Melvin's Macabre is a Horror Comedy animated series made by MeatCanyon.

Melvin (MeatCanyon) is a quiet, shy young man who seems to have the worst luck of running into horrifying and visceral monsters as he tries to go about his regular life - and balances his deeply suppressed emotions that bubble up every now and then. Just like many of MeatCanyon's work, Melvin's Macabre leans heavily into Gross-Up Close-Up Deranged Animation, however it is one of the more story driven of his works.

There are currently six episodes out that can be watched on MeatCanyon's YouTube channel.

Episodes

• "EARWAX"
• "GUTTERBALL"
• "NOSTALGIA"
• "GHOST HUNTERS"
• "Disney Adults..."
• "Gooner..."

Melvin's Macabre provides examples of:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: In NOSTALGIA, two of Jeremia's buddies are named Collector Kyle and Retro Ron.
• Ambiguously Human: Jeremiah's roommates appear human, but they seem to be more comfortable moving on all fours, and their limbs can twist and bend beyond the limitations of the muscular system to facilitate this.
• Ambiguous Situation: While Melvin is at a bowling alley that his deceased father, Jim, used to take him in GUTTERBALL, an acquaintance from both his and Jim’s past, Robert, makes himself known. Robert spends virtually all his screentime insulting Jim, saying that he was a horrible person, that he cheated on Melvin's mother, was a pedophile, and cheated on bowling games. It’s unclear whether Robert is lying about Jim just to be a jerk to Melvin or if he's telling the truth. Melvin never denies Robert's words, but Melvin may be too meek to confront Robert outright and admits to being furious about the things he's saying about his father. Later, a sentient bowling ball comforts Melvin by telling him his father‘s choices do not define him, implying that his father was flawed as a person. However, nothing is certain about Jim other than that he is a flawed person and that his son loves him.
• Art Shift: When Melvin loses his temper, the art style shift to monochrome and becomes more fluid and sketchy.
• Asshole Victim: At some occasions, an absolute despicable Jerkass will be killed or heavily be injured by the Monster of the Week.
  • In the episode "Gutterball", Robbie spends the entire video badmouthing Melvin's father, as well as Melvin himself, and even points out to the Bowling Pins that Melvin was cheating at the game, therefore risking his and everybody else's lives for the sake of the sport. At the end, Melvin requests the pins take Robbie to Bowling Hell, where Melvin kills him by bowling a strike. It's rather telling that everyone in the bowling alley starts cheering when the Bowling Pins grab Robbie.
  • In “Ghost Hunters”, when the possessed Chet jumps out of the window and Melvin traps the demonic spirit in the box, Chet is unpossessed and falls to his doom, heavily injuring him while his friend Spider cuts ties with him and leaves him to rot, serving as karma for his outright rude behavior and poor treatment of Melvin.
• Allegorical Character: In Earwax, the parasite appears to represent a manipulative friend/partner who provokes an otherwise innocent person to their Rage Breaking Point for the purpose of playing the victim, convincing Melvin's doctor to kill himself. In this vein, Angela, in taking pity on the parasite despite Melvin's warnings, is the exact type of person who would fall for this sort of manipulation.
• Animation Bump:
  • The animation becomes more smoother whenever Melvin’s temper is lost.
  • In “Gutterball”, during the scene where Robbie is giving Melvin an "The Reason You Suck" Speech while also shielding himself from being put into Bowling Hell by grabbing a nearby bystander, his expressions and talking is animated more fluidly compared to the other scenes.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Zigzagged in Disney Adults. Melvin tells Jasmine he wishes that the plane could continue its course rather than stop in Kansas City due to a medical emergency as the other Disney obsessed passengers were not happy with this decision. It is clear that Melvin is only saying that out of exhaustion for Jasmine's temper tantrum and does not actually believe what he said.... But that did not stop Jasmine from trying to make Melvin's "wish" come true by using her magic to threaten the pilot to continue the plane's course and create a "Disney World" in the plane by transforming the passengers (willing or not) into horrifyingly deformed versions of Disney characters. It is implied that Jasmine might have done this anyway, regardless of what Melvin said.
• Big Bad:
  • The parasite in “Earwax” actively manipulates Melvin throughout the animation.
  • Robbie is the cause of the events in “Gutterball”, beginning with him causing the animated bowling pins to appear by pushing Melvin, making him get a gutterball on his first game. However, he spends most of the episode in the sidelines, while the bowling pins actively contribute more to the plot.
• Big Damn Heroes: In "Gooning", Luke's mother prevents the Gooning Dimension entity from getting into the real world by copying what Luke and his friends did to open the portal to it (for reasons, we will not state what it is).
• Bittersweet Ending: In "Earwax", Melvin successfully gets the parasite out of his ears, only for Angela to walk in on him lashing out at it. She falls for its manipulations and snaps at Melvin, angrily rebuffing him while letting the parasite into her ears and taking it to the concert, leaving a despondent Melvin behind.
• Butt-Monkey: Melvin finds himself having to endure unpleasant situations in which he gets belittled, insulted and terrorized by both dangerous monsters who threaten his well-being and regular people who are total assholes to him.
• Cruel and Unusual Death:
  • Let's just say, Robbie getting forcibly transported into a virtual hell, watching Melvin seal his fate, and slowly but surely be blown to smithereens by a nuclear bomb as everyone in the bowling alley cheers for his demise, is not exactly a common occurrence.
  • Jerry is so scared of going back to Disney World with his wife he decides to stab himself in the neck with a shiv that he made with a toothbrush. However, instead of dying quickly, he spends a couple of minutes slowly bleeding out and gasping for air before crawling off with blood dripping out and the shiv still embedded in his throat. He's later found partially stuffed in a duffel bag after seeming to have finally bled out from his self-inflicted wound while Melvin is in the luggage area.
• Company Cross-References: In "Nostalgia," several plushies of Katz and Uno, the main protagonists of MeatCanyon's previous series Monster Lab (2021) can be seen across Jeremiah's apartment.
• Deadly Euphemism: The collectors in "Nostalgia" make frequent references to a "game night" throughout the episode, insisting that Melvin join them for it. It turns out they're planning a group suicide which involves uploading their consciousnesses to a virtual world they've designed using their own wistful feelings for the past with intentions of escaping the difficulties of adult life.
• Dirty Coward: Once the Pins try to claim their first victims, Robbie uses a pregnant woman as a shield. Fortunately she’s brought back once Melvin wins the game.
• The Dog Bites Back: After Robbie constantly makes his experience in the bowling alley terrible while also turning what was supposed to be an nice experience into an high-stakes situation for his and the lives of others, Melvin promptly asks the bowling pins to take Robbie into Bowling Hell, and also gets a strike (while using the same ball his father used for good measure) in order to seal his fate for good.
• Domestic Abuse: Jasmine in Disney Adults does not care for Melvin's emotional wellbeing. Melvin offers to talk to the captain for Jasmine and she threatens him with her magic, notably before he tried breaking up with her. Even before the trouble started on the plane, she pressured Melvin into upgrading their flight to Disney World to first class, presumably making him pay for it along with the entire trip in the first place.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: When Melvin finishes his Reason You Suck Speech towards the collectors in "Nostalgia" by stating that he feels sorry for them, their leader Jeremiah angrily tells him to shut up.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Aside from the bittersweet first episode, each episode ends with Melvin growing as a person and happier than he started, whether that be getting rid of a bully, getting closure, or just plain learning a lesson that makes him a better man.
• Entitled Bastard: Once the Pins drag Robbie to Bowling Hell, he demands Melvin not to hit a strike that will kill him, despite spending the entire episode doing nothing but shit-talk him and his late father, even after Melvin saves his life. Unsurprisingly, Melvin doesn’t give a rat’s ass on him.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Pins in Gutterball were willing to send everyone in the bowling alley to their own personal hell had Melvin lost, but judging how they were pretty quick to take Robbie with them upon Melvin's request kind of signified they were tired of his crap as well.
• Everyone Has Standards: Chet Spooks in "Ghost Hunters" was genuinely horrified when his grandfather's ghost got naked and was trying to give Melvin oral sex.
  • Despite the other Disney adults seeming unbothered when Jasmine begins mutilating everyone into horrific monstrosities similar to Disney characters, they seem very disturbed by her wanting to crash the plane into Disney World with one even exclaiming "What?" at her idea.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: A Central Theme of the show juxtaposes Melvin's normal personal issues with the weirdness of the world around him.
  • EARWAX: A gullible person that Melvin likes believes Melvin's abuser over him. Said abuser is a strange sapient parasite that was living inside his head.
  • GUTTERBALL: Melvin never got over the death of his father and is dealing with a bullying asshole. He also faces bowling pins that will drag everyone into "Bowling Hell" if he can't bowl well enough.
  • NOSTALGIA: Melvin's beloved pet hermit crab died recently, and he then meets a group that encourages a bad coping mechanism. Said group reveals they plan to kill themselves via Brain Uploading to pure nostalgia.
  • GHOST HUNTERS: Melvin had a friend who drowned years ago. The incident gave Melvin Survivor's Guilt. The plot is kicked off by attending a seance that goes terribly, terribly wrong when a demon shows up.
  • DISNEY ADULTS: Melvin wants to break up with his girlfriend but doesn’t want to hurt her, so he’s stuck in a relationship he doesn’t want to be in with a Psychopathic Womanchild who's so far out of touch with reality that she's on another planet. Then it turns out she also has magical powers and starts inducing painful transformations on people when their plane to Disney World gets diverted due a man stabbing himself because he doesn't want to go back. Furthermore, Melvin only dated her for fear of being alone.
  • GOONER: Melvin visits a man named Luke for his 21st birthday, who has been struggling to adjust to his stepfather marrying into his family five years ago and longs to see his birth father one more time after he walked out on him. Having experienced the same thing, Melvin tries to connect with him on that front but Luke insists that his birth father went to another plane of existence he can only catch glimpses of while masturbating. This other world, the Goon Plane, is indeed real, but it's also extremely dangerous.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The pregnant lady in bowling episode that got turned into 3D polygon has also her fetus transformed into bowling ball. Luckily, she gets better.
• Game Face: Melvin's appearance becomes noticably wild when his emotions flare. His eyes bug out, his teeth sharpen, his brow ridge swells, and his overall face shape becomes lumpy.
• Go Out with a Smile: When Melvin manages to grab the box in Ghost Hunters and traps the demon and spirit of Barry inside, the latter is shown smiling happily after he helped save Melvin.
• Gross-Out Show: While less reliant on this style of humor than Meat Canyon's previous works, the show still is this, with incredibly gruesome imagery, frightening character designs, and no small amount of the Gross-Up Close-Up.
• Hate Sink:
  • Robbie in "Gutterball" never demonstrates a single redeeming quality and spends his whole screen time being unpleasant to Melvin, shaming him and his late father (with implications that all of Robbie's accusations toward the latter are projection) and almost gets everyone killed by pointing out that Melvin is using the living bowling ball, therefor making it likelier that he will lose.
  • Chet Spooks in "Ghost Hunters" is a selfish, immature asshole obsessed with getting footage of the supernatural for his crappy ghost hunting channel, threatening Melvin and forcing to go along with the show, even faking a horrified reaction for when his grandmother gets murdered by the demonic spirit for the sake of views.
  • Jasmine in Disney Adults is Laughably Evil with her antics but the way she treats Melvin puts her firmly in this territory, emotionally and finanicially abusing and manipulating him even before she began to go crazy with her magic.
• Heel–Face Turn: Chet's friend and cameraman Spider abandons him by the end of "Ghost Hunters" after he helps Melvin.
• I Have No Son!: In "Gooning", Luke's stepfather, Jared, is this. When in private with Melvin, he makes it no secret that he despises his son. Or at least what he became, as in the end he comes up to save him with his friends from Gooning Dimension entity and makes a speech in Darkest Hour how much he loves his son. Cue to the ending with the Group Hug, where the whole family and Melvin perform it.
• Lighter and Softer: Downplayed with "Gooning", but so far it seems like the only episode where no one is an outright Jerkass (not counting the Gooning Dimension entity) and, aside from two of Luke's friends who end up getting transformed into monsters, everyone Melvin is working with ends up surprisingly well in the end.
• Loophole Abuse: Defied in Gutterball with the sentient bowling ball who helps Melvin. One of the bowling pins argue that nothing in the rulebook states against using the bowling ball but another pin points out the obvious and unfair advantage of using a sentient bowling ball that can always guarantee a strike.
• Magic Wand: Massively subverted for horror in "Disney Adults". Melvin breaks Jasmine's wand to reverse her powers.... Until it is revealed that she does not need the wand to use her powers.
• Magical Realism: The world of the show is similar to our own sans the addition of some bizarre monsters, which usually act in tandem with whatever personal problem is being plagued by. Other characters often have muted reactions to these horrors and the rules of the Bowling Alley seem understood by everyone, with people booing Melvin as if he were playing a regular match and not gambling for their lives.
• Monster of the Week: Zig-zagged. Almost every episode introduces a new monster or creature Melvin has to deal with along with also trying to overcome his personal issues. However, some episodes have a normal human as the antagonist, such as “Gutterball”, where the main antagonist is an Jerkass who constantly badmouths Melvin’s father much to Melvin’s dismay.
• Never My Fault: When Robbie pushes Melvin and gets him a gutterball on his first game, releasing the bowling pins, he puts the blame on Melvin as him being the one who caused it in spite of what he did a few seconds earlier.
• Non-Human Head: Evoked with Robbie, as his head shape is an upside-sown bowling pin.
  • Evoked again with Jeremiah, whose head is shaped like a Nintendo 64 controller.
  • Evoked once again with Chet Spooks, whose head is shaped like a tombstone. Even his hair is styled like a miniature graveyard.
  • In "Disney Adults", Jasmine's hair buns resemble Mickey Mouse's ears.
  • Luke from "Gooning" has a head and torso that are vaguely phallic in silhouette.
• Nostalgia Filter: Jeremiah and his roommates in "Nostalgia" base their entire lives around this, believing that nostalgia is a far better choice than what Jeremiah perceives to be the constant misery of the world around them. They even go as far as to using a room-sized machine that Jeremiah claims can upload their consciousnesses to nostalgia itself. Melvin calls them out on this at the end, stating they're just using childhood memories, escapism, and their collections as nothing more than crutches so they can avoid having to face the complexities of everyday life.
• Not Good with Rejection: Melvin tries breaking up with Jasmine in Disney Adults. She does not take it well as she expected her life to be like a Disney fairytale which she lampshades. Unable to handle the rejection, Jasmine tries crashing the plane to be remembered forever.
• Nothing Is Scarier: Babs' husband Harold in "Ghost Hunters" is revealed to have done some very horrible things while he was alive to the point that Babs mentions he was on death row, though it's never specified what exactly it was. It's heavily implied he was some kind of sexual predator, though, as he tries to give Melvin oral sex as a ghost and Chet later finds a mysterious roll of film hidden in a shoebox under Harold's bed that Spider suspects has something very bad on it.
• Pet the Dog: The bowling pins in Gutterball carry out a request from Melvin to get rid of Robbie who proved to be nothing but a horrible person to Melvin.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: Jasmine is a very disturbing example, being a grown woman who maintains an unhealthy obsession with Disney. She throws a temper tantrum when the plane is forced to divert its course from Disney World and uses her magic powers to painfully transform the other passengers into grotesque versions of Disney characters. Melvin himself notes that she's completely incapable of properly facing reality.
• Rage Breaking Point: Melvin is typically rather anxious and soft-spoken, but every episode when he's pushed too far and goes into one of these.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Melvin delivers one to the collectors towards the end of "Nostalgia" as he finally stands up to them and chastises their unhealthy coping mechanisms.
  Melvin: YOU'RE ALL DELUSIONAL!!! Chasing these feelings of childhood memories, buying and hoarding everything that could drown out all the complicated shit in your adult life, numbing yourself until you can't feel anything at all! You're stagnant, you're hollow... and I feel sorry for you...
• Shrinking Violet: On a typical basis, Melvin is soft-spoken and polite, but also anxious and non-confrontational, which often results in letting other people walk all over him. This is what makes his moments of wrath all the more unsettling.
• Survivor's Guilt: Melvin saw his friend Barry drown years ago and feels terrible about it. He feels like he should have done something about it but it's implied that there really wasn't anything he could do.
• Take That!:
  • Chet Spooks is a jab towards wannabe ghost hunters from reality shows, being an egotistical loser who only cares about getting footage for his channel.
  • "Disney Adults" is a massive jab towards adults who are fanatical fans of Disney, portraying them as grotesque, immature lunatics with no regard for the people around them. Even the titular antagonist Jasmine did not seem too fond of the Star Wars obsessed Disney Adults either.
• Tempting Fate: In “Ghost Hunters”, Barbara mentions to the trio after they run from the ghost of her husband that as long as the candles are lit, the spirits prove no harm. Three guesses as to what happens to the lit candles behind her immediately afterward (hint: she doesn’t make it out alive because of it).
  Barbara: Don't worry! As long as these candles are lit, the spirits can't harm you!
  (The candles go out behind her, which leads to her demise)
• There's No Kill like Overkill: Played for Laughs. Robbie’s fate in “Gutterball” is him getting blown up by a nuke, keep in mind that Robbie is the only person who ended up in Bowling Hell without being released.
• Too Dumb to Live: Angela, who lets the parasite in her ears while telling Melvin off while completely oblivious to the fact it's clearly harmful.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Robbie continuing to insult Melvin and his late father after Melvin wins the game and saves everyone’s lives, Robbie’s included. It’s at that second Melvin asks the Pins to just take him to Bowling Hell, and they comply.
• Vengeful Ghost: Bob and Barry are this. Subverted for Barry however, as he forgives Melvin for not being able to save him and goes out of his way to help protect him and Spider from the demon possessed Chet.
• Villainous Breakdown: When Melvin refuses to press the button to upload his mind directly to the "nostalgia", Jeremiah is not happy.
  Jeremiah: MELVIN, PRESS THE FUCKING BUTTON!!! This all depends on you! [...] Melvin... you worthless sack of shit! You're going back to a place with no life, heartache and misery! Do you realize how foolish you are being?!
• Vocal Dissonance: From time to time, characters will usually talk in a drastically different tone compared to their normal voice.
  • In “Gutterball”, when Robbie calls out Melvin for using the animated bowling ball, delclaring said ball as illegal, this causes the pins to take the ball and out him out as a traitor. One of the pins then shows up with a bowling instruction guide (along with wearing glasses), reading that the animated bowling ball isn’t an illegal ball and marks all of the qualifications of being an acceptable ball while having an casual-sounding tone rather than the usual high-pitched wicked voice they talk in.
  • “Nostalgia” has a scene where Melvin suddenly begins talking in a naslier, deeper voice after it’s announced that he and the others are going to be killing themselves.
  Melvin: Euuuuugh, what did you say?
• What You Are in the Dark: A character trait for Melvin where despite his monstrous side coming out to vent his anger at the world and his circumstances, he does not give into them and tries to do the right thing when he can, even if it is against his better judgement and no one would know about his choices.
• World of Jerkass: The world Melvin lives in isn't all bad, as it's rather mundane and ordinary when Melvin does not confront deranged entities, but many regular folk are still rude, self-serving jerks (like Robbie and Chet), or gullible and impulsive (like Angela).