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Youtube, you genius, you beautiful old thing: Sis sent me a link to a movie she and I were terrified by and obsessed with as children, something no one else seems to have heard of. It's this bizarre, filmed kid's theatre piece done by a Minnesota theatre company in 1983, Hans Christian Anderson's "The Red Shoes" told mainly through dance. Hans visits a neighborhood child who's been feigning illness and tells her one of his morality tales to make her realize the error of her ways. They use her puppet theatre and improvise the scenery and characters with toys and bits of things found around her room, and as they do, the story unfolds behind them by life-sized actors made up to look like dolls, all wearing disturbing doll-masks and things. You have to sort of see it to understand the uncanny, freakish feeling of it.

Bit of strange trivia number one: the actress who plays the little girl also played A.C. Slater's kid sister in an episode of Saved by the Bell.

Strange trivia two: the year after this movie was made, one of the co-directors and the founder of the theatre company was convicted of sexually assaulting three boys in the children's school connected with the theatre.

Yep.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 1:47 AM | shower me with attention