Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
Minions & Monsters, which opened July 1, sends the Minions back to 1927 Hollywood, where two of them, James and Henry, steal a sorcerer’s spellbook and read from the Necronomicon to summon the eldritch god Cthulhu to star in their own silent monster movie. Predictably, the minions screw this up, and what they summon instead is Goomi, a small, green, adorable eldritch horror about the size of a shoebox.
Goomi, corrupting all the kids with its cuteness. (Courtesy of Universal Pictures)
The controversy stems from the movie’s use of an actual Lovecraftian resurrection spell on screen. Morons apparently don’t realize that Lovecraft made everything up, and instead a meaningful slice of Christian TikTok believes Minions and Monsters depicted an actual occult ritual.
X user Sabrina Ferrari set the tone, writing that the film “brings together invocations of demons, sexual perversion, and satanic symbols/seals” and was “made to corrupt your children from an early age.” Tailah Scroggins filmed herself calling the movie “straight up satanic” and said it is “desensitizing our kids to witchcraft and the occult.” An Instagram account called Holy House Wife took the argument further, warning that content that “used to be clearly dark, strange, or occult-adjacent” is “now softened with jokes, cute characters, and ‘family fun’ marketing,” a critique that also could describe Halloween.
Over on Reddit’s r/TrueChristian, one parent titled a post “Please don’t take your kids to see the new minions movie,” reporting that the Minions “perform a ritual and summon a literal demon.” To be clear, this happens in an animated movie that is not real and involves reciting a spell that is not real, or even satanic. Lovecraft made it all up.
Amazingly, not everyone on the Internet is a complete moron about this. “Everybody on this video sounds exactly like how I imagine what it was like during the Satanic Panic, a bunch of people making up nonsense,” one commenter wrote under a viral clip. Another X user, replying to a TikTok post calling the film the “work of the devil,” posted only: “We actually cannot be serious.” A TikTok user who goes by @cinecultured noted that Monster House, Coraline, ParaNorman, and Hotel Transylvania all ran the same monsters-and-witchcraft playbook, and argued the real problem is that some people watch a cartoon and see fantasy while others watch the same cartoon and see spiritual warfare.
It probably didn’t help that this scene was included in a preview, which lets people who love being outraged by things like this be outraged without even seeing the actual movie.
The Motion Picture Association rated Minions & Monsters PG for “violence/action, language and rude/macabre humor,” a category that apparently includes fictitious demon-summoning. The movie still opened at No. 1 over the Fourth of July weekend, but also logged the lowest domestic debut of any film in the Despicable Me franchise. Meaning anyone outraged by any of this is actually giving the studio hope that they’ll keep on being outraged and inadvertently kick off a viral marketing campaign…
Or was this the plan all along?
This story is based on fully factual news, but if we got it wrong, blame these guys, we’re just here to make it funny.
