Movies of War

A Tribute to ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,’ the Slasher Movie You Can Show Your KidsMatt SingerMatt SingerPublished: March 12, 2026Warner Bros.Share on FacebookShare on TwitterIf I wanted to torture my brother when we were kids, I only needed to say two words:“Blueberry Girl.”The simple utterance of those 13 letters was enough to send him into a screaming panic. He’d run out of the room, and I would laugh and laugh. All because of Blueberry Girl — who you might know by the name of her character in the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Violet Beauregarde.In the movie, Violet is one of the five winners of a “Golden Ticket” that grants its owner a once-in-a-lifetime tour of Willy Wonka’s factory, a wonderland full of magical confections, impossible sights, and deliciously dangerous temptations.Violet’s personal temptation is gum; when she encounters an experimental prototype for a three-course dinner gum, she can’t resist. Over the protestations of the eccentric, reclusive chocolatier, she pops a piece in her mouth. By the time the blueberry pie dessert course hits her tongue, she’s begun to transform. Her skin changes color as she mutates into an bulbous sphere of flesh and liquid. Aghast, her mortified father watches helplessly and then utters the unforgettable line “Violet! You’re turning violet, Violet!”READ MORE: 13 Spooky (But Not Too Scary) Movies to Watch on HalloweenThe “Blueberry Girl” effect is not especially convincing, even by the standards of the late 1980s when my brother and I first encountered Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. For reasons he’s never fully articulated, something about this moment nonetheless rocked my brother to his core. We would watch Ghostbusters and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” with zero issue. But just the threat of putting on Willy Wonka would send him into hysterics.In other words: From a young age, I was aware just how scary Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory could be to some audiences. Never mind the fact that it was based on a 1964 Roald Dahl book read by millions of schoolchildren, or that the film is rated G by the Motion Picture Association of America. In the right context, it is the ultimate celluloid nightmare. Still, it’s only dawned on me in the last few months that Willy Wonka is not only scary to some viewers, it’s actively structured like a slasher movie.Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)Paramountloading...I’ve been watching a lot of Wonka lately. My kids are currently in rehearsals for a children’s theater production of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, so we’ve revisited just about every piece of Wonka-related content on streaming, including Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka and (despite my vocal objections) Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The one we’ve watched the most (because it is my favorite, so I lobby for it on family movie nights) is Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory — and with each revisit, I see more and more parallels to actual horror films aimed at mature audiences.The most obvious one is Wonka himself. Every good slasher movie needs a deranged yet oddly charismatic (and distinctively dressed) psychopath at its center. That psychopath then systematically eliminates a cast of young characters one by one in elaborate and amusingly sadistic ways, until only one final hero is left.Wonka, especially as portrayed by Gene Wilder in the 1971 film, really fits the bill. The Golden Ticket winners have barely taken off their hats and coats before Wonka begins bumping them off. Augustus Gloop falls into a chocolate river. Veruca Salt gets sent down a garbage chute (and probably into a furnace?) for bad eggs. Violet chomps the tainted gum and then must be juiced. In a matter of minutes, only innocent Charlie Bucket remains.When recounting the story of his casting in later years, Wilder would say that when director Mel Stuart offered him the part, he had one demand: Wilder wanted to be introduced as Wonka in a scene where he walked unsteadily with a cane, then loses the cane and appears to collapse to the floor — only to tuck and roll into a graceful somersault. When Stuart asked why, Wilder replied “Because no one will know from that time on whether I’m lying or telling the truth.”Wilder’s instincts were correct. His performance alternates between pure sweetness and pure menace, like an arsenic gummy enrobed in velvety milk chocolate. From one moment to the next, it’s impossible to predict what Wonka will do, and that uncertainty about his true motivations is completely terrifying.In one scene, he’ll flatter and delight his young factory tourists with some whimsical candy invention. In the next, he will scream at them at full volume as he takes them on a boat tour through a psychedelic hellscape complete with footage of chickens getting their heads cut off, an image far more disturbing than anything in the most recent Scream sequel.While it’s true that Willy Wonka ends with the title character offering sweet little Charlie Bucket ownership of his chocolate factory, it’s worth noting that he extends this offer in yet another suspenseful scene. After all the other Golden Ticket winners have been dealt with, Wonka lures Charlie and Grandpa Joe into his “Wonkavator,” an experimental elevator that can supposedly go anywhere.Wonka doesn’t explain what the Wonkavator is or what it can do until after he’s tricked Charlie into pushing the button that will blast it at his factory’s ceiling. Grandpa Joe screams that they’ll be “cut to ribbons.” As his eyes glitter with malevolence, Wonka declares “I’m not exactly sure what’s going to happen.”The Wonkavator successfully breaks through the factory roof and sails off into the sky, and Wonka invites Charlie to bring his family to the factory and take over his work. The two embrace, the credits roll, and a choral version of “Pure Imagination” plays on the soundtrack.That’s a happy ending, right? I’m not so sure. The more I watch Willy Wonka, the less I am convinced that Wonka will make good on his deal. It seems equally likely to me that at some point during their Wonkavator trip, Charlie or Grandpa Joe might make commit some faux pas so unforgivable in Wonka’s eyes that he murders both of them on the spot. He turned Violet into a human blueberry because she liked to chew gum! What if Charlie accidentally lets out a fart in that tiny glass elevator? You think Wonka would be cool with that?When you break Willy Wonka down to its component parts, it’s not all that different from the plot of one of the Saw movies, which follow a serial killer named Jigsaw who attacks victims whose thoughtless actions violate his demented moral code. As a twisted means of revenge, Jigsaw then traps his targets inside monstrous torture “games.”Wonka’s tactics are a lot less bloody, but the two men share a chillingly similar methodology. Their victims are obnoxious, foolish, and cruel; viewers are meant to enjoy their ironic punishments. And just like Jigsaw, who often turned the survivors of his games into future accomplices, Wonka wants to test the capabilities of his chosen apprentice and determine whether he is qualified to replace him after his eventual death.Quaker OatsQuaker Oatsloading...Of course, Willy Wonka predates the creation of Jigsaw, and the slasher film in general, by years and decades. Technically, Norman Bates had already sliced his way through his family’s motel by the time Dahl’s novel was first published. (If I told you that Willy Wonka kept his mother’s desiccated body in a fruit cellar so he could pretend she was still alive while slaughtering young women in her name would you really be that surprised?) The true early slasher landmarks — The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween — wouldn’t arrive until the mid and late 1970s, at which point Willy Wonka had already begun to charm and terrorize generations of children.So it’s time Willy Wonka took his rightful place among the pioneers of this beloved genre, and got the credit he deserves for helping to popularize the idea of bumping off a bunch of annoying people in rapid succession using diabolical traps. Forget the Everlasting Gobstopper; this should be Wonka’s true legacy. Of course, the only thing more horrifying than Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is the thought that now that I’ve shared these observations, someone with an impure imagination is going to try to make a Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey-style exploitation movie that turns all this subtext into text.Famous Horror Movies That Got Surprisingly Good ReviewsAlthough critics have a reputation for unfairly dismissing horror movies, they do get it right from time to time.Filed Under: Roald Dahl, Willy Wonka, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate FactoryCategories: Longform, Movie News