Dahl Study: Georgy Porgy

My author study of Roald Dahl started with a reading of his Collected Stories while watching the accompanying episode of Tales of the Unexpected. Each Friday I'll recap a story and show (with spoilers, just so you know), but I encourage you to read and watch them on your own if you're interested!

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"Georgy Porgy" from Collected Stories (read 1/11/19)

A vicar has never settled down, and all of the "spinsters" in his parish are after him. He resists, but one finally puts something in his drink and gets him alone. The vicar had a traumatic experience as a boy - watching a mother bunny eat her newborn, and then thinking his mother was going to do the same to him. He ran away from his mother at the time, and she ran after him but got hit by a passing car. In present day, when the spinster leans forward to kiss the vicar, he freaks out about her mouth. She apparently actually eats him and he lives inside her?

"Georgy Porgy" from Tales of the Unexpected (viewed 7/4/19)

This was... pretty different from the story in terms of specifics and story building. I didn't remember the story that clearly, but it didn't stand out to me as weird or unsettling, besides the odd ending that didn't seem typical for Dahl. But the show version was very strange, and I felt uncomfortable the whole time I was watching it. The vicar is weird from the start, kind of twitchy, and it kept showing him clench his fists behind his back while preaching and singing. There were flashbacks showing how off her rocker his mother was - she really messed him up. To the extent that the father was shown nearby in all the scenes, and I wanted to scream at him "Why aren't you stopping her?!" She was so inappropriate with her son. 

          The woman of interest in the show wasn't a spinster from town, but rather one of their younger, female, married, relatives. This woman spikes the vicar's drink, and when she leans in to kiss him, he freaks out as he did in the story. But in the show, he strangles her. She falls to the floor, bleeding from the mouth, and two spinsters come to see what happened. He yells about his mother and runs past them. The strangled woman is still alive on the floor, and then we are shown the vicar in a straitjacket, talking to a therapist about where in the woman's body he is living now.

          I wonder if this was how the story ended. I remember the writing explaining that the vicar is living inside the woman because she ate him, but maybe I read it wrong, or didn't read into it enough, and it was actually him in therapy talking about it.