The Boat Ride In ‘Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory’ Is The Scariest Scene In Cinema

My childhood copy of 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, taped off TV complete with ads for Brashs and Tony Barber-era Sale of the Century, was lovingly played so many times that the handwritten label had worn away.

I knew every word to every song, even the dreary, pace-killing ‘Cheer Up Charlie’ — but every time, I leapt for the fast-forward button as soon as they approached that damned tunnel, too traumatised by millipedes crawling over a person’s face to watch it a second time. Watching the Boat Ride sequence now, I still get tight in the chest and my breathing gets shallow, but that delirious two minutes of terror packs in more panic than most standalone horror movies, and I think more kids’ movies could use a touch of darkness like that.

I’m not sure whose idea it was to put a Luis Buñuel film in the middle of a whimsical kids’ movie about a local eccentric and his imported slave labour, but congratulations to them for making a bold choice and sticking to it, I guess.

From the moment the strings drop from the breezy dream of Pure Imagination into a low, threatening chug and the grown-ups in the boat start to freak out, the Boat Ride loads tension upon tension until you’re ready to chew your own jaw off. The lights build from disorienting strobes that make you feel like the boat is rocketing through the tunnel at impossible speeds, giving way to roiling reds and sickly greens, then just as you’re getting your bearings again, up pops some jarring footage of bugs and lizards, completely out of context and projected at massive scale on the tunnel walls, with a close-up of an unblinking human eye to keep things from getting too cosy.

what scared me at age 8:
-quicksand
-spiders
-the boat scene from willy wonka

what scares me now:
-taxes
-dying alone
-the boat scene from willy wonka

— Cat Wininger (@CatWininger) November 9, 2017

And not only did they put this distressing and occasionally gruesome sequence in (I had legitimately blocked out the memory of the flash of a chicken being beheaded), they delivered it at just the right spot to provide nightmare fertiliser for years.

Up to that point, Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka had been a bit odd, but essentially harmless. From his surprise tumble into a forward roll at the gates to his conveniently-mentioned hearing trouble, he was an oddity, but a charming one. Just a moment earlier, he was swanning through Technicolor fields and chomping on edible buttercups, but here he’s wild-eyed and maniacal, singing a cryptic song about rowing as coloured lights swirl over his face until he bursts into a terrifying, wordless howl — honestly, it’s a moment I should remember to bring up with my therapist next time we talk.

Then just as the tension peaks and the sinews in your neck are crying out for relief, Wonka stops the ride as abruptly as it started, and no one ever mentions the Boat Ride again. No payoff; no release; just on to the Inventing Room, so much time and so little to do.

The Boat Ride’s outburst of terrifying sensory overload adds a sense of danger that was strangely lacking from a movie where children are dropped into furnaces and shot like a bullet from a gun towards the Fudge Room.

As a kid, I just didn’t grasp that children very nearly died on a tour of a chocolate factory, but the Boat Ride made the threat clear — this place is scary, and the rules of normal life won’t protect you.

Most kids’ media steers clear of that darkness, preferring to give characters like The Little Mermaid a happy ending rather than fading to credits on the loose pile of sea foam that Ariel ended up as in the original. Roald Dahl, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, played with darker moments in almost all of his work, from the gruesome (and, let’s be honest, anti-semitic) true forms of the Witches to Matilda’s monstrous Ms Trunchbull.

His crass, silly takes on fairy tales in Revolting Rhymes probably haven’t aged super well, but I adored them as a kid, and the Boat Ride gives Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that same adrenaline-soaked edge, where the risk is real and Wonka himself only ever a moment away from madness.

Willy Wonka boat scene. Still freaks me out. pic.twitter.com/1DqI2hdUaZ

— Suzanne (@kjaneway8) October 19, 2019

It also gives the I SAID GOOD DAY beat later in the film a real weight — in a world where an eccentric capitalist has a nightmare tube just waiting in his factory, is it so hard to believe he’d deny a child his prize on an absurd technicality? And this is only after said child has dodged traps like being chopped up by an industrial fan or turned into a blueberry or getting broadcast over the airwaves like a prime-time sitcom. If this is Wonka’s hiring process for a new factory owner, I’d hate to see the deathtraps he’d set up for an employee’s quarterly review: “Your KPIs are slipping for the third consecutive quarter, dear boy — you must subdue and kill the Cocoa Shark dwelling at the bottom of this lake, or you’ll be out of a job!”

The Boat Ride’s surrealist horror might have been traumatic for me and generations of kids, but despite (or maybe because of) the utter panic that rushed through Kid Me every time Gene started muttering “There’s no earthly way of knowing…”, the whole scene is etched in my memory, and now it’s one of my favourite moments in the movie. I’m not saying that Frozen 3 should have a sequence where Kristoff and Olaf are put through a The Cube-style sci-fi labyrinth, but I am willing to write that script if Disney’s interested — Elsa’s not bothered by the cold, but maybe a little danger would get her heart beating faster.

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From silly to pseudo-sociological, Ginger Valentine’s writing and podcasts grapple with gender, politics, and why Taylor Swift can’t say the word “off”. Listen to their show, Key Change, or follow Ginger on Twitter.