This Gross Theory About Willy Wonka's Secret Candy Recipe Changes Everything
Willy Wonka has been charming children and creeping out adults for over 50 years. Gene Wilder debuted the candyman character in the 1971 movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." The story was simple enough: five lucky children score golden tickets to tour the mysterious candymaker's famous factory, but only one of them, "good boy" Charlie Bucket, makes it out of the place intact and inherits Wonka's factory. The other four "bad" children suffer mishaps and are never seen again in the film.
Wonka comes off as creepy from the jump, but a radical theory on Reddit suggests that he was actually a serial killer who lured children to their deaths. Another theory floats that the secret ingredient in Wonka's candy is the same ingredient found in the nutrition wafer featured in the 1973 movie "Soylent Green." That's right — the theory suggests that Soylent Green and Wonka candy are both made out of people!
On Reddit, u/Notorious Lynx noted how Wonka went to great lengths to hide the secret recipe for his candies. "What kind of terrible secrets could Wonka be hiding in the factory? This theorist believes that Wonka's various candies are made from children," they wrote. And u /James_Austin pointed to the dark tone in Roald Dahl's 1964 book, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," which was the basis for the film adaptation. The user claimed that in an original draft, another child was trapped in one of Wonka's rooms. "The stories said he died and the sweetest candy is made from those mean type of people," the Redditor wrote.
In real life, the child stars cast in the film got a taste of Wonka terror when they filmed a scene that was ad-libbed by the candyman himself.
The child actors experienced a terrifying moment while filming the original Willy Wonka movie
"Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" has its share of creepy moments, but the scariest by far is the psychedelic boat ride scene as the group flies through a tunnel of terror. In the scene, a demonic Wonka tells his Oompa-Loompa minions to row the boat "Faster! Faster!" While shooting the scene, the child actors did not know exactly what was in store for them, because it turns out, on set, Gene Wilder was sometimes as unpredictable as his character.
Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt in the movie, told TIME in 2016, "Gene wasn't a method actor and did take direction, but he was always creating his own thing. We never quite knew what we were going to get from him, particularly the boat scene in the film, when he went slightly loopy— whether that was improvisation or not I'll never know, but we certainly didn't see it coming!"
Denise Nickerson, who played Violet Beauregarde, also recounted the truly terrifying filming experience. "I was quite surprised with that, there was no acting involved," she told People that same year. "My chin dropped, hit the ground and never came back up. I had not anticipated that, it was not in the script that he was going to go off on that tangent. I was completely speechless."