I recently added another idea to the pile of 'why is this film scary', which is the... Dorothy's guardians... Aunt Em in particular, because she's a mother figure, takes Dorothy, trying to help Dorothy she takes Dorothy to a place which ultimately might do her harm; this clinic. And the idea is, we are going to erase your memory of this event. This is just the result of hitting your head. Your neurons are a little scrambled and we're going to smooth out the neurons so you don't remember this.

And the film... the subtext of the film is, you must defend your dreams; you can't let the world take away your dreams from you. That's your most prized possession. And that's what happens in the film. Dorothy defends her dreams by going to Oz and defending Oz and restoring that place. And the film ends with a happy reconciliation of Ozma in the mirror and Dorothy looking at Ozma in the mirror so we know it's real. But Aunt Em, the guardian, takes Dorothy there and leaves Dorothy there to go back to deal with her husband, Henry, and we know, as audience members, that something funny is going on here.

Why doesn't Aunt Em, with using her woman's intuition or her mother's radar, say... Halfway down the road she should say, 'Hmm, there's something funny about this place. I'm going to go back and take Dorothy out of there.' But she doesn't. She... Dorothy is there overnight and then one thing leads to another and she gets swept up in the flood that takes her to Oz.

So, the scary sub-basement of the sub-basement of the story is: grownups can hurt you, potentially, while trying to help you. That, even though grownups sometimes have the best of intentions and sometimes they don't, because what is the doctor and the nurse... what are their intentions? But even your guardian can mistakenly harm you and you have to defend yourself. And this is that message that I overtly wanted to put into the film, to make kids realize that is some circumstances... sometimes in life you're on your own and even the people who are there to protect you... Things can go funny sometimes, so you have to be on alert.

And this is fundamentally a very challenging idea for the kids. And it's also challenging for the grownups who might be sitting next to the kids, who may not want the kids to get this message. Even though they may not be understanding this message in as clear terms as I've just laid it out but that feeling that she [Aunt Em] should have gone back, she should have... She should have realized there was something funny going on is a... It's the equivalent of the undercoat in a painting. That there is... this undercoat has a funny quality to it that undermines a lot, if you're disturbed by that kind of thing.

Because relatively speaking, compared to other films that were coming out at the time that were full of blood and gore and sawn-off arms and limbs that, to which young kids would be taken... This doesn't have anything of that. There is no blood in this film. Nobody even touches anyone else successfully to do them harm. And every time harm looks inevitable, something happens to allow you to escape from it. And people are courageous in the face of danger and that courageousness is ultimately rewarded and the bad folks in the film are... dissolve away and they weren't that harmful to begin with. They just looked scarier than they really were.