Movies

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure Was A Big Inspiration For A Horror Classic

Pee-wee's Big Adventure Warner Bros. Pictures
By Sandy Schaefer/

The late, great Paul Reubens was an artist of incredible duality, a quality embodied by his most famous character, Pee-wee Herman. With his neatly-cropped hair, snazzy red bow tie, and stylin' grey suit and pants, Pee-wee looked like a member of The Little Rascals who had inexplicably grown up overnight. He wasn't all childish innocence and mischief, though. More than a bratty streak, there was something undeniably twisted about Pee-wee, even if, as a kid, I could never quite place my finger on what it was. I just knew that I liked it.

Reubens' brilliance in the art of dark absurdism made him a perfect match for Tim Burton, another artist who appealed to my off-kilter sensibilities before I was old enough to understand why. The pair would join forces multiple times over the course of Reubens' career, beginning with Burton's feature directing debut, "Pee-wee's Big Adventure," in 1985. Looking back now, however, I'm not sure they made anything quite as inspiredly bizarre and impish as their initial collaboration. Even stacked up against the likes of "Batman Returns" and "The Nightmare Before Christmas" (which, never forget, Burton only produced), there's something about "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" that makes it stick to your brain like gum ... but not the trick kind Pee-wee gives to his man-child nemesis Francis (Mark Holton).

Perhaps it's because when "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" wants to be, it's legitimately creepy and zany and not just for a film aimed at families. Sequences like the one where Pee-wee has a nightmare about a group of evil clowns performing "surgery" on his precious bicycle would almost feel at home in an honest-to-goodness horror film, as comedic as they ultimately are. In fact, the infamous Large Marge scene directly inspired none other than director Sam Raimi's 1987 horror-comedy classic, "Evil Dead II."

The worst accident I ever seen

Pee-wee's Big Adventure Large Marge Warner Bros. Pictures

To quickly recap: "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" follows Pee-wee on a quest to recover his stolen bicycle, taking him on a cross-country road trip that, at one point, finds him hitchhiking on a lonely foggy night. He eventually catches a ride with Large Marge (Alice Nunn), who Pee-wee later learns is actually the specter of a trucker killed in a terrible accident 10 years prior. Even before that, though, it's obvious something is off about Marge and her Bride of Frankenstein-styled beehive hairdo — even in the film's bizarro universe — as she regales what's actually the tale of her own grisly death to Pee-wee, briefly morphing into a bug-eyed, cackling ghoul and scaring Pee-wee senseless along the way.

The visual of the transformed Marge traumatized the generation of kids raised on Burton's film (in a fun way), but it was perfect inspiration for "Evil Dead II" special makeup designer and effects artist Mark Shostrom (whose numerous other credits include "Videodrome," "Phantasm II," and several "Nightmare on Elm Street" films). "Paul Reubens provided huge inspiration for my work on ['Evil Dead II']," Shostrom wrote on Twitter. "I had been watching 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure' on VHS repeat while sculpting. Large Marge gave me the idea for Henrietta's bugged-out eyes and mouth."

When paired side by side like this, it's impossible to deny how much Large Marge influenced the look for the Deadite-possessed version of the character Henrietta (Lou Hancock) in Raimi's "Evil Dead" sequel. There are other noticeable similarities between the two films, too, from the way they nimbly flip from comedy to horror and back again to their surreal sight gags and unfettered commitment to cartoonish mayhem. It makes sense enough; in his prime, Raimi was one of the few artists who could keep up with Reubens in the absurdism department.

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