I Will Never Know Peace Thanks To The ‘Round The Twist’ Episode With That Goddamn Scarecrow

Call me a sadist, but some of my favourite films as a child turned my brain to quivering, terrified slop.

There was nothing I liked more than being unnerved; than being haunted for days by the nightmare of Johnson and Friends and that fucking hot water bottle. I didn’t just fail to avoid horror. I sought it out, relishing hiding behind the couch, and fearing the long walk to my dark bedroom.

I haven’t grown out of that desire to be scrambled, either. I remain convinced that Return to Oz, which opens in an asylum and features a trundling army of baddies called The Wheelers, is a masterpiece, and that Babe: Pig in the City, which culminates in a sequence set in dog heaven, is as good as art gets.

And that’s not even to mention Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches, a film that shares with its titular antagonists a burning hatred of children. How else to explain the sequence set in broad daylight in which a young boy is abducted, a waking nightmare so scarring I can still call it to mind whenever I close my eyes?

Indeed, that desire to be deeply unsettled by art also goes some way to explaining why I love Australian televisual classic Round the Twist — albeit with the kind of love that I recognise could very easily be a form of Stockholm Syndrome.

Round the Twist is Ghoulish, Beautiful Art

Round the Twist branded itself as a comedy series, and it’s true that the show occasionally dips into the domain of the light, cheerful sitcom. There’s a familial unit at the centre — the beleaguered Twist family — and there’s an ongoing series of misadventures that must be bested in order to learn important lessons about virtue.

But watch even a single episode, and it will become clear that the series wore these genre trappings like a bloodied skinsuit. Sure, there are some familiar narrative beats nestled in the thing, but they lie in the centre of a stew of blood, vomit and twisted, otherworldly creatures.

Watching an episode of Round the Twist is a little like listening to a story told by a hostile entity you gradually come to realise is not human.

Thus, watching an episode of Round the Twist is a little like listening to a story told by a quietly hostile entity you gradually come to realise is not human. The words are all in the right order; the speaker clearly understands that stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end. But in place of the usual character and plot development, the growing maw of teeth and wild, flashing eyes sitting across from you substitutes in an obsession with human bodies, like they’re composing a medical textbook. Or, worse still, a cookbook.

And nowhere is that truer than in the show’s most famous episode, ‘Know All’.

David Cronenberg Could Never

‘Know All’ starts relatively normally for a Round the Twist episode, with the Twist family encountering a trunk washed up on the beach. Rather than containing the treasure that the youngest member of the family, Bronson, is eagerly expecting, when pried open, it instead reveals… clothes.

But not just any clothes: circus clothes. Eager to experiment with their new bounty, the family dress up their straw-headed scarecrow, only to quickly discover that the outfit is enchanted, and bestows the curse of life onto the inanimate object.

So what does a scarecrow do when it has suddenly been granted with sentience? Well, stalk the family that brought it to horrifyingly life, of course, waggling its tongue and chasing main characters across the screen like a makeshift Jason Voorhees.

All told, the scarecrow is something of a B-character in the episode. His sub-plot is resolved quickly; he is only one small part of a melange of circus buffoonery. But just as Anthony Hopkins is only onscreen throughout the duration of Silence of the Lambs for 12 short minutes, so too does the scarecrow do a lot with very little.

Indeed, he is memorable precisely because of the gaps in his backstory, not in spite of them. Who is he? What are his wants? Why is he so malevolent? What the fuck is going on with that goddamn tongue? When the sentient scarecrow sleeps, does he dream? Like all great horror icons, he is essentially unknowable; a blank slate onto which you can project whatever kind of insidious intention that you so choose.

The episode ends, but the horrors do not.

And then, with a cheery resolution featuring a family of jolly clowns, the episode ends. The episode ends, but the horrors do not. There is an entire generation of adults who still bear the psychic scars of watching a humanoid scarecrow batter down a door in pursuit of a young woman that he wants to… what? Kill? Eat? Who knows?

It might be odd to call Round the Twist subtle, given this is a show in which a young man becomes pregnant by pissing on a tree. But ‘Know All’ is precisely that. Like any successful slasher property, it shaves off everything but the horror, going to work at the great task of melting pre-pubescent minds with a precision that is practically surgical.

And that’s a good thing. The world is a terrifying place when you are younger, full of strange customs and leering adults so bizarre and hard-to-read that they might as well be aliens. Any art that captures that fear is doing something right. And ‘Know All’ captures that fear and then some.

Every episode of Round The Twist hits Netflix very soon.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.