By: Kristen Anderson
I am less than 5 years old, and I am horrified, crying, screaming at a TV playing The Wizard of Oz.
My babysitter was trying to be cute when Glinda the Good Witch floated down in her pearlescent pink bubble to greet Dorothy in Oz, putting her finger to the screen and making a “pop” noise, as though she were popping Glinda’s bubble. She probably thought it was an innocuous move, but it freaked me right out.
I don’t remember why I reacted that way. I know it wasn’t my first time seeing the movie. But maybe I felt like Glinda was a safe space in an otherwise hellscape of cinema, and I didn’t want that space to be violated. Because The Wizard of Oz, like so many other movies and TV shows supposedly made for children, is low-key terrifying. (Those talking trees throwing apples at Dorothy? SHUDDER.)
I’m a child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and from “classics” like The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory to various Nickelodeon shows, unintentional horror was built into my entertainment experience from the get-go. It was like Pixar’s “Don’t worry, adults can enjoy this, too!” style, but for sickos.
Take The Wizard of Oz’s unofficial sequel, 1985’s Return to Oz, starring Fairuza Balk (who would later go on to become witch royalty in The Craft) and Piper Laurie, who played Sissy Spacek’s mother in the adaptation film of Stephen King’s novel, Carrie . Not only are there visuals in this that are hard for a grown-up to digest, let alone a child, but the plot itself is PG-13 in a movie marketed for kids.
It’s worth noting that Dorothy is younger in this movie than she is in the original. Balk as Dorothy was 11 when Return to Oz was made, as compared to Judy Garland’s 17 in The Wizard of Oz.
We pick up with this young Dorothy who is back living her normal Kansas life after journeying to Oz and she’s understandably still talking about that experience a lot. Uncle Henry and Auntie Em (Laurie) are troubled by what they see as a too-rich fantasy life, so they bring her to get electroshock therapy from a nurse in a pointy, black victorian gown. This is a treatment that’s still misunderstood as barbaric today in 2020, and 35 years ago? The perception was that they may as well have been murdering this child.
Luckily, lightning strikes the building and a mystery girl releases Dorothy from her restraints in the melee, and Dorothy falls into a river during her escape, climbing aboard a chicken coop(?) and waking up in a now-dilapidated Oz with a talking chicken.
Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t get more normal from there.
Among the horror highlights are Princess Mombi, who collects living human heads in locked glass cases so she can pop hers off and switch up her look whenever she wants. While showing off her collection, she tells Dorothy, “I believe I’ll lock you in the tower for a few years until your head is ready, and then I’ll take it.”
Then there are The Wheelers, who are basically Princess Mombi’s flying monkeys that terrorize Dorothy. They’re humanoid creatures who walk on all fours except oh wait, they don’t walk, they roll on all fours with wheels that are a part of their body and, disgustingly, are made of the same material as finger and toenails. The monkeys are weird Oz gang members who dress like baggy Boy George bikers, and graffiti on the crumbling ruins of Emerald City warns, “Beware the Wheelers.”
The villain of the movie is the Nome King, a hellish claymation-looking lump who’s pulling Princess Mombi’s strings and who gave her all those interchangeable heads as a “thank you” for helping him take over Oz.
With all these bad guys running around, won’t someone help Dorothy? Oh sure, Jack Pumpkinhead will, a huge Jack Skellington prototype whose head keeps popping off and who weirdly calls Dorothy “Mom.” He was created by a defector to scare Princess Mombi, but instead he scares us in the process.
Dorothy eventually gets home, of course, but none of us are ever okay.
Why not chase that disturbing experience down with some lovely chocolate, you think? WRONG. 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is home to one of the freakiest psychedelic tripfests ever on screen: the tunnel ride on the SS Wonkatania.
A movie about children who win a tour of a mysterious candy magnate’s never-opened factory, Willy Wonka is known for the plot that has misbehaving children basically picked off one by one, never to be seen again. That’s unnerving in and of itself, but when Wonka takes the families from one area of the factory to another by means of a boat ride on a chocolate river that runs through a tunnel, things take a real turn.
The tunnel is dark and film is projected onto the walls, showing images of:
A flying cockroach
A millipede crawling over a human face
An extreme close-up of an eye
A chicken being decapitated
A image of Wonka's rival Arthur Slugworth
A lizard eating a bug
A close-up of a scorpion's mouth
A reminder: this is a movie for children about candy.
While these images are projected all around the tunnel like a mini IMAX experience from hell, Wonka, red lights and green lights strobing onto his face, recites a poem that crescendos with the following lines:
Not a speck of light is showing
so the danger must be growing.
Are the fires of hell a glowing?
Is the grisly reaper mowing?
Yes! The danger must be growing
for the rowers keep on rowing.
And they're certainly not showing
any signs that they are slowing!
The family members on the Wonkatania are freaking out, saying they’re going to be sick, the children are crying, and finally, Wonka snaps out of it. He calls to the Oompa Loompa at the helm to stop the boat, and they pull up at a perfectly ordinary (for the situation) dock where Wonka invites them to proceed as if nothing’s happened. It rules. It’s so weird. It would not fly in a children’s movie today.
But they weren’t having all the twisted fun on the big screen: television got in the mix with some unsettling children’s material, too. Zeke the Plumber, anyone?
Zeke the Plumber was a character in a 1991 episode of Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts, a comedy show that followed the hijinks of the kids and counselors at Camp Anawanna. Zeke the Plumber lives in infamy in the show as one of the first true urban legend/horror figures that a lot of kids got to see. While that’s cool, depending on the fear threshold of the adolescent viewer, they may or may not have overshot it with his storyline and his overall look.
In the episode, veteran camp bad boy (and like, 12 year-old) Bobby Budnick tells the campfire story of Zeke the Plumber to scare his frenemies. The story is that Zeke, the camp handyman, had his nose bitten off by a parrot and lost his sense of smell. That's why he didn't smell it when he was digging a hole and hit a gas line, subsequently lighting a match and blowing himself to smithereens. (Budnick said he was a "human party popper.") The only thing they found of him, besides part of his upper lip, was his toilet plunger...which Budnick happens to have.
Budnick tells his buddies that Zeke still wanders the camp searching for his lost plunger, and anyone who touches it will be haunted by Zeke in their dreams, where Zeke uses his plunger to suck the secrets out of their faces.
There are a couple of grown-up horror homages happening with Zeke. He has a Freddy Krueger vibe, uses children’s innermost thoughts to terrify them, and he looks a little like Michael Myers. Zeke is supposedly covered with scars from the explosion, so he wears a white face mask with attached hair and a mustache, a bandaged and bloody nose, a hat and overalls. He's very, very creepy looking.
He's also not real! It turns out that any sightings of Zeke were the long-suffering counselor Kevin “Ug” Lee dressing up to freak out the campers. Don't worry, Budnick gets his just desserts when "Zeke" comes for him. (But not an “Awful Waffle,” a Camp Anawanna punishment among campers where you make the target lie on the table, pull their shirt up, press a tennis racket onto their stomach, and pour syrup all over it. ‘90s TV was insane.)
Although I marvel at how these things got made, I also love them. Childhood trauma aside, it’s so fun to look back and get nostalgic about these freaky relics, wondering what impact they made on our preferences today. Maybe The Wheelers made you close your eyes tight and hope to forget them...or maybe their sick bicycle hands were really the training wheels for a lifelong love of horror.