Daring to Revisit Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island This Halloween

“Am I really going to watch Evil Dead 2 again this Halloween?” It’s the question that rears its head every October 31^st. The answer is, of course, yes. But this year I’d thought I’d spice things up. Instead of jumping straight into Army of Darkness for a classic double bill of Ash, I watched a film I’ve been meaning to revisit for years, probably decades now. The first film to scare me as a child: Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island.

I’m not ashamed to say that this year, despite turning 30, has been a big year for Scooby-Doo for me. I began it by watching Mystery Incorporated, a fantastic series with serialised storylines and enough jokes and references to not only make it accessible to adults but perhaps designed for them. Then I went back to the beginning, watching the original series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and The Scooby-Doo Show, with all their seventies cheese and charm.

I’ve been holding off on Zombie Island until it felt right, and Halloween seemed like the perfect time. It’s a film that holds a special place in the hearts of a generation. A reintroduction, a revival, of the franchise into something cool and scary, that birthed a renaissance that led to more classic straight-to-video movies, What’s New Scooby-Doo?, and even the live action films of the early 2000s. It’s quite the legacy and I wondered whether it would hold up, worthy of being deemed the best instalment of the franchise. That’s a big, dangerous call to make but it’s safe to say I wasn’t disappointed.

An aspect of the film I certainly didn’t pick up on when I was kid is its meta streak. The franchise was in dire straits in the 1990s, a tired joke people had long since found funny and near total death. The film plays with that by having a very Where Are You? inspired opening sequence, with a big chase, complete with jaunty music and the classic unmasking, before then cutting to where the gang is now, disbanded and out of the ghost-hunting business. “Got a little boring, eh” suggests one of the characters in a dig to the franchise. The Scooby Snacks have literally gone stale.

Recognising this at the outset is a wise choice, and the film is able to remix the elements and breathe new life into the franchise. This is the start of Scooby-Doo 2.0, informing everything that comes after. The following films and series owe a debt to Zombie Island for being first to push the franchise into new territory. The gang now have richer characterisation rather than just boilerplate descriptors. It sets the template, and lines can easily be drawn from Zombie Island to James Gunn’s movies and Mystery Incorporated.

Daphne might actually be the best character in the movie, despite being the weakest of the prior shows. The gang are now adults. With jobs. Shaggy and Scooby gorge themselves on confiscated foodstuffs as airport security (and no doubt their lax attitude led to multiple air disasters), Velma runs a bookshop, and Daphne is the successful one. She’s a TV host and becomes pretty much the new de facto leader of the gang as they reunite for a ghost hunting show, seeking actual supernatural beings. Meanwhile Fred is just Fred. The sidekick to Daphne in a fun twist on the classic formula, although his dopiness has now been overplayed in subsequent shows. Separating them before bringing them back together gives them all different motivations, and they truly begin to feel like the characters I know and love from my childhood.

In fact, I like the human characters so much that Scooby becomes to feel like the weak link. He’s fine but it’s interesting to see the former star of the show begin to hold the franchise back as every other element becomes more developed. I also don’t like Scooby’s new voice, with Scott Innes taking over the role. It’s the one weak link, with the other voice work being notably great. Well, actually, some of the Cajun accents are pretty questionable.

I  was expecting a few surprises from this revisit, things I’d forgotten or not understood as a kid, but I didn’t expect the biggest shock to be the location. The film is set in Louisiana?! I remember the jungles, the swamps, the river boat ride, the weird accents I couldn’t place at the time (being a kid in middle England), and assumed it must be South America or somewhere, not the American south. A place Indiana Jones would go. But no, Moonscar Island is in the US but looks and feels properly exotic. A good chunk of Where Are You? is also set amongst bayous but Zombie Island, through visuals, sound, and atmosphere, does a great job creating a sense of place, even if I wasn’t sure where that place was.

The film also has real threat. This isn’t some elderly bank manager putting on a mask to scare away some kids while he makes off with some bags of cash. The characters are in danger here. There’s actual death! The gang hang over perilous drops without cartoon physics to save them. A zombie isn’t just waving his arms around goofily, he’s pointing a sharp sword. We see a whole community of innocent people get eaten by crocodiles! Okay, we don’t see it, the camera pans away, but it happens. Welcome to the new Scooby-Doo, now with 100% more mass murder.

We get to the big question: is the film still scary? Well, no. I didn’t find it scary. As a kid, sure, it’s pretty intense, but years of recalling the film in my mind built it up as some truly terrifying thing that would amount to child abuse if a parent put it on for their kids. It’s a step up from the previous shows but it’s not that bad. However, I would call it effectively creepy. There are times when the gothic score drops and the film embraces silence. This lack of music as the tension builds is unsettling and new for the franchise, the old shows having the same repeated music cues over everything.

A haunted house. Ghosts. Levitation. Zombies. Curses. Life drain. Cat people. Cat gods. Voodoo dolls. The film runs the supernatural gamut. The floodgates are finally open, the franchise committing to the actual supernatural rather than just people in dress-up, and the writers just can’t help themselves, throwing every element they can think of into the film. I remembered the zombies, obviously, and this film, along with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, made me scared of voodoo dolls, but I had no memory at all of the weird cat people. It’s quite the twist. But it works. It’s a risk but it pays off massively, changing the core concept of the franchise and allowing for actual paranormal encounters, which will come to dominate the series’ future. Although perhaps the film’s biggest influence isn’t on the franchise at all but its viewers: the sexy cat ladies birthing a generation of furries.

I do love some 1990s animation and Zombie Island looks fantastic. It’s an era of animation that has aged fantastically well. I still watch Batman: The Animated Series in awe. The artistry in the pre-CG landscape is next level, and there’s one gruesome moment where Fred tries to unmask a zombie but ends up pulling its head off which looks amazing. The only animation issue I have is that the zombie looks more alive than Fred. He might be the most unsettling part of the film, or more specifically his eyes. He’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes. Eyes that stare right into your soul, likely with envy because it looks like he doesn’t have one.

The impact of Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island cannot be overstated. It saved the franchise from its slow death and imbued it with ideas that still dominate to this day: the supernatural villains, the depth of the characters, Daphne and Fred in an unending battle of jealousy while Velma is the one who finds love, maybe even with Shaggy. It’s a great movie to this day, with a good final twist I didn’t remember. Not as scary as its biggest worshippers will try to make out but certainly more intense than the shows. But after almost 30 years, perhaps we need to find the franchise’s new Zombie Island already, a revival and regeneration with the same impact because the ideas it introduced that once seemed so fresh are now themselves on the stale side.