In the mid 90’s the horror franchises like Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween had pretty much burned out the genre from its golden age in the 80’s. That is until “Cabin in the Woods” writer Joss Whedon and a group of fearless visionaries had the audacity to make the first big budget horror movie, done as a cartoon.

To fully delve into the darkness of Toy Story I’d have to go through every single scene because it is 121 minutes of non-stop gut punches, but I’ll do my best to condense it down.

As the movie begins we find a group of toys who are the literal playthings of a godlike creature named Andy, who, without him, their lives have no meaning. Andy and the other gods in the house are in the process of moving to a new habitation, so Woody, God’s favorite, is organizing the toys to pick “moving buddies” to ensure no toy gets left behind, banished to a dusty toy purgatory of isolation.

In addition, inhabitants of the bedroom are fearful because Andy’s birthday is approaching, where he will receive new toys and discard any who have lost favor. The day of reckoning comes early, as Andy’s parents agree to let him hold his birth ceremony early because of the move. Woody dispatches a group of soldiers to perform recon on the party, where one of the brave soldiers is crushed under the foot of Andy’s mother, and subsequently tossed aside without a second thought.

The group breathes a sigh of relief as all the presents are opened, revealing mostly board games and other innocuous gifts. That is until the last package is opened. It is a Buzz Lightyear doll. Andy tosses the toys in the bedroom and leaves to play with the other god children. Woody is visibly shaken to find Buzz is everything he is, and more. As Andy’s favorite, his continued existence was all but guaranteed. But no more. For the first time, Woody knows the fear of the other toys, and more. After all, he who sits at the top of the tower has the farthest to fall.

The lower tier toys flock to Buzz, marveling at his superiority to Woody. Hardly giving the audience time to process what has happened as we launch into a montage of Buzz Lightyear usurping Woody’s place in the pecking order as he teaches the lower caste new skills and has fun with them. We watch as cowboy posters and bed sheets disappear from the bedroom, replaced by Buzz Lightyear merchandise. Culminating with Woody being unceremoniously tossed into the toy box with the other peasants. A forlorn Woody peers out of the box, watching as Andy brings Buzz into his bed. Homoerotic undertones aside, Buzz has no idea he is a toy during all of this. The poor creature thinks he is actually a space traveler on a mission to save the universe, which he cannot fulfill because he is stranded on an alien planet.

The following morning a rejected Woody tries to tell Buzz his whole life is a lie but is cut off by the sound of the chaotic God next door ruthlessly murdering an army man. They barely have time to mourn when we hear Andy’s mother tell him they are going to Pizza Planet and he may bring one toy with him. Woody, driven by desperation, tries to murder Buzz by taking control of a toy car and knocking him out the window. It would have worked but the sentient car exposes Woody’s actions. Lead by Mr. Potato Head, the other toys turn on Woody and threaten to kill him. They all freeze when Andy comes into the room searching for Buzz. As they wait, Mr. Potato Head shows Woody a picture of a hangman’s noose on an Etch-A-Sketch while glaring at him with murder in his detachable plastic eyes.

Unable to find Buzz, Andy takes Woody and throws him in the back of the car. Buzz, who is miraculously alive in the bushes outside, climbs onto the car and drops in through the sunroof. Woody is happy to see Buzz alive, not because he has remorse for what he has done, but because he thinks he can avoid the consequences of his actions. A desperate fight for survival ensues between the two toys until they both fall out of the car when the gods stop at a gas station. At this point, Woody and Buzz might as well be on the fucking moon.

Anyway, after Woody almost gets run over by an 18-wheeler, he sees a Pizza Planet delivery truck and uses Buzz’s delusions to convince him to get in the truck by saying they’re getting on a rocket to a space airport or something. The first thing Buzz does when they arrive is climb into a claw machine shaped like a rocket. I almost forget Woody is a sociopathic killer at this point in the movie because I feel so bad for him. Buzz is like one of those side characters in a video game that you have to escort somewhere without him dying and the character just keeps spinning in circles and banging into a wall over and over again while getting shot at.

This is the point where the movie starts ramping up the horror from your basic Hitchcock murder story to like an episode of The Twilight Zone directed by Eli Roth. The claw machine is full of aliens, who like Buzz, don’t know they are toys. These poor fuckers have developed a cult around the claw that children send down to try to win a toy. The claw comes down and grabs one of the alien toys. Everyone is excited and happy because claw god chose one of them to go to alien heaven. We see outside the machine and at the controls is none other than the Chaotic God, Sid, who lives next door to Andy. All the other aliens celebrate their friend ascending, but we know whatever short life he has left will be spent being sadistically tortured. Then Sid catches Buzz with the claw. Woody tries to save Buzz but is thwarted by the religious zealots, and they both wind up being captured and taken to Sid’s house of horrors, which is obviously a metaphor for Dante’s Seventh Circle of Hell.

They barely get into Sid’s house when the poor alien is unceremoniously fed to a Hellhound. We never even found out the alien’s name. Then, without warning or provocation, Sid snatches his little sister’s doll out of her hands, takes it to his room, decapitates it, and replaces its head with a pterodactyl head, all the while laughing maniacally. Woody and Buzz spend the next day or so trapped in Hell, fearful of being eaten by the freakish victims of Sid’s awful experiments, such as the one-eyed baby head doll with metal spider legs who obviously lives in constant agony. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here, indeed.

While trying to avoid the Hellhound Buzz enters the layer of Sid’s Father. Of course, the guy is passed out drunk, and from everything we know about Sid and serial killers we know the father is certainly abusive. Buzz sees a commercial for Buzz Lightyear toys on the television and realizes everything he thought he knew about not only himself but the very nature of reality is a fucking lie. We all knew it was going to happen eventually, but to send Buzz through hell, where you think it can’t possibly get any worse, to hit him with this NOW. Buzz tries to fly out a window from atop the second-floor banister to prove to himself he is real. You see Buzz realize the truth as he falls to the ground, unable to stop his descent to the floor and into madness. The scene is as powerful as it is horrifying. His arm breaks off when he hits rock bottom, just in case he needed any more clues that he isn’t human. Sid’s sister picks him up off the floor and dresses him as a woman, then forces him to have tea parties with a group of decapitated Barbie Dolls. His sanity shattered into a million little pieces, Buzz accepts his new life as “Mrs. Nesbit.”

Meanwhile Woody manages to communicate with his old friends next door, but they refuse to help him escape, knowing full well what horrors await Woody if they leave him in the hands of Sid. Buzz is no help because he is rolling on the floor, lost in madness. If things weren’t bad enough for Buzz, Sid gets a giant ass rocket in the mail and straps it on to Buzz’s back so he can blow him up, obviously paralleling the story of Icarus. Woody rallies the grotesque victims of Sid’s experiments to corner Sid in the backyard like a hoard of zombies and tells Sid the toys are watching him. On the surface, this seems like a win, but knowing Sid is on the path to become a serial killer, this is just the push his already fucked up psyche needs to go from shithead kid to full blown monster.

In a last second race against time, the moving van that is taking the other toys is leaving Andy’s house at that very moment. The two toys grab onto the back of the truck just as it pulls out of the driveway, but Buzz falls and gets left behind…again…while being chased by the Hellhound. Woody gets into the back of the van and uses the same remote-control car he tried to kill Buzz with earlier to pick him up. Unfortunately, the other toys see him and throw him out of the back of the vehicle. Woody ignites the rocket strapped to Buzz’s back to launch them back to the others while they are celebrating murdering Woody.

We skip to later and everyone is in the new house pretending they all haven’t tried to murder one another and they are one big happy family. The happiness doesn’t last long though because now it is Christmas and presents are on the way. We fade out, knowing the whole horrible ordeal is about to begin again…..