Happy Goat Horror

Dark bleatings everyone! I’ve been thinking about my first horror experiences a lot recently, and while I’m sure there must be so much that’s just fallen away from my memory, one thing I know for certain is the profound impact that Return to Oz had on me as a kid. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to enthuse about it for a few minutes.

I never much cared for The Wizard of Oz. It was too full of glitter and sunshine for my liking. I know it had its scary elements; The Wicked Witch of the West, the flying monkeys, etc, but it just never interested me that much. I was never a kid that enjoyed the singing, dancing aspects of Disney. I loved Alice but wanted to fry Ariel. Snow White was a favourite, but holy crap did Aurora make me snooze. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz – for reasons I can’t remember – wasn’t the hero I wanted. But Dorothy in Return to Oz – now she was a badass.

I was hooked and scared before Dorothy even got to Oz. The opening scenes in which she’s being accused of hallucinating her entire original adventure, followed by being imprisoned in a mental institution and forced to undergo a scary experimental treatment to rid her of “delusions”…. it’s the stuff of nightmares! So many bases were covered in the introduction to the plot. Character that we know and love isolated, with not a soul in the world (besides her chicken) that listens to her – check. Terrifying location in which she’s trapped – check. Mean and frightening authority figures – check. And that’s before we get to the electrical probes and the giant thunderstorm and Dorothy running for her life in torrential rain.

When she gets to Oz, she finds herself in the deadly desert – a place that is so dangerous because should you even step a toe onto the land, you’ll instantly turn to sand. To avoid it, she uses stepping stones to reach the grass, which is safe. I swear that this is the original version of ‘The Floor is Lava’. My cousin and I used to play ‘Deadly Desert’ with our Nan’s sofa cushions (later on, we’d start calling that game ‘Tremors’). Then, Dorothy finds a lunch pail tree – a delightfully imaginative element to the world that has forever made me love the idea of a packed lunch.

Oz – as Dorothy knew it – is wrecked. It’s empty, the munchkins are gone, there’s no Good Witch to guide her. The yellow brick road is smashed to smithereens. I’m grinning even at the memory of watching it. Something major – almost apocalyptic – has happened. Oh my god, I’m having the epiphany right now that this is quite possibly the reason that I’m so in love with apocalyptic fiction. The devastation coupled with the intrigue and mystery, as well as the hints that we’ve already seen that Oz is now a terribly dark place, made for the best hook ever. Dorothy landing in Oz and immediately wanting to find her way home had nothing on Dorothy returning to the aftermath of some sort of carnage and wanting to figure out wtf happened in her absence.

The Wheelers. As villains go, what a stroke of genius. Who didn’t both fear and love them? They’re essentially an infantalized biker gang, but instead of bikes they have wheels for hands and feet. They’re human… but not quite. Their limbs are too long, they move on all fours, they’re always chasing Dorothy. They speak weirdly and cackle like witches. They squeak (not in the cute mouse way, more like the sound of a rusty saw). As if everything about them isn’t already bad enough, they wear these horrible masks that depict grotesque, twisted faces.

But they’re nothing. I know The Nome King is technically the big bad of this film but, to me, he has nothing on Mombi.

Mombi, in my humble opinion, is the greatest villain to ever grace what is considered a film for children. She’s a powerful and beautiful princess with minions (sort of like Blair Waldorf, actually). But the clues that she’s not… quite right… were there. As Dorothy approaches Mombi’s residence, she finds a bunch of statues. It seems like art at first but then Dorothy realises that her old pals The Cowardly Lion and The Tin Man are stone, and is horrified at the realisation that every statue was once a living character. Which is why that dancing circle of headless maidens is so unsettling.

Mombi is vain, and likes to collect the heads of pretty, younger women. She switches heads out like hats. She keeps all these LIVING AND CONSCIOUS heads in a corridor of glass cabinets, and when she retires for the night she…. goddamnit… she takes off her damn head to sleep. She, of course, takes Dorothy prisoner, deciding she’ll wait for her to age a bit and then take her head.

Return to Oz has what I believe is one of the greatest horror sequences ever committed to film. Along with some new friends who are also trapped by Mombi, Dorothy hatches a plan to escape. It involves stealing a key from a sleeping Mombi to obtain magic dust that will help her companions fly, and popping off out of the window. Only Mombi, of course, wakes up and realises what’s going on before they’ve finished building their flying escape vehicle. Headless Mombi lumbers after her as her own original head screams after Dorothy in in the world’s deepest, booming voice, while the corridor of decapitated heads scream the place down. Dorothy and pals, in an unbelievably tense race against time, are panicking in their bid to escape. Holy crap balls – even thinking about this scene now has me all excited and tense.

I could talk all day about this film, but it’s time to start wrapping things up here. I still think that RTO is an incredible piece of work. It’s a classic adventure tale but threaded through a scarier narrative in a world that’s frightening – and one of the reasons that the world is so frightening is because it’s the exact opposite of what we already know it’s supposed to be. I was a kid that loved playing in the woods, imagining great evils that I could escape, and I pretended that my toys and my cats talked back to me. I was totally sold on this film because I wanted to be in Dorothy’s shoes. I wanted to pick lunch off a tree, get sassy with baddies, and win games that were rigged against me. This is the kind of film that has a protagonist that simultaneously has a strong personality, and is someone that the audience is meant to imprint on. There are puzzles to solve, and the narrative is set up so that Dorothy encounters stages of baddies of ascending evil and difficulty to thwart. It would make a great videogame, now that I think about it.

If there are better works of horror fiction aimed at kids, I haven’t seen them. This will forever be my favourite. ❤