The new Looney Tunes movie is basically John Carpenter body horror — as it should be

“Daffy Duck and Porky Pig get jobs at a bubblegum factory to pay their mortgage” reads like the plot of a classic Looney Tunes short. “Alien overlord taints that bubblegum with mind-control technology that turns consumers into zombies,” on the other hand, could be the logline of a 1950s sci-fi cheesefest. When the gum gains sentience, though, that’s a John Carpenter movie. That happens to be the situation Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza) wind up in halfway through the new theatrical feature The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. 

In the odd-couple step-siblings’ mad scrabble to hold down jobs and save their childhood home, they stumble across a scheme devised by a devious extraterrestrial overlord called The Invader (Peter MacNicol). In the first phase of his plan, The Invader reduces Daffy and Porky’s fellow townspeople to slavering automatons. They secure a sample of the gooey mystery treat for Petunia (Candi Milo) to study, to discern what’s gotten into the locals.

At first, she comes up with bupkis. But when The Invader remotely triggers the gum, it bonds to a pair of novelty chompers, sprouts tentacles and eyestalks, and attacks the trio like they’re Kurt Russell and Keith David in The Thing, Carpenter’s masterpiece of chilly Antarctic paranoia: trapped in a small, confined space with nowhere to run and no one to save them, as the creature stalks them, relentlessly lashing at them with its feelers. It’s a mercy it doesn’t like fire, and also that Petunia keeps a flamethrower in her lab. 

The Day the Earth Blew Up director Peter Browngardt may have added too generous a splash of 1980s body horror to his lovingly rendered take on Looney Tunes, that beloved institution of American animation. Genre enthusiasts will relish the movie’s parallels with The Thing: the monster’s weakness against flame; the unnerving realization that familiar friends have become mindless, drooling thralls; the threat of a shapeless alien creature that can take nearly any shape it wants. Parents taking their kiddos to see it might find those similarities upsetting in the framework of a family comedy, which no one rightly expects to contain raw nightmare fuel. 

Goofy as the idea of a bubblegum monster may read on paper, The Day the Earth Blew Up makes it genuinely frightening on screen. The creature is a relentless purple abomination made of sticky appendages and teeth, roaring with the force of an ancient eldritch terror. What Browngardt and his bench of co-writers were thinking when they came up with this sequence will likely be a mystery to most, but not for Looney Tunes aficionados who love horror cinema as well. The franchise’s incongruous relationship to horror dates back to the 1950s; The Day the Earth Blew Up, which surprisingly holds distinction as the first-ever fully animated feature-length Looney Tunes film, contributes a new chapter to that history, keeping tradition alive with a combination of richly drawn elasticized animation and homage to a horror canon all-timer. 

Adding body horror to Looney Tunes isn’t a big leap for Browngardt, given the context. Looney Tunes has a deep catalog of horror-centric material. Once upon a time — 1991, to be exact — Warner Bros. tacked Darrell Van Citters’ short film Box-Office Bunny onto The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter to celebrate Bugs Bunny’s 50th anniversary. In the short, Bugs (voiced by Jeff Bergman, taking over as Bugs after the death of originating voice actor Mel Blanc in 1989) has his peace and quiet disrupted by the construction of a gaudy 100-screen multiplex atop his warren. Being the anti-authority rebel he is, Bugs pops out of the ground and into one of the theaters, and sets about outwitting Elmer Fudd, an usher, and Daffy Duck (who likewise avoided paying for a ticket, and throws Bugs under the bus to divert attention from his own crime). 

Bugs is as Bugs does; he bests Elmer and Daffy (each also voiced by Bergman) and traps them in a projection screen. They’re ecstatic to be in the movies, at first, but the growl of a chainsaw revving in the hands of a Jason Voorhees stand-in kills their buzz. It’s a funny gag, but constitutionally unsettling. We know what happens to characters in Friday the 13th films: They go to Crystal Lake, they stumble across Jason, they get dead. Granted, the “getting dead” part is omitted in Box-Office Bunny, but still, it’s best not to dwell on the implications of the climax, where Bugs sits back to enjoy Elmer and Daffy’s desperate off-screen screaming.

Apart from a trio of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde riffs — 1954’s Dr. Jerkyl’s Hide, 1955’s Hyde and Hare, and 1960’s Hide and Go Tweet — Box-Office Bunny is arguably the most specifically horror referentialist Looney Tunes film, but countless others are shaped by horror’s hallmarks. In 1954’s Satan’s Waitin’, Sylvester the Cat dies, literally goes to hell, and then dies again and again, burning through his eight remaining lives. Bugs fends off badly drawn doppelgangers of himself, Elmer, Daffy, and Yosemite Sam in 1992’s Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers. Foghorn Leghorn knocks off another rooster in over-the-top slasher fashion in 2004’s Cock-A-Doodle-Duel. 

And 1964’s Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare ends with Bugs taking a brutal off-screen beating administered by the hulking robot he builds to do the same to Taz. (The execution may be meant to blunt the scene’s disturbing nature; Bugs begs his invention to spare him, to no avail, and the subsequent attack plays out in silence.) 

Coupling the scariest storytelling genre with the colorful, fourth-wall-breaking slapstick of adult-centric cartoons makes a bizarre contrast. Looney Tunes is abidingly silly. At times, so is horror, but its broader scope expresses a whole lot more; even screwball horror comedy invites viewers to stare into the mirror of their souls and take stock of what stares back at them. The genre is fundamentally an existential creative space where characters’ lives may be cut short at any moment, courtesy of whatever fiend is chosen to menace them.

Typical Looney Tunes shorts are absent this quality, and instead embrace over-the-top farce, antics, and hijinks, occasionally mixed with social commentary about, for instance, American consumer culture or firearm fetishization. (To say nothing of the brand’s extensive racist past.) As an aesthetic as well as a format, Looney Tunes seems, on its face, an ill-suited partner to horror.

It verges on paradox that the discrepancies separating horror from Looney Tunes cartoons are the same reasons they pair so well together. Looney Tunes sketches have higher priorities than horror cinema’s macabre existentialist fascinations, but think of how many times Wile E. Coyote fumbles his pursuit of the Road Runner so spectacularly that he ends up getting blown sky-high by his own box of TNT. Think of Bugs rigging Elmer’s shotgun to backfire in his face. Think of every instance across all of Looney Tunes’ shorts and features where characters are domed with a colossal wooden mallet. Nobody dies from the injuries they suffer in such incidents, of course. They come back well and whole for the next short, to be maimed all over again for our entertainment, to the envy of every victim in every horror movie ever. 

While death is far less final for Looney Tunes characters than their horror counterparts, though, it is nonetheless a chief reason people pay the price of admission for both. Just as people watch slashers, creature features, and countless other horror niches for the Kills™, they also watch Looney Tunes shorts to see Daffy eat a stick of dynamite and then snark about the results. If a duck taking a bomb to the gob is entertainment, and teenagers getting chopped to bits by a man in a hockey mask is also entertainment, then Looney Tunes and horror cinema are closer kin than meets the eye. 

Exaggeration is key, too. Picture Daffy’s bill hanging off the back of his head like a poker player’s visor. Then, unless you’re squeamish, picture Jason Voorhees folding up a sheriff like a picnic table in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Freddy Krueger turning Phillip into a flesh marionette in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987), or Art the Clown, our modern-day slasher darling, using Santa Claus as his test subject for a practical science experiment with liquid nitrogen in Terrifier 3 (2024). 

Is it all that difficult to imagine Bugs making Elmer or Daffy into flash-frozen Popsicles? The difference is in the graphic details, and Looney Tunes’ regard for death versus horror’s. But under that surface, the former has a great deal in common with the latter — so much, in fact, that the strange, shocking birth of The Day the Earth Blew Up’s writhing bubblegum abomination isn’t all that strange or shocking at all. 

In fact, it’s one of the film’s many merits. Browngardt’s love for Looney Tunes is apparent in The Day the Earth Blew Up in the diligence he takes in contemporizing the series’ look. The linework is clean, the motion is fluid. He has an abiding respect to this cornerstone of American animation, which extends to its long connection with horror. That genre crossover feels like an obscure connection compared to Looney Tunes’ more popular iconography, from TNT blasting machines to the familiar ringed logo and opening music. But it’s no less essential to Looney Tunes’ spirit, which The Day the Earth Blew Up cheerily embraces. In our age of peak horror, that gusto is revitalizing.