Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is more than just a beloved children's story, it's also a gateway horror movie. Take away the candy, charming music, and bright colors, and a visit to Wonka's factory begins to look more like a trip to hell.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, based on the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, has twice been adapted for the screen, first in 1971 by Mel Stuart, starring Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, and then again in 2005 by Tim Burton with Johnny Depp as the industrious chocolatier. While both take liberties with the original source material, with Tim Burton's version being a little closer to the book, overall the story is a morality tale for children: good children are rewarded while bad children are punished. However, when the cheerful veneer is stripped away, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory soon becomes a survival horror movie teetering into the realm of torture porn.

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In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, a highly-successful candymaker opens the doors to his enigmatic factory to five children and their parents. For years, no one has seen what's inside or how Wonka is able to develop and produce his sugary treats. What the children don't know about the factory they are about to enter is that inside are special rooms designed to test them in order to determine if they are worthy enough to inherit Wonka's chocolate fortune. As it turns out, these elaborately-designed tests do a lot more than simply identify each child's greed, they're also downright dangerous.

Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory Groomed Generations To Love Horror

Willy Wonka

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory has a lot of the classic elements of a horror movie. Inside Wonka's factory, the children are picked off one by one, similar to a slasher movie like Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street. Wonka has seemingly designed different rooms to tempt the weakness of each particular child that he has invited into his haunted torture factory. In one, a greedy girl who refuses to do what she's told is pushed into a garbage chute that leads to an incinerator. In another, a boy nearly drowns in a river of molten chocolate. Willy Wonka himself, a sinister man in a top hat, watches on with a creepy gleam in his eye and a smile. He already knows that most of the children are doomed, just as Jigsaw knows the majority of his victims will fail his tests in the Saw movies.

In other words, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a horror movie for kids. When you strip away the candy and the seemingly cheerful singing, you're left with a wealthy industrialist torturing children in elaborate and violent ways to send a message to the world about greed. Several generations now, whether they knew it or not, have grown up with this children's classic, unknowingly being groomed to love horror movies. In many ways, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the perfect gateway horror movie for kids.

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