Kellams: This is Ozarks at Large. April Wallace, our culture vulture, also an instructor with the School of Journalism and Strategic Media at the University of Arkansas, with me in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio. Welcome back.
Wallace: Thank you, Kyle.
Kellams: What are we going to talk about today? You always give us recommendations, but you often get us started with a question.
Wallace: Yeah. Why don’t you tell me, what is the first scary movie you remember seeing?
Kellams: The first scary movie I remember seeing is the original “Frankenstein” from 1931. There was a show on one of the Springfield, Missouri, channels that I could get growing up that showed classic scary movies Saturday nights at 10:30, “Doctor Dead Theater.” And the first one I remember, and still one of my favorite movies ever, was the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein.” Yeah. How about you?
Wallace: It was whatever number of “Scream” came out in, like, 2002. It was a sleepover situation.
Kellams: Gotcha.
Wallace: It’s a very bad idea. That’s all I’ll say.
Kellams: Sounds like a bad idea.
Wallace: A few years later, in high school, a friend of mine tried to show me “The Ring.” I lasted for 90 seconds.
Kellams: No. Do your recommendations have a Halloween theme?
Wallace: They do.
Kellams: Yay!
Wallace: So I mentioned that I obviously am not much of a horror person, but I’ll come with some dark comedy each week until Halloween is done. So my favorite of all favorite dark comedies is “Los Espookys” on HBO.
Kellams: I have never seen this.
Wallace: I think you’re in the majority of people.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: There are only two seasons of this, but it is delightful. It is so weird. It is a band of weirdos who have found each other. They’re good friends. It is primarily in Spanish, so there are subtitles, but there are great parts of episodes that are also mostly in English. And it is written by Fred Armisen of “Saturday Night Live” fame.
Kellams: Yes. “Portlandia.”
Wallace: Yeah. And he plays in it as well. So “Los Espookys” is a band of friends. They’re all about, I’d say maybe college age. Some of them may be early workforce. They’re all kind of goth and emo, and they all have a penchant for the supernatural and for horror.
And they have this little side gig that they’ve developed in providing spooky services for people who are problem solving. It starts out that they are turning a quinceañera into a spooky-themed party. And because they do it so well, it’s so believable, how the cake looks like intestines that have been spilled open, you know?
Kellams: Right.
Wallace: Et cetera. That’s Uncle Tico, played by Fred Armisen, says, “You should really think about doing more of this because this was excellent. Like, I really thought that cake was human.”
So they start there and they get hired for individual jobs. So there’s Renaldo, who is kind of the ringleader. He has the creative vision. He has long, kind of greasy hair. He wears the trench coat. You know, he looks the part.
Úrsula is the smart one. She has a job in a lab, I think a dental lab, perhaps. She’s always cleaning up everybody’s messes. Tati is her cousin. She doesn’t have a thought going on in her brain, but she’s very useful and hilarious. Andrés is played by Julio Torres, a comedian who also has a special on HBO. And then Uncle Tico is a valet whose lifelong dream is parking cars, and he’s very good at it.
Kellams: I appreciate that.
Wallace: And they all help Bianca Nova, a celebrity actress played by Carol Kane. They start to get a name for themselves and they do all sorts of things. Their tagline is like, “We make real horror for people who need it.” So that’s an American ambassador who wants to fake an abduction.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: And they’re like, “What if we trap her in a mirror?” Never mind how they do that.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: But they have, you know, solutions. At the start, they stage an exorcism at an orphanage for a, yes, for a priest who is aging. He’s like close to retirement, and this hot new priest comes in and has all the attention and is completely inexperienced, and he wants to show him up by successfully getting rid of this demon.
Kellams: This is awesome.
Wallace: It goes very well. Meanwhile, not only are they doing these horror performances that are not obviously, like, known to be performances, supernatural things start happening to them.
And the funnier part about it is that they are so in tune with the supernatural world that it’s just kind of background noise for them. And so it’s, like, interesting to the viewer, but they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll get back to you, water spirit, whatever.”
Kellams: Gotcha.
Wallace: So highly recommend “Los Espookys.”
Kellams: On HBO.
Wallace: For a movie this week, I’m recommending a family film because I think kids especially like to anticipate Halloween.
Kellams: Yes.
Wallace: “Halloweentown.” It was released in 1998, I think. I wouldn’t know because in my house growing up, they didn’t like Halloween, so I totally missed it. But I recently watched it with my kids, which means...
Kellams: So when you went to this sleepover to watch “Scream,” you were just really not ready for it.
Wallace: Really not. Yeah.
Kellams: You hadn’t. Okay. Go ahead.
Wallace: I’m not sure the parent knew what was going on.
Kellams: Sure. “Halloweentown.” Is this an animated-type thing?
Wallace: No.
Kellams: It’s claymation.
Wallace: No, it’s live action.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: In this, it’s a family, and there are, I don’t know, three or four kids, and the kids are the main characters. They are a bit bummed out because their mom doesn’t particularly like Halloween either. She’s a bit strict about it. She won’t even let them have a cookie before dinner, you know, little things like that. But she’s always kind of weird about it. And they don’t get to go out and trick-or-treat and do parties.
And the main character is the girl in the middle, and she is just ready to have parties and just be done with this. But she’s beginning to notice that she has some special abilities that no one else seems to have.
And Grandma comes for a visit, a very unexpected visit on Halloween night. They haven’t seen her in ages, and, well, it turns out that Grandma is a witch. And that explains why Mom is weird about Halloween and why she won’t let her daughter out of the house. She’s afraid that things are going to start happening.
So the kids follow Grandma on this mysterious bus that comes out of nowhere when it’s her time to go home, and it transports them to Halloweentown, which is a place where Halloween is every day. And there’s all kinds of strange creatures and weird things going on. And magic is real. So there, Mom, we proved it.
This is on Hulu now. In my little research after we watched this, I learned that Kimberly Brown, the main character, has since married someone from this movie. Anyhow.
Kellams: There was magic on set.
Wallace: There was. For books today, I have a couple recommendations, the first one being “Ghostly.” It is an anthology. It’s a collection of ghost stories and it’s quite mild, quite tame. That’s why I was able to read it and reread it. It’s collected in part by Audrey Niffenegger, my favorite author, and illustrated by her.
So she was contacted by her editors at Vintage in the U.K., and they pretty much had pulled a lot of these stories. So a lot of the collection was formed when they asked her to do it. So she did a lot of the illustrating, but she also has a piece in the book.
And it’s both modern and not authors. So there’s Edgar Allan Poe, of course. There’s M.R. James. There’s Neil Gaiman, H.H. Munro. It kind of just shows you, like, the evolution of ghost stories over time because it’s very different from era to era. There’s gothic horror and Victorian stories.
And what she realized as she was editing it was, once she pulled some of the stories that she wanted to include, she realized there was a theme that it all involved houses, children or cats.
Kellams: Mm.
Wallace: So I really like the idea of a ghost story not being too scary, that, like, not all ghosts are frightening or out for revenge or have your worst interest in mind. Some of them have just moved on, you know, moved on to the afterlife, kind of stuck in between, and that maybe they just really like their house.
Kellams: And you said you had a second book.
Wallace: I do. So I have one for kids as well. My kids are kind of, my oldest one is becoming middle grade. And so I’m kind of in the stage of finding him stories that are also not too scary, but maybe just a little scary.
Kellams: Yeah.
Wallace: So I found a year or two ago “The Skull” by Jon Klassen. He wrote “This Is Not My Hat,” which is a famous picture book that is just so funny. Please go find that if you have young people in your life.
This is a pretty spooky tale. It’s actually based on a traditional folktale, a Tyrolean folktale, but he brings his own twist to it, and it is highly illustrated. It still has...
Kellams: It’s a gorgeous book.
Wallace: It is. It’s beautiful to look at. This girl named Otilla runs away and she finds a house in the woods, and there is a skull there. And the skull speaks to her. And the skull has a secret. And that’s about all I can say without giving too much away. But it is fantastic. It’s not too scary for my kids, who have inherited my aversion to horror, but it is mysterious. And it’s such a good story.
Kellams: Okay, I love this. So we have “Los Espookys” on HBO, “Halloweentown” available on Hulu, the books “Ghostly” and “The Skull.” More Halloween next time.
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: Thank you, April Wallace. She is our culture vulture, and she’s an instructor at the University of Arkansas.
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