Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

Willy’s Wonderland is a mascot horror film in the vein of Five Nights at Freddy’s with a typical 80s slasher/B-movie vibe to it. It is the return of the director, Kevin Lewis, to filmmaking since his last film in 2008.

Plot Synopsis

An unnamed and silent man finds himself lost in the small town of Hayesville, presumably in Appalachian North Carolina. His car breaks down due to some kids allegedly stealing road spikes from the sheriff’s car and laying them randomly on a road just outside town. His car is towed and he is given a lift into town, only to be met with a bill of $1000 dollars to be paid cash – and with only a card and no internet service in the town to allow for withdrawal even if the ATM worked. He is given an opportunity to pay for his debt with a single night’s work cleaning up the local animatronic restaurant, the titular Willy’s Wonderland.

Upon agreeing to clean up the building overnight, he enters and starts his work while wearing a graphic tee of the restaurant and with a healthy supply of Punch energy drinks. He is very quickly put on edge by the animatronics which appear to move as he turns away from them, which soon becomes a violent fight between man and machine. Throughout the duration of the film, the unnamed janitor repeatedly fights and destroys the animatronics which attack him – but also consistently takes his legally mandated breaks to drink his energy juice and relax at the pinball machine even in the midst of combat encounters.

Meanwhile, a group of late teens or early 20s kids are attempting to destroy Willy’s Wonderland by burning it down with gasoline canisters 20 years after its closure at the insistence of their leader, Liv. The animatronics and the sheriff of the town attempt to stop them, often violently, as it is revealed that the people of the town are routinely pulling the same road spike gambit on unsuspecting travellers and sacrificing them to the animatronics who are actually serial killers who have performed a Satanic ritual to put their souls into the machines.

Originally, the serial killers were a group of workers at Willy’s Wonderland who lured families to a special back room to allegedly give them a private performance from the animatronic weasel, Willy, where they are then violently killed. As the police and the town started realising there were so many missing persons all linked to the restaurant, they closed in on the group. To prevent being captured, they drank a blue beverage analogous to the kool aid of the Jonestown massacre and died in a pentagram shape.

After this, animatronic killers were bent on killing as many people as possible, before entering into a pact with the town wherein they will receive a sacrifice each year to maintain the peace. The town – and only the town, as the visiting police officer is unawares of the ongoing struggle – willfully feeds people to the killing machines to prevent their own deaths. The building had been closed for many years under this deal, when the sheriff went to clean out the bodies for one year, finding a small child in an off-room, unscathed. This child turned out to be Liv.

After many battles with the animatronics, the janitor finally finishes cleaning and leaves the building, only to be stopped by the sheriff who drags him back inside at gunpoint to personally feed him to Willy. When he appears, however, he is indiscriminate and kills the sheriff instead, leaving an opening for the janitor and Liv to finish off the job of killing Willy. Throughout the course of the evening, Liv’s friends have all been killed by the animatronics, and after cleaning up once more and finally leaving the building for good, the janitor and Liv are the only human survivors. The towman and the owner of the building meet at the door, surprised to see him alive and the building spotless, before handing over the keys to the janitor’s newly fixed car where they drive out of town, sharing a final energy juice between them, and the building is blown up by a surviving animatronic using leftover gasoline to explode the owner’s car.

Analysis

“Congratulations. You are officially on staff!” – Tex Macadoo, Willy’s Wonderland (2021)

Willy’s Wonderland as a building is a “family entertainment centre” or FEC, an offshoot of the theme restaurant industry. Theme restaurants have been dated back to at least the 18th century, with the more modern versions that we would recognise today gaining popularity in America in the 1930s. Fueled by the popularity of Disneyland in 1955, themed areas gained significant popularity, and by 1977 the first Chuck E. Cheese was opened in California. Despite some growing pains, it went on to be a cultural touchstone for many people as evidenced by its continued referencing in media even in the 21st century.

By the mid 2010s mascot horror and edutainment parodies such as Five Nights at Freddy’s, Bendy and the Ink Machine, and Baldi’s Basics were leading a pivot in the horror genre of video games from the more classic survival horror (i.e. Resident Evil and Alone in the Dark) to a meta take on what horror actually means to people. Just as in the movie industry a shift was made between slasher and thriller horror films to more psychological, so too was this shift present in horror video games. The horror aspects of the majority of media designed to tackle it are based on cultural fears. During the cold war there were many films about nuclear war and annihilation, during the AIDS crisis there were many about werewolves as an allegory for infectious disease, and during the Satanic panic we saw many religious themed horror films about purity and corruption.

The cultural fear being tackled in edutainment parody and mascot horror is similar to the Satanic panic films - that of corruption. Not necessarily of us, but of our memories and our nostalgia. The constant deluge of XYZ celebrity from our youths being revealed to have been assaulting young children, or even the comparatively milder form of the constant reboots and advertisation of what started out as innocent children's media being turned into a cash cow for a billionaire. The 21st century is an impossible landscape to navigate as a person who isn't willing to sell their morality for minimum wage and a legally mandated 20 minute break. We are increasingly being shown pictures of the future that are bleak, and examples of the past being full of lies and deceit at best. There is nowhere for people to turn to, and this is where mascot horror comes in.

By juxtaposing the sense of nostalgia with the reality of the times, mascot horror seeks to create tension which is relieved through the destruction of nostalgia and carving of a better future in spite of the world. Further to this, Willy's Wonderland tackles the idea of lying itself. The mute janitor is perhaps the most honest person in the entire film, and the very first person he speaks to has a constant stream of lies and mistruths and manipulation which we are led to believe as honesty, only being revealed towards the latter half of the movie that it was, in fact, a planned deception.

We also see a focus on birthdays and birthday celebrations, another typically happy time warped to be violent and traumatic. This is similar - though to a far greater extreme - to how birthdays are less exciting and less important as you get older for many people.

The camera timings and choreography of not just the fights but overall movements in the film have a mix between quick cuts and snappy gestures to slow and thoughtful pans and facial expressions. This is representative of the need to balance action with planning. You cannot expect to get out of the current climate with words alone, but neither will rash and ill thought out reflexes lead us into a better world.

Additionally, as the janitor gets more and more in his own head about things, we also see the view of the world around him get distorted with blur and chromatic aberration. This is again similar to needing to stay true to what is happening when making plans or taking action, as creating idealised or demonised versions of what is going on will lead you to make errors in judgement and cause harm.

Naturally, this movie also ties in to video game mechanics in several instances. The silent protagonist, the "auto-save" breaks for drinks, and the pinball minigame. In addition to the video game references, are also more cultural or general ones. The gator is near universally known to inhabit sewer systems - or, in this case, the similarly claustrophobic and encased vent system. The suicide method of the serial killers is the oft-referenced Jonestown Massacre kool-aid cups - regardless of its factual basis. The animatronic Tito Turtle portrays many Mexican stereotypes as well.

The crux of the movie is, in my belief, workers' rights. It even extends beyond just the film itself as the creators dub the fans as "employees".

The janitor is an employee of Willy's Wonderland, however brief the contract may be. Within the meta of the movie, he is referred to as a janitor rather than any other name, a traditionally working class job with little respect amongst many groups despite its cruciality in making the world a safe and sanitary place to live in. He is there to perform a job, and does so with minimal flair but a constant level of effort.

He takes his regularly scheduled breaks with consistency even in circumstances where it causes problems for other people. He has a uniform which he keeps tidy where possible. He is fulfilling all the roles of his contractual obligations and taking advantage of all the legal benefits he is entitled to. In contrast, the serial killers and the town are also in a contract - but one in which they cheat each other. The killers murder outside of their deal. The townsfolk try to persuade and bargain to get more favourable terms even after the deal has been settled. The contract itself screws over the employees they hire by killing them.

This is all analogous to a real life employee/boss situation. The employee is there to perform a job in exchange for money, and the boss is there to extract benefits from the labour of the employee - in this case in the form of safety. Wealth is also a form of safety, a financial security blanket. This makes it even more telling that Tex Macadoo, the current owner of Willy's Wonderland, is himself similar to the archetypal oil magnate from Texas. In this film, however, wealth is not enough to protect you from the workers' wrath or, perhaps more aptly, apathy towards those who seek only to exploit them. The janitor did not attack the sheriff, or Macadoo, or the tradesman who set him up. He merely left and let their own poor decisions be their folly. The film posits that capitalism is eating itself. That you do not owe your employers your life, merely your labour, and that to go beyond that is to harm yourself. It presents a world in which if we simply hang tight and do what we must to survive, better things are coming. This is not necessarily guaranteed in the real world, but it's a comforting notion for a movie to show.

In fact, one of the most striking things that happens towards the end of the film is where Tex Macadoo looks at the building after the janitor has left and fully cleaned it, and says that "with the machines gone, [he] just might actually reopen it" before being killed. The greed of capitalism knows no bounds, and that is what will be its downfall.