As a Fridge page, all spoilers will be unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Fridge Brilliance
- Establishing that Mystery Inc. actually disbanded at one point provides a canon-friendly explanation for the members of the group except for Scooby and Shaggy being Put on a Bus at various points in the franchise's history.
- The gang stumbling across four separate fake mysteries in Louisiana alone in such a short-time period might've to do with the gang having been retired and off the radar for so long, inspiring more crooks to think they were safe with that dodge.
- During "It's Terror Time Again", Scooby has fallen into quicksand, and Shaggy is looking for a vine to pull him out with. One of the zombies taps him on the shoulder and gives him one. Shaggy nods in thanks, realizes who gave it to him, and skedaddles in terror. It looks exactly like one of the stock gags that Scooby Doo has used for decades. However, since the zombies are the good guys and genuinely are trying to help, this time the implausible behavior is fully justified.
- When the zombies first start making their presence known, it's via ghostly messages telling them to leave the island. The standard Scooby Doo villain motive is trying to scare people away from a certain location for various reasons. The zombies of Moonscar Island, however, have a genuinely benevolent motive in trying to keep more people from becoming fuel for Simone, Lena and Jacques.
- While being asked about Beau's background, Simone mentions that he had plenty of references on his resume. As an undercover cop, of course the police would make sure he had a legit-looking cover story.
- The four hoaxes busted by the gang during "The Ghost Is Here" offer a perfect selection of classic "Scooby-Doo" Hoax themes: the seance-ghost fits the "creepy occultist with prop gadgets", the man-bat/vampire fits the "cartoon take on Hammer Horror monster" (complete with Shaggy trying to repel it with a mirror), the riverboat spook plays off the old shows' frequent "notorious local historical character's ghost" motif, and the lobster-thing embodies the "monster spawned of whatever-the-facility-the-crook's-robbing-happens-to-manufacture" premise that's virtually unique to the franchise.
- Lena claims that the tunnel under the mansion was dug "to hide from Union soldiers." We later learn this is not the case. But even before this, there are a few clues suggesting she's lying, if the island's history is any indication. It's so remote that it's difficult to get to even in modern times and is in a bayou that few people enter for any reason, so the chances of the islanders being visited by the Union Army with any regularity are slim. Note, too, there are fewer Union soldier zombies than Confederate ones, further supporting the notion that Northern troops rarely came there. From this, it can be gleaned that the tunnel was not dug for the purpose Lena claims.
- Why does the ferry only take people across Moonscar Island and back during the daytime? Because during the night many zombies show up and attempt to warn them that Moonscar Island is dangerous. Inevitably they will heed the warnings and attempt to leave the island, depriving Lena, Simone, and Jacques of victims. By stranding them on the island, the problem's solved.
- When Scooby and Shaggy have unwittingly entered Simone's chamber and find the dolls of Daphne, Velma, and Fred, the bats swarm out. This is a nice Scooby gag of having bats come out of nowhere just to give them a scare. But, looking at what happens later, it doesn't take long for a savvy viewer to realize that the bats' behavior was triggered not by Scooby and Shaggy, but by Simone entering the chamber with Beau's voodoo doll, as it was not there when Shaggy and Scooby first played with them. Simone likely triggered the bats intentionally to get Scooby and Shaggy away from the dolls without revealing herself and her true evil nature to them, and by extension to the audience.
- Why couldn't the zombies have tried any other method to warn people about Simone and Lena? Well for one, they can only fully physically exist at night. Aside from some mild spooking with ghostly energy during the day (the ghostly wall writing, some mild apparitions, and reflecting back in mirrors), they clearly can't have much of a presence aside from the night of the full moon. And with what they are, they're unable to get anyone they're trying to warn to sit still long enough to be listened to. They look like terrifying monsters: gaping mouths with missing teeth, decayed skin stretched over shambling skeletal frames, etc. And considering many of them appear extremely decayed, along with their sole vocalizations as zombies being strangled moans, it's unlikely they have many faculties of verbal speech left to them. They literally have no other option other than try to scare people away from the island, or otherwise physically drag them somewhere safer. And no sane person seeing a zombie for the first time would let them close enough to grab hold of them.
- Everyone is always applauding Lena's cooking. This makes sense, considering the centuries of practice she's had.
- The "Again" in "It's Terror Time Again" could be construed as a hint that this is a regular occurrence for visitors to Moonscar Island.
- There's the fact that the zombies are dressed in drastically different time periods, from 18th-century pirates, Civil War confederates, 30s mafia members, and even local tourists of implied present day. The usual Villain of the Week sticks to one theme for their respective monster of their local area. If it were just the pirates, it would make sense they'd be a collection of disguises that would be somewhat difficult to solve normally- which is initially implied to be a front for Simone and co.'s suspicious activities, but the time period clashes of the zombies would be too complicated to make a feasible story for criminals to hide behind. The simpler and rational yet irrational explanation is that they're indeed real- being victims across different time periods and something or someone made them this way in the first place for truly nefarious reasons. And since it becomes gradually obvious the undercover detective isn't behind it, it's obvious the current owners of the plantation are behind it.
- The zombies disappear from the film after the Terror Time montage, since the gang all end up back at the plantation mansion. This isn't the filmmakers being lazy or not knowing what to do, it means that Simone and Lena put up some kind of magic ward to keep them out or, much more likely, the zombies are actively avoiding going anywhere near the Werecats. After all, it's not like they can do anything to stop them.
- It's unlikely that the gang is the only one the zombies appeared to. Unlike the gang, who'd seen their fair share of Scooby Doo Hoaxes and became cynical of real monsters, the previous visitors wouldn't dismiss these zombies as fakes and realize they're real. Imagine being a tourist and going to a bayou island for a nice vacation, everything seems fine, the hosts are lovely and friendly, then ZOMBIES ATTACK, and you're left defenseless as the undead keep coming after you. You want to leave, but you can't. You can only hope the ferry comes back before you die. Then the ferry comes...and the captain turns out to be a cat monster who wants to drain you of your life force until you're a shriveled husk. Since the hosts were so nice to you, you decide to warn them that Jacques is secretly an evil cat monster. But as it turns out, they're also cat monsters who proceed to drain you alive. Even in death, you can't find peace and your only recourse is to join the zombies and try to warn the next batch of visitors about the women and the ferry driver and hope they don't make the same mistake as you did.
- On that note, its possible that on some level, the lyrics for "It's Terror Time Again" are from the zombies' point of view as they see that it's time for another sacrifice and once again, they aren't having any luck and have to deal with knowing that's to come.
- On a more positive note, it's also possible that the zombies were able to successfully get some people to leave (without them ever realizing the truth about the cat creatures) and those survivors helped spread the zombie legend of the area.
- Simone stating that it was necessary for Lena to lure outsiders to Moonscar Island. Since several victims are from time periods where there was no quick travel, this means Lena had to plan out when people would come to the island.
- Simone stating that she has been killing people for 200 years. Given the implication of just how large some of the groups of her victims were, it's implied her body count could run into potentially thousands of people dead.
- Even worse, it's possible that she, Lena and Jacques didn't drain everyone from some of those larger groups during the first harvest moon after revealing themselves, but kept them prisoner to save for the next year, with them knowing what fate awaited them all that time.
- While the era of the 1700's with the Civil War and tropical disease, not to mention the threat of a ship getting lost at sea, would be able to explain away most of the disappearances, the modern era victims would not have that luck. As a result, since many of them look like modern tourists, and it doesn't take a lot of imagination for some of these poor people to have told their kids that they would be away for a few days and then they get brutally murdered, never to return home.
- Some of the female zombies, when they first emerge from the swamp, have extremely round stomachs. They could have just been stereotypical fat tourists, but the shape of them doesn't look like mere fat. It looks like they were pregnant...
- Since at least one of those zombies looked unusually old to be pregnant, it might have been simple plumpness after all.
- Alternatively, it could be because the bodies were dumped in the swamp; bodies dumped in sources of water have been known to bloat up.
- On the same topic, has Simone and Lena actually killed children?
- Since at least one of those zombies looked unusually old to be pregnant, it might have been simple plumpness after all.
- A few of the zombies are dressed like 1920s big-city gangsters. On the one hand, this may imply that at least in their case, it wasn't innocent people whom the villains were targeting for such a fate. On the other hand, it does raise the ugly thought of why a bunch of urban gangsters would've set foot in the bayou in the first place.
- Along with the aforementioned connection of gangs and swamps, New Orleans was rife with bootlegging during Prohibition, and the isolated Bayous would've been useful for smuggling.
- The way Simone and Lena talk about how they cursed themselves makes it likely that they were forced to start killing others to stay alive from the very start after Moonscar. It's very much a possibility that they weren't originally so untroubled and sadistic about it, but were just desperate and afraid to die before their time, but as the years went by, found out that Murder Makes You Crazy and decided to keep from dying ever.
- Another possibility was that their determination to live forever came from fear of having damned themselves when they first made their deal with the Cat God and slaughtered the pirates, wanting to delay that judgment only to make their hands even bloodier as a result.
- The fact that Beau is specifically noted as being the estate's new gardener and how Simone and Lena had a doll ready for him indicates that other past victims had been servants who Simone and Lena had hired. Those people would have likely had it especially bad, being betrayed and murdered like that by people they'd come to know and trust over a long time period.
- Not only is the zombie body count excessive, but keep in mind how the spectral nature of the zombie curse seems to work, reanimating flesh on top of decayed remains and bone. With how many of the zombies rise from the bayou waters, it's entirely plausible that a very uncomfortable amount of those waters are filled with long-rotted and decayed corpses, with potentially no way to even find or recognize them anymore until the curse brings them back temporarily, and no way to leave without Jacques's boat. The perfect territory for a Serial Killer trio and no way to even find evidence of it at all.
- Even worse, Shaggy and Scooby dip into those waters by accident with a mouthful, and Snakebite Scruggs regularly fishes from them, all of them completely unaware of how filled to the brim with buried and decomposed corpses the bayou is. Nausea Fuel at its finest.
- Seeing that among the zombies are Confederate soldiers from the Civil War indicates that the villains slaughtered an entire regiment of soldiers at least once, and the soldiers most likely tried to put up a fight for all the good it did them. That raises the hideous implication that the werecats may well have been powerful enough due to the curse that bullets and bayonets had little to no effect on them. What's more is that they almost certainly did so without the Confederate or Union governments being any the wiser, the chaos of the war a perfect cover for Simone and Lena's killing spree. It's also possible that the Union soldiers seen as zombies at one point were sent in search of the unaccounted-for 8th Alabama at the end of the war, only to join their erstwhile foes as undead.
- When Simone, Lena, and Jascue's goals are boiled down, it's essentially a murder scam operation where they lure in unsuspecting victims luring them into a false sense of security before they inevitably have to run to their protection from the monsters that suddenly appear, only for them to be victims of the real monsters that drain their life force and add them to the countless victims they have added- with the added irony being the "monsters" also being victims that try to unsuccessful warn them of their real monsters. They're essentially Serial Killers mixed with natural predators that trap their victims to feed them, and demons that subject their victims to unjustified torment just to prolong their lives and out of sadism.
