Pixar is the source of beautiful animation and wonderful stories, the sort that films you with happiness. They make you cry, but in a good way. Except, maybe, they're all actually secret horror movies and everything about Pixar is a terrifying nightmare starting from the opening logo. That's the premise of a piece of digital animation recently shared by Doctor Strange director Scott Derrickson.
The director, who was known for making more than his share of horror movies before making the jump to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, recently dropped an interesting piece of digital nightmare fuel on Twitter which recreates the iconic Pixar logo sequence, where the Luxo Jr. lamp takes the place of the letter I in the word Pixar, but puts the viewer in the point of view of that letter, and from there, the Pixar logo is a place where a vicious murder takes place, right before our eyes. Check it out.
The original animation can be found on YouTube, from Ratboi Pleb. It adds the ominous music and the apprehensive breathing that you would expect from a horror movie where a character is about to become the victim of a brutal slasher. The perspective of that letter I is certainly a bit chilling when you see it this way. The light from the lamp comes on in the darkness. It's unclear what it is, but it's ominous and seems to be unfriendly. Unfortunately, the I is locked in place and there's nothing it can do. Nothing can be done than to sit and wait for the inevitable.
Death is nothing new to Pixar. People die in those movies all the time, but it's usually in a peaceful and heartbreaking way. It turns out the "death" of the letter I is actually the most violent death in Pixar history.
I don't know about you, but I'll never be able to watch the opening Pixar logo ever again without seeing this. I will, I hope, be sitting in a movie theater in November to watch Soul and the opening titles will begin and after seeing the beautiful Disney castle the Pixar logo will appear and I'll start having flashbacks to this brutal destruction.
Of course, now having seen this, I'm wondering what a completely computer-animated horror movie would look like. It's a genre that we've never really seen. Monster House and Paranorman certainly have elements but I'm not sure you'd call either of them a horror movie. It would be out of the wheelhouse of Pixar to do something like that but I'm sure there are horror movie fans among all the people that work there. Perhaps they could ask the creator of this short to work with them on it.
