Creepypasta stories

return to return to Oz

“So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to my plough

Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road”
– Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

Kansas

In 1985, the Disney film ’Return to Oz’ was released in cinemas, and a few years later made its way onto home VHS.

I can’t remember how old I was at the time I seen it, perhaps five years old at most. I knew right away that there was something unusual about the film, something especially disturbing. I remember that the first time I seen it, I cried. I remember watching the film, glued in place in front of the television, not out of involvement but out of terror.

Truth be told, it is a bloody scary film. Now before you groan and go to read something else, don’t worry, this isn’t a story of a haunted video tape. The film itself played out perfectly normally, as much as possible. Dorothy didn’t turn to the camera and start screaming while blood poured from her eyes, or anything stupid like that. I’m not interested in telling you stupid stories like you’ve read a hundred times before. I just want to tell you how I felt when I watched this video, and some of the strange things that it reminded me about.

It’s a strange story and I really wonder quite what the producer, Paul Maslansky, was thinking at the time. I know that the power behind the film didn’t really rest with him; instead it rested with the film’s director, Walter Murch. A specialist in sound and editing, Murch worked on editing for films like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, but Return to Oz was his only venture into directing. I keep thinking that something may have happened to him during production of this film, maybe something that put him off directing any films from then onwards. But that’s just a guess.

My mother got a copy of the film on VHS. I remember distinctly, because she also had a copy of the old Judy Garland musical version. She loved that film. I was somewhat less impressed with it. The sepia opening, for a child who was used to colour television, seemed boring to me. I didn’t care for the dancing and the witch didn’t impress me. All the sets looked just too false, and I found myself not appreciating the film. My mother, though, loved it. When I was an adult, she told me about Judy Garland’s drug addiction and her gradual fall from Hollywood grace, a story that felt equally tragic to anything on the silver screen. Return to Oz, however, wasn’t a sequel. In fact, the only thing that connected it to the musical version was the presence of Ruby Slippers, which were silver in the original book. But my mother was still excited to see it, so she had asked a friend to find her a copy of the film, and we had watched it.

The film tells the story of Dorothy’s return to the wonderful Land of Oz. Or at least, it should be wonderful, but it really isn’t. But she’s desperate to go back, and when we first meet her in the film she is very depressed, miserable and lonely. The very first image we have in the film is her staring sadly into a dirty mirror, and before long her family take her to a hospital.

At the hospital, which it transpires is more of an asylum; Dorothy is introduced to a doctor. Keen to try out the newly-invented electric healing machine, the doctor introduces Dorothy to it, pointing out the machine’s features. ”Here,” he explains, pointing to the voltage meter ”Is its mouth. And here,” he explains, pointing to the switch that will send crackling shocks of electricity searing through the young girl’s skull, ”is his nose.”

She is escorted down into the bowels of the hospital, through tall and towering hallways, and locked within a barren, empty cell. That night, she is strapped to a hospital bed and, whilst the screams of other inmates echo through the hospital, is secured to the electric machine. A storm rages outside, and soon it knocks out the hospital’s power, during which Dorothy is rescued by another young girl. Together they flee into the river at the banks of the hospital, where they…