Where the Wild Things Are (video game) he stumbles upon the village of the Wild Things, a group of fearsome looking monsters. The Wild Things attempt to eat Max, who cries "Be still!" causing them to jump back in fear and knock over the village. Impressed, they introduce themselves and invite Max to stay with them. The game then goes through a series of events with Max helping out the Wild Things, or exploring the island with them, all the while investigating the appearance of strange black gunk and the "shadow creatures" emerging from it. Tensions rise in the group, however, causing some of the Wild Things
Where the Wild Things Are as an escape from their chaotic weekly visits, on Sunday afternoons, to his family's Brooklyn home. Sendak, as a child, had observed his relatives as being "all crazy – crazy faces and wild eyes", with blood-stained eyes and "big and yellow" teeth, who pinched his cheeks until they were red. These relatives, like Sendak's parents, were poor Jewish immigrants from Poland, whose remaining family in Europe were killed during the Holocaust while Sendak was in his early teens. As a child, however, he saw them only as "grotesques". When working on the 1983 opera adaptation of the book with Oliver