There’s a saturation point with overtly derivative horror movies where, if you make enough of them on a similar topic, they stop being treated as knockoffs and start being treated as a legitimate subgenre. Were there any dedicated fans of Bob Clark’s Black Christmas that initially brushed off John Carpenter’s Halloween as a copycat knockoff in 1978? Maybe, but dozens of Fridays the 13th later, they’re now both understood to be historic landmarks in the slasher subgenre, with little need to distinguish which arrived first. I’m sure the first couple body horrors of the 80s gore era were dismissed as shameless knockoffs by Cronenberg devotees, just as the found footage wave was first met with Blair Witchy skepticism and the giant-turtle creature feature Gamera was understood solely as a Godzilla copycat before there were other kaiju to compare it against. Likewise, when the killer-animatronics horrors Willys Wonderland and The Banana Splits Movie were first released a few years ago, they were initially understood to be shameless knockoffs of the popular Five Nights at Freddy’s video game series (albeit more successful movie adaptations of that series than its officially licensed ones). Since then, there have been enough Five Nights-riffing “What if the Chuck E. Cheese band tried to kill you?” variations that the subgenre has been legitimized with its own name: mascot horror. Write it down, commit it to memory; mascot horror is officially a thing.  There will likely be college courses about it at some point, so yes there will be a quiz.

Mere days after Casper Kelly’s “What if Barney was evil?” mascot horror Buddy screened at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, I saw an online advertisement for the straight-to-Screambox “What if Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was evil?” mascot horror Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round, signaling to me that this newly coined subgenre is having a real moment. If I weren’t aware of Five Nights at Freddy’s or the previously mentioned mascot horrors that beat it to the big screen, I might’ve mistaken Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round as a rushed-to-market mockbuster of Kelly’s Sundance-premiered oddity. They are remarkably similar in narrative structure and production design, framing their mascots-gone-wild horror stories within the rules & rhythms of vintage children’s TV shows. For its part, Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round starts as a direct parody of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, with a kindly, sweatered TV host explaining simple concepts like mailboxes, welcome mats, and memories to the children at home. That last concept proves to be a sticking point for the poor TV host, who discovers that he has lost access to his own memories outisde the pocket universe where he’s stuck hanging out with sock-puppet animals on a fenced-in playground set made entirely out of cardboard. His chipper animal friends needle him about his lost memory in increasingly hostile, passive-aggressive ways until his concept of reality breaks down entirely, and he starts begging the audience through the camera to set him free from his play-pretend prison cell. Instead, his imaginary-friend playground adventure turns into a televised blood bath.

Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round suffers a lot of the same structural issues as Casper Kelly’s Buddy. Both movies are at their most compelling in the earliest stretch when they play as uncanny parodies of vintage children’s TV shows that are just slightly, menacingly off. Once that hyperartificial reality is broken and the ultraviolence starts in earnest, they become much more conventional horror stories, testing the audience’s patience as they meander towards their inevitable, genre-mandated conclusions. Admittedly, the highs are higher in Buddy, while Mr. Monkey‘s lows are much, much lower, which makes for a no-brainer choice if you’re only going to watch one mascot horror this year and skip the other. If there’s anything that makes Mr. Monkey worth a look it’s in the extremity of its ultraviolence, featuring lengthy, torturous scenes of surgical gore as our semi-demented TV host is strapped down to the titular merry-go-round and tormented by the sock-puppet avatars of his own subconscious. Once the mood lighting shifts from bright & bubbly children’s show cartoonery to dingy torture porn grit & grime, the novelty appeal of the picture falls apart, and it starts to resemble the mascot-adjacent slashers of the public-domainsploitation “Poohniverse.” I very much preferred hanging out with the dead-eyed, cheery puppets in their children’s playhouse before it becomes an adult flayhouse, when the scares are centered on odd details like Mr. Monkey‘s dirty human fingernails instead of maniacal screaming & disembowelings, which you can find in pretty much any horror subgenre. The most illuminating thing about the picture overall was how it makes apparent just how ahead of the curve pro wrestler Bray Wyatt’s Firefly Funhouse gimmick was on the current “mascot horror” trend, not to mention the even earlier genre prototype in Wonder Showzen, which predates Five Nights at Freddy’s by a full decade. In that long mascot-horror continuum there isn’t much room for Mr. Monkey’s Magic Merry Go Round to stand out as anything special in particular, but it’s at least a convenient bite-sized appetizer of what Buddy will offer once it hits theaters later this year.

-Brandon Ledet