Reminder: Casper The Friendly Ghost Is A Giant Creep

Back in 1995, Hollywood reasoned that what kids really wanted to see was a big-budget movie about the wildly hormonal post-mortem escapades of a dead child character first introduced in the ‘30s. Casper was a huge deal at time, arriving in theaters along with an avalanche of marketing tie-ins from companies ranging from Pepsi to Comfort Inn – the latter of which presumably pounced on the opportunity to turn any rooms haunted by the lost souls of the damned into a premium feature. 

But the Casper of the Casper movie is, to put it bluntly, a big giant creep. Right from the jump, we see that the amiable ghost of yesteryear is way more horny than friendly; as soon as he spies Christina Ricci’s character Kat in his room, he brags to absolutely no one that there’s  “a girl on my bed” followed by an enthusiastic “YES!”

And for the rest of the movie, Casper aggressively crushes on his new housemate – which is harmless, right? After all, they’re both kids. Yeah … no. We later find out that Casper isn’t just another in a long line of ghost-people, as in previous iterations of the character, he was a real child who died of pneumonia a long-ass time ago. 

As we’ve mentioned before, based on Casper’s love of old-timey baseball stars who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, a team that moved to Los Angeles in 1957, the latest that Casper could have been born is around 1952. So, while he looks and sounds like a 12-year-old phantom, Casper has been alive for 43 years at least. Now, with that information, go back and watch the scene where he kisses Kat while she’s unconscious.

Or how about the scene where they share a (far more consensual) kiss at the end of the movie? Yes, Casper looks like Devon Sawa now, but remember that he’s still been conscious for the same span of time as a full-grown adult, and was born before Tim Allen and Dog the Bounty Hunter. It’s basically the paranormal equivalent of catfishing.

If all that wasn’t enough, at one point, Kat’s dad, Dr. Harvey, dies and becomes a ghost himself – but he’s still wearing his glasses, shirt, and cardigan.

Which seemingly implies that Casper and his uncles are just floating around in the nude all the time. 

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Thumbnail: Universal