Things That Scare Me #13: Oral Storytelling

This is the print version of a post that appeared on Psychobabble in audio form as my one and only podcast five years ago today. It was part of my long dormant series Things that Scare Me, in which I evaluated whether or not I was justified in being terrified of the many, many things that terrified me when I was an overly terrified kid. Enjoy!

Things That Scare Me #13: Oral Storytelling

My experience with scary stories began when I was four or five years old. My sister was having a slumber party for her birthday and my prankster parents decided this would be a terrific opportunity to traumatize their kids and a gang of neighborhood kids. The evening began with everyone gathered in the living room and perched on their sleeping bags, the lights dimmed, and my mother hovering over us with an arsenal of classic ghost stories. The first one she read was based on an old Washington Irving story called “The Adventure of the German Student”. Irving’s tale is about a college boy who encounters a forlorn young woman in Paris during the French revolution. She wears a black ribbon around her neck, which she refuses to remove under any circumstances. The terrifying denouement of the story reveals her to be a victim of the guillotine who wears the ribbon to tether her severed head to her severed neck. This print story was later simplified for its oral version, re-titled and re-tinted and passed from person to person as “The Green Ribbon”. This was the version of the story my mother told at that slumber party.

The next story was less dependent on plot and more on the way it was told. It was a story called “The Golden Arm”, which tells of a man who marries a woman with a golden arm, an object he covets till the day she dies. At that point, he sneaks out into the night, digs up her body, and swipes it. Creeping home in the night, he begins hearing a ghostly voice calling “Who stole my golden arm?” The phrase is repeated over and over with mounting intensity until, finally, the storyteller grabs the nearest listener and screams “You did!” Everyone jumps and everyone pees.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 1

The Date: October 1

The Movie: The Adventures of Ichabod… (1949)

What Is It?: On this first day of 366 Days at the Drive-In, I’m easing you in with a mere short—the second half of Disney’s package film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Feel free to skip through the first half of the film, which is an adaptation of Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. It’s not very Halloweeny at all. The second half, quite faithfully based on Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, however, delivers the seasonal goods. The songs are aces too. Bing Crosby's “Headless Horseman” should have been to Halloween what his “White Christmas” is to that other holiday.

Why Today?: On this day in 1971, Walt Disney World opened in Bay Lake, Florida.

Monsterology: The Headless

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Dracula. The Wolf Man. The Frankenstein Monster. If there’s one thing that all of these fellows have in common, it’s that they all have heads. Dracula and The Wolf Man use the mouths embedded in their heads to bite you. The Frankenstein Monster’s head is what houses the abby-normal brain that sends him on murderous rampages. Without their heads, these guys are much less threatening. They probably couldn’t do much of anything at all.

Review: 'The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad/Fun and Fancy Free' Blu-Ray

Despite its reputation for taking disturbing stories like “The Little Mermaid” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and cutesifying them for toddler consumers, Disney has produced some of the scariest sequences in children’s cinema. Millions of kids remember the wicked queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the demon from Fantasia, or Dumbo’s nightmare hallucination giving them their first serious scare at the movies.

Such moments have always been my favorites in Disney films, which is why my favorite of all the studio’s cartoons is the relatively underrated The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Disney’s short adaptation of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” brings that story’s climactic chase between a cowardly schoolteacher and a headless horseman to life with punishing intensity. The horseman’s first appearance on screen with a blaze of crazed cackling, stinging music, and a zoom that forces the viewer into his saddle is as scary a shot as you’ll see in any film for young or old viewers. The subtle, windy, Halloween night atmosphere that precedes it builds to that horror magically.

Most viewers come away from The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad remembering the chase scene above all else. The film has a lot more going for it than that, particularly some surprisingly memorable songs sung by Bing Crosby (“The Headless Horseman” song is a Halloween carol that should have been), and even more surprising considering Disney’s overstated reputation for diluting the classics, an incredible degree of faithfulness to the original story. Crosby’s narration even reuses a good deal of Irving’s text. And let’s not short change the other terrific animated short that comprises The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. Based on Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mr. Toad’s wild adventure enjoys the same painterly animation and extra-relish narration (Basil Rathbone, to compliment a very British fairy tale) as “Ichabod”. The segment’s Christmas setting makes the package great to split up and savor on our two most popular national holidays.

A less beloved package film is 1947’s Fun and Fancy Free. An adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s “Little Bear Bongo”, in which a circus bear escapes to the wild where he falls in love, is less eventful and artfully illustrated than the usual Disney cartoon. But that’s why your remote control has a “next” button. The following cartoon short, “Mickey and the Beanstalk”, is a big improvement with more atmospheric animation and some of the old Disney spookiness back in the mix (in one delightfully demented passage, Donald Duck tries to axe-murder a cow!). The cross-talking narration by too-precious child actress Luana Patten, puppeteer Edger Bergen, and his wooden charges is kind of annoying, though, as are the spell-breaking live-action interludes in which they appear.

Disney’s new blu-ray edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is available solo and as a package with Fun and Fancy Free. Ichabod is a startling upgrade from the previous DVD edition, which suffered from washed-out color and an almost constant invasion of white specks. The blu-ray intensifies color, wipes out the vast majority of those specks, and maintains a healthy grain. The animated segments of Fun and Fancy free are less textural but still perfectly presentable. The live-action bit, however, suffers from so much heavy-handed noise reduction it almost looks animated too.

The one big gap on the new edition is the lack of “Lonesome Ghosts”. This 1937 short in which Mickey, Donald, and Goofy play amateur ghostbusters against a quartet of spooks was the highlight bonus feature of the 2000 Ichabod and Toad DVD. It’s a shame “Lonesome Ghosts” could not have received a similar hi-def buffing for the new blu-ray (a few other minor extras aimed at very young viewers didn’t make the transition either). In its place is an admittedly substantial bonus feature film with material based in part on another Kenneth Grahame story. The Reluctant Dragon is generally more concerned with showing off Disney’s new Burbank studio than spinning cartoon yarns, but the live action backstage tour hops with cornball nostalgic fun (and looks a lot better in hi-def than Fun and Fancy Free). Because it shares DNA with “Mr. Toad”—and because the two films were released as a Grahame-centric package in 1955—The Reluctant Dragon is a most appropriate bonus feature for this blu-ray. I just wish Disney could have made room for the mere eight-minutes of “Lonesome Ghosts” too. Nevertheless, the new edition of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is well worth checking out for its vastly superior picture quality.

October 31, 2009: 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Halloween

1. Halloween evolved from two ancient pagan celebrations: the Celtic new year holiday of Samhain (pron: Sow-win) when the border between the natural world and the realm of supernatural creatures and magic blurs, and Pomona, a Roman festival in honor of the goddess of fruit trees (hence the Halloween tradition of bobbing for apples).


2. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term “Jack-o-lantern” derives from “Jack-with-the-lantern”, a nickname for a night watchman.

3. Washington Irving took the name of the cowardly star of his classic Halloween ghost story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” from Colonel Ichabod Crane, a military man from Staten Island, New York, who was Commanding Officer to the Confederate Lieutenant Stonewall Jackson.


4. Of the many adaptations of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” the most faithful to Irving’s original tale may very well be Disney’s animated version in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949). A good deal of Bing Crosby’s narration is taken directly from Irving’s text.


5. Bats and Owls became associated with Halloween because these nocturnal predators were attracted to the mosquitoes that would convene around Halloween night bonfires built to scare off spirits.

6. Trick-or-Treating has its roots in a medieval All Saint’s Day practice called “souling” in which the poor would ask for food door-to-door in exchange for offering prayers for the dead the following day (All Soul’s Day).

7. Beistle, the company responsible for those simple but memorable cardboard window decorations that greeted many a trick-or-treater throughout the years, has been in business since 1900. While the company’s signature images of pumpkins, witches, and black cats rendered in basic shades of orange, black, white, and green now fetch big money on ebay, Beistle is still very much a functioning company and quite reasonably priced repros of these pieces are available at Retroween.com.


8. Although master escape artist Harry Houdini reveled in debunking the supernatural, the New York Times reported that he planned to communicate from beyond the grave following his death on Halloween night, 1926. Widow Bess Houdini held séances on the first three Halloweens following her husband’s death in the hope of receiving a private, coded message only she knew. After the third attempt failed, she gave up. That’s when a medium from New York named Arthur Ford delivered a message to Bess: “Rosabelle answer tell pray answer look tell answer answer tell.” She confirmed that the message was, indeed, the one her late husband told her he would impart.


9. The holiday of witches and goblins made its film debut in 1914’s The Three of Us. The film featured a brief dance number set on Halloween. The first film titled Halloween was an animated short released in 1931, the same year that saw the debuts of Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein.


10. While many of us associate Universal’s classic monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolf Man, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.) with Halloween, the studio did not begin marketing its monsters’ relationship with the holiday until the early ‘60s when the famous creatures first figured prominently on Halloween costumes and decorations. In 1999, the studio started promoting the DVD releases of its classic films with the subtle tagline “Universal IS Halloween.”


11. The image of witches as broomstick-riding, green-faced creatures in black dresses and pointy hats was basically birthed in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, although depictions of witches in similar garb can be found in W.W. Denslow’s illustrations of the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s original book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, as well as Halloween cards that pre-date the film.


12. According to Cinema Suicide.com , the Brach’s candy company claims that if all the candy corn that is eaten each year was laid “end-to-end it would circle the Earth 4.5 times.”


13. Ben Cooper costumes— those cheap-o-la ensembles consisting of a vinyl bodysuit and plastic mask with a rubber band strap that dominated the youth costume market from the 60’s through the 80’s— can still be found relatively cheaply in their original packaging by collectors on ebay. That is, except for the Spiderman costume produced in the late ‘60s. Because this version of the costume was redesigned in the ‘70s, original versions (which make the wearer look as though he/she is wearing a pair of blue wrestling tights) fetch up to $200.

14. Ray Bradury’s classic young adult novel The Halloween Tree (1972), which follows a group of eight trick-or-treaters searching for a friend who has gone mysteriously missing, began life as a screenplay for an unproduced animated film the writer intended to make with Loony Tunes legend Chuck Jones. The book was eventually adapted into an award-winning cartoon in 1993 without Jones’s involvement.


15. The urban legends regarding killer Halloween candy that caused a minor panic during the ‘70s and ‘80s were nothing more than that. Despite a New York Times piece that warned of razorblades concealed in apples and “bubblegum… sprinkled with lye,” there has never been a reported death or life-threatening injury caused by Halloween candy obtained by trick-or-treating and there have only been a few cases of minor injuries. The only children who ever died from eating poisoned Halloween candy were poisoned by their own parents.

16. According to Wikipedia, New York City’s famed Village Halloween Parade (founded 1973) partially gained popularity due to an asinine law aimed at the city’s substantial gay community that prohibited people from wearing clothing traditionally associated with the opposite sex. The parade allowed New Yorkers the opportunity to don whatever outrageous garb they damn-well wanted to wear. The law has since been repealed

17. As closely as Halloween is associated with horror movies, few classic (pre-‘80s) horror films are set on the holiday. Appropriately enough, the most significant classic fright flick set on Halloween is Halloween (1979).


18. Before Donald Pleasance took the iconic role of Sam Loomis in Halloween, director John Carpenter offered the part to Hammer Horror legends Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Both actors turned down the role, a decision that Lee later admitted was the worst of his career.


19. Don Post is best known for developing a best-selling line of latex Halloween masks (including the William Shatner mask worn by Michael Myers in the Halloween movies), but he also made a mark in feature films. Post created special props for the 1956 sci-fi/horror classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Following Post’s death in 1979, his costume company designed the “stillsuit” used in David Lynch’s 1984 film Dune.

20. The appearances of Kang and Kodos—the tentacled, one-eyed aliens that have been staples of “The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror” Halloween episodes since 1990—were modeled directly on a pair of aliens on the cover of an E.C. comic book.

*I consulted several sources while putting this list together, but by far the most essential was David Skal’s Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween. All Halloween aficionados should have it in their libraries.