The 80s Children’s Movie With One Of The Decade’s Scariest Scenes

The Adventures of Mark Twain is a masterpiece of stop-motion claymation that was brought to life by the imagination of artist and director Will Vinton.

It follows Twain characters Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher as they stow away aboard an airship piloted by the famous author. Twain is flying the airship to meet Halley’s Comet, a revelation that the three children come to believe will kill them all.

As the children explore the airship, they discover a contraption called the Index-o-Vator.

This machine functions as an elevator of sorts, though it does more than take the riders to different parts of the craft. With the push of a button, it will take those on board into parts of Twain’s writings.

The Adventures of Mark Twain sees Tom, Huck, and Becky find themselves seeing the scenes from “Eve’s Diary,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and other stories and novels play out.

At Twain’s encouragement, the three curious children find themselves ushered into a scene from his story “The Chronicles of Young Satan”, which is where the terror begins.

Tom, Huck, and Becky are greeted by a robed figure that, while headless, uses his hand to hold a mask where his face should be. The mask is plain white with large holes for eyes and a thin mouth, existing somewhere in between the Greek masks for comedy and tragedy.

The figure introduces himself as Satan, and invites the children into his realm to play.

As the creepiest scene in The Adventures of Mark Twain unfolds, the children see Satan lead them onto a barren wasteland, only to wave his hands and make it become a lush landscape.

He fills their hands with delicious fruits, and, to their delight, conjures up a small castle from the ground.

Satan asks the children to create toy people and animals to place in and around the castle.

After making numerous small figures out of the clay that Satan conjures into their hands, little people, horses, and cows are put all around the kingdom. Jolts of electricity shoot from Satan’s fingers into the clay figures and bring them to life.

At first, these little characters in The Adventures of Mark Twain are jovial and loving their newfound lives. But when two of them begin to argue and fight over a steer, Satan becomes enraged and smashes them with the palm of his hand.

As the flattened lumps of clay that were once their bodies morph into coffins, mourners gather around them and wail uncontrollably.

This angers Satan further. More jolts of electricity from his fingers open up fissures in the ground and the people and animals begin to fall into the chasms one at a time.

The images of mothers crying over their dead children, helpless animals falling clumsily into the abyss, and the further flattening of the kingdom’s people by their creator add additional layers of horror.

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Most horrifying of all are the expressions on the mask that represents Satan’s face. His look goes from stoic to twisted in a matter of seconds, making it difficult to tell if he is killing his creations out of anger or out of sheer joy.

By the time the scene concludes, it gives The Adventures of Mark Twain one of the most creepy seven minutes of film in the history of children’s movies.

The film is brilliantly put together, though suffered from minimal distribution. Like the late Ray Bradbury‘s works, bringing together a vast body of stories and novels by Mark Twain has been far underdone in the film world.

But as The Adventures of Mark Twain shows, there’s a ton of source material that can be effectively used by the author to captivate audiences more than a century after his death.

You can stream The Adventures of Mark Twain for free on Tubi.