This Fake Trailer Reimagines Pokémon As a Horror Movie and It’s Hilarious
You didn't suspect that life inside a pokéball was comfortable, did you?
Youtuber Ryan Higa has been leaving people in stitches with comedic video vlogs and short films for years now. His latest ‘fake’ trailer for Pokémon: The Horror Movie raises a few ethical questions about the joys of catching them all and it may be some of his very best work yet.
One of Higa’s go-to bits is the ‘fake’ movie trailer, in which he takes a well-known cultural phenomenon, like Fortnite for example, and makes a movie trailer for it. Rather than come up with a plausible and realistic story, he usually just steers into whatever makes the thing he’s joking about totally absurd.
The trailer for Pokémon: The Horror Movie essentially gives viewers a truly terrifying look at the life of a Pokemon before and after capture. At the start, Higa can be seen dressed as young Pikachu carefreely roaming through the forest. When he returns his home is wrecked as a smug Pokémon trainer is perched over his wounded mom. The trainer eventually leaves Pikachu’s mom and captures him [Higa] instead.
In this storyline, Pokémon trainers don’t train their Pokémon with treats and affection, but rather by locking them inside their Pokéballs until they have an inevitable mental breakdown. Once they snap on the inside, getting them to do the trainers bidding and fight to the brink of death is, well, easy. Is that dark as shit? Yep. Is it also funny as hell? Without question.
Many a Pokémon fan have actually wondered just what exactly happens to the small creatures inside of their Pokéballs. And, writing it off as a scarring purgatory from which there is almost no escape, well, that’s as good a premise as any.
This article was originally published on
