What is the Scream Extractor in Pixar released Monsters, Inc. While the 2001 movie wasn’t one of Pixar’s biggest box office earners, it’s still one of the studio’s most beloved. The charming animated adventure is set in Monstropolis – a city populated by monsters that gets its energy from the screams of human children.
This energy is collected and converted by the titular Monsters, Inc – a scream-harvesting power factory at which fluffy blue monster James P. "Sulley" Sullivan (John Goodman, Kong: Skull Island) is the company’s top scarer. With the help of his best friend and colleague Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal), Sulley es through portals that lead to the bedroom closets of children in the human world to scare them and collect their screams. Sulley’s job is considered dangerous work since human children are thought to be highly toxic to monsters, which hilariously means the monsters are often more frightened than the kids they’re trying to scare.
However, there’s a pretty big problem facing Monstropolis and Monsters, Inc: kids just aren’t as scared by monsters as they used to be. The energy crisis leads Sulley’s rival Randall (Steve Buscemi) and Monsters, Inc boss Mr. Waternoose (James Coburn) to invent a wicked machine they dub the Scream Extractor which works by forcibly sucking out screams via a mask placed over a child’s face. While the Scream Extractor eliminates the company’s reliance on its increasingly ineffectual scare tactics, it does require kidnapping children, which is a tad morally questionable.
Randall intends to use the Scream Extractor on Boo, a two-year-old girl he’s been assigned to scare who Sulley accidentally allowed to cross over into the monster world via a portal on the Monsters, Inc factory floor. Luckily for Boo, Sulley and Mike – who she finds cute rather than scary – take the toddler under their wing and vow to get her home. In the process, Sulley and Mike also find out that children aren’t toxic to monsters at all.
After Sulley and Mike bravely save Boo from Randall’s evil clutches, it’s soon discovered that children’s laughter is a far more potent power source than their screams. Monsters, Inc’s Scream Extractor was, therefore, redundant. At the end of Monsters, Inc. Sulley becomes the new CEO and solves Monstropolis’ energy crisis by instigating a new process which sees monsters enter the human world to entertain kids with stand-up comedy and the like to extract their laughter – a far more ethical and sustainable energy source.
