As previously announced here, each day I will be posting a film to get you in the Halloween spirit. Each film is picked strategically based on what will excite you closer and closer to the big day.
DAY 5 : Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998) | Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%
I AM SO EXCITED TO INTRODUCE THIS FILM ONTO THE LIST THIS YEAR!
This Saturday morning of 31 Days of Terror, we have to take it back to how everyone used to spend their Saturday mornings. For 60 years now, the Mystery Inc. gang has been solving mysteries of ghouls and monsters that have inspired all of our Halloween fantasies, and probably the spookiest case they’ve ever solved was on the bayous of Moonscar Island in Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.
After taking a hiatus from the team, Fred and Daphne are approached by a family on the island to help them figure out the haunting of Morgan Moonscar, a pirate who once lived on the island. They get the gang of Velma, Shaggy, and of course Scooby-Doo back together to solve the mystery.
Compared to the formulaic plot of original Scooby-Doo episodes that introduced us to a problem – typically caused by a ghoul of some sort – that would be solved in 24 minutes, in Zombie Island we get a 77 minute long episode that actually features some of Mystery Inc.’s first real life monsters. **SPOILERS** when we get to the climax of the story, it is revealed that Simone and Lena – who asked the gang to visit the island – are actually settlers from a group of people who looked up to a Cat God and are cursed Cat Creatures that bring people to the island to drain the life from them in order live on. The zombies that originally spook the crew are actually pirates that chased the settlers off the island, and their intent was not to eat the gang, but warn them of the evil intent of Simone and Lena.
The characters of Zombie Island are fun, lore-like characters that we see commonly across horror – characters of Simone and Lena are inspired by films like Cat People (1942) whose original actress was Simone Simon – and after looking at the likes of Night of the Living Dead already on this list, seeing zombies are more of a red-herring rather than the monster is an interesting turn. It is one of the most horror inspired Scooby-Doo entries, and also one of the scariest children-targeted films I have seen. It is one of the movies I give huge credit to why I love horror so much today because I watched it so much as a kid, I had to pay tribute to it this years series because they just released a sequel, Scooby-Doo: Return to Zombie Island and the nostalgia has never felt so real.
Check out 2018’s Day 5 entry here for more Halloween fun! You can watch Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island here.
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