8 Reasons Why Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory Is The Creepiest And Weirdest Kids Film Ever Made

The 1971 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s classic novel is not just a joyous family film with a stunning lead performance from Gene Wilder, but also one of the creepiest and strangest children’s movies EVER MADE. Here’s the proof…

The terrifying boat ride

Frankly, there’s no explanation for this utterly bizarre and startlingly scary sequence, in which the remaining visitors board a paddle boat and go through a tunnel at dizzying speed while Wonka intones a portentous poem and mad images flash up on the walls behind them.

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Shot of a massive centipede crawling over a guy’s mouth, check. Iguana catching a fly with his tongue, why not? Kaleidoscopic colours pulsating and spinning in vomit-making fashion like some kind of outtake from an evil Happy Mondays video? Yes please.

To make things even more intense, Gene Wilder’s acting during the scene was so convincing that some of the child actors thought he really was going mad from being in the tunnel.

Licking snozzberries doesn’t mean what you think

At first it seems perfectly innocent – an amazing Wonka invention in which you can lick your wallpaper and it tastes of the fruit your tongue is caressing.

Which is fine, apart the fact one of the fruits on offer is the snozzberry and in another Dahl story, ‘My Uncle Oswald’, the author uses snozzberry as a slang word for penis.

So that means in ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’, we see a bunch of kids being encouraged to lick…well, you get the idea.

The bloke with the cart full of meat cleavers

For some reason, there’s this guy outside the factory pushing a cart while Charlie is gazing longingly in. But look closer – his trolley is full of meat cleavers and other assorted bladed weapons.

Er, why?

Slugworth

Okay, so we find out later that this isn’t actually Willy’s rival Slugworth, but someone paid by Wonka to test the ticket-holders’ honesty.

And that’s fine – if you were going to sign your entire life’s work over to a child, you’d want to check they weren’t bad eggs too.

But why does it have to be a terrifying middle-aged man wearing serial killer glasses who appears out of nowhere brandishing cash when the kid is wandering along by themselves? Also, these scenes aren’t in the book.

The hidden Nazi

For some reason, the fraudulent winner of the fake fifth winning ticket appears to be Nazi minister Martin Bormann. Look at the photo of the winner in the newspaper and held up by the Paraguayan newscaster. Bormann of course was rumoured to have fled to South America after the war finished. Very strange.

Wonka’s dialogue

Watch the film again and you’ll notice that Wonka’s dialogue is peppered with literary quotes, which add to film’s air of strangeness. For example: “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” - which is from ‘Reflections on Ice Breaking’ by Ogden Nash, or “We are the music makers, And we are the dreamers of dreams”, from ‘Ode’ by Arthur O'Shaughnessy. Again, none of these bizarre (but brilliant) quotes are from the book, but were inserted by writer David Seltzer.

The scene where Charlie is almost decapitated

We know that factory equipment can be very dangerous, but even the smallest company demands a rudimentary level of safety.

Not so for the chocolate emporium, which is obviously why Wonka gets his guests to sign that impenetrable legal document at the beginning. Still, wouldn’t there be some fail-safe measures in place?

For instance, if there was a killer death fan just waiting to chop people into a million pieces? We can hardly imagine a court would accept “well, he just should have burped” as a defence when someone gets cut to smithereens.

The terrifying final scene where Wonka screams at Charlie

When Charlie is the only contestant left he is ushered into Wonka’s office and told he has not won the prize because he broke the rules by stealing the Fizzy Lifting Drinks.

Wonka then has a full-scale screaming rant at Charlie, which is even more terrifying when you realise that young Peter Ostrum (Charlie), who by this point was good friends with Gene Wilder, was not told that Wonka would scream at him in advance (at the behest of the director) and his petrified reaction was real.

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Image credits: Rex_Shutterstock, Paramount