This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures,

ideas, and monsters in time.

Once more, we return to the rich magical world of Jim Hinson's 1986 classic Labyrinth.

Having previously covered two other of its creatures here on the Monster

Fact and the film itself on Weird House Cinema.

Today I want to talk about the most terrifying denizens of the Goblin King's Labyrinth, creatures

that have unsettled children for almost four decades now, the fireies of the fire gang. You remember them.

Do not tell me that you don't because I know even now you're picturing their lanky,

vulture-like bodies, their huge ears, their bright red and orange fur, and those piercing mad

eyes. The Labyrinth Bestiary by S.T. Bende, with illustrations

by Iris Complete, devotes no fewer than eight pages to illustrations of the fireies, along with

notations that describe them as chaotic, unhinged, good-natured troublemakers. And that is essentially correct, but Binde also points out that, quote,

anyone adverse to combustion, disorder, and the possibility of dismemberment is advised to steer

clear of their revelry.

Yes, because for starters, the fireies are so named not only for their brilliant flame-like

colorization, but also for their innate pyrokinetic abilities. And even more terrifying, they

possess the ability to detach and reattach their own limbs and heads at will. They can also

remove their own eyeballs, roll them as dice, and then swallow them in order to return their eyeballs to their sockets.

But all of this reaches a fever pitch when these inhuman hedonists engage in what I can only describe as a dismemberment party.

Fieries will dance around the Great Fire and pull themselves apart with gleeful enthusiasm. They'll employ

...