Justin Dow

Eerie Earfuls 1.06: The Babadook & A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The movie posters for The Babadook and the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. The babadook features a stylized childs drawing of the silhouette of the babadook -- a long figured figure with a top hat. The Nightmare remake poster is a close up of freddy krueger, hat brim pulled low obscuring his eyes.

Originally released 6/26/2018

Sources and Extra Reading:

Transcript:

Below is the transcript for Eerie Earfuls 06: The Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) and The Babadook. The text has been cleaned up some for readability and clarity.

Justin: Hey, everyone. Justin here from Eerie Earfuls. We’re bringing this old podcast back and to prepare for the big return we’re re-releasing our old episodes every two weeks until we catch up. These were originally recorded in 2018, so the references are going to be a little out of date. Also the earlier episodes have some occasional sound or editing issues as we figured out our process, which I’ve tried to fix or mitigate if possible. Personally, I still think they sound pretty good, but we definitely got better as we went along. I hope you enjoy these older episodes, and expect us to start dropping new ones sometime in July or August. Stay scared everyone.

 (Intro — “Baba Yaga” by Kevin MacLeod plays)

Justin: Hey, everyone! Welcome to Eerie Earfuls — close captioned in Cthonic. Every two weeks we choose a horror movie double feature to compare and contrast for your entertainment. Fair warning: there will be spoilers.

I’m Justin

Stephanie: And I’m Stephanie.

Justin: So this is a special guestisode of Eerie Earfuls. Brandon is out dealing with some school stuff. There may or may not be another guest episode. It kind of depends on how that plays out. So I have my amazing wife Stephanie joining me. Before we jump into the double feature, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit?

Stephanie:  Yeah, sure. Um, well, my name is Stephanie. I’m married to Justin, who hosts this podcast in our bedroom every two weeks.

I’ve been a big fan of horror movies for my entire life. I think it started back whenever my mom first showed me Scream when I was about five — she was 22, so it about hit her demographic. And from there, I’ve just kind of loved horror movies. And I’m really interested in the final girl thing where the girl can defeat the world, and I relate to that. And then somehow I lucked out and found someone who loves horror movies as much as I do. Long time listener, first time guest.

Justin: (Laughs) So usually the person that picks the double feature rotates from episode to episode, but since we have a guest, I figured that it would be fun to have Stephanie pick the movies. So why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you chose for the week?

Stephanie: Absolutely. So I chose The Babadook and then the 2010 remake of one of my favorite horror movies, Nightmare on Elm Street.

Justin:  Okay. Let’s pop in the synopsis tape.

 (Cassette tape being inserted in player; “Anxiety” by Kevin MacLeod plays)

Justin: The Babadook is a 2014 Australian horror film written and directed by Jennifer Kent. Amelia’s husband Oscar was killed in a car accident as he drove her to the hospital while she was in labor, leaving Amelia to raise her son, Samuel alone. Sam displays erratic behavior suffering from insomnia and terrified of imaginary monsters against which he builds weapons to fight.

One night, Sam asks his mother to read a popup storybook titled Mr. Babadook. It describes The Babadook, a tall pale-faced humanoid in a top hat with pointed fingers that torments its victims after they become aware of its existence. Amelia is disturbed by the book and its mysterious appearance, while Sam becomes convinced that The Babadook is real. Soon after strange events occur, cockroaches infest the house, family photos are vandalized, and Amelia finds glass shards in her food. She blames Sam, but he insists it’s The Babadook.

She rips up the book and disposes of it, but soon finds the book reassembled on her front doorstep. New words taunt her by saying that The Babadook will become stronger if she continues to deny its existence, accompanying images of Amelia killing her dog, Bugsy, Sam, and then herself.

She burns the book. She becomes more isolated and impatient, accusing Samuel of disobeying her constantly, and having frequent visions of The Babadook. One night it attacks and finally possesses her. She breaks Bugsy’s neck and attempts to kill Sam, but he lures her into the basement and knocks her out.

She awakens, and when Sam lovingly caresses her face, she throws up an inky black substance, seemingly expelling The Babadook. An unforeseen force drags Sam into Amelia’s bedroom. Amelia confronts The Babadook, and is then able to make the beast retreat into the basement. The film ends with Amelia and Sam having recovered from the ordeal. Amelia is attentive and caring, sharing in Sam’s interests. They gather earthworms together and Amelia takes them to the basement where The Babadook resides. She places the bowl on the floor for The Babadook to eat and returns to the yard to celebrate Sam’s birthday.

 (Tape is ejected and flipped; “Night of Chaos” by Kevin MacLeod plays)

Justin: A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 2010 remake of the 1984 original, directed by Samuel Bayer and written by Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer.

Kris meets her ex-boyfriend Dean who has been suffering from nightmares. He falls asleep at the table and is attacked and killed in his dream by Freddy Krueger, a man covered in burn scars, wearing a clawed glove on his hand. Kris begins to dream about Freddy herself and is soon murdered in her sleep, which is blamed on another ex-boyfriend, Jesse. Jesse flees to friend Nancy’s house and learns that she too has been having dreams about the same man. Jesse is arrested for the murder and dies in his sleep in jail, having been killed by Freddy in his dreams.

Nancy and her friend Quentin discovers that everyone attended Badham Preschool. Nancy’s mother admits that there was a gardener at the preschool, Freddy Krueger, who was accused of abusing the kids that attended. She claims Freddy disappeared before he was arrested, but Nancy doesn’t believe her and attempts to track down the remaining kids from the school. She discovers that all of the other kids have been killed in their sleep.

Quentin falls asleep during a swim practice and witnesses what really happened to Freddy — everyone’s parents hunted him down and burned him alive. Quentin and Nancy believe that the parents killed an innocent man. They decide to go to the preschool to investigate further, and on the way, Nancy is attacked by Freddy, and she pulls a piece of his sweater out of her dream when she awakened.

At the preschool Quentin uncovers evidence that proves Freddy was, in fact, abusing the children all along. Nancy decides to pull Freddy out of their dreams to kill him in reality. After their confrontation, Freddy reveals he intentionally left her for last so that she would stay awake long enough that when she finally fell asleep, she wouldn’t wake up again.

Quentin uses an adrenaline shot to wake her, Nancy pulls Freddy into reality, and she uses a broken blade to slice his throat. She then torches the preschool with his body inside. The film ends with Nancy and her mother returning home, but Freddy appears and kills Nancy’s mother before dragging her through a mirror as Nancy screams.

(Tape ejects; music stops)

Justin: Okay. So why did you pick these two movies?

Stephanie:  So I picked these two movies because I think that they both have a really interesting way of dealing with childhood trauma. In one movie, the mother obviously suffers from extreme PTSD, and then in Nightmare, the children suffer from PTSD, and I’m sure to some extent the parents do too, but they were both just really similar in how they deal with mental illness and also kind of dream monsters, which I find really fascinating and how they’re similar and how differently they approach the subject.

Justin:  Cool. That’s a really interesting way to pair these two. It’s not a traditional pairing because most of the time, people wouldn’t think to pair something with the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, but that is a change that they made to the remake, isn’t it?

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. And in the remake, they explore more about the actual reasoning behind why Freddy is doing this, and moreso in the original they just focused on Freddy getting in the dreams and attacking the children of Elm Street. But in this one, it tries to tell more of a backstory, so you get more context for the mental position that these kids and their parents are in versus the original. So I felt like that aspect of it would make it pair really well with The Babadook, which is, I don’t know if you can find a more PTSD-centric movie, honestly.

So it’s almost the only thing that the remake’s good for, but, you know.  (Both laugh)

Justin:  Yeah, that is sort of one very key difference because in the original Nightmare on Elm Street, they explicitly always use the term child murderer, just murderer and nothing else. And in the remake, they take that further because that was originally Wes Craven’s plan from what I’ve read was that Freddy Kruger was going to be a child molester and murderer, but he sort of toned it down to just child murderer.

And then in the remake, they decided to actually explore that aspect. So yeah, in that regard, it sort of makes sense to the victims that he’s choosing in the remake, because in the original he’s just killing all of the kids of the parents that murdered him back however many years ago. But in the remake, it’s very explicitly the kids that he targeted with his abuse.

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. There’s a reason for it. And a reason that he’s especially haunting these parents in particular, no matter where they went. So I feel like in the original, it was more just about the children of Springwood and Elm Street in particular that he’s going to go after, and the parents who did this, but in this one in the remake, he goes worldwide kind of a vendetta against these parents and these children for telling on him, I think, for the children and then for the parents to torture them because, you know, they were responsible for his death, no matter how reasonable it was to burn him alive.

But I think that it’s, it’s really interesting how this one gives more backstory and you would think that that would be a good thing, but

Justin:  Well, some people debate about in horror, whether providing backstory, demystifies the boogeyman or whether it makes them more interesting. It depends on which camp you fall into.

Because that’s one of the big problems that people had with the Rob Zombie Halloween remake. In a way they kind of do that with Freddy Krueger, although they kind of, they kind of pull back on that. They don’t quite make him sympathetic because the remake does a fake out where it angles toward he’s innocent and has been wrongly murdered, but it turns out that’s actually not true. He actually was an abuser.

Stephanie:  Yes. And, but I think that that’s interesting and especially what they did in the trailers and everything portraying him as innocent because you, whenever you go to sleep and you go into Freddy’s world, he’s the one who is controlling this so he can manipulate it any way he wants, you to take it as an unreliable narrator.

So it’s whenever he falls asleep at swim practice and then goes to see his parents or all the parents really, you know, murder this man alive. He can look as pathetic and innocent and “No, no, no! You got the wrong guy!” as he wants because he’s the one who is controlling this. It’s his reality. And you’re only seeing what he wants you to see, even if that’s not how it happened back then. You don’t know if that’s the truth or not.

Justin:  That’s a really good point. It’s possible that what he showed Quentin in his swim practice dream is real, but it, it definitely still divorces it from the context of what actually happened. Uh, and I think that there’s an interesting difference between how he is portrayed in that dream, where he’s way more frantic and, and scared. And like, “what do you guys think I did? I didn’t do anything” versus later when they have an actual flashback, whenever Nancy is, or maybe it’s before that. But whenever Nancy’s mom talks about Freddy as a gardener and as an abuser, he seems much more sinister in that flashback, although that could be because it’s being told from the mom’s point of view, but it’s interesting how they use flashbacks to sort of influence your opinion of Freddy Krueger.

Stephanie:  But none of them are necessarily 100% reliable because it’s coming from, you know, from Freddy’s perspective or he wants the children to think that he was innocent, because then they’ll think about him more. Or if it’s coming from, you know, the mom and Connie Britton’s mind because she’s trying to justify to herself what they did, and she wants to close out any possibility that he could have been innocent. So you really don’t know.

Justin:  Well, we don’t know until the end anyway, because when they find those pictures, it’s pretty hard evidence.

Stephanie:  Well. Yes.

Justin:  So I’m glad that you brought that up, that sort of unreliable aspect of that dream sequence, because The Babadook shares a similar aspect in that the movie is pretty heavily told from Amelia’s point of view. It’s all about her experience with her son. In the first half of the movie, it goes through pains to set up the kid as particularly annoying. We’re not seeing it from the kid’s point of view and how he’s dealing with living a life where he’s always in the shadow of his father’s death. Instead, we’re seeing the point of view of this kid, he’s almost like a leech for a while. Like the first time that we see him, he’s sharing a bed with his mom and he’s literally at one point he’s like grinding his teeth, which I mean, one is sort of like a little symptom of trauma coming through because people that are anxious, you know, have a tendency to grind their teeth and people with PTSD grind their teeth in their sleep.

But also he’s clinging so tightly to his mom that he’s literally squeezing her throat strangling her. So it’s about the metaphorical strangling, and in this case, an actual strangling. And throughout the movie, her perception of reality sort of breaks down.

There are a handful of moments that sort of hint that the Babadook may not be real. Um, there’s a scene when she goes down into the basement because she catches her son playing with Oscar’s things, and when she goes down there, she sees an old coat that Oscar had and a hat hanging on the wall. And then later that’s how The Babadook looks. It turns out later he he’s wearing a long coat. He has this top hat. And uh, after she burns the Mr. Babadook book, and she goes to the police to report it, she looks in the background and she sees this coat and hat hanging on the wall. And it looks similar to the one from the beginning of the movie or from earlier in the movie, but this time it’s got long fingers poking out of it. So it mimics the shot, but it’s clearly like the Babadook kind of disguising himself and hanging on the wall.

But there’s a moment when she’s describing that she received a children’s book and the police don’t take her seriously because she burned the book, she says, and the cop looks down at her hands and her hands are covered in black chalk. And that’s how The Babadook‘s illustrations look, they look like they’re, they’re like, uh, charcoal drawings.

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. So, and I think that it kind of goes to speak to kind of the overall message of The Babadook with how this is just a part of someone. But there was something interesting that I noticed, and this was before she even burned the book. The second time that she receives it, after she first tore it up is the, it actually had an extra page that was added to it. And it says, quote, “The more you deny, the stronger I get,” and then it has the popup of her killing her son and then herself. And that’s what made her burn the book. The more that you try to deny your mental illness in your PTSD and and all of these problems that you’re having, the stronger that they’re going to manifest themselves because it’s just pressure building up in a bottle until it eventually will just full stop explode.

Justin:  So that actually segues really well into some notes that I had on the two. Because whenever you brought them up as examples of trauma manifesting as like a supernatural haunt, I immediately knew what you were talking about. It was a great pick and I immediately like latched onto it. So whenever I was watching the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, I started watching specifically for that. And it’s not exactly subtle that that’s what that is, but it was still an interesting way to spin Freddy. So he’s not just the manifestation of the sins of the past, but very explicitly the chart, the trauma that these specific kids endured.

So one of the things I noticed is that Freddy Krueger does not appear until Dean starts going to therapy. Whenever Kris sits down and starts talking with Dean, he mentioned that he’s been going to therapy and they’ve been digging into his childhood. And then he started having nightmares.

Stephanie:  Yep.

Justin:  So he has clearly been staying up because of Freddy Krueger. I don’t know that he explicitly states it, but he he’s clearly been staying up because he’s been haunted by Freddy Krueger.

And then whenever Freddy kills him, he actually, um, he doesn’t kill him like he does the rest of them. Unlike — the rest of them were explicitly like they are being murdered by Freddy. Kris gets clogged down her middle, like Tina did in the original. And Jesse has an arm thrust through his chest. But Dean, he holds a knife to Dean’s throat and makes Dean cut his own throat so it looks like a suicide.

This traumatic event then sets off everyone else’s nightmares because he killed himself in front of Nancy and Kris, and therefore they start having nightmares. And Kris having nightmares makes Jessie start having nightmares. And once Kris dies, Jesse starts having nightmares and dies. And once Jesse dies, then Nancy and Quentin start having nightmares. And so this trauma of seeing Dean kill himself then triggers everyone else. And it’s kind of made even more concrete by Dean saying, “you’re not real. You’re not real.” And then Freddy says, “I am now.” And so this one event cascades into everything else.

In the same way that Nightmare — the trauma starts because of a, a new traumatic incident that sort of reignites the old trauma, in The Babadook, the visions that Amelia has on the sort of haunting and the paranoia and all that increases in intensity the closer they get to Samuel’s birthday because his birthday is the day that her husband died. And so that has always sort of marked Samuel. Like Amelia loves Samuel, you could say, but she also sort of resents him because it is his birth and that’s why they were in the car and that’s why her husband died. And so this child is a constant reminder, even on the best days of what she lost. But since his birthday is also the anniversary of her husband’s death, the closer they get to the birthday, the more upset she gets.

And everyone talks about it. Her sister, her neighbors, they constantly say, I know this time of year is hard for you, so much so that she won’t even celebrate Sam’s birthday on his birthday. She always makes him share it with one of his cousins, Ruby, because they’re relatively close — they’re within a week of each other from what I can tell.

Stephanie:  Yeah.

Justin:  So they always just celebrated it on that day and then they don’t have to worry about Sam’s actual birthday at all, because they’ve already celebrated it. And she can sort of scooch through that with as little trauma as possible. But like you said, the more you bury it down, the more explosive it comes back

Stephanie:  In the book, it says that he will knock three times and you’ll see him at night. And what I found really interesting was that it was 11 minutes in when the Babdook book actually just arrives of nowhere. But the day that it arrives is the same day that she went through three triggering events.

Because, so it was the same day that her sister told her that she won’t do the joint birthday party anymore and that she should be celebrating Sam’s birthday on his actual birthday, which is a trigger because that’s the day that her husband died.

And then it’s also the day when she got called to Sam’s school because he was acting erratic and violent and ends up having to pull him out of school.

And then the third thing that happened was that they went to the grocery store and Sam was just telling this random lady at the cart, whenever Amelia was checking out that his dad lived in the cemetery and that his dad died whenever his mom was on the way to the hospital to give birth to him. And like, because he’s so blunt about it, I think that also triggers her.

She has three triggers in one day, and then all of a sudden the Babadook book shows up and says that you have to he’ll knock three times.

Justin:  Oh, that’s, that’s a really cool point. That was not something that I noticed, but that is really cool.

You mentioned the scene in the grocery store. And I actually noticed something different whenever Sam is with his mom in the grocery store, and then he kind of wanders off while she’s paying and he winds up talking to that random parent, I noticed is that she always treats Sam like he’s a burden. And I mean, he’s, he’s definitely a handful. He definitely has some sort of like behavioral issue or processing issue of some kind. It seems like it’s leaning into some sort of autistic spectrum disorder, but he clearly has something going on that he honestly needs therapy and possibly medication for that she, that she’s not equipped to handle.

But he’s not always a burden as evidenced by the fact that this woman comes up and she’s just talking to Sam, like normal and then Amelia rushes over and she’s like, “Sam don’t bother her. I’m so sorry.” And like, she’s just already assuming that he’s being a brat, but he was just, you know, being a kid. And I mean, he, he overshares, but all kids overshare. So when she says like, Oh your dad, and he mentioned that his dad is dead. Like all kids mentioned that. Kids just notice things and stuff that polite society says we’re not supposed to talk about. They don’t know that it’s not considered polite, so they just point out like, “Hey, you look funny, you’ve got this weird thing. What’s going on there with that?”

Stephanie:  Yeah. I mean, that’s how they learn stuff is, you know, by having these awkward interactions and then you’re supposed to gently correct them and just be like, “Hey –“

Justin:  Or explain to them.

Stephanie:  Yeah. Just be like, “Hey, that’s not nice. You probably shouldn’t say something like that.” And also she should be teaching him about stranger danger. (Justin laughs) Come on. Like in Australia, everything’s trying to kill you, you know? Like you can’t just go up to random people in the grocery store. It’s not okay.

But something also interesting in the blame that she kind of puts on him is one day she sleeps in until 11 and her alarm clock normally goes off at seven. And her, her son wakes her up and says, mom, it’s 11.

Justin:  It was, it was nine.

Stephanie:  It was nine. Sorry. So it was still two hours late and she was late for work. So she calls her work and says that her son was sick. He was throwing up and all this stuff. And just putting the blame on the kid rather than admit, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t set my alarm. I overslept.” She just threw all the blame onto that kid, even though he wasn’t sick or anything was wrong with him.

Justin:  And then pawns him off on her, her sister to deal with so she can go to work.

Stephanie:  Yeah. So it’s just interesting how she always finds anything that goes on that’s wrong in her life, she finds a way to pin it on him and he’s just the blame receptical. And maybe that’s why he’s acting like such a little shithead.

And I also noticed that five minutes into the movie I think he’s trying to do a magic trick or something, but he’s literally sitting there begging for his mom’s attention and she just keeps ignoring him. And like, he’s about to start crying because he just wants her to pay any attention to him. And it’s like, well, your kid shouldn’t have to beg for your attention.

Justin:  Well, I mean, we we’ve experienced, we don’t have kids, but we’ve experienced like our friend’s kids and they’re like, kids want your attention to all the time for every single mundane thing. Everything that they do, they consider like super important and in immediate need of your attention.

Like, it’s, it’s an interesting multifaceted portrayal of motherhood because on the one hand she clearly has issues and he clearly has issues. She’s not equipped to deal with his issues or her own issues. So on the one hand, she’s being a little neglectful, but also on the other hand, kids are exhausting. Like they just have days where they’re little shitheads and they act out and sometimes it’s everything you can do just to get them into bed at the end of the day.

Stephanie:  Yeah. But I think that the trauma that she suffered at his birth, she has had such a hard time processing it, that now in turn, his childhood has become traumatic. She shifts all the blame to him because I feel like she holds him responsible — if she hadn’t been going into labor with him, then they wouldn’t have been in the car that killed Oscar. And so I feel like now in turn, his childhood has become traumatic.

Justin:  It implies that she was a children’s book author. She’s constantly reading him children’s books, and then at Ruby’s birthday party, Sam’s cousin, one of them asks her what she used to do. And she says, “Oh, I used to do some writing: magazines and I did some kid’s stuff.” So it kind of implies that she used to be a children’s book author. And it’s not a far jump to assume that she stopped doing children’s books when Oscar died. So now she’s not making any money from her writing, she’s just a retirement home nurse, which is not exactly a lucrative career.

And since she’s still a single parent after seven years, they live in this rundown house and there’s a great shot at Ruby’s party where all the moms are there and they look all glamorous and their hair’s all done really nicely. And she, meanwhile is frazzled and she’s not wearing makeup and she looks sleep deprived. So she, she clearly stands out at odds from the rest of them. And even in the framing of those shots, everyone else is all grouped together in one shot, and then she is in a frame by herself isolated and it will cut between those two shots.

Stephanie:  Well, and I think that also as the story goes on, as she gets worse, it’s because she gets triggered more and more. And especially what you said about at that party was that one of the other moms asked, Well, what were you doing? You know, before he died? And then goes on to say that she volunteers with some widows and that really what Amelia needs to do is just to get back to what she used to do and get back to work, and then she’ll feel so much better.

That’s definitely a trigger because that’s what a lot of people say to depressed people is, well, maybe if you just got back into your old hobbies, if you just jumped back into it, then you would feel better, but that’s not how mental health works. So for the other mom who knows nothing about her situation to just say that like–

Justin:  It’s very presumptive.

Stephanie:  Yeah, it’s very presumptive. And I think that that’s another trigger that leads to more of her downfall.

Justin:  I want to circle back around to trauma. Specifically, I wanted to look at PTSD. The thing with PTSD is it’s used a lot in media and I wanted to sort of read a little bit of an article about what PTSD is.

PTSD is post traumatic stress disorder. It’s a psychiatric disorder that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war or combat, rape or other violent personal assault.

Trauma is a term that is mushy. It fell out of favor for a while because people would use trauma to mean really anything.  Like I saw this person yell and it was traumatic. So for awhile, shock was used, but trauma still works. It’s the T in PTSD.

One of the things that everybody knows about it — it’s pop psychology — is the triggers. Whenever someone has PTSD, they can be triggered. Whenever someone suffers from some previously traumatic event, then there are things that trigger them. And it’s unfortunate — that’s sort of where the conversation of trigger warnings came from — and it’s sort of unfortunate that trigger warnings have become sort of like a punchline because to be triggered in a clinical sense is a very specific set of symptoms that can occur based on these traumatic events.

And so some of the symptoms are like intrusive thoughts, such as repeated involuntary memories, distressing dreams, or flashbacks of the traumatic event. And the flashbacks may be so vivid that people may feel like they’re reliving the traumatic experience or even seeing it before their eyes. They avoid reminders of the traumatic events by avoiding people, places, activities, objects, situations that may bring about those distressing memories.

Stephanie:  Some people don’t even know what all their triggers are.

Justin:  Some of those key things, avoiding people, places, activities and objects is exactly what Amelia is doing in The Babadook. She refuses to celebrate Sam’s birthday on his birthday. She doesn’t do children’s books anymore because that’s her life back when she had Oscar.

All of Oscar’s things are locked in the basement and Sam is explicitly told, do not go into the basement. He does because it’s his father and there’s just an obvious missing piece to his family. And that is where that piece is being locked away or what’s left of it. It’s sort of like a puzzle where one piece is missing. You don’t know what the piece looks like, but you know what the absence of that piece looks like. And so he goes down there to explore it. And that is one of her triggers is going down there and seeing his old stuff upsets her and makes her cry. She gets so bad at one point in the movie that she literally goes into the basement and finds his violin and then starts like trying to sleep with it, cuddling it, like it’s a teddy bear. And when Sam comes in and accidentally lays his hand on the violin, she shouts at him, “LEAVE IT!”

You can point to similar things in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake. Involuntary memories, distressing dreams, flashbacks of the traumatic events that may be so vivid that it’s like they’re reliving the trauma which happens with Nancy whenever they go into the basement. At first, none of them remember it, but whenever she looks at the pictures, suddenly it all comes flooding back and she knows this actually happened to her.

Stephanie:  And also the parents keep everything that was associated with their preschool locked away somewhere. You know, one mom did it in her attic — Kris’s mom did that and her school dress and everything like that. And then Nancy’s mom, Connie Britton — I only will refer to her as Connie Britton.

Also, I want to say that Connie Britton’s hair loses some of its luster whenever she lies. And that’s a fact.  (Justin laughs)  So I just wanted to make sure I got that in there.

But Connie Britton keeps all of the pictures and everything…I believe kept in her bedroom or they’re kept away because she doesn’t want her kid to see them. And even at one point, Connie Britton says, I don’t want you to remember. I wanted you to forget. So that’s why they split all the kids up into different schools. And I know that Quentin and Nancy didn’t meet again until sixth grade is what Nancy says. And Kris and Dean, Kris says that they didn’t meet until high school. And then she saw the picture at the funeral.

They went out of their way to separate the kids as much as possible because they kind of had an idea that once they got together, they might start remembering things that they didn’t want them to remember. And on the one hand, I mean, yeah, you don’t want your kid to remember, you know, being assaulted, but at the other hand, the proper thing to do would have been to immediately put those kids into counseling so that they can work through those emotions because taking away someone’s memories is taking away their agency to decide how they feel about it.

Which is another thing that both of these movies have in common is parents taking away their children’s agency because in Nightmare, not only does Connie Britton want to take away Nancy’s memories, but she also tries to forcibly give her sedatives at the hospital to the point that Nancy has to, like, she broke out of the hospital while Connie Britton was out of the room getting to sign a document to forcibly give her the medication that she was refusing.

And then in The Babadook, the mom goes out of the way to go to her child’s pediatrician and get sedatives. Like she specifically asks for sedatives so that she can keep him asleep because it’s easier to deal with him if he’s asleep.

Justin:  And it’s important to point out that it’s not the sedatives themselves that were the problem because that kid clearly had issues and he wasn’t sleeping like she wasn’t sleeping either. So getting sedatives to help him sleep at night is one thing, but she’s also, she’s not just sedating him at night to help him sleep. She’s sedating him throughout the day. Because there’s a clear delineation point in the movie where in the beginning, he is very wild and loud and not just a handful, he’s also just full of personality. And once she gives him those pills, he’s suddenly very quiet and docile. There’s even a scene explicitly demonstrating that where Amelia takes Sam out to a restaurant to have a burger and have a shake. And he is sitting there quietly sort of docile. He’s sipping his shake and then the next table over there is a mom with like four kids and they’re all screaming and being rambunctious and shouting. And she’s like snapping her fingers and trying to get them to listen to her, which is demonstrating that Sam’s behavior, some of it is just he’s seven and kids are assholes sometimes.

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. And I believe we’re also missing a piece of the the story about why she took him to Wally’s. But she took him there because I believe that was after she had threatened him with a knife for asking for food.

Justin:  Yeah. Yeah. And he kept saying, “Please, Mom, I’m very hungry.”

Stephanie:  “I’m very hungry!” And she flipped out on him and told him to go eat shit. And then, you know, he started to cry and she realized what she had said, and you know, was like, Oh, I’m so sorry. We’ll we’ll, we’ll, we’ll take you. We’ll take you to Wally’s and you can get whatever you want. Ice cream for breakfast if that’s what you want. At the same time, she’s trying to turn it around to where she’s the victim. Cause she hasn’t slept in days and she doesn’t have control over what she says. And, you know, she didn’t mean that and like…that’s abusive! Like, no, there is no excuse for telling your six year old child to go eat shit.

Justin:  So, um, one of the things I was really impressed with in — actually both in the Nightmare on Elm Street remake and in The Babadook — is that both of them involve confronting the trauma. Freddy Krueger in the remake explicitly is a great boogeyman because him showing up with an exaggerated monster face and a big claw glove…he is literally the embodiment of their abuse. He symbolizes this monstrous version of their past, of this person that they used to trust that abused them. In the same way that the Babadook, he has clothes that sort of look like Oscars, but facially, whenever you actually get to see the creature, he kind of looks like Samuel. There are moments where Samuel looks like the Babadook. He, especially the more tired he gets, he’s got this long dark shaggy hair, these dark eyes. He’s got these dark rings around his eyes that The Babadook has. And the Babadook even sort of has these, like, child’s teeth almost — these sort of like chiclet looking baby teeth. So he looks like an amalgamation of Oscar and Samuel haunting her.

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. And it’s funny that you would talk about the way that these things present because I actually did some research into sleep deprivation and hallucinations from sleep deprivation.

So one thing that I found was — because clearly this movie features people who are definitely not getting their recommended eight hours every night — but something I found is in Nightmare, they introduced this concept of micro naps from when you were awake for so long that while you’re awake, your brain will suddenly go into these little micro naps. And that’s a real thing, but they’re actually called micro sleeps instead of micro naps.

Normally they last between…what I’ve read online, and I read it from two different articles…between 1.6 and 6.3 seconds, but sometimes they have been reported to go up to two minutes. So it’s just nodding off for just a split second. It’s not a full blown nap and you do it while you’re standing up. You can do it anytime. You can just go into micro sleep.

Justin:  So that’s not quite how they were playing it in the movie. Because in the movie he was saying that it was when your brain hit REM sleep for like seven seconds.

Stephanie:  Yeah.

Justin:  When your eyes were still open.

Stephanie:  So I think they used some creative control to create this reality, but it is a real thing.

But what I postulate is that all the characters and these movies appear to be suffering from micro sleep, but they also seem to have a condition called hypnagogia. Now hypnagogia is a state that can occur when going to sleep or waking, which can happen many, many times a day, if you’re so sleep deprived that you’re having micro sleeps. And the latter, if you’re waking, is called hypnopompic. During a hypnagogic episode, dreamlike elements can intrude into the view of the real world like a hallucination. So this is a real thing where you can hallucinate while awake just from lack of sleep. It’s interesting to me that these are both based in reality.

Amelia starts seeing the Babadook for the first time at the police station, and then she sees it several times in her car. She sees it whenever she’s trying to go to sleep, which is probably when you would most frequently have micro naps when you’re in your pajamas, trying to get in bed and you just can’t fall asleep, but you’re having those micro sleeps.

Likewise, in Nightmare, they explore this whole concept of micro naps, which is just, you don’t sleep for days for whatever reason. You’re drinking coffee. You’re drinking sodas. You’re taking Ritalin. You’re doing whatever you have to do to stay awake, to not die, but you have these micro naps just from when you’re driving, when you’re in the grocery store, at school, just whenever.

Justin:  Yeah. If you want to argue that the Babadook isn’t real, you could argue that the way the Babadook manifests partially is spurred on by Samuel because Samuel becomes so convinced that the Babadook is real. There’s a scene where he’s literally freaking out where he acts like he sees the Babadook sitting in the backseat with him and he’s screaming into the empty seat beside him, just screaming, “Don’t let him in. Don’t let him in.” She, meanwhile, is just trying to get Sam to calm down and she’s just shouting, calm down, calm down, just calm down. It’s fine.

Stephanie:  Because nothing makes you calm down like someone’s screaming at you to calm down.

Justin: (Laughs) But clearly him having a fit, you could argue that it influences her because the next time that they’re in a car together, she does. She doesn’t see him necessarily, but she hears him. She can hear him on the roof doing that, like (gutteral, inhaling voice) “Baaaaa…baaaaaa…DOOOOOOOK.“

Stephanie:  No, she stays in the back, but whenever she looks in the rear view mirror, she sees him in the back of the car, not in the back seat, but she sees him in the back of the car, maybe in the back glass or something. And that’s whenever she crashes.

Justin: Well, yeah, cause he’s, he’s on the roof. You can hear him scratching on the roof of the car.

Stephanie:  Yeah, so you can hear it. But also that was the cockroaches that she was hallucinating.

Justin:  That, well, that led into it. That was sort of like a precursor. And it’s interesting that roaches. Become a precursor–

Stephanie:  And they are big Australian roaches too. I mean, you could ride them here in America.  (Justin laughs)

Justin:  To circle around, back to trauma, it’s interesting that cockroaches are sort of the precursor to some of her events of seeing the Babadook, because her neighbor, Mrs. Roach, is one of her triggers. I don’t know…I don’t think that she’s Oscar’s mom, but she’s clearly, she clearly knew them very intimately and she loved them very much. At one point she comes over to make sure they’re okay, and it’s when Amelia is going nuts and is literally about to kill Sam, and Mrs. Roach says “I would die for you and Sam.” She loves them so much that she would die for them. So I don’t know–

Stephanie:  She’s become like a grandmother type figure in his life.

Justin:  Or had been at one point.

Stephanie:  But I think that she must’ve known Oscar because she’s telling stories about Oscar, you know, before he died. But I feel like she has taken on a grandparent role in Sam’s life.

Justin:  But it’s also clearly a relationship that isn’t fostered much anymore because Amelia has pushed away from Mrs. Roach, and it’s just interesting that Mrs. Roach brings up that story about Oscar. She says like, “Oh, he’s he tells it like it is” and talks about how observant Samuel is. And then she says Oscar was the same way. He always spoke his mind. And then she, she like snaps and she doesn’t want to hear it. And then Roach has become a trigger for her where like she starts seeing roaches in places. So like Mrs. Roach becomes like a manifested in a way in her visions and her nightmares.

One of the things that I really honestly admire about both of these movies is the way that they deal with confronting the trauma. Because one of the things that’s always a problem in horror movies is that they present evil as something that can be not just overcome, but like defeated. In Nightmare on Elm Street, Nancy confronts Freddy, which is if you’re taking him as a manifestation of her past trauma, then she’s confronting this trauma and sort of dealing with it, but it doesn’t go away. That doesn’t mean that it’s cured because even though she confronts Freddy and defeats him, he still comes back and kills her mom at the end of the movie because her mom has not dealt with the trauma. Her mom has been hiding it.

Stephanie:  Yes.

Justin:  In The Babadook, Amelia and Sam both confront the Babadook, — specifically, Amelia, you know, screams at The Babadook that this is my house and get the fuck out of my house. And then the creature sort of runs into the basement, but they don’t kill the Babadook because as Sam says, you can’t get rid of the Babadook. So they learn to cope with it.

Once she confronts the Babadook and sort of finally comes to terms with her trauma, she starts being a mother to Sam, they celebrate Sam’s birthday on his birthday. She takes an interest in his hobbies. He’s clearly a very smart kid because he made two functioning weapons. And rather than just screaming at him not to do that, she starts giving him the opportunity to exercise that in a safe environment. So he made this little crossbow that uses a dart instead of a bolt, and she sets up a target in the backyard so he can shoot the darts at the target. She takes an interest in his magic and lets him do these, these magic tricks for her.

But at the same time, the Babadook is not gone. It’s the day. It’s Sam’s birthday. It’s the day that her husband died. So she takes a bowl of earthworms, she goes into the basement, the Babadook freaks out and screams at her, but she feeds it some earthworms and sort of placates it. And it sort of recedes back and she she’s able to come to terms with her trauma. Just like depression. Depression doesn’t go away, but you can treat it through either or medication or therapy. Being emotionally healthy enough to understand what you are feeling is a good step in the direction of being able to navigate those feelings and sort of deal with them when they arise. I mean, it doesn’t mean you’ll never feel them, but it means that you won’t necessarily be consumed by them like she was.

Stephanie:  And what’s also interesting about that, and about that ending, is that Sam was actually the one who went and found all the earthworms. Because she compliments them how and how many he was able to find that day. So they’re working through this together. They’re dealing with it together instead of just individually trying to deal with it. It’s something that they’re both dealing with as a family unit and coping.

Justin:  They’re sort of united in their trauma.

Stephanie:  Exactly. He’s recognizing what she has gone through. And she is also doing the same for him, I think. And recognizing — cause he acts a lot better. He’s not going so crazy, probably because she’s treating him, she’s being more of a parent and tending to what he needs emotionally and physically, because it appears she’s feeding him (Justin laughs), which is two thumbs up on that.

Justin:  Always a step in the right direction.

Stephanie:  Yeah.

Well, I would like to say for anyone who’s going to watch the Nightmare on Elm Street remake, I would highly encourage you to watch the alternate ending because it is so much better than what they decided to go with.

Justin:  So the ending is already pretty messed up because Freddy Kruger is a child abuser in the remake. And in the theatrical version, he puts Nancy in this dress that she used to wear when she was a kid. And so it’s very fetishistic and he ties her to the bed where she’s immobile. And then he’s sort of toying with her and he’s going to penetrate her with this gigantic finger blade. It’s all very rapey already. But in the alternate version, when she screams at him and tries to wake up, he says, I can make it like it used to be. And he makes his face look like it was when he was just the gardener and when he wasn’t burned.

In the theatrical cut, when he has the burned face, he says, look at me, look at me, look at what you did to me. And then after she pulls them into the real world, they just cut us throat and then he’s laying on the ground dead. And then they throw a lantern in the opposite corner of the room for some stupid goddamn reason setting part of the room that he’s not in on fire and then burn the school down.

In the alternate ending, after she pulls him into the real world, he has his human face because that’s what he had in the dream, and she beats the fuck out of him with a baseball bat and then says, look at me. Look at me, look at what you did to me. And then she kills him. Yes. And it’s, it’s a more satisfying ending.

Stephanie:  I loved it.

Justin:  It feels so much more satisfying because they’re actually addressing the abuse all the way to the end, to the confrontation, instead of just turning it into gotta stab Freddy with the, with the blade stabby, stab.

Stephanie:  You know, confronting her abuser because she remembers now. All of those memories that had been buried down, she remembers because he made her remember. So she gets to confront her abuser and beat the shit out of him and fucking kill him, which is how it should end. Why did they choose the other ending?

Justin:  I honestly think that it probably got to real for the studio because it turned him from a monster back into like a pedophile.

Stephanie:  That frustrates me because pedophiles aren’t gonna always have burned faces. They’re nice gardeners who play hide and seek with the kids, and, you know, they’re family, friends and everything, because most of the people who do molest, especially little girls and little kids, are people that they know. And so putting the monster face on him and killing him, it’s just killing a monster. But if you give him his face and kill that? It means so much more. So definitely give that one a watch.

That movie is such a mess.

Justin:  That’s actually, I wanted to go there next. Um, I don’t typically like to do reviews of movies. I prefer sort of an analysis, but I thought maybe we’d do a little bit of analysis.

Stephanie:  Well I can analyze it into saying it’s a mess.

Justin:  Yeah. Because I am a soft defender of the remake while recognizing that it has some serious problems. People shit all over the remake, but some of the complaints people had, I don’t agree with. I thought that the makeup and design of Freddy Krueger in the remake was fantastic. I thought Jackie Earl Hailey did a fantastic job.

Stephanie:  I thought he did a great job, and he wasn’t like…he had his like joke moments, but it wasn’t the same kind of tone that Robert England had, which I appreciated because if I’m going to see a remake and you’re going to tell a different story, then don’t give me the same Freddy.

Justin:  I agree.

Stephanie:  You know what I mean? Like let him be his own thing. Freddy is a sarcastic character. He’s got a personality. He’s not gonna just be, you know, Michael Myers or Jason, where they just deep breathe and stab-stab.

Justin:  So, in the first two, I would say he comes across as sort of impish and sinister. Whereas by the third, and especially in the later sequels after that, he comes across as just like Bugs Bunny. He’s just like a cartoon character, constantly quipping. The third one is where we get stuff like “Welcome to prime time bitch,” and then throws her head into the TV — which is enjoyable, but if you’re going to do a remake, especially if you’re going to do like a serious remake, you don’t want Bugs Bunny.

His jokes in the remake to me come across as like sneering. He is fucking with these kids because he knows he’s in control. So like Nancy at one point, is running down the hallway and the hallway turns into like liquid, and then she has to like swim down the hallway, and he says, “How’s this for a wet dream?” But it doesn’t come across as like (vocalizing a vaudeville style tune) “na-na-na-na-na-na-waaah!” It comes across like he knows that he’s got her, and he has her anytime he wants to. He’s playing with her.

Stephanie:  Or, uh, what did he say to Nancy? He asks, what game do you want to play Nancy? And she says, fuck you. And he’s like, Oh, that’s a little fast for me. But if you say so.

Justin:  Well, he says “that’s a little fast for me. Let’s hang first.” And then he turns her around to see that he has been hanging the sort of souls of her dead friends from these pipes in the background. That’s the first time he confronts her.

He just seemed, in the remake, he seems so much more in control and so much more sinister because he seems in control. It’s not like impish teasing. It’s more like he knows it, and he’s just sneering at them, daring them to try something because they can’t. It’s the dream world. And it’s his world.

Jackie Earl Haley is hands down the best part of the remake. I genuinely wanted to sequel even though the first one isn’t great just because I wanted more of Jackie Earle Haley as Freddy Krueger.

Stephanie:  Yeah, absolutely. At one point Quentin turns to Nancy after he’s done the adrenaline shot and he’s like, well, if we survive this, I’m going to take you out on a date. And he clearly as a super crush on her, but, they are so bland and milquetoast that like, even as they’re being murdered, they’re just kind of passive. I don’t know if they gave them Benadryl before they sent them out on the set, but they’re trying to make us ship these two characters, because you would think hormones would at least take care of part of it. But no. Nothing.

Justin:  I think it’s because they’re supposed to be ciphers that we project our personality onto, but they just went too far with it. And so they’re just like stick figures. They’re just kind of like Stick Stigleys in there doing their thing.

It’s a shame to me because the movie tries structurally to follow the original way too closely so almost every single thing that happens in it besides the beginning — which is genuinely great! The beginning with Dean? With the like the pig parts boiling on the stove in the diner? 

Stephanie:  That’s the best segment of the remake. The first scene. Everything with Dean was the best part about it.

Justin:  There were even like references because in the original movies, anytime that Freddy showed up, they would light the scenes with red and green lighting. And as like a nod to that, whenever Dean falls asleep, the neon outside for the Springwood Diner is reflecting red and green alternating on his face. So it’s this great nod to the original kills.

And they hired Samuel Bayer because he directed, I think the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video, which is a very visually interesting video, and he’s good at visuals, but he doesn’t…he wasn’t a fan of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. And so he just kinda turns in a standard movie.

The script is too reverential to the original because you can line up everybody almost exactly to characters from the original. Nancy is obviously Nancy. Kris is Tina. Jesse is, uh, Rob, I believe his name was?

Stephanie:  Rod.

Justin:  Rod, that’s right. Quentin is Glenn. So everyone has this — Dean is the only original character. And he’s the one that has the most interesting stuff happen to him because everyone else just gets referenced roughly to what happens to them in the original. Kris’s death is exactly Tina’s death from the original. Nancy has both the scene where Freddy appears over the bed, and then the bathtub scene is referenced to where like Freddy’s claw comes through in the bathtub between Nancy’s legs.

Stephanie:  It’s just worse.

Justin:  Which thankfully it does not lead to him pulling her into the bath tub, like in the original, instead it leads to what is genuinely a really interesting scene where she goes into her bedroom and there’s this beautiful visual where it’s snowing inside and her entire room is covered in snow. And I was like, “Why isn’t more of the movie like this?” Because instead, we get stuff like Nancy running down the hallway and falling into the liquid hall is pretty much the stair scene where Nancy is sinking into the oatmeal stairs. So like everything that happens in this movie is a reference to the original.

Stephanie:  My favorite nods to the original were the small ones that people wouldn’t necessarily pick up. Like whenever they have the scene when Kris falls asleep in the classroom. Which by the way, that’s one of the best visuals — when she falls asleep, and she’s trying not to fall asleep, and then the classroom turns to ash. That was a great visual. Again, burned all the good stuff at the beginning of the movie.

But the teacher says, please turn to page 84. And I was like, I noticed that because it was like, “Hey, that’s the year that this one came out!” So it was like when they were trying to like reference it, but not in the super obvious ways, that I found it really interesting.

Justin:  I feel like they did a weird issue with the casting because they cast people to play Kris, who was basically Tina and Jessie who is basically Rod, and the two actors that they cast are really good. They’re like really charismatic, really interesting actors. Kris is genuinely leading girl performance level. She should have been the main character. And when she dies referencing Tina’s death, it feels like a waste because you have spent by that point, I believe it was like 35 minutes with her?

Stephanie:  We spent 41 minutes and 45 seconds before we finally switched to just Nancy and Quenton’s point of view.

Justin:  It’s not like the narrative is shared evenly among the four characters until they get picked off. It is entirely Kris’s movie. And then Jesse kind of takes over as sort of like, uh, like in a marathon, he sort of like takes the Baton for a little bit because he’s the one who’s going to get arrested for Kris’s murder.

And then 41 minutes in, finally Nancy becomes the main character. Until that moment she has had like three scenes. She had a scene where she was drawing. She had a scene where she was sleeping and Freddy appeared above her. She had a scene at the funeral, but that’s not her scene. It was still, Kris’s scene the whole way through.

Stephanie:  She had, I believe I researched it, and she had like three minutes and 25 seconds of screen time until the forty-one minute mark.

Justin:  Then she suddenly becomes the main character and then you’re having to reintroduce a whole new main character and make us care about her. And where Kris had, like, we were already invested in her mystery and her knowing Dean, she is the person who sees Dean kill himself. She is the spark of the whole thing. Nancy then has to be established as a character. But the only thing that we know about her is that she’s kind of alternative and draws. And that’s it.

Stephanie:  Another interesting thing that I just thought about was that in as compared to the original, all of the parents in this movie are all single parents. Nancy’s dad was a big character in the original, but we don’t see him at all.

Justin:  The Nightmare remake, they chose the director because of his sense of style. And he does have a sense of style, but he didn’t take it far enough. He didn’t make the movie his own because he didn’t care about the movie and he didn’t even want to do it. He was very hesitant and reluctant about it because he didn’t like the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. But they kind of pushed it on him until eventually he agreed. Whereas The Babadook written and directed by Jennifer Kent, she actually kickstarted it and got her funding through Kickstarter. And you can tell she is going places. Like she’s gonna make some amazing movies if they will give her money and directing capabilities. Cause you can see–

Stephanie:  There’s passion in this movie.

Justin:  There’s definitely passionate and you can see style in it. She has an eye for visual style. The Babadook is really, really heavily influenced by German expressionism. And you can see it all throughout. There’s lots of moments of using shadows very heavily. The, if you watch like, um, Frankenstein or Dracula, the sets on those are really exaggerated. There’s big shadows cast, and it’s all about creating this heightened experience. It’s more about emotion than it is about logic. And you can see that in The Babadook.

The moments where she’s outside, in the world, at the school, at work, everything is shot very normally. It’s very, um, you know, like pastel colors, but when she goes home, it becomes almost starkly black and white. There’s these great shadows, the stairs have this like worn spiraling look to them.

Stephanie:  I thought it looked like a popup book.

Justin:  It does. It looks like the very sort of Gothic style of the popup book. And she, I was reading an article where she talked about some of the influences, like the use of shadow looks a lot like Nosferatu. There’s this very famous scene where Nosferatu’s silhouette climbs up these stairs. The sets at times kind of look like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from the 1920s and her house kind of looks like that.

One of the movies that she cites as an influence is this French horror movie, which isn’t German expressionists, but has a sort of expressionist vibe to it: The Witch House from 1908. It’s a silent film. And they even show part of it in The Babadook whenever she’s watching TV and she starts having those sort of hallucinations. And it’s got these very expressionist, nightmarish visuals. So you can see these sort of like very stylized movies influenced her look.

Alright. Well, I think that just about, does it. Thank you very much for being here today, Steph.

Stephanie:  Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you for having me.

Justin:  You can contact us on social media. We would love to hear from you. You can find us on Twitter @eerie_earfuls. Email us at eerie.earfuls@gmail.com. Visit us on  the web at eearieearfuls.wordpress.com. You can subscribe to us on Castbox and on Apple podcasts. While you’re there, go ahead and give us a review. It helps other people find the show, but more importantly, it lets us know that you’re listening, and it gives us feedback and lets us know how we’re doing.

Our theme music is “Baba Yaga” by Kevin MacLeod. Our synopsis  music is “Anxiety” and “Night of Chaos” — also by Kevin MacLeod. You can find more music at incompetech.com. Thank you for listening and stay scared everyone.

(“Baba Yaga” by Kevin Macleod outro plays)

Stephanie:  Would you rather me do Derry Murbles? Or should I do August Clementine?

Justin:  What are you talking about?

Stephanie:  For my voice. Should I do  (imitates quiet NPR voice) Derry Murbles from Pawnee NPR. Or  (imitates louder, more bombastic voice) August Clementine from Eagleton NPR!

Justin:  (Laughs and begins imitating Derry Murbles) “I’m Derry Murbles. Welcome  to Pawnee NPR.”

Like…not shouting into the microphone, but the louder you can talk, the more you can project.  (loudly, dramatically) Use your theater voice!

Stephanie:  (In a loud, warbling voice) I DoN’t HaVe A tHeAtEr VoIcE… (in a very soft, meek voice)…but okay…

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