judy Garland film was its long distant Fairuza Balk-starring sequel, Return to Oz, which was exactly the kind of proto-horror that my young brain was attuned to. 

Return to Oz opens in Kansas, where the reality of post-tornado living is dreary and dire (and, given the age that I was when I first saw it, likely felt familiar to me in the wake of Hurricane Andrew). It’s nearly winter and the new house isn’t complete, and while Dorothy excuses Uncle Henry’s tendency to stare into space with his feet up, Aunt Em knows that it’s PTSD, even if the terminology doesn’t exist yet. Still, she’s more concerned with young Dorothy’s mental state, given that the little girl no longer sleeps through the night (when she sleeps at all) and is insistent that her imaginary journey to fairyland and the friends she made there are real. Em’s desperation to do the right thing for her niece leads her to leave the girl in the care of a doctor named Worley (Nicol Williamson) and his severe-faced nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) overnight, where they promise that the newly discovered “science” of electroshock therapy will cure all of Dorothy’s ills. A storm comes in the night that allows Dorothy an opportunity to escape, which she does, although she ends up falling into a river; climbing aboard some floating debris, she falls asleep, only to discover that she has awakened near Oz, and is in the company of Billina, one of her chickens, who has not laid an egg since the tornado. 

Dorothy quickly discovers an Oz in ruins. Although she finds the old house she first arrived to Oz in, there’s no Munchkin village nearby; the yellow brick road she travelled for much of the first film is in a state of advanced disrepair; the Emerald City’s brilliant gemstones have vanished as the city’s architecture lies in ruins. Worse, the city itself is ruled by the Wheelers, a pack of feral Klaus Kinski-looking men who travel on all fours on legs that end in squealing wheels. Hiding from them, she finds “the royal army of Oz,” which consists of a single individual, a mechanical man named Tik-Tok who is awakened via a series of wind-up keys. The inhabitants of the city have all been turned to stone by magic, with only Tik-Tok having survived this transformation unharmed by virtue of not quite truly being alive. He’s only the first of Oz’s inhabitants to join Dorothy’s new adventuring party, however, as she also soon collects Jack Pumpkinhead—a Jack o’ Lantern/scarecrow hybrid brought to life in order to scare the witch Mombi (Marsh again)—who governs the empty Emerald City as regent for the Nome King (Williamson again). The final member of the group is the “Gump,” a loathsome creature that Dorothy and company build out of old furniture and assorted attic garbage and bring to life via the same magic powder as Jack was in order to escape Mombi. Adventure awaits! 

Although it may not be the most valuable element of media made for children, I do think one of the things that makes a piece of kid-oriented art have some sense of staying power is the extent to which it encourages imaginary play. A kid who loves The Land Before Time will get just as much pleasure out of going to the playground and pretending to be Littlefoot with their friends as they would out of rewatching the movie. I vividly remember running around in my front yard with my mom as a kid, sometimes on all fours, shouting “To the meadow! To the meadow!” in recreation of a scene from Bambi; the Little Golden Book Scuffy the Tugboat encouraged me to get outside in the rain and play with my own toy boat, and my mother still uses “There’s enough to float Scuffy” as a descriptor of how much rainfall she gets when I call her. Even more so than The Wizard of Oz, The Return to Oz capitalizes on this inherent hunger that children have to create the magical out of the mundane, and it does so using the same extratextual decision that Wizard did—that Oz contains “echoes” of the real world—in a more deliberate way. In the earlier film, this was much more explicitly a way of telling the audience that Dorothy’s adventures were just a dream all along, that her companions were the farmhands and the witch was Mrs. Gulch, translated into her fantastical dreams. As an official sequel, Return follows that same narrative choice, but more subtly and arguably more fantastically. Besides the obvious correlation between Worley/the Nome King and Wilson/Mombi, we also see Dorothy’s “inspiration” for Tik-Tok in the form of the shock therapy device, and she’s given a tiny jack o’ lantern by another patient (who is the spitting image of the missing Ozma, princess of Oz, who also happened to be Jack Pumpkinhead’s “mother”). 

This is something that all children do, applying personality to toys and items and giving them voices and roles in their imaginary play. Even if kids don’t pick up on that being what’s happening in the film, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t unconsciously get absorbed and make their internal worlds just that much more magical. That’s not even counting the number of kids who realized that they could imagine returning to a fantasy land in disarray as a new adventure to play out, following the yellow brick road once more, but one that’s twisted and broken. What if I pretended I was in NeverNeverLand, but without Peter? What if Fantasia needed another Bastian to give the Empress a new name? What if Narnia fell? (Admittedly, Prince Caspian opens in the ruins of the Pevensie’s castle Cair Paravel and The Last Battle features the actual end of Narnia, but you get what I’m saying.) 

I’ve spent enough time praising the film for its potential to inspire imagination, which, while valid, isn’t praise for the film as a text unto itself. Every time I watch Return, I discover (or rediscover) something new to love about it. For one thing, this is a film that I never really thought of as being funny when I was a kid, but there are one-liners and jokes aplenty that will no doubt appeal to any adults in the audience (one of my favorite smirkers is Dorothy’s reply to Jack’s confusion that Tik-Tok might still be able to talk after his “thinking” spring had run out, which is to say that “It happens to people all the time”). My favorite thing about the film is the presence of the copper kettle-like Tik-Tok, who was always my favorite character in the books as well, with the eighth book in the series, Tik-Tok of Oz (specifically the one with this less-than-honest cover) being read no less than fifty times in my childhood. He’s just adorable. I love him. Billina is perhaps the second best non-human actor in the film, a Henson Company creation that’s such a perfect recreation of a Buff Cochin Bantam hen that there are moments where I know she’s a puppet and others where I know she’s a real chicken, but there are many more where I could not tell you if she’s “real” or not to save my life. 

If the general public remembers this one at all, it’s usually negatively in comparison to their memory of the MGM picture, or they remember this one specifically for being on the scary side. While Wizard’s Wicked Witch of the West scared generations of children, this film had multiple frights that play out over the course of the film. The escape from the sanatorium is notably frightening, as the nurse screams into the pouring thunderstorm for Dorothy and her benefactor to return before they fall into a river and nearly drown. The Wheelers are scary, with their squealing wheels (inspired by the squeaking gurneys in the Kansas portion, naturally), and several of them are turned to sand and desiccate before blowing away when they fall into the Deadly Desert while pursuing Dorothy and friends. The Nome King’s death as he becomes more rocklike before crumbling and melting away in a hellish fire, his stone skeleton frozen into a screaming death face before it eventually crumbles, is also noteworthy, as is much to do with the Nomes and their kingdom in the first place (their faces moving about in stop motion on various rock faces remains impressive to this day). But the most memorable scene is one that I would argue remains one of the most chilling in all of cinema, including horror made for adults. At one point in the film, Dorothy must sneak into the chambers of Princess Mombi, which she has already seen contains dozens of glass-fronted cabinets containing the detached (but still living) heads of various Ozian women, which she changes to suit her mood as easily as changing hats. She awakens Mombi’s original head, which then begins chanting her name in a guttural, almost unearthly voice, as all the heads around her scream and Mombi’s headless body rises from her bed to attack. It’s fantastic!

It’s only a matter of time before this film gets lumped in with its intro-to-horror brethren as fodder for slop content along the lines of “CaN yOu BeLiEvE they showed THIS MOVIe to KiDs!!?!” that I’ve started to see pop up online. (Newsflash: if you’re under a certain age, you may not realize this, but art used to be created for multiple groups to enjoy and get something different out of because we didn’t all have individual devices programmed to shovel unchallenging, hyper attuned, algorithmically-driven, intellectually incurious fodder into our brains every waking hour). Enjoy it now before the internet tries to ruin it for you.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Craft (1996)

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Two of my childhood-favorite horror classics from the year of our Dark Lord 1996 screened at The Prytania Theatre this month: Wes Craven’s teen-slasher renaissance sparker Scream and Andrew Fleming’s teen-witchcraft charmer The Craft.  Of the two, I only made time to revisit the latter, where I had the pleasure of sitting behind a row of giggling college students who were enjoying it for the very first time.  Repertory screenings of The Craft are a much rarer treat than screenings of Scream (as evidenced by only one of those titles also playing at The Broad this month), which makes sense given the stature of Scream‘s director within horror nerdom and given that it is still being kept alive by endless discourse & rebootquels well into the 2020s.  Both movies meant a lot to me as a wannabe goth young’n who never earned his eyeliner wings, if not only because I was the perfect age to look up to their much cooler, slightly older teen protagonists when the movies were fresh arrivals on the shelves of my local Blockbuster Video.  My anecdotal research (scrolling through my Letterboxd follows’ flippant one-liner reviews) suggests that The Craft is considered the much lesser of the two works, especially in recent years, which is the exact opposite opinion that dawned on me while watching it on the big screen for the very first time.  As a kid, Scream was a great reference text for a laundry list of horror classics I needed to catch up with in future video store rentals, while The Craft was the full witchy power fantasy I desperately needed in my miserable Catholic school years – a substantial, self-contained work that required no extratextual viewing.  Among the two slick ’96 teen studio horrors currently enjoying victory laps around the city, my heart clearly belongs to coven; praise be to Manon.

Pitting these two enduring sleepover classics against each other is mostly a game of 1-on-1 performance match-ups.  Fairuza Balk is just as chaotically charismatic in The Craft as Matthew Lillard is in Scream, but she’s much better dressed – sporting mega-goth bondage gear instead of oversized sweaters from The Gap.  Neve Campbell is dependably lovely & solid in both, playing the genre’s most sensible Final Girl in Scream and the coven’s most vulnerable pushover in The Craft, where she cedes power to Balk, Rachel True, and Robin Tunney.  Skeet Ulrich is the deciding factor, then, putting in the performance of his career as a dopey puppy dog under a love spell in The Craft, which comes slightly ahead of his performance as a dirtbag psycho boyfriend with a horrid secret in Scream.  It’s unlikely that these names mean anything to anyone born outside the Millennial age range of 1981 – 1996, but I can confirm from first-hand observation that Skeet Ulrich’s performance in The Craft still kills with the modern teenage crowd.  The row ahead of me was explosive with giggles every time he showed up at Tunney’s feet, adorably perplexed over why he was so magnetically attracted to her despite his usual aloof bad-boy demeanor.  Of course, a lot of the film’s current entertainment value is rooted in nostalgia for 90s pop culture aesthetics, whether it’s the extremely dated teen cast or the tie-in CD soundtrack that includes artist like Jewell, Julianna Hatfield, Letters to Cleo, Portishead, Elastica, and Our Lady Peace.  Even on that end, I’d say The Craft has Scream beat, since it’s only invested in setting a traditional witchcraft story within that 90s pop arena instead of simultaneously cataloging & restaging tropes from previous missteps & triumphs in its genre.

When I say that The Craft doesn’t require extratextual viewing the way Scream does, that doesn’t mean I didn’t immediately go home to watch all of the Special Features on my ancient DVD copy as soon as I left The Prytania, so I could prolong the pleasure of the experience.  There were some fun insights in its promotional behind the scenes “interviews”, mostly in the cast’s recollections of Fairuza Balk’s contributions as a true-believer Wiccan bringing authenticity to the production (along with hired outside Wicca consultants) and in Rachel True’s observation that as the coven’s magical powers grow stronger & stronger, their skirts are hemmed shorter & shorter.  Mostly, my extratextual journey outside The Craft was a horrified scroll down Letterboxd lane, where I found a lot of complaints from cinephiles I usually trust about a movie I’ve always loved.  Most reviews among mutuals range from 1-to-3 star ratings, with a particular disdain for the third-act dissolution of the central teen coven.  It’s true that the “Fuck around” section of the movie is a lot more fun than its “Find out” counterpart, as that’s when we watch goth teen witches confidently strut down their Catholic high school hallways to 90s pop tunes in defiance of their school’s usual social power rankings.  Once all four witches have solved their very simplistic personal issues at home (racism, body dysmorphia, the powerlessness of poverty and, least significantly, crushing on a bully) through dabbling in dark magic, there’s nothing left for the movie to do than to show what happens when they take their magic powers too far.  It’s a political blow to idealists looking to The Craft for depictions of feminist solidarity (who would be best served skipping the ending entirely), but it at least opens the movie up to other themes besides the allure of power to teen-girl outsiders: addiction, fear of losing social stature, the willingness to cower behind an overly bossy leader for convenience, etc.

Speaking of extratextual viewing, what’s interesting to me about the complaints over The Craft‘s third act is that someone did attempt to correct its political issues in a modern revision of the film.  Zoe Lister-Jones’s recent soft reboot The Craft: New Legacy smooths out a lot of the original film’s rough spots in representation, feminist solidarity, and third-act resolution, mostly by giving its own coven an outside enemy to fight instead of each other (David Duchovny as an MRA warlock) and by putting their hunk-bully stand-in for Skeet Ulrich under a “woke” spell instead of a love spell.  It might be a more politically sound film, but it’s also a thoroughly dull one, mostly because its poorly lit, dialogue-heavy teen drama registers more like a backdoor pilot for a CW series than a legitimate Movie.  Say what you want about the original, but it at least has a sense of style, something the recent remake only approaches when copying the exact occultist-imagery graphics of the original’s opening credits as lazy homage.  The Craft‘s style happens to be tied to a very specific era in commercial filmmaking that I happen to be susceptible to nostalgia for, but it still looks fantastic.  It probably serves me right, then, to see this same story warped into an extremely dated generational touchstone for a different era of potential horror nerds, so I can see how generic one of my childhood favorites looks to people who it didn’t hit at the exact right time.  To me, The Craft: Legacy is cute but inconsequential, which is seemingly what most audiences also think of the original, even among my peers.  So, maybe I should shelve my argument that there’s more overt queer sexuality in the suggestive wagging of Fairuza Balk’s fingers during the original’s iconic light-as-a-feather-stiff-as-a-board scene than there is in the entirety of the deliberately inclusive Queer Representation remake.  I’m already risking sounding like an out-of-touch whiner about the good old days here, exalting the pop culture residue of my youth as if it were a sacred text.

-Brandon Ledet