Honourable Mention: Casper’s Scare School

This was a 2006 3D-animated film directed by Mark Gravas and starring Casper the Friendly Ghost (Devon Werkheiser). The film begins with Casper at home, missing the haunting of a supermarket by his three ghostly uncles as he is busy, in his friendly manner, teaching the human (or fleshy as the creatures call humans) boy Jimmy (Brett DelBuono, Let Me In) how to play soccer.

Worse than that he was actually scared by Jimmy and this ended up on the ghost TV show Scar Centre. Casper is sent, by leader of the creatures Kibosh (Kevin Michael Richardson, the Batman Vs Dracula,Scooby-Doo! And the Legend of the Vampire ), to Scare School where he will be taught to be scary. If that fails he’ll end up being banished to the Valley of the Shadows, a place all creatures fear.

Thatch the vampire

He reaches the school by flying pirate ship and from that moment the story and surroundings become very Harry Potter. He makes friends with a Mummy called Ra (Kendre Berry) and a zombie called Mantha (Christy Carlson Romano) – essentially Ron and Hermione – and quickly becomes the enemy of school bully Thatch (Matthew Underwood), a vampire and, of course, the reason for this mention.

Thatch in his coffin

Thatch has some standard vampire traits, he has fangs (and claims that a bite will make someone his slave), he sleeps in a coffin and turns into a bat. The sunlight element is removed as we see him in the human town, during the day, scaring fleshies. Whilst he is set up as the antagonist for Casper on a daily basis the real baddy is the headmaster – the two headed Alder (James Belushi) and Dash (Bob Saget).

Thatch in trouble

The film was one that I felt was probably great for the kids but lacked the nuances an adult audience would look for in a kid’s film that would make it enjoyable at both levels. However it did feature a vampire (and a vampire who bites his own tongue at one point, for that matter).

The IMDb page is here.

;)Q