10 Horror Movies With Scooby Doo Plots

Urban Legend - a real dog of a movie.

urban legend poster
TriStar Pictures

Hollywood won’t admit it, but most modern horror films owe a debt to Scooby Doo. The teenage leads (typically a nerd, a stoner and a damsel in distress) always know best, and every person in a position of power, from the parents to the Sheriff, is unhelpful, corrupt or thoroughly evil, and probably has a dark secret.

Young folks, these pictures tell us, are the only ones that can save the world from the terrible mistakes of hypocritical adults. That’s because they possess “It”, the secret, mystical power that makes them the fount of all wisdom as well as our best hope for redeeming society from the actions of Old Farts that are either sincere-but-useless or wicked.

It’s a clever inversion of the Andy Hardy character, who learned life-lessons from his father, a small-town judge, before entering the Big Bad World. Here, the authorities are powerless to stop a villain who appears where and when he damn well pleases (to hell with logic), but The Kids have no trouble bringing him down and revealing his identity.

If the following films prove anything, it’s that there’s no shortage of movies where the bad guys would’ve gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids. 

10. The Beach Girls And The Monster

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x7weBEHqWI

Released by American International Pictures, who’d made a fortune distributing cheap Beach Party films and even cheaper Drive-in horror flicks, The Beach Girls And The Monster is an attempt to combine the two that would be laugh out loud funny if it wasn’t so leaden.

There’s a bunch of wrigglin’, jigglin’ teenagers with nothing better to do than hang out on the beach, having hot dog parties and singing a tune called There’s A Monster In The Surf, which includes the lyric, “Everbody’s sleepin’, monster comes a creepin’, yeah yeah yeah!” But wait a minute – there really is a monster, and before you can say “bimbo burger”, he’s carried off three bikinied blondes.

If you think the shabby-looking monster looks like a man in a costume, that’s because….well, you know where there this is going. It turns out that the oldest cast member (Jon Hall, who also directed) hates kids, so he decided to dress up and punish them. “The boys are nothing but a bunch of loafers and the girls are little tramps,” he tells a cop. “They contribute absolutely nothing to a decent society!” 

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Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'