This Crazy Theory About “Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory” Actually Makes Sense

As if Oompa Loompas weren't scary enough already.

Yesterday Uproxx delivered a video explaining an INSANE theory about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory...

UPROXX

To understand the theory, you've got to be familiar with Dante's Inferno, a poem about a man named Dante who is taken through the different levels of hell...

Gustave Doré

In the poem, a ferryman named Charon carries freshly dead souls across rivers that divide the living world from the deceased...

UPROXX / Paramount Pictures

In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Wonka leads the group on a legitimately terrifying boat trip into the factory.

Wonka's words even seem to be describing such a descent into hell...

Paramount Pictures

"Are the fires of Hell a-glowing, is the grisly reaper mowing?"

The next comparison made is to Dante's Inferno's "nine circles of hell..."

Gustave Doré

Each circle is designed to punish a particular type of sinner, in a manner that relates to the sin. For example, the seventh circle is for violence, so a murderer might be sent there to cook in a fiery river of boiling blood.

Well, in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the kids are punished in a way that relates to their respective "sin..."

Paramount Pictures

For example, Augustus Gloop is gluttonous for chocolate, and he almost drowns in a river of it.

Or Violet Beauregarde, who commits theft for stealing gum...

Paramount Pictures

And is promptly turned into a blueberry...

The final comparison is between their endings. At the end of Dante's Inferno, Dante climbs up Satan and ascends out of Hell...

Paramount Pictures

In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie ascends off into the sky in a glass elevator.

All of this begs the question, is Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory a harmless story about kids in a candy factory, or is it about children experiencing some variation of the "circles of hell" from Dante's Inferno?

UPROXX

youtube.com