The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hi, this is Dana Stevens, Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with a Slate spoiler special podcast on A Christmas Carol, the new Robert Zemeckis adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic story.

Joining me from Washington, D.C. is Dan Cois. Hi, Dan.

Hey, Dana. How are you?

Please identify your profession at this time.

I've given up on keeping up with you.

You're writing for the Washington Post, reviewing movies.

You're still writing for Vulture, the New York Magazine Culture Blog.

I write for True Slant.

So, all right, so let's get into Christmas Carol.

Actually, I want to talk about the scariness factor.

Why don't we just start off with that?

Do you think that this is a kid's movie for any age of kids? I would say that maybe a kid who enjoys scariness in general. I mean,

I feel like parents know whether their kids enjoy scary scenes, even scenes that aren't that

scary for grownups, whether they enjoy the feeling of being scared. If you have a kid like over eight or

nine who enjoys that feeling, they probably will really like this movie. But at the screen and I

was at, I don't know what happened with you, but at the screening I was at, there were a lot of

whimpering kids, smaller children, and there were a lot of parents taking crying kids out into the hall.

Right, because the movie really goes to extremes in order to scare you.

It doesn't cut corners on any of the ghost sequences.

Right.

Well, so I think we don't really need to summarize the plot of the Christmas Carol, right?

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