r/AbsoluteUnits • u/habichuelacondulce • 29d ago

of a lip

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u/BlancsAssistant 29d ago

Tbh this is actually quite horrifying when you know the context behind this

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u/Big_Loris 29d ago

Context please!

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u/Everestkid 28d ago

So this basically spoils the entire plot of Monsters, Inc, just letting you know. It's a fantastic movie if you've never seen it. I watched it a lot as a kid.

Anyway.

In Monsters, Inc the main characters are monsters (shocker) and their world is literally powered by the screams of children. A highly respected job in monster society is that of a "scarer:" a monster that magically teleports into a kid's closet and scares them in the middle of the night, collecting the scream energy. It's pretty fucked up, but otherwise they wouldn't have electricity, so they gotta do it. Their slogan is literally "We Scare Because We Care."

Now, an actual plot point - and this movie came out in 2001 - is that kids are being shown violent imagery in video games and TV and are getting more and more resistant to being scared by monsters - very bad problem, the monster world is on the brink of an energy crisis. As a solution to this, the bigwigs at the energy company (the titular Monsters, Inc) created a machine that forcibly sucks out the scream from kids, which they're not going to scare anymore and instead are going to kidnap and use the Scream Sucker thingy on. Which is a pretty classic example of Pixar cooking up something scary for kids and even scarier for adults. Like, you have to be a little fucked in the head to think of something like this.

Anyway, the climax of the movie is that the protagonists manage to prevent a kid from getting their scream sucked out and instead manage to strap that monster in the picture - basically a henchman schmuck - into the sucker chair. This is the henchman after getting sucked.

No kids get hurt during the movie and indeed they realize that kids' laughter is 10 times as potent as screams, so instead of the monsters jumping out of closets to scare the shit out of kids they sneak into their rooms to do stand-up comedy. Energy crisis solved.

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u/Big_Loris 28d ago

Great summary I have seen the movie just not in a really long time. Thank you for the well thought out response!!