I had never seen Super Mario Movie until last week, but for some reason, it felt familiar. If I wanted to be poetic, I’d say it was familiar in a way I can’t quite place, like it was a film I’d grown up watching in another universe or something along those lines. However, I’m not going to be poetic because that is not true. I know exactly why it felt familiar, and thats because its the exact type of video I would’ve stumbled upon as a kid.
I grew up watching youtube as most people my age did. The two types of content I was most drawn to were video games and horror. I’m not sure why, considering I hated horror. Seeing something that creeped me out would stress me out so badly I would need to google “cute animal photos” to try and erase what I had seen, like copying over an old VHS tape. Of course, people’s brains are not built like VHS tapes, so that never worked. Frankly, I’m glad, because if it had, I would have no fodder for this post.
To cut a long tangent slightly shorter, Super Mario Movie is exactly the kind of thing that would scare me as a 3rd grader. It isn’t necessarily a horror film, but its looping music, flashing imagery, and black dialogue screens are reminiscent of the analogue horror genera (although I was exposed to that much later, as a 5th grader). More importantly, though, it is reminiscent of old-school creepypastas and Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared videos.
It uses a childhood icon (Mario) and a creepy setting (degraded video game cartridge) to make a trippy video that I love. I find the idea of “the world around you is corroding and there is nothing you can do” to be a fascinating concept. But if I had seen this as a kid? I would have hated it. It would have given me nightmares. I was a very anxious kid with an active imagination, so I’d probably spend at least a day in constant fear that Mario would crawl out of my ipad and drag me to the degraded Super Mario rave. Then I’d find a new scary video to watch, and the cycle would repeat.
As I get older, I find myself revisiting the videos that used to scare me. It’s probably because I fell in love with Five Nights at Freddy’s in 4th grade, but that’s a blog post for later. Either way, I’ve realized that those videos bring me a sense of comfort because they were so significant when I was a kid. The fear I used to feel has been replaced with the same fondness I feel when looking at old drawings and stuffed animals.
Super Mario Movie was beautiful because it gave me the same feeling, while also letting me experience the video for the first time. I’m glad I found the video at 20 (the same age as the video itself, and the same number of years the Super Mario cartridge has been left untouched!) rather than at 8. It lets me look at the piece without nostalgia clouding my perception, but still leaves me with the same feeling.
Super Mario Movie also felt familiar to me, but it did not remind me of my childhood; instead, it reminded me of playing Problem Attic. Certain sounds in the film reminded me of metal clashing, which were similar to the sound that plays when making contact with crosses in Problem Attic. The visuals also reminded me of the unsettling feeling I got from playing and getting bombarded with flashing lights. Even without thinking of Problem Attic, I also felt like this film would have scared me as a kid, especially since this would have been so different from the Mario universe I had known. I also didn’t realize how old this film actually was until your comment on it.