The Trap Door

I found out about "Trap Door" when it was mentioned in a "Guardian" below the line discussion about scary children's television. It probably would have been too weird and uncanny for me when I was a child, but being a Gothic adult I love everything about it, and keep coming back to it. The Michael Jackson's "Thriller" style theme song performed by an Alice Cooper impressionist. The brilliantly designed and executed stop motion animation. Willie Rushton's engaging character voices and spot on comic timing. Above all, it's an absorbing pastiche of feudal decadence in the tradition of Mevyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, in which an aristocratic skull observes the goings-on in the kitchen of his former castle, crawling with insects and worms and inhabited by a bloblike servant and his master who are either no longer human, or never were.