I actually have a pretty ambitious post in the works, but it's not ready yet. Maybe next week.
For now, let's think of all of those bits in the Oz stories that you may not notice when you're younger, but can become really odd or creepy when you grow up.
Like the Tin Woodman. After trading in his meat body for metal, he searches for a heart. Fairy tale character, or the ancestor of all cyberpunk?
Princess Langwidere: Someone who treats heads as just another fashion accessory. Up-and-coming trendsetter, or body horror?
Anybody got any others?
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2 comments:
How about later in the Oz stories when the Tin Woodman talks to his own head?
Now that's creepy!
The nearer a text is to the traditional fairy-tale and the farther it is from the modern fantasy, the creepier facts can be embedded into it without making the text itself creepy... Folk tales are full of all types of cruelty, and nobody cares, while the same story would be considered gory if it was translated into the language of adult fantasy without changes.
Oz is somewhere in between on this scale, so it can be both funny when read as a tale and creepy when read as a fantasy.
...For me the scariest moment was the one from "Doroty and the Wizard in Oz" where the Mangaboo sorcerer makes Oz stop breathing.
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