Disney Gothic

LEXINGTON BOOKS HORROR STUDIES

Series Editors
Lorna Piatti-Farnell, Auckland University of Technology
Carl Sederholm, Brigham Young University

Lexington Books Horror Studies is looking for original and interdisciplinary

monographs or edited volumes that expand our understanding of horror as an
important cultural phenomenon. We are particularly interested in critical approaches
to horror that explore why horror is such a common part of culture, why it resonates
with audiences so much, and what its popularity reveals about human cultures
generally. To that end, the series will cover a wide range of periods, movements,
and cultures that are pertinent to horror studies. We will gladly consider work on
individual key figures (e.g., directors, authors, showrunners, etc.), but the larger
aim is to publish work that engages with the place of horror within cultures. Given
this broad scope, we are interested in work that addresses a wide range of media,
including film, literature, television, comics, pulp magazines, video games, or music.
We are also interested in work that engages with the history of horror, including the
history of horror-related scholarship.

Titles in the Series

Dissecting Cannibal Holocaust by Nathan Wardinski
Disney Gothic: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse, edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell
and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Ethics of Horror: Spectral Alterity in Twenty-First Century Horror Film by Michael
J. Burke
Transnational Zombie Cinema, 2010 to 2020: Readings in a Mutating Tradition by
John R. Ziegler
Star Trek Discovery and the Female Gothic: Tell Fear No by Carey Millsap-Spears
Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Possible Futures, edited by Simon
Bacon
The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Simon Bacon
Grief in Contemporary Horror Cinema: Screening Loss, edited by Erica Joan
Dymond
Supranational Horrors: Italian and Spanish Horror Cinema since 1968, by Rui
Oliveira
The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in the Contemporary Popular
Imagination, edited by Simon Bacon
Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling,
edited by Natalie Neill
Disney Gothic
Dark Shadows in the
House of Mouse

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, 1980- editor. | Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, editor.
Title: Disney gothic : dark shadows in the house of mouse / edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell
and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock.
Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2024] | Series: Lexington books horror
studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024007817 (print) | LCCN 2024007818 (ebook) | ISBN
9781666907209 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666907216 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Walt Disney Productions. | Gothic fiction (Literary genre)--History and
criticism. | LCGFT: Film criticism.
Classification: LCC PN1999.W27 D573 2024 (print) | LCC PN1999.W27 (ebook) | DDC
809.3/8729--dc23/eng/20240312
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007817
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024007818

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Contents

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse xi
Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Part 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies 1

1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney 3
Murray Leeder
2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death 15
Terry Lindvall
3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion 33
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition
and the Disney Channel Original Movie 53
Jay Bamber
5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney’s Watcher in the
Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes 67
Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackson
6: The Game Is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher 85
Gwyneth Peaty

v
vi Contents

Part 2: Monsters and Magic 99

7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes 101
Kevin J. Wetmore
8: “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?”: Disney’s Medieval
Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame 115
J. S. Mackley
9: Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side: Magic, Cultural
Echoes, and the Gothic Trajectories of Difference in Disney’s The Princess
and the Frog 131
Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell
10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities and the
Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan 147
Antonio Sanna
11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” as
Ecogothic 163
Christy Tidwell

Part 3: Something Wicked 177

12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia
Fairyverse 179
Joan Ormrod
13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and Immoral in Disney’s
Tangled 195
Angelique Nairn
14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic
Excess of Ursula from The Little Mermaid 211
Simon Bacon
15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and
Excessive Desire in Cruella 225
Blair Speakman
Index 239
About the Contributors 243
List of Figures

Figure 0.1 Lampwick transforms into a donkey in Pinocchio (1940) xiii

Figure 0.2 The ghostly Inez in Disney’s Child of Glass (1978) xiv
Figure 2.1 A quartet of dancing skeletons frolic in Thomas Rowlandson’s
etchings on the frontispiece of William Combe’s witty The English Dance
of Death (1816) 18
Figure 2.2 The Skeleton Dance (Ub Iwerks, 1929) features the grinning
skull, an amalgam of horror and hilaritas 19
Figure 2.3 The Haunted House (Jack King, 1929) continually interrupts
the haunted Gothic site with wonderfully vulgar gags 22
Figure 2.4 Peacefully asleep after saying his prayers, Mickey is about to
enter a domestic nightmare in Mickey’s Nightmare (1932) 24
Figure 2.5 The devilish tyrant tosses a demonic snack to his Cerberus pet
in Hell’s Bells (1929) 26
Figure 2.6 The ghastly equation portends a nasty ending for Pluto in The
Mad Doctor (1935) 29
Figure 3.1 The comic portraits in the stretching room. Initially, only the
top half is visible. The bottom half comes into view as the elevator descends 37
Figures 3.2A–3.2B A comparison of Disneyland’s plantation facade with
the Magic Kingdom’s Gothic Revival facade 39–40
Figures 3.3A–3.3C Compare Manderley in the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock
movie version of Rebecca and Hill House in Robert Wise’s 1963 version

vii
viii List of Figures

of The Haunting of Hill House to the facade of the Magic Kingdom’s

Haunted Mansion 42–43
Figure 5.1 The hall of mirrors in Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods 75
Figure 5.2 Mr. Dark in Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes
showing his tattooed hands 78
Figure 6.1 A scene from the video game in Disney’s Stay Alive 88
Figure 7.1 Chernabog in Disney’s Fantasia 102
Figure 7.2 Meilin in red panda form in Disney’s Turning Red 106
Figure 7.3 Moana confronts Te Ka in Disney’s Moana 112
Figure 8.1 Quasimodo in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame 119
Figure 8.2 Esmeralda in the Flames in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame 123
Figure 9.1 Dr. Facilier in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog 139
Figures 10.1A–10.1B Mowgli and Tarzan from Disney’s The Jungle Book
and Tarzan 152–53
Figure 11.1 This sauropod and her babies, for instance, present a
sympathetic, pastoral vision of the dinosaurs—before T. rex appears 165
Figure 11.2 The “Augurs” chord spelled out: E-flat dominant seventh
with an F-flat-major triad 168
Figure 11.3 Ultimately, even the fiercest predators end as only skeletons 169
Figure 11.4 At the end of the “Rite of Spring,” only bones remain in a
desolate landscape 172
Figure 13.1 Gothel in her young form in Disney’s Tangled 199
Figure 14.1 The Evil Queen from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty 214
Figure 14.2 Ursula from The Little Mermaid showing her tentacles 219
Figure 15.1 Cruella di Vil from Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians 229
Figure 15.2 Actress Glenn Close as Cruella in Disney’s Cruella 232
Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Judith Lakamper at Lexington Books, not only for
commissioning the book in the first place but also for her patience, grace, and under-
standing as the project took a few unexpected twists and turns along the way. Infinite
appreciation goes to the contributors of the volume for their excellent chapters and
for their ongoing commitment to the project throughout.
For Lorna: Thanks go to my colleagues, friends, and family (and my husband
Rob, in particular), for their continued love and support, even during difficult times.
Thank you for indulging my obsession with Disney over the years. Most of all, my
most heartfelt gratitude goes to my brilliant coeditor Jeffrey, for his unwavering dedi-
cation, compassion, and hard work, without which this wonderful project would
never have been brought to completion.

ix
Introduction
Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse
Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

If there is an opposite to the Gothic, it might seem—at least on the face of it—to
be the Disney brand. After all, the Gothic, as famously defined by Fred Botting, is
the literature of transgression (1996, 6–13). Perceived as “morally dubious” since the
eighteenth century (Mulvey-Roberts, xviii), the Gothic speaks to the dark side of
the human experience: “erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected
with contemporary fears” (Bloom, 2). Disney, in contrast, has worked assiduously
to cultivate the opposite impression. Associated since its early twentieth-century
beginnings with “family fun, childhood” and “naïve sentimentality” (Wills, 4), the
Walt Disney Company, now a multinational entertainment conglomerate, has made
its name synonymous with “family friendly” fare “imparting conservative principles”
and insisting on “absolute morality” (Wills, 4). Although it has received its fair share
of criticism over the years for things such as its sanitized approach to history and its
stereotyped representations of racial minorities (where they were represented at all;
see Telotte 2004), few would think of Disney as transgressive, morbid, or perverse.
Indeed, the official tagline for Disneyland is the “Happiest Place on Earth”. And yet,
where there is light, there are invariably shadows.
As the contributions to this volume will delineate, Gothic elements are present
throughout Disney’s productions—its films, television programs, theme parks, and
so on—and one need not look too hard to find them. Indeed, it may well be that
the Gothic serves as the unacknowledged motor of the Disney machine, turning the
wheels of narrative and eliciting affective engagement by giving us villains, ghosts,
and monsters to threaten the safety and well-being of Disney princesses and other
protagonists. Things invariably wrap up favorably but, along the way, “Disney mov-
ies,” says Wills, have introduced children to such adult themes as melancholia, loss,
violence, and death” (Wills, 106)—and, to Wills’s list, we could add transgression,
perversion, violence, and even eroticism. How else can one describe Cruella de Vil’s

xi
xii Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

desire to make a coat out of Dalmatian fur in One Hundred and One Dalmatians
(Wolfgang Reitherman, et al. 1961) or Frollo’s advances on Esmeralda in The
Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise 1996)?
For some, such as the editors of this volume and its contributors, it is the Gothic
part that sticks:

LORNA: While my love for villains remained well-established—and truly does to

this day—this does not mean that I did not experience fear in witnessing Disney’s
re-elaborations of the Gothic. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this manifested most intensely
when Disney experimented with body horror, as seen perhaps most aptly in Pinocchio
(1940).

The Pleasure Island sequence between Pinocchio himself and Lampwick is perhaps
one of the most haunting within the whole Disney animated repertoire. It comes
after a large group of naughty boys has been tempted to the Island by the mysterious
Coachman, and allowed to indulge in a number of questionable behaviors, includ-
ing drinking alcohol and smoking cigars. After much debauchery, Pinocchio and
Lampwick find themselves alone in a pub, playing pool. Suddenly, Lampwick’s body
begins to change. As a tail and animal ears emerge, the shocked Pinocchio—and
arguably, the audience—can only watch frightened and powerless, as Lampwick’s
shape transmutes into that of a donkey. Here, shadows on a wall are used cleverly, as
we see Lampwick’s hands dramatically transform into hooves, as the dramatic score
accentuates the severity of what is happening. Lampwick’s scared and confused cries
for help are truly frightening, as the faculty of speech is quickly removed and he
begins to bray and kick in full donkey form.
As Pinocchio escapes the Island, just as his own bodily transformation is starting,
we quickly learn that the Coachman takes the naughty boys to the Island and, after
the transformation has occurred, sells the little donkeys off for profit. The haunt-
ing continues here, as (in one final look of the Island) the Coachman mocks a little
donkey who can still talk, as the defenseless boy cries for his mummy.
The final Pleasure Island sequence is scary precisely because it uncovers several
aspects of the fear experience, making effective use of horror, excess, uncertainty, and
helplessness, which build the foundations of Disney Gothic in its most frightening
incarnations.

JEFFREY: For me, it was the ghosts. It was in the first place a made-for-TV film called
Child of Glass that aired on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1978. It concerns the
ghost of a little Creole girl, Inez, who manifests to a young boy, Alexander, living on
a Louisiana plantation. Over the course of the film, we learn that Inez was murdered
(and her little dog, too) by her uncle, a notorious pirate, after she refused to reveal to
him the location of the family fortune. Alexander must assist her in solving a riddle
before Halloween or she will be doomed forever to relive her murder every night.
Along the way, Alexander falls down a well (how Inez was murdered) and has his life
threatened by a disgruntled handyman. All of this is well and good, but it was the
 Introduction xiii

Figure 0.1. Lampwick transforms into a Donkey in Pinocchio (1940)

glowing specter of Inez’s ghost that transfixed me—and the terrible burden she laid
on a boy about my age.
In the second place, and at almost the exact same time in my life, there was the mesmer-
izing spectacle of Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction in Orlando (the subject of
my chapter in this volume). From the comic tombstones one passes in the queue to
get in to the hitchhiking ghosts that appear in one’s “doombuggy” as the ride ends, I
was captivated by the mock-Gothic aspects of the ride—its oxymoronic lighthearted
morbidity—and, given the attraction’s enduring popularity, I’m far from alone in this.

Body horror, haunted houses, villains, and children in danger. As our personal re-
flections suggest, Disney, it turns out, far from being the opposite of the Gothic, is
rather very much a vehicle for its contemporary dissemination, cannily packaged as
family-friendly fare and obscured by Disney’s reputation for “entertainment that is
safe, wholesome, and entertaining” (Wasko 2001, 2). It is this contradiction—the
dark shadows not just coexisting with but in fact undergirding a fantasyland where
“the sun never sets”—that is at the heart of this collection, the first of its kind to
explore the critical intersection of Disney and Gothic horror. The aim of the volume
is to uncover how the veneer of happy endings and fun experiences that the world of
Disney is known for hides the presence of a dark and insidious side entangled with
fascinations over villainy and wrongdoings and populated with echoes of fear and
terror.
xiv Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

Figure 0.2 The ghostly Inez in Disney’s Child of Glass (1978)

That Disney, a conglomerate that has staked its claim on “wholesome” family
entertainment, is in fact deeply invested in the Gothic raises fascinating questions
about the appeal, marketing, and consumption of Gothic horror by adults and
particularly by children, who historically have been Disney’s primary audience—an
appeal to which, as reflected upon above, the editors of this volume can attest. The
framework of Gothic horror allows exploration of not only how Disney constructs
its often-dubious dichotomies of “good vs evil,” but also how those representa-
tions—while ostensibly placed in fictional contexts—are able to reflect real-life
preoccupations and cultural anxieties of their sociocultural contexts and historical
eras. As such, attentiveness to the dark side of Disney helps clarify the ways through
which Disney media properties construct and reinforce conceptions of normalcy and
deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity
categories.
For this first foray into the dark side of Disney, our intention is to focus on clas-
sic or especially recognizable media properties marketed under the Disney imprint,
with some consideration as well of Pixar films. More recent additions to Disney’s
portfolio, such as the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, will be reserved for a future
date. Our approach here will be both multidisciplinary and transmedial, as con-
tributors adopt a variety of different and interdisciplinary approaches to everything
from Disney’s early animation and theme park rides to Disney television and con-
temporary cinematic remakes. The overarching focus, however, will remain on the
significance of Disney’s use of the conventions and iconographies of Gothic horror
in its various forms of entertainment.
 Introduction xv

The included chapters have been organized loosely into three at times overlap-
ping categories. Part 1, “Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies,” addresses early
deployments of Gothic themes and motifs in Disney film and television, as well as
its theme parks, with an emphasis on how Disney packages the Gothic in ways that
defuse its terrors. Murry Leeder’s “Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney”
starts things off with a focus, as per his title, on skeletons, which in Disney date back
to the very first Silly Symphonies and carry all the way through to recent films such
as Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017). As Leeder explains, the skeleton in Disney’s works has
helped shape the nature of “spookiness” in contemporary culture via an oxymoronic
lighthearted memento mori. Leeder’s essay is followed by Terry Lindvall’s “Black
and White and Gothic: Disney’s Haunted Imagination in the Early Films of Mickey
Mouse,” which expands the consideration of early Gothic motifs in Disney from a
focus on skeletons to a more general consideration of ghosts, cemeteries, haunted
houses, and other recognizable Gothic tropes. They are surprisingly common in early
Disney animation, and, as Lindvall explains, they play an important role in generat-
ing audience affect. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, in his “Hidden Histories: The Many
Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion,” shifts the focus from early Disney animation
to the haunted house near the heart of the Disney theme parks, which Weinstock
reads as a pastiche of Gothic devices that, taken together, are emblematic of Disney’s
approach to the past: a comic facade obscuring actual history.
These chapters are then followed by three more that each address twentieth-century
flirtations by Disney with actual Gothic horror. Jay Bamber’s contribution,
“Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the
Disney Channel Original Movie,” moves us forward into the twentieth century
through a consideration of the Disney Channel’s made-for-TV movies that ap-
propriate and redeploy familiar Gothic devices in new contexts to address the
anxieties of late-twentieth-century children. In “Sinister Surveillance: Threatened
Youth in Disney’s Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes,” Carl
Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackson then explore Disney’s contributions to the
Gothic genre in these two 1980s releases, situating them in relation to Disney’s at-
tempts to retain market share in a shifting cinematic marketplace. The final essay in
this section, Gwyneth Peaty’s “The Game Is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the
Disney Slasher,” examines Disney’s only slasher film, Stay Alive (William Brent Bell)
from 2006, as a curious exploration of contemporary concerns regarding our abilities
to manage increasingly sophisticated technologies.
Part 2, “Monsters and Magic,” groups together five essays exploring Gothic as-
pects of Disney’s fantasy films. Leading off this section with a focus on monsters,
Kevin Wetmore argues in his “Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses of
Monsters and Heroes” that Disney monsters, whether classic or modern, are there to
be overcome on the path toward “restoration” and reconciliation. The types of mon-
sters change, but their functions within Disney films do not. J. S. Mackley’s “The
Monstrous in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame” takes Wetmore’s general thesis
concerning monsters in Disney films as obstacles and shows us how this plays out
xvi Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

in Hunchback with attention both to protagonist Quasimodo’s physical abnormality

and antagonist Frollo’s nefarious activity. Also with a focus on monstrous bodies, but
hopping us toward the magic side of the equation, Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna
Piatti-Farnell focus on the character of Dr. Facilier in “Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends
on the Other Side: Magic and the Gothic Trajectories of Difference in Disney’s The
Princess and the Frog.” Coded as queer and racially ambiguous, Facilier in Johnson-
Hunt and Piatti-Farnell’s estimation, is patterned off of a wider narrative of racialized
and sexualized Gothic villainy. Tackling monstrosity from a different perspective,
Antonio Sanna in “The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminality, and the
Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan” situates Mowgli and Tarzan within
the Gothicized tradition of tales of feral children. Their liminality as part human and
part animal foregrounds according to Sanna an inimical relationship between nature
and civilization that is at the heart of the conflict in these films. Closing out this
section is Christy Tidwell’s “Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of
Spring’ as Ecogothic.” Here, she examines how the film uses dinosaurs to contextual-
ize human life and hint at the possibility of future human extinction.
The final section of this collection, “Something Wicked,” focuses squarely on a
topic already touched upon lightly by some of the other inclusions: villains and the
nature of evil. Joan Ormrod starts things off with a consideration of Maleficent in
Disney’s original Sleeping Beauty, as well as in the two live-action versions starring
Angelina Jolie, Maleficient (2014) and Maleficient: Mistress of Evil (2019). Situating
the latter two narratives within the context of “post-truth,” Ormrod explores how
the different perspectives offered on this Disney antagonist complicate the idea of
a singular truth. Shifting our attention from Maleficent to the character Gothel
in Tangled, Anqelique Nairn in “Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and
Immoral in Disney’s Tangled” explores how Gothel’s Gothic villainy functions as
a negative example for viewers, thereby shaping understandings for children of
moral and immoral behavior. Simon Bacon’s “The Vampire Queen of the Disney
Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little Mermaid” and Blair
Speakman’s “Gorgeous, Vicious and a ‘Little Bit Mad’: Queer Gothic and Excessive
Desire in Cruella” adopt a similar tack, considering how Disney encodes messages
about moral and proper behavior through representations of immoral and abnormal
antagonists. Ursula in The Little Mermaid, explains Bacon, draws on the history of
the cinematic vamp while the sadistic Cruella de Vil links queerness with cruelty.
This final section of the collection in particular makes clear the ideological stakes
present in Disney’s appropriation and redeployment of Gothic themes and tropes be-
cause, as “family friendly fare” marketed to children, Disney properties are invested
in conveying moral messages. Historically, such messages have been, as commenta-
tors such as Janet Wasko and Annalee R. Ward have appreciated, conservative reaf-
firmations of a patriarchal white, cis, able-bodied norm—and Disney has with much
justification been criticized for its historical exclusion or othering of minorities and
its sanitizations of history (see Wasko 2001 and Ward 2002). Its attempts to redress
these omissions and representations have then elicited criticism from the ideological
 Introduction xvii

right over its more progressive messages or “wokeness.” What both sides correctly
appreciate is that media properties come freighted with meanings for viewers to de-
code, and Disney’s centrality to global children’s culture gives them an outsized role
in the process of childhood socialization.
What also needs to be borne in mind, however, is that media messages are not
always decoded in uniform or intended ways and Gothic narratives are often exem-
plary in this respect because, while they may end up happily ever after, their appeal
may in fact inhere in the messy middles and their even messier villains. As our
earlier personal reflections attest, what may command attention and elicit delight
even from young consumers of Disney media are precisely the Gothic elements that
are presumably meant to be disturbing. In this respect, the Gothic elements that,
as the contributions to this volume attest, are abundantly present in Disney media
may serve as training wheels, so to speak, for young consumers to move on to more
adult Gothic media. Disney’s Gothic, therefore, is not just an interesting—and
under-acknowledged—aspect of Disney’s output, but arguably a crucial aspect of
contemporary Gothic horror in general. Disney’s dark shadows in the end stretch a
long, long way.

REFERENCES

Bloom, Clive, ed. 2007. Gothic Horror: A Guide for Students and Readers. Second Edition.
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. New York: Routledge.
Mulvey-Roberts, Marie, ed. 2009. The Handbook of the Gothic. Second edition. New
York: New York University Press.
Telotte, J. P. 2004. Disney TV. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Ward, Annalee R. 2002. Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Film.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Wasko, Janet. 2001. Understanding Disney. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Wills, John. 2017. Disney Culture. Camden, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Part 1
DARK BEGINNINGS AND
GOTHIC TECHNOLOGIES
1
Silly Spookiness
The Skeletons of Early Disney
Murray Leeder

This essay will discuss three early Disney animated shorts, The Skeleton Dance (Ub
Iwerks, 1928), The Haunted House (Walt Disney, 1929), and The Mad Doctor (David
Hand, 1933), to show the roots of Disney’s affiliation with things Gothic and, in
particular, the animated (in several senses) skeleton. All of these three shorts feature
stock Gothic locales (graveyards, haunted houses, ruined castles, laboratories), char-
acter types, and iconographies filtered through cartoon whimsy, and all prominently
feature skeletons—perhaps the perfect monstrous archetype to embody the particu-
lar comically spooky tone that marks most of Disney’s Gothic ventures. I will spend
the most space on The Skeleton Dance, which is probably second in significance only
to Steamboat Willie (Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, 1928) in terms of early Disney
shorts; it was the first entry in the Silly Symphonies series, of which there were ulti-
mately seventy-five over the course of a decade, and the first film where “the image
was entirely made to match a pre-recorded soundtrack” (Carels 2012, 29).
To be sure, the presence of the Gothic in early animation is not unique to
Disney: Gothic, supernatural, and horror scenarios are commonplace throughout
early animation and frequently include skeletons alongside ghosts, devils, mad
scientists, rampaging gorillas, and the like.1 The first lengthy series built around an
animated character, Colonel Heeza Liar, had multiple spooky scenarios as signaled
by their titles: Colonel Heeza Liar, Ghost Breaker (1915), Colonel Heeza Liar in the
Haunted House (1915), and Colonel Heeza Liar and the Ghost (1923). In the 1920s
and 1930s, characters like KoKo the Clown, Betty Boop, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit,
Flip the Frog, Piggy, Bosco, and Mickey Mouse all encountered supernatural sce-
narios to comic and lightly scary effect. The stock spooky scenario of the haunted

3
4 Murray Leeder

hotel seen in trick films like Georges Méliès’s L’auberge ensorcelée (The Bewitched Inn,
1897), Uncle Josh in a Spooky Hotel (1900) by Edwin S. Porter, La maison hantée
(The Ghost House, 1906) by Segundo de Chomón, and The Haunted Hotel (1907) by
J. Stuart Blackton proved especially adaptable to animation; in fact, Blackton’s film
contained extensive stop-motion animation. Just a year before The Skeleton Dance,
Fleischer’s elaborate and reflexive KoKo’s Haunted House (1928) practically filled the
screen with skeletons. At one point, KoKo stands before a funhouse mirror, where his
image turns into that of a skeleton. KoKo’s body collapses, only for the skeleton to
step out from the mirror and don KoKo’s boneless body like a costume. It is perhaps
a more innovative and mind-boggling scenario than anything in The Skeleton Dance.
Nonetheless, The Skeleton Dance has a particular historical importance with regard
to the foundation of the Disney brand (especially in its Gothic affinities), and the
integration of music and animation around the figure of the skeleton. Its significance
echoes through to later properties like The Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick,
1993) and Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017) which, however differently, invoke the simulta-
neous friendliness and spookiness of the animate, animated skeleton.

SPOOKY, SCARY SKELETONS

The skeleton is possibly the most undervalued and understudied of the gallery of
horror monsters (for exceptions, see Westfahl 2005, Wing 2014, and Leeder 2022).
It is a ubiquitous part of the iconography of Halloween but usually takes its place
in the background. Wikipedia has separate articles for “Skeleton” and for “Skeleton
(undead),” the latter denoting the animated, walking, and sometimes dancing be-
ing that clanks its way all through popular culture, often representing a suitable foe
for low-level characters in Dungeons & Dragons and comparable games. That is
the paradox of the skeleton: it is both the subject of objective reality that we all lug
around inside our bodies and which will be all that remains of us in the end, and
the grinning, rattling monster. In perhaps the ultimate reflection on the disjunc-
ture between the skeleton as anatomy and the skeleton as monstrous figure, in Ray
Bradbury’s story “Skeleton” (1945), the protagonist has developed a complex about
his body containing such a vile thing: “Skeletons are horrors, they clink and tinkle
and rattle in old castles, hung form oaken beams, making long, indolently rustling
pendulums on the wind” (Bradbury 1945, 34).
But not all invocations of the skeleton are so grim; the various traditions of the
memento mori often use skeletons as reminders to be cheerful because of the cer-
tainty of death. And the most obvious cinematic examples of monstrous skeletons
examples are high fantasy films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan H. Juran,
1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffery, 1963), where they are threaten-
ing but scarcely terrifying expressions of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion wizardry.
When they appear in horror films, skeletons often mark the boundary of horror and
fantasy (perhaps most obviously in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors
 Silly Spookiness 5

[Chuck Russell, 1987], Army of Darkness [Sam Raimi, 1992] and A Nightmare Before
Christmas). Nonetheless, horror’s most memorable skeletons may be the nonambula-
tory ones in in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Poltergeist (Toby Hooper, 1982).
If the skeleton is the inexorable “fate that awaits us all!”—a phrase that would ac-
company the image of a skeleton in the Phantasmagoria (Barnouw 1982, 19)—it
is also seldom represented as truly terrifying, perhaps because it is too clean, fragile,
and non-abject.
One interesting locus of the skeleton’s cultural profile is the children’s novelty song
“Spooky Scary Skeletons,” recorded by Andrew Gold in 1996 and more recently in-
spiring a TikTok craze (Dickson 2019). The song’s lyrics actually address the fact that
skeletons are “so misunderstood” and only “want to socialize,” but are still dangerous
in the impact they make. They will “smile and scrabble slowly by / And drive you so
insane.” Another couplet states:

Spirits supernatural are shy, what’s all the fuss?

But bags of bones seem so unsafe, it’s semi-serious.

It is a remarkably good articulation of the delicate balance between scariness

and silliness inherent to the spooky, and also resembles the explicitly mock-scary
but actually social role played by the “Grim Grinning Ghosts” in Disneyland’s The
Haunted Mansion.

DANCE, SKELETON, DANCE

Inevitably, there is a YouTube video of “Spooky Scary Skeletons” playing over an edit
of Disney’s The Skeleton Dance (Timeless Music). The Skeleton Dance is a product of
the end of what Donald Crafton (2005) calls Disney’s “artisan period”:

The studio was organized as a family business with Walt and Roy Disney as proprietors
and animator Ub Iwerks and music arranger Carl Stalling as limited partners. Disney’s
personal involvement was divided between establishing a viable film business and super-
vising the films that Iwerks animated. While competition and product differentiation
were always on Disney’s agenda, the precarious financial status of the studio required
constant vigilance. (Crafton 2005, 152)

In addition to crediting the Cinephone recording system, the title card for The
Skeleton Dance uses his name twice, both as “Disney Cartoons” and as “A Walt
Disney Comic.” It also names his two critical collaborators: “Drawn by Ub Iwerks”
and “Music by Carl W. Stalling.” Stalling, who wrote all the music except for an
excerpt from Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, claimed to have conceived of the film’s
premise:
6 Murray Leeder

The Skeleton Dance goes way back to my kid days. When I was eight or ten years old,
I saw an ad in The American Boy magazine of a dancing skeleton, and I got my dad to
give me a quarter so I could send for it. It turned out to be a pasteboard cut-out of a
loose-jointed skeleton, slung over a six-foot cord under the arm pits. It would “dance”
when kids pulled and jerked at each end of the string. (Barrier 2002, 40)

He also noted that “ever since I was a kid I had wanted to see real skeletons
dancing and had always enjoyed skeleton-dancing acts in vaudeville. As kids, we all
like spooky pictures and stories, I think” (Barrier 2002, 41). Stalling clearly locates
The Skeleton Dance within a tradition of skeleton media and even treats it as its
apotheosis.
The Skeleton Dance belongs to the regime of what’s come to be called “rubber hose
animation,” with its flowing curves, lack of articulation and infinite stretchiness.
This style would fall out of favor in the mid-1930s in favor of the more realistic
“squash and stretch” animation. Rubber hose animation famously proved of special
interest to Sergei Eisenstein, who coined the term “plasmaticity” inspired by his
admiration for Disney. Eisenstein described plasmaticity in terms of “a rejection of
once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification” (Eisenstein 1986, 21). It
seems especially ironic to locate freedom from ossification in a skeleton, but perhaps
appropriate, since the skeleton has long been a site of ambiguity between animation
and inanimation, and between substance and ghostliness.2 Though they share this
protean quality, the skeletons are somewhat more material and embodied than the
Disney ghosts such as would be introduced in Lonesome Ghosts (Burt Gillett, 1937),
and are also somewhat less friendly.
In my book The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017), I
track centuries worth of danse macabre imagery as it becomes relevant to the figure
of the skeleton in the trick films of early cinema, especially those of Georges Méliès
(see esp. 145–49), but did not pay much particular attention to animation in itself,
despite mentioning several animated films. In brief, the danse macabre traces back
to the Middle Ages, a period when skeletons were a common sight since many cities
maintained public ossuaries. Death began to be visualized as a walking skeleton, as in
Holbein’s La danse macabre (1523–1526) and the Death card of the Tarot deck. The
danse macabre slowly shifted away from the skeleton being a gloomy figure of death’s
inexorability toward a reminder of the necessity of merriment in the face of death.
Aesthetic representations of skeletons—often dancing, lively, merry skeletons—
became important to the media of projected light that form the lengthy prehistory
of cinema.3 Norm M. Elcott goes so far as to call the skeleton “the ur-motif of the
projected moving image” (Elcott 2016, 81). In 1659, Christiaan Huygens prepared
ten images of a dancing skeleton as moving slides for the magic lantern: “para-
doxically, the first illuminated artificial representation of life was a representation
of death” (Mannoni 2000, 40). Skeletons figure strongly in other practices like the
Phantasmagoria (invented in the 1790s in France) and Pepper’s Ghost (premiering
in 1862 in London), in the images projected by new optical technologies like the
phenakistiscope, choreutoscope, and zoopraxinoscope, and in the stage magic of the
 Silly Spookiness 7

time. It is not surprising, then, that the nascent cinema of the 1890s would follow
suit in displaying skeletons, as in Méliès’s debut trick film Escamotage d’une dame
chez Robert-Houdin or The Vanishing Lady (1896). As moving images were both old
and new, so was the skeleton—as old as the danse macabre and as new as the sensa-
tional discovery of X-rays in 1895. Méliès was not alone in taking an interest in the
skeleton. In fact, the Lumière brothers, so often rhetorically positioned in opposition
to Méliès as the founders of a realist tradition, made a film called Le squelette joyeux
(1898). This experimental stop-motion short shows a skeleton crudely dancing, col-
lapsing, its limbs coming off and moving about on their own, its skull bouncing off,
and so on, as well as an abundance of cancan kicks. Though it is of course completely
silent, musicality is suggested through the skeleton’s ungraceful yet dance-like move-
ments, presaging the intricate choreography of The Skeleton Dance.
Running alongside and intersecting with the danse macabre’s presence in pro-
jected media is a tradition in music. The Romantic-era interests in both medieval-
ism and the supernatural unsurprisingly brought attention to the danse macabre.
Numerous musical settings resulted, including Franz Liszt’s Totentanz (1849),
Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death (1875–1877), and Camille Saint-
Saëns’s Danse macabre (1874).4 In Saint-Saëns, both in Danse macabre and Fossils
from The Carnival of the Animals, xylophones represent the clanking of bones; they
just serve as a sort of primordial “Mickey Mousing,” the Disney-derived term that
would come to describe the use of musical cues to accompany character move-
ments on-screen (Jacobs 2019, 58).5 Saint-Saëns was inspired by Henri Cazalis’s
poem “Égalité-Fraternité,” in which a group of skeletons dance in a graveyard to
the Devil’s violin. The Skeleton Dance keeps the scenario minus the Devil (he would
have to wait for the fourth Silly Symphony, Hell’s Bells [Ub Iwerks, 1929]). The
Skeleton Dance merges the musical and visual strains of the danse macabre seam-
lessly. Music is not only heard from The Skeleton Dance but is produced within its
diegesis. In the absence of traditional musical instruments, the skeletons make music
using each other’s bodies (indeed, this signals the musical transition from Stalling’s
original foxtrot into Grieg’s “March of the Dwarfs” or “March of the Trolls”) and
the unfortunate cat whose tail get played as a violin; as with the goat, duck, cow,
pigs, and cat in Steamboat Willie, animals are transformed into organic music instru-
ments. Echoing Saint-Saëns, xylophones, slide whistles, and maracas accompany the
skeleton’s movements.
As Stalling notes, The Skeleton Dance does not have a story so much as a situation
that permits a series of gags (Barrier 41). It takes place in a graveyard, the location
that Eric Parisot refers to as the Gothic’s “defining imaginative locale” (Parisot 245),
and provides a concise primer on stock Gothic visual motifs. After a church bell
chimes for midnight, under the light of a full moon, a series of chalk-white skeletons
come to life, dance merrily, and then race to return to their graves at the rooster’s
call (so hurriedly that a pair of bony feet almost gets left behind). But this descrip-
tion does no justice to it all. Crafton notes that like many other Disney shorts of
the artisan period, it has a “carnivalesque opening shot [that] presents a topsy-turvy
8 Murray Leeder

version of the ordinary world. . . . Lightning strokes cut across the black screen and
two monstrous eyes over-fill the frame. As the ‘camera’ ‘tracks’ back, the eyes are
revealed to be an owl’s. Moving further back, we see the bird silhouetted against the
moon in a highly decorative vignette” (Crafton 2005, 171)—in short, a succinct
primer on spooky Gothic motifs.
The dancing skeletons are extremely protean, even by the standards of rubber hose
animation. Instead of their bones being rigid and static, they are infinitely stretchable
and expandable. And like most of the animated skeletons before them, they can de-
tach their limbs and re-form without issue; in fact, they seem completely impervious
to pain and have no trouble even when their bones are snatched away. Individual
bones can function independently of their bodies. The skeletons are playful, ludic
figures who seem to be thoroughly enjoying their respite from the tomb. Engaging
in childlike leisure, they turn each other into pogo sticks and dance together in a
ring-around-the-rosy-like pattern. The skeletons all look identical to each other and
frequently echo each other’s movements perfectly in their dances. This synchrony
goes comically wrong at the end, however. Startled by the rooster’s call, they all run
into the same spot and collide, causing them to merge with each other to become
a huge, four-skulled, sixteen-limbed amalgam in their haste to return to the grave
The short’s overall vibe is theatrical, exhibitionistic, and performative; Crafton
refers to it as “[retaining] the feel of a vaudeville dance performance” (Crafton
2005, 162). Spectatorship is emphasized: The cats and the owl initially watch and
react to the skeletons, but their gazes quickly dissolve into that of the audience. The
staging is frequently proscenium style and implies a photographic flatness, with the
skeletons lined up side by side and marching from left to right or from right to left,
as if a perfectly choreographed dance line. This is however not always true. The
first skeleton we see, after scaring away two cats, looks both right and left and then
lowers into a pose that seems to cause many of its chalk-white bones to settle into a
grayer coloration except for its skull and two arms. For a second, it looks exactly like
a skull and crossbones, a memento mori symbol long before it was associated with
piracy and hazard labeling. Perched atop a tombstone directly at center frame in a
largely symmetrical composition, seems to breach diegetic closure and stare directly
at the audience. Then it launches itself forward along the photographic Z-axis, its
mouth reaching the “camera” and traveling through its entire skeletal body. Carels
links this moment to The Big Swallow (1901) by James Williamson, in which a man
is playfully implied to eat the camera whole (Carels 2012, 30–31). In The Skeleton
Dance, this 3D-like moment of skeleton eruption is followed by what is implied to
be a 180-degree reverse angle that shows the skeleton collapsing onto the ground,
quickly standing, and then starting the titular dance. Z-axis action recurs later in
the short when one of the skeletons, teeth chattering in rhythm to the music, walks
toward and away from the “camera.” The closer it gets, the more detailed the anima-
tion becomes, so perhaps a performance of another sort is implied: virtuosity on the
part of Iwerks.
 Silly Spookiness 9

Animation and anthropomorphism are not only on display in The Skeleton Dance
but are explicit themes. The skeletons come to life—apparently not through anyone’s
agency but the film’s—but the world they occupy is also anthropomorphized, with
trees and church bells also displaying personalities and motivations. There is a besti-
ary of living (animated) animals, including cats, bats, a dog, a spider, an owl, and a
rooster, but they do not seem that much more “alive” than the skeletons themselves.
The strangeness and monstrosity of the skeletons is balanced by their expressiveness,
conveyed by both their facial features (only slightly compromised by their lack of
skin) and in their movements, or through animated conventions like a series of wa-
vering lines appearing around one nervous skeleton.
It is also important to note that the fearful figures in The Skeleton Dance are them-
selves subject to fear. The first image is of an owl that looks imposing but then reacts
in fear when a tree taps it on its shoulder. Two black cats fight on top of gravestones
only to both be scared by the arrival of the first skeleton. Later, one of the skeletons
is unnerved by the sound of the owl and reacts petulantly by throwing its skull at it.
All four of the skeletons react with panic at the rising of the sun.
All of the above combine to make The Skeleton Dance a quintessential cinematic
expression of the animated Gothic. The same pioneering integration of move-
ment and music and the construction a coherent animated world that runs on
rules of its own. Nicholas Sammond notes that early animation “has a tradition of
self-referentiality, of calling into question . . . who has the right to be alive” (LSA).
And, in The Skeleton Dance, the dead are at least as lively as the living.

MICKEY AMONG THE SKELETONS

The skeletons do not reappear in the Silly Symphonies series, though some of the
others have Gothic elements (e.g., Hell’s Bells, Egyptian Melodies [Wilfred Jackson,
1931], and Babes in the Woods [Burt Gillett, 1932]). But the skeletons themselves
make two returns in the subsequent years in Mickey Mouse cartoons. Both are more
narrative than The Skeleton Dance and both probably more frightening. The Haunted
House (1929), which reuses some of the animation from The Skeleton Dance, bor-
rows the scenario of the haunted hotel films from early cinema, showing Mickey
Mouse taking refuge in the decrepit title structure during a storm. Quite in contrast
to The Skeleton Dance, it goes several minutes without music, with only sound ef-
fects and the odd vocalization, until a robed skeleton commands Mickey to play
an organ. Then the skeletons (at least eight) begin dancing to his accompaniment,
some using their bones for percussion. Most of the gags depend once again on the
unexpected and impossible transformation of objects into musical instruments, as
when one skeleton plays a radiator as an accordion and another plays its own ribs as
a washboard bass. The bodily cohesion of the skeletons is again played with, as when
a wind blows most their bones away but the feet remain dancing. And once again,
10 Murray Leeder

Gothic-coded animals (bats and spiders) help set the scene before the skeletons take
center stage.
At the end of The Haunted House, Mickey tries to make a break for it but finds
there are skeletons everywhere. Doorknobs transform into them; a barrel shatters
and transforms into four of them. Interestingly, two different gags are vaguely scato-
logical: Mickey wakes two skeletons lying in a bed that has a chamber pot moved
by a cartoon hand underneath it, and at the very end he tries to take refuge in an
outhouse only to be chased away by an irate skeleton. The joke seems to be that
skeletons ought not to have any bodily functions to attend to.
In 1933’s The Mad Doctor, far more narrative than either of its predecessors,
Mickey is woken during a thunderstorm to find his dog Pluto being abducted by
a shadowy figure. He follows him to a twisted island laboratory built on an island
shaped like a skull, run by Dr. XXX. The doctor has a thick Central European accent
and plans to switch Pluto’s brain with that of a chicken. Again, a lot of the humor is
derived from deploying Mickey in this stock Gothic locale and comically terrorizing
him, including frequently having him interact with skeletons. We see the skeletons
before he does and watch them manipulating the environment to scare him, al-
though sometimes he is comically oblivious to their presence, as when one blows out
his candle without him realizing it and when one tries to snatch him only for Mickey
to walk away at the last moment. The short crosscuts between Dr. XXX planning
to dissect Pluto and Mickey tangling, sometimes literally, with a range of skeletons
(including a giant skeleton spider), before ending up on a dissection table himself.
The Pluto line of action also foregrounds the skeleton, since Dr. XXX has a fluoro-
scope that reveals Pluto’s bones. When the doctor reveals his hideous plan, Pluto’s
heart literally migrates into his throat, and subsequently collapses to the bottom of
his body, taking all of his ribs with it. As in The Skeleton Dance, the plasmaticity of
humanlike skeletal bodies is mirrored by the plasmaticity of animal ones.
However, this all turns out to be Mickey’s nightmare, and the film ends with Pluto
lovingly licking his face. The Mad Doctor is wall-to-wall music but, in contrast with
both The Skeleton Dance and The Haunted House, none of it has a diegetic compo-
nent beyond the persistent Mickey Mousing. Throughout these three shorts, the
skeletons become less playful and more threatening, a sort of reverse Disneyfication;
nonetheless the animation occasionally humanizes the skeletons, allowing them to
register disappointment when a plan to nab Mickey goes awry.
Though they would go away for a time, skeletons would prove to have a future
with Disney, perhaps most notably in the form of Pirates of the Caribbean—the
ride was introduced in 1967, the film series in 2003—and The Nightmare Before
Christmas. The latter film was produced by Disney but released through its adult
distribution arm, Touchstone Pictures; it has subsequently been more fully incor-
porated into the Disney fold. The original dancing skeletons have also followed
Mickey into other media. They have made cameos on the TV shows House of Mouse
(2001–2003), Mickey Mouse (2013–2019), and The Wonderful World of Mickey
Mouse (2019–). In video games, they appear in Sega’s Mickey Mouse: The Timeless
 Silly Spookiness 11

Adventures of Mickey Mouse (1994), Epic Mickey (2010), and Epic Mickey 2: The
Power of Two (2011), the latter two of which feature levels themed after The Skeleton
Dance and The Mad Doctor. These games, which involve extravagant reflexive play
with the history of Disney, evoke the company’s earlier history to present a more
mischievous and engaging Mickey than the edgeless corporate icon he had become
(Barnes 2009), and drawing on the spookiness of early Disney is part of that process.6

FINAL THOUGHTS: SKELETON TIME

It is striking (no pun intended) that one image common to The Skeleton Dance,
The Haunted House, and The Mad Doctor is a clock—in each case, a cartoony,
plasmastic clock. At a minimum, they clarify the nocturnal setting. In The Haunted
House, for instance, a grandfather clock in the eponymous domicile reads 3 a.m.,
and once Mickey begins to play the organ, it sways from side to side in the same
joyous rhythms as the jubilant skeletons. In The Mad Doctor, Mickey stumbles onto
a skeleton cuckoo clock the pendulum of which is a swaying, chattering skull. The
camera “tilts” up to show the face of the clock where, in a visual pun, skeletal hands
mark out, once again, 3 in the morning. Out comes a skeletal cuckoo that chirps
three times and disappears. It is perhaps a nightmare mirror of the static alarm clock
that sits on Mickey’s bedside table at the short’s beginning and end, which shows
9 a.m. once the dream ends (morning also signaled by streaming sunlight and a
buzzing fly).
The Skeleton Dance has an especially curious relationship to time. Less than a
minute into The Skeleton Dance, we see the clock bell in a rural church chime for
midnight; several minutes later, the sun rises. The duration of the short encompassed
most of a night, despite the absence of the conventional cinematic devices to signify
temporal elision (like dissolves). It implies that what we have witnessed is a sort of
“skeleton time” that elapses differently for the participants in the eponymous dance
than it does for the audience. This connects with the temporality of the skeleton it-
self, the presence of which is simultaneously marked with pastness (a relic, something
that has outlasted its functionality) and futureness (as in the phantasmagoria, “the
fate that awaits us all!”).
Indeed, time has also affected The Skeleton Dance in another way: it has surely
stood the test of time. If YouTube views are any indication, it is far more continu-
ally popular than most classic cartoons; its viewing numbers dwarf even those of
Steamboat Willie. It remains a valued and frequently recirculated Disney property.
As of Halloween of 2018, in the now-defunct Disney Store in Polo Park Mall in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, The Skeleton Dance played on a loop on a wall, like a piece of
animated wallpaper haunting the temple of Disney consumerism. One ventures to
say that its relative simplicity and direct presentational style enables it to serve in this
role, close to eighty years after it was made. Its datedness transforms—ossifies, one
might say—into a sort of timelessness.
12 Murray Leeder

NOTES

1. For devils specifically, see Telotte (2022).

2. For more specifically about Eisenstein and The Skeleton Dance, see Nesbet (2003), esp.
157–84.
3. The danse macabre would continue to inspire paintings, for example James Tissot’s The
Dance of Death (1860) and the many skeletons in the paintings of James Ensor, and literature
(for example, Baudelaire’s “Danse Macabre” in Les Fleurs de Mal [1857]). For more, see Kurtz
(1934).
4. Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre has itself been animated on several occasions, including for
PBS in 1982. For more on Romantic music and the Gothic, see Giakaniki (2021).
5. This tradition is referenced in the Magnetic Fields’s song “Xylophone Tracks” (Beghtol
2006, 129–30).
6. Another line of lineage can be tracked not through Disney (the individual or the com-
pany) but through animator Ub Iwerks. After breaking with Disney in 1930, he animated
the skeleton-strewn Flip the Frog cartoon Spooks (1931) for Celebrity Pictures, in which the
skeletons are somewhat more threatening (they plan to skeletonize Flip and display him under
glass). Iwerks later made Skeleton Frolic (1937), part of Columbia Pictures’s Color Rhapsody
series. Skeleton Frolic borders on being a color remake of The Skeleton Dance, expanding the
same basic scenario and featuring a set of similar gags. Perhaps because of its bright and cheer-
ful colors and the relative sophistication of its animation (no longer rubber hose animation),
Skeleton Frolic feels less spooky than its forerunner; its skeletons seem perfectly benign without
even a mock-threatening aspect.

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2
From Gothic to Gags
Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death
Terry Lindvall

Walt Disney achieved international fame with his happy-go-lucky and plucky
character Mickey Mouse. He could fly like Charles Lindbergh, navigate a boat like
Buster Keaton, or swash-buckle like Douglas Fairbanks. Mickey’s roles evolved into
such exemplary models that his creator introduced him in the 1940s as “professor,”
an honorable, but impoverished, vocation. Professor Mickey’s primary instruction,
according to his creator, was to remember that, “the important thing is to teach a
child that good can always triumph over evil” (Disney 1945, 121). In several early
black-and-white sound cartoons, Disney conjured up shady Midwestern Gothic
themes that laid the groundwork for later feature films. With his collaborator, Ub
Iwerks, Disney illustrated dark and haunted shadows, even if the ominous cartoons
ended with light comedy.
This study looks at recurrent Gothic motifs of ghosts, skeletons, nightmares,
cemeteries, haunted houses, and madness that inhabit more of Disney’s early
work than one realizes. Cartoons such as The Skeleton Dance (1929), The Haunted
House (1929), Hell’s Bells (1929), Mickey’s Nightmare (1932), and The Mad
Doctor (1933), all of which culminated in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1940), a
segment of Fantasia, introduce children to creepy and frightening images, dangling
themes of judgment, death, and hell before the imaginations of unsuspecting pupils.
These silly cartoons evoke the suspense of eldritch, supernatural elements, borrowed
from cinematic tradition of such German directors as Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau
(Hahn 2015, 345). Dark shadows haunted the edges of Disney’s American dreams.
What Disney did with his appropriation of the Gothic traditions was to defang
the prospect of death and decay with his cartoons. In one particular segment on

15
16 Terry Lindval

his television show, Walt led viewers down into the dungeons and bowels of his
kingdom. In classic horror film tradition, the camera winds its way down into the
dark Disney Studio Vaults called the “Morgue.” Walt opens a creaking door and we
find ourselves in a room of chiaroscuro shadows. “Don’t be alarmed,” he counsels.
“Appearances can be deceiving.” He then cheerfully announces, “Let’s look at things
in a different light.” As he switches on the lights, we realize he is only in a storage
room. Disney proceeds to domesticate the uncanny. Pointing to a creepy skeleton
hanging in a dark corner, he explains, “And Mr. Bones over there . . . he’s an anima-
tion model for the art school.” Coming upon what looks to be a wrapped corpse,
Disney explains that, “Even our late lamented friend here is nothing more sinister
than a table of photographs ready to be filed away” (Disney, 1957).
For Disney, light would overcome darkness, just as a parade of nuns singing “Ave
Maria” would defeat the evil of Chernabog in Fantasia. The cemetery of ghouls
would lose its victory and death its sting in his generic Protestant sermons. Levity
would triumph over the gravitas of the grave. Disney was teaching his spectators how
to look at things spectral in a different light. The cartoons would expand their spec-
trum from the scary into the truly silly (from the German selig translated “blessed,
happy, blissful” and the Gothic sels meaning “good, kindhearted, and blessed”). But
they began with images of death.

DANCING SKELETONS, GRINNING SKULLS

The eruption of the first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance (1929), also inaugu-
rated the Gothic tradition in the Disney oeuvre. Composer Carl Stalling first pitched
the idea for a musical novelty, combining tunes and a spooky atmosphere, to Disney
in Kansas City (Merritt 2016, 5). The musician convinced Disney to experiment
with skeletons against a real background of a graveyard. He borrowed the plotline
of Henri Cazalis’s tone poem (with lines like “The bones of the dancers are heard to
crack”) that French composer Camille Saint-Saëns adapted for his Danse macabre.
Based on the legend of Death appearing in a graveyard as the church bell chimes at
midnight, composer Carl Stalling set the mood with his “silly symphony.” As Death
plays his fiddle, four human skeletons crawl out of their graves and cavort until a
rooster crows at sunrise. Stalling orchestrated a strangely upbeat rendition to trans-
port the audience from the grave to giddiness, mixing shrieks and tunes to create a
baroque juxtaposition of horror and comedy. He explained his inspiration erupted
out of a childhood delight. “Ever since I was a kid I had wanted to see real skeletons
dancing and had always enjoyed seeing skeleton dancing acts in vaudeville. As kids
we all like spooky pictures and stories” (Kothenschulte 2020, 42).
On February 29, 1929, Walt wrote to Iwerks, “I am glad the spook dance is
progressing so nicely—give her Hell, Ubbe—make it funny” (Iwerks 2001, 75).
The comic Gothic tone also appeared with Stalling’s miniature symphony, mixing
Edward Grieg’s March of the Dwarfs (1893) with a minor-key foxtrot, played on
 From Gothic to Gags 17

a skeleton’s rib cage as if it were a xylophone. Complementing Disney’s ghoulish

visuals, Stalling would compose musical themes with snippets not only from the
“The March of the Dwarfs (or Trolls),” but also Danse Macabre, “In the Hall of the
Mountain King,” and “Funeral March of a Marionette” and playful pop tunes of
ragtime, soft-shoe dances, and cakewalks.
Peasants and courtiers performed this allegorical dance of death throughout
European villages in various costumed pageants, as a reminder of the universality
and inevitability of death itself. Its didactic purpose was memento mori, to prompt
the lazy human imagination with skulls or coffins to “remember, you will die.” The
symbolic motifs of skeletons, hourglasses (tempus fugit—“time flees”), snuffed-out
candles, and decayed flowers shouted that all is ephemeral vanity prompting one to
meditate on the fact that “that you are dust and unto dust, you shall return.”
Iwerks studied the macabre etchings like those in The English Dance of Death
(1816) by English caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank.
He reportedly drew the rubber-hosed skeletons “practically single-handedly”
(Kothenschulte 2020, 41). The piercing eyes of an ominous owl stare at the specta-
tors until snatching talons of tree branches accost the owl itself. The owl bristles in
the dark and stormy night, as its head spins in sheer fear. Tombstones in the church
graveyard silently wait as the clock tolls twelve, releasing a bevy of bats from the
belfry. A sharp-fanged spider and howling dog join the chaos. Two black screeching
cats taunt each other, pulling and stretching each other’s noses, spitting on each other
in a literal catfight.
The bony fingers of a human skeleton emerge between them, scaring the fur
off their backs. Creeping across the landscape, it then tiptoes and prances. After it
throws its decapitated head at the owl, three bony companions with chattering teeth
join it. The quartet alternatingly stretch and shrink in their comic jig and shimmy
dance, like slapstick vaudevillians doing turns, twirling with bony thumbs upon
their heads. They form a human circle rolling across the ground, making pogo sticks
out of each’s frames, and using femur bones as drumsticks to play the xylophone on
the other’s ribs. Finally, one skeleton stretches out the tail of an unfortunate cat and
plays it like a cello. The Charleston knee-swapping movements and hip-tapping an-
tics culminate in the cock crowing at sunrise, when panicking skeletons break down
into a heap of bones and reassemble as a monstrous amalgamation that gallops into
an open grave (with two bony feet left behind, only to kick the tomb to be let in).
The amalgam of macabre and mirthful extends back to Hans Holbein’s satirical
woodblocks in Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort (1549). What appears
to be an unnerving Gothic performance turns carnivalesque. The unheimlich (that
disquieting German feeling of something familiar, yet uncomfortably foreign and
frightening) quality of the skeletons is unmade by slapstick shtick. In her study on
medieval jokes, scholar Martha Bayless argues how laughter served to “allay that
distress” and tension caused by death (Bayless 2020, 258). Comic texts like medieval
fabliaux telling tales of “trickery and bodily excess” could subvert a serious scenario.
The joking discourse presents a truth in grotesque mask.
18 Terry Lindval

Figure 2.1. A quartet of Dancing Skeletons frolic in Thomas Rowlandson’s etchings on

the frontispiece of William Combe’s witty The English Dance of Death (1816)

The Skeleton Dance revels in displaying the Gothic tradition and temperament.
According to Ellen Handler Spitz, this Disney Symphony tackles “important and
abiding psychological themes,” which have roots in the primal fears and pleasures of
children (Spitz 2000, 5). Iwerks dismantles death by turning our bones into buffoon-
ery. In an enthusiastic review, Variety extolled the howling delights of the film, but
then warned, tongue-in-cheek, “Don’t bring your children” (Anonymous 1929, 42).
Yet scholar Nick Groom shows that throughout such ghastly marvels as disinterred
 From Gothic to Gags 19

grinning skulls, the notion of “shuffling off this mortal coil does give us pause, until
we realize it is all a game” (Groom 2012, 39).
The predominant figure from the ground of the graveyard is the image of the
skull, a trope familiar across the centuries through various artists: Caravaggio’s St.
Jerome Writing (c. 1606) or Pieter Coecke van Aelst the Elder’s St. Jerome in his
Study (1530) with the framed reminder Cogita mori on his wall. The gravediggers in
Hamlet jest about rottenness even as the Danish prince picks up poor Yorick’s skull
and monologues on it, adding dark humor. One senses in Disney a playful attempt
to avoid the inevitability of death.
This striking motif of Iwerks’s “Grinning Skull” rushes toward the screen in a
frightful game of peekaboo. This grotesquely withered and scalped human head of-
fers a darkly droll commentary on the vanity of life. Humor follows horror. In this
cartoon, Disney transforms the horrific into the hilarious, emulating the topsy-turvy
turns of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival. While many medieval priests assuredly exploited
the terrors of the afterlife to control peasants and princes, undercutting the pride and
pomp of all earthly pursuits, the Christian doctrine of the Resurrection chased out
such fears, even to the point of making Death and Judgment parodied topics, as in
Holbein’s series of engravings, where “God walks about in a mask, as at Mardi Gras”
(Lindvall 2016, np). Robert Allan observed this comical side of Gothic melodrama

Figure 2.2. The Skeleton Dance (Ub Iwerks, 1929) features the grinning skull, an amal-
gam of horror and hilaritas
20 Terry Lindval

in the work of Cruikshank and Holbein, “just as Disney-animated films a hundred

years later would combine the comic and the macabre” (Allan 1999, 14)
In “A Defence of Skeletons,” British journalist Gilbert Keith Chesterton reminded
his Victorian readers that they overlooked this disturbing motif of the skeleton.
“One would think it would be most unwise in a man to be afraid of a skeleton, since
Nature has set curious and quite insuperable obstacles to his running away from
it” (Chesterton 1901). One cannot escape the skeleton as it frames our bodies. We
would, quite literally, be dead without it. Even as a perennial reminder of death, it
may become “the essential symbol of life. And in this it almost assuredly did more
good than harm.” In T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” the poet casts a similar light on
the human condition, showing the “rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear
to ear.” In The Skeleton Dance, Disney shows the skull and yet hints at its possible
divine comedy. Holding the skull in our hands or watching it rush to the foreground
in a cartoon creates a fantasy of power over death. For Disney, the Gothic was a form
of discourse that mockingly played with death to assert a simulated victory over it
by means of laughter.

A HOUSE OF GHOSTS

The pattern of turning potential terror into partying plays out in The Haunted House
(Ub Iwerks/Jack King, 1929) as well. Borrowing essential elements of Gothic litera-
ture, the film is replete with a haunted house, suspense, ghosts, inclement weather,
and a melodramatic hero in distress and beset with fears, all of which is turned into
a comedy.
From the opening Disney logo, a foreboding title appears white on stark black
with a scratchy and ominous violin playing, then Gothic features of being cold, dark,
and damp erupt. Suddenly we are in a windstorm, leaves blowing, and a menac-
ing anthropomorphic house appears, with second-floor window eyes and window
mouth distorted by the wind. Mickey slogs through with a patched umbrella, trudg-
ing against the winds. As his umbrella is torn and blown to shreds, he grimaces but
sees the blinking eyes of the broken-down house on a hill and slogs over to it, knock-
ing on the door. As the porch collapses, the door mysteriously opens into a chasm of
darkness and the Mouse goes reluctantly into the void, letting out an unholy howl
scream at its entrance, only to be goosed by wind-blown tree branches.
Thrust into a ramshackle crooked room, with the door shutting and locking itself,
Mickey hears screeches and a half dozen vampire-like bats flutter about. Trying to
hide in a spittoon, he sneaks out, tiptoeing to the door, when a hairy spider descends.
Noises of bells and groans chase him into darkness. Shivering, he lights a match in
a hallway, with his shadow switching walls and transforming into a tall thick mon-
strous form, which causes him to scream in fright as it growls at him.
A cloaked inhuman hooded figure with four elongated spiderlike fingers corners
him in another dilapidated room. It approaches him forebodingly. The menacing
 From Gothic to Gags 21

creature comes face-to-face with him, pulls off its hood, and reveals a sinister skull
that aggressively accosts Mickey’s face. It lunges and tries to grab the frightened
Mickey, who bolts to the open door, only to encounter a bevy of ghoulish skeletons.
Knees shaking, and sweating under his collar, Mickey is deposited on a piano seat
and ordered to “PLAY!” He protests saying he “can’t play,” but is intimidated into
sitting on the piano stool. Commanded again to “PLAY” by the ghoul, Mickey starts
to pump the piano pedals and play discordant chords.
Gothic turns comic once the music starts, and the ghoul leans over Mickey’s
shoulders as he plays more recognizable tunes. Suddenly the room is alive with
dancing. Skeletons cavort, while two play patty-cake on their bony knees. The
once-ominous ghoul himself sways like an inflatable tube-balloon man, matched by
an undulating grandfather clock. The ghoul even lifts up his robes to click his bony
heels in jubilation, shaking his metatarsals like a tambourine.
The music escalates with a skeleton tapping radiators, broken chairs, cracked
walls, light fixtures, and the spittoon. It picks up the radiator and squeezes it like
an accordion, maintaining a stitched mandible grin on its sparse face. Stretching his
zygomatic bone, the creature looks both ghastly and goofy. As Mickey keeps playing,
the scary has turned silly, with two vaudevillian fleshless frames doing a two-step,
slapping hands and knocking craniums to keep the festivities going, culminating in
a comic posterior bump. A skeleton uses drumsticks to play his own ribs and back-
bone, knocking out a tune, painfully from the look on his skinless face. The duo
returns, putting on cardinal derbies in front of a fireplace, making grotesque faces
while singing an inarticulate “Yak, yak, yak.” Then, tipping their hats, they make
their stage exit off left.
A quartet of skeletons does a sort of minuet, prancing in a circle with a finger on
their heads, as a continuation of Disney’s first Silly Symphony, The Skeleton Dance
(1929). The human skeletons dance and make their bodies undulate like Slinkys. A
sudden gust of wind blows through a window, dissembling the bones, leaving only
femurs and tibia. Finishing his last note, Mickey slips off the piano stool and tries
to tiptoe away. He hears an enormous and threatening growl, so rushes to the front
door, grabbing the knob that turns into the scrawny hand of a skeleton. Running
upstairs, he escapes into a bedroom where a hideaway bed falls from a closet, and a
hand reaches out to place a chamber pot under the bed. A gaunt grandpa and bon-
neted grandma skeleton sit up and snap at him. He dives out a second-story window,
landing in a barrel of skinny skeletons, and then skedaddles into an outhouse, only
to find it occupied. He runs off into the horizon, the storm having abated.
The Gothic horror genre creeps in The Haunted House and yet tumbles lower into
the fun vulgarity of early Disney shorts—so much that some state censors worried
about these gags of an outhouse and chamber pot (Kaufman 2018, 46). In imita-
tion of many “shilling shockers” and hobgoblin romances that appealed to the lower
middle class, a familiar style evolved in the eighteenth century. Mickey’s escape from
the haunted ghouls echoes the comic excitement of Tam O’Shanter’s narrow getaway
from witches and goblins in a haunted kirk in Robert Burn’s 1790 narrative poem.
22 Terry Lindval

Figure 2.3. The Haunted House (Jack King, 1929) continually interrupts the haunted
Gothic site with wonderfully vulgar gags

Both follow the recipe for the screaming laughter in their encounters with strange
sights, an enthusiastic amalgam of horror and comedy, all bedecked in wildly festive
and morbid Gothic attire.
With such exaggerated, baroque, and ghoulish ingredients, Disney cooked up a
murky Gothic stew that would almost reach the sublime if it were not for his procliv-
ity to add a dollop of the ridiculous. Motion Picture News (January 4, 1930) praised
the “weird stuff capped by burlesque,” a “darb” [excellent piece] that should bring
down any house” (Anonymous 1930). Film Daily found parts of this “creeper” to
be a “knockout” and Variety celebrated Iwerks’s “highly imaginative” comedy as “de-
lightfully mad” (Anonymous 1933, 13). But it is author Gijs Grob who recognized
the film as evolving a “genuine feel of horror,” but one that repeated the familiar
“song-and-dance routines” of earlier Mickey Mouse cartoons, a pattern that chased
the frights into fun (Gijs 2018, 46).

NIGHTMARES

A crucial feature of the Gothic architectural tradition is the role of religious iconog-
raphy. Gargoyles on cathedrals leer out from vaulted spaces, not only functioning as
spouts for rainwater, gargling and gurgling, but as bulwarks against spiritual enemies.
The Gothic assumes a belief in a fundamental benevolence, at least until the eigh-
teenth century when skepticism and fear supplanted faith. Miles argues that, “Gothic
nostalgia registers an anxious wish to recoup the last moment in Western history
when the supernatural was knowable, when metaphysical presence lay behind words,
emblems, events, behind human and natural signs” (Miles 1991, 41).
 From Gothic to Gags 23

In the sleep of reason, goblins seize men while they sleep in bed. A succubus
would invade and trouble both body and spirit of a man at rest. His only hope was a
prayer for protection. In Mickey’s Nightmare (1932), the Gothic is again made comic.
Instead of a traumatic descent into Sturm und Drang, Disney magically made the
macabre into domestic mirth. Even in the fearfully titled Mickey’s Nightmare (1932)
with the opening of a dark and stormy night, Disney turns the terrifying trope of
nightmare into a truly silly whim of a marital ordeal.
Less an image of Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781, with its equine pun of a
“night mare”), Disney paints an image of the innocent mouse accompanied by his
pet Pluto kneeling before his bed, folding their hands and paws. He prays the chil-
dren’s prayer from the New England Primer: “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the
Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
And God bless Minnie and Pluto and God bless everybody. Amen.” Mickey orders
Pluto to his bed and kisses a photo of Minnie, putting out the light. Disney converts
this nightmarish notion of dying in one’s sleep into a comedy of marriage and family.
When Pluto sneaks back into bed with Mickey, he licks his face. As Mickey slips
into his dream world, the dog transforms into a benign succubus in the form of
Minnie Mouse kissing him. Before he had fallen asleep, Mickey places a mini-statue
of Cupid beside his photograph of Minnie, with the arrow aimed at his sweetheart.
His “nightmare” begins with wedding bells. Standing before the minister, his
knees shake and he takes Minnie for his “lawfully wedded wife.” Suddenly, scores
of baby mice arrive, a precursor of all those brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
Opening the bedroom door, Minnie and a score of infants in nightshirts greet him
from the bed. He is a father to legions of lively baby mice. Havoc reigns as they slide
on curtains, jump on plungers, throw knives and cleavers at Mickey, swing on a bra
hammock, and throw pillows at their father. Little would one expect to find such
domestic demonology in Disney. When his alarm clock rings and a rooster crows,
Mickey wakes abruptly and then smashes Cupid, shouting “yippee.”
In an article on “American Marriage in the Time of the Recession,” Alexia
Campbell illumines the stress upon domestic tranquility during seasons of economic
slumps. The psychological strain extends beyond bank accounts into the dynamics
of family life itself. One experiences gamophobia, a fear of marriage. Citing research
studies, Campbell describes how husbands grew more tense and difficult toward
their wives during the Great Depression. She points out how anxieties over financial
downturns and rapid spikes in unemployment “generate a general climate of fear and
uncertainty,” not only in society in general, but in marriages in particular (Campbell
2016). The dream of an idyllic marriage deteriorates into a husband’s lack of control
in the economic domain and triggers nightmares. While Mickey enjoyed the pros-
pect of family and children, an impending fear of a loss of control paints a portrait
of domestic horror. Ironically, as Campbell documents, American couples during the
1930s had fewer children. She notes that, “about half a million fewer babies were
born in the United States during the recession than would have been during a more
24 Terry Lindval

stable time, possibly because of so many would-be parents’ financial uncertainties”

(Campbell 2016)
Mickey’s Nightmare creatively parallels this taxing era, but turns the trauma into a
comic awakening, staging Bruno Bettelheim’s insight that “many fairy tales drama-
tize the need to be able to experience fear” and then to help children overcome it
(Bishop 1990, xxii). Disney once argued that a religious perspective “helps immea-
surably to meet the storm and stress (italics added) of life and to keep you attuned
to Divine inspiration” and “without inspiration, we would perish” (Disney “Deeds,”
8). It seems the prayers of Mickey enabled him to overcome his gamophobic fears.

FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL

The Dantean descent in Hell’s Bells (Ub Iwerks, 1929) offers a revelation of Gothic
horror, displaying three of the four last things, death, judgment, and hell. (David
Hand’s 1935 Pluto’s Judgement Day also includes a surreal, apocalyptic Judgment
Day for Mickey’s dog on trial for crimes against cats.) Satan controls his wicked
realm like a Hollywood producer. His motto, straight out of Milton, seems to be
“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.” However, in a subsequent independent
work, the Cinecolor Hell’s Fires (1934), Iwerks’ tall-tale character, Willie Whopper,
finds it fun to “reign in hell.” Iwerks, viewed as quiet and mild mannered, let loose
a dark “almost occult bent” in these two cartoons (Iwerks 2001, 79). Iwerks’s second
short echoes Dante’s Inferno in naming names of the damned (e.g., Napoleon, Nero,
and Rasputin), populating a celebrity hell with recognizable historical and literary
figures. Curiously, the most nefarious villain, deserving the most severe punishment,

Figure 2.4. Peacefully asleep after saying his prayers, Mickey is about to enter a domestic
nightmare in Mickey’s Nightmare (1932)
 From Gothic to Gags 25

is Mr. Prohibition. Rarely has an enemy of the devil’s brew been given such a recep-
tion in the devil’s lair.
After Disney mended a fear of marriage in Mickey’s Nightmare, he modernized and
domesticated hell, mixing, as J. P. Telotte points out, musical comedy and the maca-
bre. More akin to C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters than Milton’s Paradise Lost, Disney’s
hell rings with risible energy. Hell’s Bells’ title alludes to an early twentieth-century
minced oath expressing annoyance or anger. The cartoon opens with tongues of
flames lapping over a cavernous site of languid steam. A ghoulish grim reaper tiptoes
about the fiery pit, with soaring bats and a dangling spider, until a spout of flames
unexpectedly burns it to a crisp. (The spider, one of Ub’s recurring characters, pos-
sesses six rather than the anatomically correct eight legs for an arachnid.) Cerberus,
the three-headed dog, barks and growls savagely at the camera, only to take a break
to snip at some fleas. A serpentine dragon snaps at a bat, misses, and the bat responds
with a wet Bronx cheer, only to get his own comeuppance as the dragon swallows
it and sprouts bat wings to fly away. A sinister-looking head devil taps his foot as
his underlings dance and perform before him. While a five-piece devil band play
Gonourd’s music on skeletal cello, trident tuning pitchforks, and the skull of a steer
all the while grinning ruthlessly, one supine unconscious demon lays on his back,
with a flugelhorn stuck in his mouth. His fellow imps pound and pump his stomach
like a bellows. The devil’s horned tail punctures lava bubbles percolating up from a
mini-volcano.
In a remarkable segment of animation, a diverse orchestra, composed of saxo-
phone and rib-caged cello, seeks to amuse the Devil. A slinky, balletic winged devil
prances about, as his giant shadow looms behind him on the inferno’s wall, mim-
icking his every move, with flames ascending in the foreground. The chief demon
applauds his subjects, and then rings “hell’s bell.” Little mouselike devils lift the tail
of a contented, pre-Clarabelle, cow to reveal a gigantic udder, as the cow grins in
pleasure. As the mini demons squeeze the teats, flames instead of milk pours out.
The boys deliver a kettle pot of the hot dish to their master. He salivates and swal-
lows the firewater, but then emits a little belch of indigestion, which prompts him
to look at the camera and blush. He picks up one of his miniscule servants by the
tail and tosses it back to Cerberus’s mouth. One head bites it; another swallows it;
and the third licks his chops.
The sadistic Devil laughs and tries to pick up a second little wormwood, who
disobeys and runs away from an enraged devil. It squeaks, “No, no!” and flees from
the pursuing fiend. Coming to a ledge, he hides under a cliff, but lets a branch spring
back and whack the Devil in his face. The little demon sneaks up behind him and
kicks him off the precipice (a harbinger of the witch’s demise toppled off a rocky
skull cliff in Snow White [1937]) down into the deep fires of hell, where anthropo-
morphic flames tug at his tail to consume him, even pulling down his pants and
spanking his fanny.
Stalling again conjures up the macabre atmosphere, employing the Gothic tunes
of Edvard Grieg, Charles Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette” (1873), and
26 Terry Lindval

Figure 2.5. The devilish tyrant tosses a demonic snack to his Cerberus pet in Hell’s Bells
(1929)

Mendelsohn’s “Fingal’s Cave” (1832). Bizarre little demons dance with delight before
their master. The Lucifer character treats his little puppet souls as tasty treats until
one rebellious imp mocks him, with screeching violin sounds. As the greater Satan
chases his underling to the edge of a cliff, Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain
King” portends damnation, but not for the little guy. Rather, as noted, flames of hell
consume the sadistic devil and then the screen. The musical motifs punctuate the
Gothic tropes of judgment and damnation and yet the Miltonic tragedy is a divine
comedy. The infernal hijinks that Telotte interprets as “unsettling,” culminating in a
final vision of “all-consuming flames,” actually tame the terrors of everlasting damna-
tion into a vaudevillian act (45). A threatening and consuming Satan falls from his
throne, vanquished as a vulnerable villain. The transgressor tumbles to his demise.
Reviews for the black-and-white Silly Symphony were mixed, with The Film Daily
praising the rhythmic gyrations of the grotesque creatures and Variety, absorbed
with the weird representation of Hades and its “unnatural” inhabitants, calling it a
“peach filler” (Anonymous “Short Subjects, 9 and “Talking Shorts,” 12). However,
The Film Daily found few laughs in the fire-and-brimstone comedy compared to
its predecessor (Anonymous “Hell’s Bells,” 12), The Skeleton Dance. Motion Picture
News celebrated the stirring “Jack-and-the-Beanstalk finish” in which the little guy
triumphed over a menacing Satan (Anonymous “Hell’s Bells,” 38).
In medieval morality plays, clowns played the character of Vice, underlining
what Andrew Stott describes as “the need for folly to overcome before Mankind can
 From Gothic to Gags 27

proceed to Grace” (Stott 2005, 174). Comic actors would leap out of the giant maws
of hell on the stage to make the mobs laugh. One can see a similar scene in Pier
Paolo Pasolini’s ribald adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1972), where Satan
expels hordes of corrupt monks out of his ass. The grotesque and Gothic gave way to
the giddy jest. As Howard Jacobson quipped, “If there were no devils to expel, there
would be no comedy to enjoy” (Jacobson 1997, 151). Thus, not only during the me-
dieval period, but in Iwerks’s cartoons, “hell remained a locus for hilarity.” Bakhtin
reaffirms that such laughter “presents an element of victory not only over supernatu-
ral awe, of the sacred over death; it also means the defeat of power, of earthly kings,
of the earthly upper classes, of all that oppresses and restricts” (Bakhtin 1984, 92).
Lorna Piatti-Farnell astutely traces the iconographic Gothic origins of Disney vil-
lains, characters that display “an unreliable moral code, a self-centered nature, and a
distinct desire for power and destruction” (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 43). Such is the fallen
angel in Hell’s Bells, less Miltonic and more Holbein engraving. The Dance Macabre
ends in true comedic fashion with the death of the devil himself.

GOTHIC MADNESS

Disney ascends out of the dens of hell to arrive at a comparable locale on earth. An
archetypal setting for a medieval melodramatic tale evolves from Horace Walpole’s
exemplary novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764), which he subtitled A Gothic Novel.
Walpole crowds his tale of supernatural terror with such architectural elements as
an underground cavern, a spooky castle, crumbling feudal ruins, and hidden pas-
sageways. Strange footsteps, claustrophobic dark corners, skeletal apparitions, and
the classic trope of creaking doors construct an atmosphere of ghostly happenings,
all written to evoke feelings of fear and terror.
In addition to troubled Hamlet-like heroes, persecuted virtuous maidens, and
lascivious aristocrats, the genre also includes the mad scientist, such as Mary Shelley’s
Dr. Frankenstein, who in his hubris seeks to play God. The peculiar connection
among science, alchemy, and magic, often in an attempt to overcome death, em-
phasized the theme of dangerous knowledge, as embodied in the monster produced
by a laboratory experiment. Victor Frankenstein performs necropsy, eviscerates, and
manipulates human bodies, stitching together parts of cadavers to create a “walking
memento mori.” Such actions, according to Shelley, could “curdle the blood and
quicken the beatings of the heart” (Groom 2012, 92).
Similar inhumane experiments pop up in the occult machineries of Disney’s
surprisingly gruesome The Mad Doctor (David Hand, 1933), a contribution to a
somewhat Lovecraftian subgenre dealing with viscera, forbidden knowledge, bio-
logically macabre and malignant realities, a horrific cosmic dreamscape one enters
and finds oneself impotent to manage, and madness itself. Such elements augur a
dreadful scenario. Within the film, Pluto snores in his doghouse through a wild
and windy storm at night, with trees bending against the tempest. While lightning
28 Terry Lindval

strikes outside, Mickey snores in bed. He wakes hearing owlish howls, and finds that
a strange hooded creature has abducted his dog. He follows footprints through the
storm and crosses an unsteady wooden bridge to a Gothic castle with turrets built
on a skull island.
Dr. XXX has kidnapped Pluto, dragging him across his drawbridge and into the
door of a pointed arch with a gargoyle knocker. As planks fall away while crossing
the drawbridge, Mickey comes to the door and grabs the gargoyle knocker. Dragged
into a dank room, he hits a column, where a carving knife and a butcher knife fall
beside him. The door locks itself, multiple times. Vampire bats haunt the cavernous
dungeon as lightning continues to strike.
Meanwhile, the Mad Doctor (voiced diabolically by Billy Bletcher of the Big
Bad Wolf and Pvt. Snafu fame) pulls Pluto into a laboratory of bubbling cauldrons,
smoking tubes, and gurgling pipes. Mickey hunts for his dog, wandering down a
deep, dark, winding passage, which is long and claustrophobic. Two ravenous wolf-
ish creatures menace his elongated shadow. He turns and finds they are fireplace grill
carvings. Wandering through the darkness, Mickey lights a candle and confronts a
ticking cuckoo clock with a skull pendulum bob. When the cuckoo bird appears, it
is a skeletal fowl.
The cloaked kidnapper reveals himself as a bald, bug-eyed, mustached, and
bearded mad doctor, wearing the customary white lab coat, who straps Pluto onto
a torturous device. Above the incarcerated dog is a chicken in chains, suffering in
anticipation as well. “And now!” says the doctor, showing an X-ray of Pluto’s ribs and
beating heart. With bad poetic rhyming, the doctor (with four teeth, gleaming eyes,
and a villainous mustache) brags at how he is a wizard when it comes to cutting up
and can graft a chicken’s kisser on the wishbone of a pup,

And here’s the great experiment I’m just about to tackle.

To find out if the end-result will bark-or-crow-or-cackle.
Woo nyhahahaha.

He threatens Pluto with scissor knives and on a blackboard shows, quite graphi-
cally, what grisly scheme he has concocted: an image of “chicken plus dog equals a
Pluto-headed chicken.” Pluto’s heart sinks down his throat to his cloaca and he howls
miserably. Hearing the scream, Mickey climbs a ladder and bumps into a skeleton
that grimaces at him. An army of living dead throw their skulls at him and bite at
his rear. Threatened by a skeletal spider in its web, Mickey tickles its ribs to get away
and skedaddles through various dungeon doors.
The doctor, meanwhile, cuts Pluto’s shadow in half. Mickey arrives and is immedi-
ately strapped to a surgical bed. Capturing Mickey, the doctor lowers a saw. Tortured
by the pit’s pendulum, Mickey calls desperately for Pluto. But he wakes, discovering
it all a dream, and Pluto rushes into Mickey’s bedroom window and licks him.
 From Gothic to Gags 29

Figure 2.6. The ghastly equation portends a nasty ending for Pluto in The Mad Doctor
(1935)

Akin more to a depraved Lovecraftian world than a benign fantasyland, The Mad
Doctor previews something more wicked this way coming. The overreach of danger-
ous knowledge and alchemy from the aforementioned Frankenstein possesses this
cartoon, combining human hubris and cruelty. Its significance in the mid-1930s is
that The Mad Doctor offers a prescient prophecy, an ominous hint of actual human
experimentation that was to follow in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.
In the postwar years, Oxford don C. S. Lewis challenged proponents of vivisection,
quoting the great Doctor Samuel Johnson. When the Queen wanted poisons to
experiment on creatures not worth hanging, Johnson replied, “Your Highness, Shall
from this practice but make hard your heart?” (Lewis 1947, 228). If one justifies
cruelty to animals, we choose the jungle of claw and fang and lose our humanity.
Ironically, the National Socialist party of Germany, with doctors like Josef Mengele
conducting such heinous experiments in the coming decade, banned this cartoon
(Leslie 2002, 80–81).

THE LAST LAUGH

Disney employed a Gothic aesthetic incorporating characteristic themes, motifs, and

topics in his early cartoons. These cartoons encompass a legion of effects, conjuring
up a treasure chest of mystery, obscurity, and terror. Meteorologically, they summon
up wind, rainstorm, mist, tempest, and gloomy shadows, like Mickey will do in
30 Terry Lindval

“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Topographically, they furnish frightful forests, dark ter-
rains, blasted heaths, and hell itself. Architecturally, they build castles, tombs, crypts,
dungeons, mazes, graveyards, gargoyles, and locked doors. Decoratively, they design
with disguises, suits of armor, tapestries, disguises, hooded masks, billowing curtains,
and many bones. Textually, they inscribe obscure dialects, strange symbols, scary mu-
sical notes, folklore, and unknown howling tongues and evil laughs. Psychologically,
they project visions, hallucinations, nightmares, hauntings, dreamscapes, ghosts, and
a bit of madness. And spiritually, they bestow magic and the occult, arcane ritual,
mystical moments, and, surprisingly, prayer (Groom 2012, 77–78).
George Orwell once observed that, “A thing is funny when—in some way that
is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke
is a tiny revolution” (Orwell 1945, 184). The jokes and gags, of an outhouse or a
three-headed dog, defuse the macabre and turn death on its head. Memento mori
becomes carpe diem. The sleep of reason may produce monsters, but cartoons, like
jesters and holy fools, unmask those monsters, even when they are symbols of death.
Two of the old men of Disney, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, reiterated how
Disney believed that “we need terror by which to measure and enjoy our comfort;
we need thrill to ameliorate the tedium. We need evil to locate our good” (Johnston
and Thomas 1993, 11). But in Disney and Iwerks’s hands, the Gothic terror, with its
skeletons, bats, graveyards, black cats, madmen, and devils, would now tickle rather
than threaten.
As was previously stated above, Howard Jacobson observed in his study of the
Gothic medieval ages, that artists presented hell as “a locus for hilarity.” “If there were
no devils to expel,” he suggested, “there would be no comedy to enjoy” (Jacobson
1997, 151). The maws of hell in the mystery plays would belch out comic entertain-
ers, who would tumble out of the mouth brashly, break up, and fall into their dam-
nation. Such recognition of the triumph of God over sin and death led to a praise of
Divine folly. Christian humanists like Holbein and Erasmus saw and celebrated the
frailty, finitude, and folly of the human actor. They looked at the skeletons, consid-
ered their mortality, and embraced the hope of a truly comic “animated” resurrected
body. So, it seems, did Walt Disney, turning Gothic tropes into cartoon gags.

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Reader, edited by Neil Barron, xvii–xxvii. New York: Garland.
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Campbell, Alexia Fernández. 2016. “American Marriage in the Time of the Recession,” The
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american​-marriage​-in​-times​-of​-recession​/506840/.
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Combe, William. 1903. The English Dance of Death. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
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andreasdeja​.blogspot​.com​/2016​/05​/german​-expressionism​-and​-disney​.html.
Disney, Walt. 1957. “Adventure in Wildwood Heart.” Walt Disney’s Legacy Collection, True-Life
Adventures series, Volume 4: Nature’s Mysteries, September 25, 1957.
Disney, Walt. 1963. “Deeds Rather than Words.” Faith Is a Star, edited by Richard Gammon,
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Disney, Walt. 1945. “Mickey as Professor.” The Public Opinion Quarterly 9, no. 2: 119–25.
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Groom, Nick. 2012. The Gothic. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Hahn, Don, and Tracey Miller-Zarneke. 2015. Before Ever After: The Lost Lectures of Walt
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“Hell’s Bells.” Variety, November 20, 1929: 12
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Holbein, Hans. 2017. Les Simulachres & historiees faces de la Mort (1549). New York: Penguin.
Iwerks, Leslie, and John Kenworthy. 2001. The Hand Behind the Mouse. Glendale, CA: Disney.
Jacobson, Howard. 1997. Seriously Funny: From the Ridiculous to the Sublime. New
York: Viking.
Johnston, Ollie, and Frank Thomas. 1993. The Disney Villain. Westport, CT: Hyperion.
Kaufman, J. B., and David Gerstein. 2018. Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: The Ultimate History.
Berlin: Taschen.
Kayka, Misha. 2002. “The Gothic on Screen.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction,
edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, 209–28. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
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1965. Berlin: Taschen.
Leslie, Esther. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde.
London: Verso.
Lewis, C. S. 1970. “Vivisection.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by
Walter Hooper, 224–28. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Lindvall, Terry, and Morgan Stroyeck. 2016. “Holy Dung: Comic Signs of Consubstantiality
in Martin Luther Films.” Religions 7, no. 3: 20. http:​//​www​.mdpi​.com​/2077​-1444​/7​/3​/20​
/html.
“The Mad Doctor.” The Film Daily, February 10, 1933.
Malin, Irving. 1964. The New American Gothic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
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Merritt, Russell, and J. B. Kaufman. 2016. Walt Disney Silly Symphonies. Glendale, CA: Disney
Enterprises.
Miles, Robert. 1991. “The Gothic Aesthetic: The Gothic as Discourse.” The Eighteenth
Century 32, no. 1: 39–57.
Mosley, Leonard. 1985. Disney’s World. New York: Stein and Day, 1985.
Mullins, Victoria. 2021. “From Caligari to Disney: The Legacy of German Expressionist
Cinema in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: New
Perspectives on Production, Reception, Legacy, edited by Chris Pallant and Christopher
Holliday, 25–44. London: Bloomsbury.
Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. 2019. “Evil, Reborn: Remaking Disney and the Villain Intertext.” In
Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media, edited by Lorna
Piatti-Farnell, 41–60. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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Schickel, Richard. 1968. The Disney Version. New York: Simon and Schuster.
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Stott, Andrew. 2005. Comedy. Routledge.
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Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and Regina M. Hansen, 42–57. New York: Fordham University
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“Week’s Short Subject Releases Reveal Nice Balance and Variety in Theme: Hell’s Bells.”
1929. Motion Picture News, November 23, 1929: 38
3
Hidden Histories
The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Despite being invested in the past in the way that all haunted houses inevitably are,
Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction stages what might be referred to as “historicity
without history.” Less a coherent narrative than a parodic collage of Gothic conceits
and set pieces, the attraction shuttles guests through a montage of overlapping in-
vented histories, defusing the ghostly terrors of the past with a playful wink. In keep-
ing with the lyrics of the “Grim Grinning Ghosts” song that serves as the attraction’s
theme, the Haunted Mansion’s ghosts only “pretend to terrorize.” In this, ghostly
history in the Haunted Mansion is exemplary of the Disney theme parks’ approach
to history writ large: History is always “history,” a sanitized, technologized, and of-
ten comic creation designed to elicit enjoyment in (and of ) the present. Omission,
notes Alan Bryman, is used extensively in Disney’s presentation of the past to create
the impression that contemporary problems are either not real or can be easily sur-
mounted (Bryman 1995, 128). Ironically, what allows guests to enjoy the Haunted
Mansion is the confidence that there are no “actual” ghosts haunting the house. The
attraction’s advertised 999 invented ghosts would seem to leave no room for “real”
ones—a fake comic facade of history stands in for actual history.
Despite attempts at keeping the past at bay, however, this chapter will argue that
actual ghosts of the past are indeed present in the Haunted Mansion. Three “hid-
den histories” haunting the Disney Haunted Mansion attraction will be considered
starting with the attraction’s own occulted history. In the process of developing
the Haunted Mansion, a number of different storylines were considered and then
abandoned, although traces of them still remain. Consideration of the attraction’s
convoluted history helps foreground the strategic approach WED Enterprises (the

33
34 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

theme park wing of Disney, the name of which reflects Walt Disney’s initials), under
the watchful eye of Walt himself until his death in 1966, took to crafting an attrac-
tion that would elicit a particular affective response from guests. Next, the Haunted
Mansion’s indebtedness to earlier forms of carnival and amusement park attractions
referred to as “dark rides,” as well as its appropriation of themes and images from the
Gothic tradition and other sources, will be explored. Despite Walt’s desire to distance
his theme park from the “risk-taking, sense of danger, commercialism, salaciousness,
and morbidity” associated with amusement parks (King 1981, 119), the Haunted
Mansion attraction is very much invested in established frameworks for amusement
park attractions and incorporates bits and pieces of well-established narrative con-
ceits to build its parodic Gothic collage—it is the inheritor of multiple histories that
it combines in its ghostly mélange. Finally, this chapter will consider the Haunted
Mansion’s relationship to American history in light of its New Orleans Square plan-
tation manor house design in Disneyland and its proximity to Liberty Square (with
its Hall of Presidents attraction) at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.1 This sec-
tion will focus on the omissions of actual history—real ghosts—from the attractions,
which is how the attraction performs its most powerful ideological work.
A consideration of these hidden histories haunting the Haunted Mansion high-
lights the ideological sleight of hand performed by Disney across all its media prop-
erties in its creation of what might be referred to as “mock Gothic”—a deracinated
Gothic that, ostensibly disconnected from history, elicits a form of free-floating
postmodern euphoria through the combination of novel spectacle and the repetition
of familiar forms. The substitution of “history” for history in the Haunted Mansion
recasts history as a spooky story to be told around the fire or under the covers with
a flashlight in order to elicit giggles and a frisson of excitement rather than critical
reflection on the ways the past persists into and structures our experience of the pres-
ent—affect is substituted for understanding. My approach here will be to summon
the ghosts of history to allow for a recontextualization of the attraction in light of its
own history, the history of dark rides, and American history, thus bringing Disney’s
particular set of values to the fore.

HAUNTED HISTORY #1: GORE AND BLOOD

Attesting to the appeal of the Haunted Mansion attraction is the impressive number
of available histories that trace the circuitous path of its development and explore
its features.2 Happily, these various accounts, both authorized and not, all tell more
or less the same story. The idea of having a haunted house as part of a theme park
seems always to have been in the mix with Walt Disney, and the initial sketches
from 1951 of what was then referred to as Mickey Mouse Park by Disney studio
art director Harper Goff included one called “Church, Graveyard, and Haunted
House” depicting “a ramshackle Victorian house on a hill overlooking an overgrown
cemetery and a quaint, small-town church” (Surrell 2009, 13). As Walt’s vision for
 Hidden Histories 35

the park began to come into focus however, the “crumbling haunted house on a hill”
(Surrell 2009, 14) idea was shelved due to space constraints. After Disneyland proved
to be a huge success following its opening in 1955, the haunted house idea was re-
introduced and earmarked for the park’s first major expansion, slated for 1963, and
Walt assigned the concept for development to Ken Anderson, an artist and writer
for Disney Studios.
Anderson wanted the attraction to tell a story, so his approach to developing it was
to think in terms of a general concept and overarching narrative. As its location in
what was going to be called New Orleans Square became clear, the idea of a Southern
plantation house suggested itself; Anderson’s initial proposal for a delipidated ante-
bellum manor with boarded-up windows set in a sinister landscape, however, was
nixed by Walt who disliked the prospect of a run-down building interrupting the
pristine aesthetic of his theme park (Surrell 2009, 15). Walt’s rejection of Anderson’s
ideas would become a recurring theme and the attraction is haunted by the paths
not taken.
The Haunted Mansion originally was conceived of as a walk-through attraction,
and Anderson’s first creative treatment had a butler leading guests through the house
where short scenes and spooky effects would reveal the unsavory history of Captain
Bartholomew Gore—in some drafts Captain Gideon Gorelieu—and his unfortunate
bride, Priscilla, whom Gore murdered after she discovered his secret identity as the
bloodthirsty pirate Black Bart. Different versions of the story have Priscilla murdered
in different ways—bricked up in the cellar, locked in a trunk, thrown down a well—
but the outcome in each case was the same: “Priscilla’s spirit tormented [Captain
Gore] every night until he took his own life by hanging himself from the rafters in
the attic” (Surrell 2009, 17). Reflecting the drowned-in-the-well treatment, one ver-
sion of the attraction had guests exiting past the well on which would be inscribed—
or sung by children—“Ding dong dell, Priscilla’s in the well . . . who threw her in?
The wicked cap-a-tin!” (Baham, “Ken’s Conundrum,” n.d.). The gurgling water of
the well would be appropriately—and ghoulishly—red.
Of note is the link between the haunted house and pirates central to this early ver-
sion of the Haunted Mansion. As Baham, explains, Walt Disney “wanted to uncover
the rapacious, darker aspects of the Crescent City through the power of storytelling”
(Baham, “Ken’s Conundrum,” n.d.). As part of this focus on the dark side of history,
Walt also had in mind an underground walk-through pirate exhibit in New Orleans
Square involving “wax museum–style tableaus and simple animations that told the
predacious tales of New Orleans’ own Jean Lafitte and other famed buccaneers”
(Baham, “Ken’s Conundrum,” n.d.). This idea eventually developed into the Pirates
of the Caribbean attraction. That Disney would want to introduce “rapacious, darker
aspects” of New Orleans’ history into his theme park at all is a curious idea, given
how sanitized Disney’s representation of American history is; despite some apparent
willingness to entertain Gothic themes, however, Walt clearly had his limits where
morbidity was concerned, and Anderson’s murderous Captain Gore plot was largely
dismissed.
36 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

Anderson’s next haunted house treatment retained the idea of the ghostly bride,
but left out the pirates, substituting Blood for Gore—that is, instead of a murder-
ous, haunted, suicidal pirate, visitors would be introduced to the “tragic and bloody”
history of the Blood family of Bloodmere Manor (Anderson qtd. in Surrell 2009,
18). There were several different iterations of this narrative, too—in one version, the
recorded voice of Walt Disney himself would explain that the run-down state of the
house was due to unhappy ghosts of the family disassembling repairs each evening; in
another, reflecting the influence not only of nineteenth-century American literature
but of twentieth-century cinema, famous monsters such as Dracula, Frankenstein,
and the Headless Horseman would make appearances—but central to all the varia-
tions was a large spectral wedding celebration (Surrell 2009, 19). These ideas, too,
were largely rejected by Disney as too spooky, and Anderson eventually left the
project, although traces of his concepts certainly are discernable in the finished proj-
ect—notably, in the figure of the hanged man in the stretching room, the spectral
bride in the attic, and in the ghostly ball central to the attraction.
Although the Southern plantation facade (well-maintained rather than dilapi-
dated) of the Disneyland attraction was finished on time in 1963, completion of
the actual interior ride itself was delayed until 1969, in large measure due to Walt
Disney’s involvement in the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Delays also resulted from
continued creative differences among the designers, which were amplified by Walt
Disney’s death in 1966. After Anderson’s treatments were rejected, he was replaced
by WED “Imagineers” Yale Gracey and Roland “Rolly” Crump. This duo was then
supplemented post–World’s Fair by animator Mark Davis, background artist Claude
Coats, and animator X. Atencio, the latter of whom came on board as a scriptwriter
having done the script for the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction. Under their aus-
pices, the attraction became more lighthearted in tone with an emphasis on impres-
sive visual effects, and much less focused on anything like a linear narrative—gags
and illusions substituted for anything like a coherent story.
The result of these twists and turns in the development of the Haunted Mansion
attraction and the contributions of multiple creators is a dark ride that is essentially
a collage of Gothic conceits and devices with only the barest threads of connective
narrative tissue. A quick overview of the attraction, which has been updated from
time to time but is still largely the same as it was when it premiered in 1969, be-
gins in the queue area where its lighthearted approach to death and the afterlife is
introduced by tombstones with comic rhyming epitaphs (“Dear Departed Brother
Dave / He Chased a Bear Into a Cave,” etc.). Gesturing toward the history of the
attraction, the names on the tombstones pay homage to the Imagineers who worked
on the attraction (see Heimbuch 2011). Some more interactive features, including
a pipe organ and busts of the Dread Family that feature clues for visitors to piece
together concerning their deaths, were added to the queue area in 2011 (see “Dread
Family Mystery,” n.d.).
Once inside, visitors move from a foyer with a portrait over the fireplace man-
tel that transforms from a young man into a skeleton to the famous stretching
 Hidden Histories 37

room—really an elevator that slowly descends revealing the bottom halves of darkly
comic portraits and culminating in a clap of thunder and a ghostly vision of a hanged
corpse dangling far above (a remnant of the original Captain Gore story). A wall
then slides open and visitors move through a portrait gallery with more morphing
portraits to the Doom Buggy boarding station. The Buggies transport guests past a
seemingly endless corridor with a floating candelabra in its center, a conservatory
with a coffin housing an unquiet inhabitant, and a room with a séance in progress
featuring the face of medium Madame Leota in a floating crystal ball. The Buggies
then glide along a balcony looking down on a great hall with a ghostly celebration
in progress, including banqueting and waltzing specters, before moving through an
attic haunted by the ghostly bride—an element present in all the versions of the
script going back to Anderson’s original conception. The ride then tours a graveyard
extensively populated by festive singing spirits and concludes with an encounter with
hitchhiking ghosts, one of which appears in a reflection of the Doom Buggy with
its occupants.
The Orlando Magic Kingdom version of the Haunted Mansion attraction is
modeled after the Disneyland version and is more or less the same, although it is
slightly longer and includes some more elaborate scenes, including an M. C. Escher–
inspired staircase room (see Bryce 2020). Its most notably difference, however, is its
exterior. In contrast to the Southern plantation facade of the Disneyland attraction,

Figure 3.1. The comic portraits in the stretching room. Initially, only the top half is vis-
ible. The bottom half comes into view as the elevator descends
38 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

the version in the Magic Kingdom, positioned near Liberty Square rather than New
Orleans Square, presents itself as a redbrick mansion. Baham explains that the al-
teration of the facade was due in part to the desire “to create something that doesn’t
seem too familiar to local guests” for whom plantation houses wouldn’t be especially
exotic, and in part because a Southern plantation–style home would seem out of
place in Liberty Square (see Baham, “The Architecture,” n.d.).3

Connecting the different scenes is narration by the “Ghost Host,” which begins
when visitors enter the Mansion foyer and continues as guests move into the stretch-
ing room as the Ghost Host introduces himself with his famous “Welcome, foolish
mortals, to the Haunted Mansion!” monologue.4 The Ghost Host then points out
that the room appears to be stretching and asks them to observe that it has neither
windows nor doors. How then to get out? “There’s always my way” laughs the host,
as thunder booms, the lights go out, someone screams, and a body is revealed hang-
ing from a noose above the room. The Ghost Host is most active in the early stages
of the attraction, setting the mood and directing guests toward the Doom Buggies.
After guests begin the ride, his role is limited and he pops up only occasionally,
preparing guests for the “swinging wake” in the graveyard, for example, and warning
them to “beware of hitchhiking ghosts” (“Haunted Mansion [Disneyland]” 2017).
More consistent across the entire ride is the “Grim Grinning Ghosts (The
Screaming Song)” theme song. Written by American composer Buddy Baker with
lyrics contributed by X. Atencio, variations on the song are heard throughout the
ride beginning in the queue to enter the attraction and with a dirgelike version in the
foyer. The song is featured prominently as a waltz in the ballroom with the addition
of some dissonant elements and is then central in the graveyard, where the lyrics can
be heard as sung by a chorus led by Thurl Ravenscroft.5
Over the course of its planning process, the Haunted Mansion increasingly
evolved into an attraction that defuses morbidity with humor and substitutes spec-
tacle for narrative. Its ghosts became detached from any obvious history, essentially
becoming simulacra—copies without originals. While the traces of other stories are
still recoverable, one needs to dig for them. In this, it is characteristic of Disney’s
handling of darker themes in general as it effaces with one ghostly hand the very
history toward which it gestures with the other, substituting free-floating affect for
historical engagement and laughing at the omnipresent specter of death. In keeping
with the lyrics of the jaunty “Grim Grinning Ghosts” song that serves as the ride’s
theme, the Haunted Mansion’s ghosts are somehow both “grim” and “grinning” at
the same time, perhaps because the grimness of the past becomes a source of present
amusement shared by the dead with the living.
Figures 3.2A, 3.2B. A comparison of Disneyland’s plantation facade with the Magic
Kingdom’s Gothic Revival facade
40 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

HAUNTED HISTORY #2: DARK RIDES AND GHOSTLY SIGHTS

Despite Walt Disney’s desire to distance his theme park and its attractions from the
tawdriness of more conventional amusement parks, the Haunted Mansion attrac-
tion ended up as an excellent example of what Brandon Kwaitek addresses as a “dark
ride.” As summarized by Kwaitek,

A dark ride is an amusement park ride that delivers passengers in cars along a winding,
electrified track (often composed of a single rail) and usually through various rooms.
. . . Conventional, cartoonish depictions of supernatural beings and grotesque scenes,
as well as optical illusions, frightening noisemakers and unlit gloom, contribute to the
atmosphere of real and figurative darkness. (Kwaitek 1995, 72)

Such rides, characteristic of mid-twentieth-century amusement parks and carnivals,

possess an extensive genealogy, having evolved out of and combining elements of
nineteenth-century magic lantern shows and phantasmagoria featuring the first slide
projectors (Kwaitek 1995, 35), ghost illusion shows staged by itinerant showmen
using wagons (Kwaitek 1995, 37), nineteenth- and early twentieth-century “scene
railway” and “tunnel railway” rides in which passengers “coasted through tunnels and
past exotic scenes and other-worldly tableaux at the leisurely pace of a sight-seeing
tour” (Kwaitek 1995, 43), elaborate “illusion rides” crafted for twentieth-century
expositions in which passengers “were led through rooms and into an area or car
around which choreographed images were projected to give the sensation of move-
ment” (Kwaitek 1995, 43), and tunneled boat rides, often referred to as Tunnels
of Love or Old Mills (Kwaitek 1995, 49). Also incorporated into dark rides were
 Hidden Histories 41

elements of the fun house. As Kwaitek explains, “In the early twentieth century,
fun houses were constructed in the form of dark mazes; these walk-through rides
featured darkened interiors, angled passageways, moving stairs and floorways, fake
cobwebs and blasts of compressed air. The dark ride consequently adopts the archi-
tectural elements of the scenic railway, illusion ride, and dark maze while continuing
a secular tradition of iconography” (Kwaitek 1995, 43).
Disney’s Haunted Mansion, rather than being something categorically different,
is in fact a sophisticated version of the dark ride that draws inspiration from and
combines elements of all these earlier forms. One example of this inheritance in
particular is the attraction’s use of what is referred to as “Pepper’s Ghost.” Named
for English scientist John Henry Pepper, who introduced the effect to the public
in 1862, “Pepper’s Ghost” is an illusion using angled plates of glass to project
ghostly images in a way that can (anachronistically) be described as holographic (see
Burdekin 2015). Disney uses the Pepper’s Ghost effect for the Haunted Mansion’s
ballroom scene. As visitors move along the mezzanine, they look through an angled
thirty-foot-tall pane of glass into an empty room. Animatronic ghosts move in hid-
den rooms above and below the mezzanine resulting in the spectral forms that appear
to be dancing and cavorting in the ballroom (see Karstens Creations 2013). As sum-
marized by Angela Ndalianis, with the Haunted Mansion, Disney’s “Imagineers re-
fashioned multiple media experiences—phantasmagoria and magic lanterns, Pepper’s
Ghost, automata, film, the haunted houses and ghost trains of amusement parks—
and redesigned them into the kind of hybridized, hi-tech spectacle that would come
to typify the theme park of more recent times” (Ndalianis 2012, 68). The attraction
was simultaneously cutting edge and indebted to earlier forms of themed attractions.
The Haunted Mansion does something similar with its thematic content, drawing
inspiration and pilfering freely from the Gothic literary tradition, nineteenth-century
theatrical melodramas, folklore, and twentieth-century film. Anderson’s original
Captain Gore story, for example, draws heavily on the Bluebeard folktale, while
murdered women who haunt their killers are a stock component of folklore, murder
ballads, Gothic novels, and horror cinema.6
On the whole, specific points of reference are hard to establish with any certainty
as the Haunted Mansion, rather than alluding to specific works, is instead a distilla-
tion of recurring conceits and tropes. For example, portraits that move, transform,
or are in some way “haunted” are a hallmark of Gothic fiction that originates to-
gether with the Gothic novel in Horace Walpole’s 1764 The Castle of Otranto and
has had many subsequent iterations ranging from the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon
in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) to Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—the latter of which found memorable visual
representation in Albert Lewin’s 1945 film adaptation and could certainly have
served as inspiration for the attraction’s transforming portraits.7 Similarly, haunted
houses—also present in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and finding repeated expres-
sion in literature and film—are very much part and parcel Gothic. The mansion in
Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963), his adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel,
42 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

The Haunting of Hill House, suggests itself as a visual point of reference for the fa-
cade of the Magic Kingdom’s Haunted Mansion. Bringing together the themes of
the murdered bride, the haunted portrait, and the haunted house is another possible
point of reference: Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 Gothic novel Rebecca and its 1940 ad-
aptation by Alfred Hitchcock.
Séances as well, with or without Romani mediums, are a stock convention of the
Gothic horror genre. A possible reference point here is another 1940s film involv-
ing a haunted mansion, Lewis Allen’s 1944 The Uninvited, in which one of the two
ghosts present, invoked during a séance, is that of a Spanish gypsy woman.
While identifying influences on the Haunted Mansion is for the most part a mat-
ter of speculation, in a few instances, allusions are more direct. As James Graham
observes, promotional materials for the Magic Kingdom’s attraction described it as
“the Edgar Allan Poe–style ‘Haunted Mansion’” (see Garlen 2012) and nods toward
Poe are evident throughout the attraction. The raven that appears in a number of
places is the most obvious example, but Graham also mentions the unquiet coffin
occupant in the conservatory as a reference to Poe’s stories of premature burial, the
beating of the attic ghost’s heart as an allusion to the “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and
the stretching room without windows or doors as a reference to “The Pit and the
Pendulum” (Garlen 2012).
As Foxx Nolte explains, the Haunted Mansion attraction not only draws on
the Gothic literary tradition, but is also very much a reflection of the popularity
of 1950s and 1960s science fiction and horror films, as well as television “shock
theater”—late-night airings of classic horror films often introduced by costumed
hosts such as John Zacherle and Vampira (Nolte 2022). Running through a range of
Figures 3.3A, 3.3B, 3.3C. Compare Manderley in the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock movie ver-
sion of Rebecca and Hill House in Robert Wise’s 1963 version of The Haunting of Hill
House to the facade of the Magic Kingdom’s Haunted Mansion
44 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

examples from the films of directors William Castle and Roger Corman to the televi-
sion sitcoms The Munsters and The Addams Family, Nolte writes that “The Haunted
Mansion very much belongs to this cultural moment, the years when horror movies
stopped being cheap juvenile entertainment but were also not yet so deadly serious
as they would shortly become. It actually opened just slightly after the peak of the
era, but it synthesizes the whole of the 50s and 60s monster fad into an unreplicable
[sic] whole” (Nolte 2022). He adds that the “Ghost Host cracks just as many jokes
as any host of Shock Theater ever would” (Nolte 2022).
The Ghost Host’s corny jokes (we’re told, for example, that the Haunted Mansion
comes equipped with “wall to wall creeps and hot and cold running chills”), the silly
tombstone epitaphs, and the attraction’s other gags, including the stretching room
portraits near the start and the hitchhiking ghosts at the end, return us to the his-
tory of the dark ride. As characterized by Kwaitek, such rides are insistently marked
by an “attitude of mockery and derision” toward death and the afterlife (Kwaitek
1995, 13). Often offering “secular interpretation[s] of religious images of death”
and “[d]effusing the horrible with the humorous,” Kwaitek relates such rides to
medieval festivals and “the stylized grotesquerie of Carnival” (14). Kwaitek here is
not only situating the dark ride as a modern variant on a deeply entrenched tradi-
tion—one including phantasmagoria shows, Gothic novels, the carnivalesque novels
of Rabelais, and medieval mystery plays—but theorizing part of their appeal. Dark
rides allow us symbolically to conquer death and laugh at all its terrors. The ghosts
that they conjure are there are inevitably convivial ones that only pretend to terrorize.
In keeping with dark rides in general, the Haunted Mansion “[cannibalizes] past
and contemporary forms and images for its own present purposes to surprise and
amuse” (Kwaitek 1995, 14). As it appropriates familiar generic features, its strategy
is decontextualization followed by recombination into the form of a postmodern
Gothic pastiche. Wrenched out of context and paraded for amusement, its Gothic
machinery is affectionately mocked. Recontextualizing Disney’s Haunted Mansion
in relation to the history of dark attractions, the Gothic tradition in literature and
film, and the popular culture of its moment allows for an appreciation of how it
functions as a repository of memory that hides its actual ghosts in plain sight.

HAUNTED HISTORY #3: AMERICAN HISTORY

As has often been noted in the critical literature, the Disney theme parks offer an ide-
alized representation of American history creating nostalgia for a time that never was.
Adams, for example, observes that the Main Street, U.S.A. thoroughfare presents
“an idealized caricature” of American life that never existed in reality (Adams 1991,
98). She writes, “It is a rose-colored visual image that successfully stimulates a feel-
ing of nostalgia for a simpler, more relaxed past and serves as a preferred substitute
not only for the dingy reality of such streets as they existed in the past but also for
the disillusionment and shortcomings of one’s own hometown” (Adams 1991, 98).
 Hidden Histories 45

Fjellman similarly notes that the theme parks “tap into people’s nostalgic need for a
false memory” (Fjellman 1992, 60) and present history “as if there had never been
any problems, just continual progress” (Fjellman 1992, 61). Digging deeper into
the Disney theme parks’ representations of history, Bryman emphasizes the various
ways in which the parks present a sanitized, rosy view of the past that “exaggerates
positive elements and plays down or altogether omits negative ones” through a com-
bination of humor and omission (Fjellman 1992, 128). Where humor is concerned,
writes Bryman, “The past is often presented as slightly zany, and humour is used
to convey the eccentricities of history” (128). Omission is then used to “present an
upbeat, optimistic message” for visitors (128). And, as Fjellman points out, some-
times Disney’s representation of history is simply anachronistic or wrong—as when
the voices of disenfranchised women are included in the reading of the Preamble to
the U.S. Constitution in the Hall of Presidents attraction. “We are thus confronted
immediately with a central irony of all of Disney’s historical productions,” explains
Fjellman. “In order to suggest the appropriate ‘idea’ of history, Disney pedagogy
must suppress, rearrange, and invent history in the interest of safe dramatic presenta-
tion” (Fjellman 1992, 67)—a practice that Mike Wallace characterized as “histori-
cidal” (Wallace qtd. in Fjellman 1992, 67).
While critics have “excoriated” Disney’s vision of history (Fjellman 1992, 62), little
attention has been paid to the Haunted Mansion attraction in this respect—perhaps
because, unlike Main Street U.S.A., Frontierland, or Liberty Square, the Haunted
Mansion doesn’t appear to engage in any serious way with American history. This,
of course, is the inherent irony of the attraction—a haunted house without history.
Its ghosts are manifestations of the present overlaid with a veneer of pastness: histo-
ricity without history. And yet the odd placement of the Haunted Mansion in the
Disney theme parks—New Orleans Square in Disneyland and Liberty Square in the
Magic Kingdom—suggests that, all appearances to the contrary, they are neverthe-
less saturated with a kind of ghostly history that manifests when one looks at the
attraction awry.
As mentioned above, among Walt Disney’s ideas for New Orleans Square in
Disneyland was to delve into “the rapacious, darker aspects of the Crescent City”
(Baham, “Ken’s Conundrum,” n.d.) through a focus on piracy. His original idea
was “a wicked little exhibit of the notorious pirates of yesteryear that guests were
to walk through in caverns underground, viewing wax museum–style tableaus and
simple animations that told the predacious tales of New Orleans’ own Jean Lafitte
and other famed buccaneers” (Baham, “Ken’s conundrum,” n.d.).8 Ken Anderson’s
early Captain Gore narrative for the Haunted Mansion coordinated with this pirate
theme, although triangulating it with the Bluebeard folktale. This focus on piracy,
however, would seem to deflect attention from the most rapacious aspect of old
Louisiana telegraphed by the Haunted Mansion’s Southern plantation manor house
facade: slavery. Tellingly, although certainly not surprisingly, among the Haunted
Mansion vaunted 999 ghosts, none appears as a specter of color. The Doom Buggy
46 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

trip through the mansion conveniently avoids the slave quarters, and servants and
slaves are, of course, absent from the attraction entirely.
It would seem almost impossible to consider the facade of an antebellum Louisiana
plantation manor house and not have slavery as a point of reference, and yet that is
exactly the sleight of hand Disney performs with the Haunted Mansion attraction
in California. The attraction’s ghosts are silly, slightly creepy, and in some cases con-
nected to comic demises; strategically absent, however, is any reference to the actual
American history toward which the plantation facade gestures. Given the purpose
of the attraction—evocation of pleasurable affect—and Walt Disney’s general ap-
proach to history, this is predictable. As Bryman notes, Disney historically has done
poorly where representations of racial difference are concerned. References to racial
conflict and institutionalized racism have been avoided and problematic stereotypes
reinforced (Bryman 1995, 131).9 Disney has made twenty-first-century efforts to
tidy things up: Racist portrayals of indigenous people in the Jungle Cruise attraction
were revised in 2021 (see Alexander 2021), Song of the South (dir. Harve Foster and
Wilfred Jackson, 1946) has not been released on Disney’s streaming service, Disney+,
and so on. But the ghosts haunting the Haunted Mansion remain pale indeed. For
this reason, one can argue that the real ghost haunting Disney’s plantation manor
house is the absent presence of slavery.
The shift from New Orleans Square in Disneyland to Liberty Square in the Magic
Kingdom reframes this consideration of occulted history in a particularly interesting
way by juxtaposing the invented histories of the Haunted Mansion with the Hall
of Presidents attraction and replicas of the Liberty Bell, the Liberty Tree, and the
Liberty Belle riverboat.10 While the Hall of Presidents attraction has gone through a
number of renovations and updates, the general structure has remained consistent: A
patriotic film about American history starts things off and includes an animatronic
Abraham Lincoln rising to deliver the Gettysburg Address. After the film is a roll
call of American presidents who acknowledge in some way their name being called.
The performance concludes with a speech by George Washington about how the
“American Dream will endure” and the inaugural oath of office by the current US
president. As Fjellman explains, this explicit introduction of aspects of American
history to the Magic Kingdom results in a more deliberate “pedagogical experience”
(Fjellman 1992, 60) as the theme park asserts a nostalgic vision of history celebrat-
ing “progress” and “liberty” while subordinating, as Bryman observes, problems
created by industry and corporations, issues of race and class, and conflict in general
(Bryman 1995, 129).
The Haunted Mansion attraction in the Magic Kingdom, with its “Dutch
Colonial Gothic” facade (see “Haunted Mansion [Magic Kingdom],” n.d.) replacing
that of a Southern plantation manor house, would seem to participate even more
fully than its Disneyland counterpart in this erasure of conflict.11 However, like the
original Disneyland version, the Magic Kingdom’s iteration, too, gestures toward the
history it simultaneously effaces, but which continues to haunt it. On the one hand,
the attraction’s Gothic Revival facade, “[resembling] an ominous haunted castle,
 Hidden Histories 47

with large, imposing brick facades, heavy wrought iron, and landscaping that appears
to have run amok” (Baham, “The Architecture,” n.d.), provides an architectural link
between America and Europe, foregrounding continuities between past and present
and the colonization period of North America. (It is indeed rather remarkable that
the Haunted Mansion’s cemetery at the Magic Kingdom isn’t built atop that most
threadbare of American Gothic conceits, the “ancient Indian burial ground.”) On
the other hand, its positioning off of Liberty Square permits one to exit the Hall
of Presidents, having just heard Abraham Lincoln address the “honored dead” who
fought on behalf of the Union during the Civil War, and immediately queue up for
the Haunted Mansion where ghosts frolic seemingly divorced from the same history
of internal strife foregrounded by the Gettysburg Address. The “grim grinning ghosts
that come out to socialize,” as the attraction’s theme song puts it, are seemingly not
those who gave their lives at Gettysburg furthering the belief that “all men are cre-
ated equal.” But the presence of a haunted house in Liberty Square is nevertheless
a reminder that history is itself a house packed to the rafters with the ghosts of the
abused, exploited, and forgotten. In both its Disneyland and Magic Kingdom forms,
the attraction disavows the very history toward which it simultaneously gestures,
substituting comic ghosts without history for the real ones it nevertheless invokes.

GOTHIC AMERICA

Thus, we end up back where things began: with the original vision for Mickey
Mouse Park as a small, old-fashioned town featuring a general store, town hall, soda
fountain, police and fire stations, village green, and so on, all presided over by a
“ramshackle Victorian house on a hill overlooking an overgrown cemetery” (Surrell
2009, 13). The Gothic was there from the start as even this idealized vision included
ghosts. In Margaret King’s writings about the Disney theme parks, she argues com-
pellingly that they are “deeply rooted in, and reflective of, American core values”
(King 2002, 6) and that they “encapsulate American myths and belief systems” (King
1981, 117). The presence of an inert haunted house—one drained of any history,
lacking in narrative, and played for comic effect—is arguably central to this vision
and characteristic of Disney Gothic in general: neither the past nor death hold any
real terrors. To move boldly into a brighter tomorrow, the Disney parks would seem
to suggest, requires extricating oneself from the shadows of the past. To that end, in
keeping with dark rides in general, the only ghosts are playful ones conjured into
being for the purpose of being exorcised. Disney’s Gothic is always mock-Gothic,
balancing, as Williams puts it, “low-level scares and a tone of creepiness with the
ultimate familiarity and reassurance of a Disney attraction” (Williams 2020, 109).
To achieve this balancing act, actual history must be bracketed off, replaced by an
invented one that defangs the past in the service of present enjoyment. And yet,
one need only scratch the surface of the Haunted Mansion to uncover the other
48 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstoc

histories that have been whitewashed. There are indeed ghosts haunting the Haunted
Mansion, just not where one usually looks.

NOTES

1. While this essay will restrict its attention to the shared design and mirrored experience of
the Disneyland and Disney World attractions, the other variants of the attraction are interest-
ing to consider. See Bryce 2020 for more details.
2. The “authorized” versions include episode two of the first season of Disney’s The
Imagineering Story documentary on the development of the theme parks (“What Would
Walt Do?” 2019) and the official history of the ride, The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic
Kingdom to the Movies, by Disney writer and show director Jason Surrell. The fits and starts
of the attraction’s development, discarded ideas, and bits of trivia are also covered from
the fan perspective by the extremely thorough the Doombuggies.com website created by
Haunted Mansion superfan Jeff Baham (developed even more fully in his The Unauthorized
Story of Walt Disney’s Haunted Mansion [2014]), in Foxx Nolte’s unofficial history, Boundless
Realm: Deep Explorations Inside Disney’s Haunted Mansion (2020), and in a variety of YouTube
videos including several from the Offhand Disney YouTube channel (see, for example,
“EVERY ghost in the Haunted Mansion: Explained” [2021] and “The STRANGE Origins
of the Haunted Mansion . . . ” [2021]), from the Yesterworld Entertainment YouTube chan-
nel that explores the histories of theme parks, and other popular culture media and attrac-
tions (see “Yesterworld: The Evolution of The Haunted Mansion & Abandoned Effects (The
Disneyland Original)” [2018] and “Yesterworld: The Original Haunted Mansion You Never
got to Experience—Disneyland’s Ghost House”) [2019], and from the Park Ride History
YouTube channel (see “The Evolution of the Haunted Mansion” [2019] and “The History of
& Changes to The Haunted Mansion | Disneyland”) [2017].
3. The decision to replace New Orleans Square with Liberty Square to a certain extent
follows the same logic—to those from Florida, Louisiana isn’t especially exotic. However, as
Midway to Mainstream explains, Walt had planned something similar to Liberty Square for
Disneyland, but lacked the necessary space to include it (see Midway to Mainstream 2017).
It thus was incorporated into the Florida site, with the idea of also building a New Orleans–
themed hotel complex (what is now Disney Springs) (see Marcus Q 2020).
4. The Ghost Host is voiced by actor Paul Frees, perhaps best known for voicing the char-
acter Boris Badenov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
5. Ravenscroft is recognizable to many as the voice of Tony the Tiger and the singer of
“You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch” from the Chuck Jones/Dr. Seuss special, How the Grinch
Stole Christmas (dir. Chuck Jones, 1966). Interestingly, the title of the song, “Grim Grinning
Ghosts,” is taken from Shakespeare’s lengthy narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), in
which Venus chides Death for blighting beauty. Little of the song apart from the title, how-
ever, reflects the themes of love, lust, and death present in Shakespeare’s poem.
6. The Bluebeard inspiration is preserved in the attraction’s final form. On the way out of
the attraction, guests pass three crypts. The third one contains Blue Beard and his seven wives.
7. On the centrality of the portrait to the Gothic literary tradition, see Elliott 2012.
8. Disney, notes Baham, had a lifelong love for pirate tales, and the studio’s first live-action
film was Treasure Island (dir. Byron Haskin, 1950) (Baham, “Walt’s Early Haunts,” n.d.).
 Hidden Histories 49

9. For an alternate perspective of Disney’s representations of race, see Brode 2005.

10. Disney’s Liberty Tree, less familiar to many than the Liberty Bell, is a live oak recall-
ing “the original Liberty Tree in Boston under which the self-styled Sons of Liberty gathered
in 1765 to protest the Stamp Act. Hanging from its branches are lanterns that represent the
thirteen original colonies” (Fjellman 1992, 66).
11. According to The Haunted Mansion Wiki, the design for the Magic Kingdom’s Haunted
Mansion is based on the Joel Rathbone mansion, “a Gothic Revival Pointed-style villa de-
signed by Alexander Jackson (A. J.) Davis, in the upper Hudson River Valley area of Albany,
New York” (“Haunted Mansion (Magic Kingdom),” n.d.

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———. 2002. “The Theme Park: Aspects of Experience in a Four-Dimensional Landscape.”
Material Culture 34, no. 2: 1–15.
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.com​/watch​?v​=7leQs​_am9o8​&t​=338s.
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Inklingwood Press.
———. 2022. “Disney’s Haunted Mansion and the Invention of Halloween as You Know
It.” MiceChat: Welcome Back to the Magic, 11 January 2022. Accessed Jan. 23, 2022. https:​
//​www​.micechat​.com​/308943​-disneys​-haunted​-mansion​-and​-the​-invention​-of​-halloween ​
-as​-you​-know​-it/.
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Raven​_(The​_Haunted​_Mansion).
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 Hidden Histories 51

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-grand​-guignol​-was​-so​-shocking.
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4
Monsters on the Mouse-Tube
The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the
Disney Channel Original Movie
Jay Bamber

“That’s the thing . . . I believe that watching the Revenge of Count Krelski is an ef-
fective way for Taylor to come to terms with his fears!” This is the plea of Adam
Hansen (Matt O’Leary), the protagonist of Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire (Steve
Boyum, 2000), when chastised by his mother for letting his little brother, Taylor
(Myles Jeffrey), watch what is clearly meant to be a Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)
adaptation on television. This exchange works as a sly joke as the film makes many
metatextual references to the filmic and literary Dracula, but also anticipates discus-
sions that may be happening in the homes of the target audience. The film centers on
the three Hansen siblings’ attempt to enjoy their Halloween unsupervised by setting
their mother (Caroline Rhea) up on a date after what is presented as a postdivorce
dry spell. Surprisingly for the children, though perhaps less surprisingly for the audi-
ence given the film’s title, the handsome, mysterious Dimitri (Charles Shaughnessy)
that they chose to be their mother’s paramour is an ancient vampire looking to turn
her into one of his minions.
Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire continued the tradition, started by Under Wraps
(Greg Beeman, 1997), of made-for-TV movies shown on The Disney Channel that
loosely adapt Gothic horror films and transpose them into the milieu of late 1990s
and early 2000s suburbia. While The Disney Channel Original Movie (DCOM)
encompasses many genres, perhaps most notably the musical, the number of
Gothic-influenced DCOMs and the frequency with which they are repeated gestures
toward the Disney Corporation’s investment in arguing horror’s therapeutic potential

53
54 Jay Bamber

for children to justify a popular, easily repeatable, and lucrative formula. While the
corpus examined here has been chosen for its engagement with the cinematic Gothic
lineage, it is by no means exhaustive in covering the full scope of the DCOMs’ rela-
tionship with the horror genre. Popular franchises such as Halloweentown (Duwayne
Dunham, 1998) and Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (Paul Hoen, 2018) are equally indebted to the
horror genre, further reinforcing the genre’s centrality to the DCOM, though are less
obviously calling upon established Gothic iconography and tropes.
As will be unpacked in this chapter, this corpus frequently shows child protago-
nists arguing the merits of the Gothic genre and suggesting that parents’ aversion to
them accessing it is short-sighted and even harmful to their development. This motif
perhaps shows these films defensively providing real-world justification for what
some may see as the incongruity between The Disney Channel’s wholesome image
and genre fare—an opposition spurred on by the (perceived) disconnect between
“Disney’s sanitized and ‘family-friendly’ corporate aesthetic” (Chesluk 2007, 197)
and cultural associations of the horror genre with problematic child behavior (Trice
and Greer 2019, 18). By making their central protagonists mouthpieces for more
sympathetic views of child horror fandom, and Gothic fandom more specifically,
these films can be seen to anticipate the criticism that children’s horror, as Jessica
Balanzategui contextualizes it, “gestures towards the perception that the quest for
profits is being prioritized over children’s wellbeing” (Balanzategui 2018, 120) and
provide a viable counterpoint.
While Adam’s mother finds his argument unconvincing, this brief interaction
neatly sums up many of the cultural debates surrounding children’s engagement
with horror cinema. As Catherine Lester notes, “[the horror genre] is one particu-
lar area of media from which children are often thought of as needing protection”
(Lester 2016, 25), a stance with which the parental figure here aligns herself. Yet,
Adam’s assertion that horror, and in particular Gothic horror, has cathartic and even
instructional value is ultimately validated by the film. It is through their knowledge
of Gothic tropes and aesthetics that the Hansen siblings can defeat the Gothic force
that threatens their family and, in doing so, overcome some of the emotional and
societal challenges the family unit faces.
In this sense, these films echo Margarita Georgieva’s assertion that the child
protagonist of Gothic literature is often presented as being in a “state of constant
becoming” and that it is “the vast gothic experiment that is built around the
child” (Georgieva, 68) which demonstrates this process. It is within the Gothic
mise-en-scène of an abandoned castle that eight-year-old Taylor, who is shown cow-
ering behind the sofa when exposed to Revenge of Count Krelski at the beginning of
the film, faces the suave vampire that seeks to destroy his family and asserts his brav-
ery and maturity. Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire’s final image, like many in the
horror DCOM canon, is one of familial unity. The film ends on a freeze-frame of the
Hansen’s smiling within a Gothic castle in an unusual shot of the family members
together in one frame (they have previously been positioned as a loving, but frac-
tured unit characterized by significant temporal distance throughout the narrative).
 Monsters on the Mouse-Tube 55

It is made clear in these final moments that interacting with the motifs of the
cinematic and literary Gothic has facilitated a traditional happy ending from which
every “good” character has benefited. As the Hansens happily chat about pancakes
(a signifier of suburban domesticity) in front of a coffin in a grand, dilapidated
hallway (signifiers of the Gothic), Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire achieves what
Howe and Yarbrough see as the primary conclusion to family films produced in
the United States: “happy endings [that] resolve most if not all of a film’s thematic
conflicts and in the process reifies the dominant ideologies of the era” (Shepard and
Wojcik-Andrews 2014, 228). As this chapter will demonstrate, Mom’s Got a Date
with a Vampire is not alone in the DCOM canon in suggesting that the Gothic space
can be a site of personal empowerment. Indeed, the horror DCOM frequently ar-
gues that Gothic interruption provides a necessary opportunity for child protagonists,
and their parents, to change in ways that allow them, as Megan Troutman argues, to
“grow sideways” (Troutman 2019, 157).
Again and again, the horror DCOM engages with cultural arguments against hor-
ror’s “appropriateness” for children and finds them lacking, instead presenting the act
of grappling with (Gothic) horror as tantamount to grappling with personal, familial,
and socioeconomic fears. In this, the DCOM can be seen to wade into the Gothic’s
negotiations around oppression and empowerment and renegotiate them to include
suburban children’s fears of adulthood and the concerns of the post-1990s divorced
family. As will be discussed, by engaging with playful pastiche, Under Wraps, Mom’s
Got a Date with a Vampire, and Phantom of the Megaplex (Blair Treu 2000), the hor-
ror DCOMs that most overtly adopt Gothic cinematic texts, sometimes revel in the
joys of slasher and B-movies but ultimately find their emotional revelations in the
images and themes of the Gothic, either by reconfiguring its monsters into friendly,
neutral forces or destroying them.
By centralizing the role of the Gothic tradition in horror DCOMs, this chap-
ter will explore how the visual and narrative signifiers of the cinematic Gothic
are adapted to engage with the anxieties of suburban children and teenagers. This
work will argue that DCOMs don’t divorce the Gothic from its ability to “question
mainstream versions of ‘reality’ and to interrogate the values associated with them”
(Palmer 1999, 9) by adapting it to youth audiences, but rather furnish it with
renewed metaphorical meanings. Additionally, by discussing how the relationship
between the horror genre and Disney media is often seen as incompatible, this work
will position the DCOM as an overlooked, but significant corpus to untangle the
relationship between child audiences, Disney visual media, and horror cinema. In so
doing, it will in the process discuss how a reticence to class these films as “true hor-
ror” is driven by “a desire to control the genre’s boundaries and, specifically, to do so
by rejecting the legitimacy of young audiences” (Antunes 2020, 90).
In comparing Gothic novels aimed at adolescents to other genres of youth fiction,
Glennis Byron and Sharon Dean argue that “adolescent power is depicted in a far
more positive and empowering fashion in teen Gothic texts, where power structures
are shown to be challenged, compromised and defeated” (Byron and Dean 2014,
56 Jay Bamber

97). Although Byron and Dean are examining the literary Gothic here, the trajectory
they point out adroitly describes what this essay will propose as the central theme of
the horror DCOM: that Gothic monsters and metaphors, which bring with them
central tenets of the Gothic like Gothic doubling, “the return of the repressed”
(Clemens 3 and passim, 1999), and a destabilization of traditional power structures,
provide valuable context to the child protagonist’s maturation, emotional develop-
ment, and understanding of the suburban lifestyle.

“IT’S CALLED UNIVERSITY OF DEATH!”: PASTICHE,

CINEMA KIDS AND THE GOTHIC IN UN-GOTHIC PLACES

The horror DCOMs’ fascination with movies and movie history appears to be em-
bedded in its formula, with intertextual references forming much of their humor
and, perhaps not unusually for the films discussed here, these references tend to
find the most purchase in the horror genre. In Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, for
example, the characters are shown walking underneath a sign for The Lost Boys (Joel
Schumacher, 1987), a film that similarly finds narrative momentum in a plot that
sees children trying to stop their mother being consumed by a handsome vampire.
Indeed, the first Disney Channel Original Movie, Under Wraps, opens with a fic-
tional horror movie being viewed by the main characters in the cinema. Under Wraps
centers its narrative on horror fanatic Marshall (Mario Yadidia) and his attempts to
help his nervous friend Gilbert (Adam Wylie) embrace life through a love of horror
movies. When they accidentally stumble on an ancient mummy, who is harmless and
comically clueless about the technological advancements of 90s Los Angeles, they
must help him find his long-lost (mummified) bride and find eternal rest.
Under Wraps’ fictional film includes stylistic hallmarks of the horror movie, in-
cluding POV shots from an antagonist lurking outside, elaborate monster make-up
effects and insert shots of potentially dangerous weapons. While it is not immedi-
ately obvious that this is a film-within-a-film, the somewhat graphic nature of it (it is
heavily implied that the patriarch of the onscreen family is going to be decapitated by
a disfigured monster) indicates that Under Wraps is situating the at-home audience in
a separate diegesis. This is reinforced by a visual style and performances that suggest
B-movie pastiche. One way this opening functions is to remind child audiences of
the artificiality of what they see on screen, thus alleviating some apprehension on
their part—a key strategy that Kimberley Reynolds identifies in children’s horror
novels, which often reveal “what was thought to be inexplicable is explained, and
what seemed dangerous and menacing is made safe” (Reynolds 2004, 2).
Here, the horror DCOM is offering some of the pleasure of more graphic hor-
ror, and as other children’s horror scholars have argued, in order to understand this
complicated genre, it is important to centralize pleasure rather than simply focusing
on the didactic or “worrying” elements of it (Lester, 2021; see also Daniel 2006,
182; see also Hood 2016, 82). This sequence gestures to the transgressive pleasure
 Monsters on the Mouse-Tube 57

that children may find in watching violent horror films—Under Wraps’ main pro-
tagonist Marshall is seen delighting in the potential for what he refers to as “horrible
things”—yet ameliorates the potentially disturbing impact of them through rein-
forcing that it is “just a movie.” The idea that B movies can provide children with
pleasure is reinforced by the image of popcorn flying into the air at the reveal of the
on-screen monster and giggles from the young background actors.
Under Wraps, much like other horror DCOMs that will be discussed throughout
this chapter, achieves this double pleasure (that of gesturing toward taboo horror
conventions while ultimately rendering them safe) partly by engaging in obvious
pastiche, which Michael Coyle argues offers “nothing more serious than nostalgia,
offering a comforting view wherein historical struggle is made quaint, made safe,
displayed precisely to show it no longer is alive” (Coyle 2015, 120, emphasis mine).
There is clearly a shared semantic field between Coyle’s summation of pastiche and
the kind of language that is used to talk about family-friendly children’s films (and
maybe Disney films more specifically). David Buckingham echoes similar sentiments
when paraphrasing the responses from adults whom he interviewed about The Walt
Disney Studios’ output: “Disney was generally seen as safe, sanitized, predictable,
inauthentic and somewhat corny” (Buckingham 2008, 47, emphasis mine). These
descriptors suggest that pastiche and children’s movies are an obvious match, both
of them aiming to render “alive” things dead and divorce them from vital, perhaps
complicated, interpretations. However, the horror DCOM can be read as using pas-
tiche, which Jemma D. Gilboy more generously defines as “an imitative celebration
of a given text”—one which is distinct from parody because of its lack of a “definitely
critical element” (Gilboy 2019, 228)—in more complicated ways.
In this corpus, pastiche is often used to poke gentle fun at certain horror genres,
while lauding the Gothic’s ability to promote emotional revelation, once again wad-
ing into (perhaps inevitable) discourses of horror’s value to children and ultimately
finding Gothic horror to be the most enlightening. This finds its fullest expression
in Phantom of the Megaplex, which focuses on Pete Riley (Taylor Handley), the
“youngest-ever assistant manager” of his local multiplex, and his movie-obsessed
siblings Karen Riley (Caitlin Wachs) and Brian (Jacob Smith) as they navigate an
eventful night in the titular megaplex. On the eve of a big Hollywood premiere,
strange things start to occur with projectors breaking down, giant promotional in-
flatables consuming the audience, and a mysterious cloaked assailant running around
behind the scenes.
Karen’s relationship with horror is established immediately, as she is introduced
complaining that she cannot see University of Death, which her mother (Corinne
Bohrer) mistakenly refers to as College of Blood. Both titles gesture toward the 1980s
campus slasher canon, which featured similarly outlandish titles like The Dorm That
Dripped Blood (Stephen Carpenter and Jeffrey Obrow, 1982) and Splatter University
(Richard W. Haines, 1982). The amusingly grotesque title of this fictitious film, and
the confusion of said title with something more grotesque, suggests that Phantom
of the Megaplex views slashers as interchangeable but ultimately humorous while
58 Jay Bamber

establishing the protagonist as a horror aficionado. Like the opening moments of

Under Wraps, here horror genres that deviate from the Gothic are seen as spectacles
and something for enjoyable communal consumption, though are framed in campy,
teasing ways aligning these subgenres themselves with a sense of pastiche. Brigid
Cherry sees the medium of television as particularly adroit at exploring the pastiche
potential of the Gothic genre, arguing that “the extent to which televisual forms of
the Gothic hold some of the mode’s established conventions and canonical figures
up to parody, subversion and pastiche” (Cherry 2014, 490). However, Karen is
seen wandering in and out of a screening of University of Death with her friends,
distracted by the Gothic figure of the Megaplex’s “phantom” who most closely aligns
with Gothic cinema. That Karen is distracted from a film that she is initially shown
as being desperate to engage with by a figure of the Romantic Gothic foreshadows
the film’s ultimate conclusion that the Gothic is related to notions of nostalgia, magic
and what Isabella van Elferen refers to as the “liminal space between history and
memory [in which] the Gothic roams” (Elferen 2009, 129), and that those connec-
tions justify the DCOMs’ elevation of the Gothic more generally.
Phantom of the Megaplex’s fascination with Gothic cinema is reinforced by the
use of footage from Rupert Julian’s The Phantom of the Opera (1925) as a framing
device. As the iconic sequence of Lon Chaney being unmasked by Mary Philbin’s
Christine Daaé plays in sputtering black and white (clearly enhanced to emphasize
the film’s oldness and thus its incongruity with the extremely modern multiplex),
The Phantom of the Megaplex signals to the audience that the film will be placing a
version of one of Gothic cinema’s most famous antagonists in an unfamiliar, mod-
ern milieu. The connection between this DCOM and The Phantom of the Opera is
represented visually with the antagonist of the movie hiding his face behind a mask
and concealing his body with a black cloak, drawing clear parallels with the popular
image of The Phantom drawn from both cinema history and the hugely popular
stage musical.
Pete, in voice-over, informs the audience that Phantom of the Opera was the first
film shown in the theater (linking the DCOM with a piece of iconic Gothic cinema)
and that the original cinema has since been destroyed in a mysterious accident, from
which, local Los Angeles legend suggests, only one person survived (echoing the de-
struction of the L’Opera Garnier by fire in La Roux’s novel). Part of this Phantom’s
plan to ruin the premiere is to disrupt the film-going experience by rendering
screenings illegible and finally replicating the on-screen conditions within the theater
space, for example, a film which appears to be a pastiche of Jan de Bont’s Twister
(1996) is interrupted with pouring water, industrial fans, and wind machines,
creating a twister in the room which forces the audience to flee. These events are
initially blamed on technical faults (as in multiple film adaptations of The Phantom
of the Opera), despite the belief held by Brian, the youngest member of the Riley
clan, that the fabled Phantom of the Megaplex is enacting some kind of revenge.
The management in charge of the multiplex dismisses this, perhaps in a reflection
of M. Moncharmin and M. Richard’s dismissal of an “opera ghost” when taking
 Monsters on the Mouse-Tube 59

ownership of the Le Palais Garnier at the beginning of 1925’s Phantom of the Opera.
Catherine Lester sees this as typical of children’s horror, which frames parental in-
competence at least partly through the lens of adults not believing children’s (correct)
concerns about the horror which has entered the suburban landscape (Lester 2016).
The elaborate nature of the “Phantom’s” stunts encourage Karen and Brian to
explore the cinema to discover the culprit, ultimately leading them to the basement,
a descent to the subterranean level that Jerrold E. Hogle sees as deeply symbolic in
several adaptations of Le Roux’s novel and central to his reading of the text being
about various forms of “sublimation” (Hogle, 2002). It is in the underground space
that the protagonists meet the ancillary character Movie Mason (played by Mickey
Rooney, another poignant nod to film history) who has been shown throughout the
film extolling the virtues of the cinema-going experience and who is, it is heavily
implied, the lone survivor of the earlier mentioned cinema accident.
Movie Mason’s introduction to the scene is scored with the iconic organ music
that audiences associate with The Phantom of the Opera, he is surrounded by several
cinema-sized posters for Rupert Julian’s adaptation, and his underground “lair” is
decorated with stills of Lon Chaney’s iconic Phantom makeup. A large, rotating fan
casts shadows over the scene, suggesting a key feature of 1925’s Phantom of the Opera,
which James Morgart suggests shows the influence of Nosferatu’s (F. W. Murnau,
1922) German Expressionist style in the early Universal Monster canon (Morgart
2014, 381). By placing Movie Mason within this mise-en-scène, the film implies
that his association with cinema’s Gothic Phantom all but guarantees that he is the
Megaplex’s.
Yet this is revealed to be untrue, as Movie Mason argues that “there is always
magic at the movies” and that to disrupt a movie is “a sin so grave as to be almost
incomprehensible.” It is within the milieu of the “subterranean space from the gothic
novel” (Pike 2007, 163) and surrounded by memorabilia from one of cinema’s earli-
est Gothic adaptations that The Phantom of the Megaplex reaches its emotional apex.
Echoing LeRoux’s Phantom’s love of opera, Movie Mason is shown to equally love
movies; but unlike the Phantom of the Gothic novel and cinema, this love is recon-
figured to one of safeguarding rather than destruction, of communal preservation
rather than individual enjoyment, of generalized appreciation rather than a singular
obsession. By engaging with the themes of The Phantom of the Opera in front of the
imagery of The Phantom of the Opera, The Phantom of the Multiplex furnishes the
Romantic Gothic text with new meaning. It is here that the youngest Riley children
recommit to their love of cinema and, in so doing, render the proxy for The Gothic
Phantom’s torture chamber a space to bring down the still-rampaging cinema ghost,
help their older brother learn to enjoy the pleasures of life (he is consistently pre-
sented as a workaholic), and witness their mother’s marriage proposal.
This emotional reinvigoration subversively renders the reveal of the actual
Phantom of the megaplex dramatically exciting but emotionally inert, in juxtaposi-
tion with the 1925 reveal of Lon Chaney’s much anticipated and cinematically sig-
nificant distorted face, which “might be the first flash-scare in horror film history”
60 Jay Bamber

(Morgart 2014, 381) and which opens Phantom of the Megaplex. This phantom is
revealed to be the general manager of the cinema, Shawn (Rich Hutchman), who
intends to ruin the evening’s press event after being passed up for a promotion. The
mundanity of Shawn’s motives stand in contrast to “the grand emotions of Gothic”
(Sanchez-Santos and Aguirre 2022, 75) and it is because of his lack of reverence for
them that he is ultimately punished. The Riley sibling embrace of the Romantic
Gothic means that they stand for the preservation of art, while Shawn’s dismissal of
it, even when calling on its aesthetics and costuming, aligns him with commerce (un-
equivocally a bad thing here and in line with children’s media’s tendency to equate
personal gain with villainy). Like the action, horror, and rom-com pastiches that
have been presented throughout the film, Shawn’s Phantom is shown to be a fun and
perhaps frightening distraction but is no match for a deeper understanding of the
Gothic’s significance and the empowerment that reworking its themes can provide.

“DON’T BE SUCH A WUSS, IT’S JUST A MOVIE”: GENRE,

FANDOM AND THE CHILD HORROR EXPERT

The valorization of horror knowledge and child horror fandom occurs in almost
all of the Disney Channel Original horror movies. Under Wraps’ film-within-a-film
structure also establishes characters with opposing points of view on the horror
genre and, through them, untangles debates surrounding it. After running away
in fear from the violent B-movie that makes up the opening moments of the film,
Under Wraps’ protagonist, Gilbert, expresses his distaste for horror movies to his
horror-loving friend Marshall. Marshall dismisses his concerns about onscreen hor-
ror, insisting that Gilbert “has got to learn to stop being afraid all of the time and
stand up [for himself ].” When Gilbert argues that he prefers movies like The Sound
of Music (Robert Wise 1965), which is presented as the antithesis of the monster
movie they have just left, Marshall is dismissive, suggesting that engagement with the
musical is, crucially, infantilizing. Marshall’s worldview is made clear; alignment with
horror represents an emotional maturity that no other genre can provide. Marshall’s
confidence initially appears supported by the film; it is his bravery that allows the
protagonists to discover the Mummy that is the inciting incident of the film. Yet
Under Wraps undercuts this or at least suggests that his horror fandom is valuable but
isolating. (He is left to watch the opening film by himself and, as will be discussed,
his horror obsession is shown to be somewhat emotionally stifling.)
Immediately, the first DCOM announces its fascination with the horror genre,
its relationship to maturation and emotional development, and its ability to grapple
with the concerns of the mid-1990s and early-2000s preteen. This is made more
explicit in the recent Under Wraps remake (Alex Zamm, 2021), which features a
similar exchange, but is more emphatic in connecting a fear of horror films with a
lack of true engagement with the world. In this remake, Marshall (Malachi Barton)
walks down a Halloween decoration-strewn suburban street with Gilbert (Christian
 Monsters on the Mouse-Tube 61

J. Simon) and expresses frustration with his friend who has been shown running
away from a horror movie, being startled by a werewolf fancy-dress costume and
jumping at a hooting owl. Marshall argues, “you’re missing out that’s all. . . . The
world is awesome and I wish you’d experience all of it. I don’t want you to be so
scared that your world shrinks down to nothing.” That Gilbert in both Under
Wraps is somehow “missing out” is reinforced by the fact that the films are set on
Halloween; as he articulates his dislike of horror films, he does so in front of an
environment that is lit up with glowing jack-o-lanterns and luminescent skeletons.
This mise-en-scène suggests that horror iconography, like the horror film at the
beginning of the narrative, may be temporarily frightening, but ultimately enjoyable
and cathartic for those who can engage with it.
That the horror DCOM presents horror iconography as deeply comforting to its
main characters is most obvious in its representation of the protagonist’s bedrooms
and the ways that those bedrooms are associated with emotional upheaval and
revelation. In Under Wraps, Marshall upon returning to his home and, finding his
mom’s new boyfriend there, flees to his bedroom, which is decorated with outland-
ish life-size casts of monsters and horror movie posters. Marshall’s mother (Corrine
Bohrer) steps into the bedroom and argues the merits of her new beau while ex-
plaining that she has been divorced from her ex-husband “for a really long time.” As
Marshall’s mother tries to emotionally engage with him, she does so standing next to
a cartoonishly large model of the monster from the fictitious film that opens Under
Wraps. This places the real-world emotions that Marshall is facing next to the plea-
sure of his fandom and reveals that his love of horror films may not have equipped
him with the emotional maturity he believes. Marshall is unable to articulate his feel-
ings, and a close-up shot reveals his obvious anguish before a jump cut to an image of
him in school, where he is removed from his horror memorabilia but surrounded by
friends. That Under Wraps so quickly problematizes the bravado that Marshall argues
horror movies provide him perhaps speaks to the horror DCOMs’ feelings regarding
what “type” of cinematic horror is valuable and ultimately edifying.
The final image of both Under Wraps is one of collegiate unity as both Marshalls
have become closer with their friends and are better able to “handle” the trials of
their lives, it is suggested, because of their transformative experience “parenting” an
incompetent Mummy. Through a series of comedic vignettes, the Gothic Mummy
figure is shown to be incongruous with the modern-day milieu (most notably being
stumped by a fast-food drive-through), constantly relying on the young protagonists
to keep him safe and to act as de facto parents to him. Yet the incompetent Mummy
is ultimately shown to be a powerful figure of love, authority, and tradition when
reinstalled into his natural habitat of tombs and the accoutrements of the Egyptian
cinematic Gothic.
It is strongly suggested that it is within this environment, and by experiencing
the Mummy’s reunion with his long-dead bride, calling on notions of the Romantic
Gothic, that Marshall is able to articulate his feelings to his mother, gain a better
understanding of the nuances of parenthood, and greatly expand his emotional
62 Jay Bamber

vocabulary. The Gothic figure of the Mummy is initially presented as frightening

(simply posing a threat), then comedic (a burden to the protagonists), and ultimately
a Romantic Gothic figure (as David Huckvale argues, it is not unusual for the cin-
ematic Mummy to be presented as a Byronic hero [Huckvale 2014, 186]). It is in
this form that the Mummy’s presence most greatly improves the child protagonists’
lives and encourages them to grow. It is perhaps due to the figure of the Mummy
holding a somewhat ambivalent role in the Gothic genre (Selim 2013, 32) that he
is here able to occupy these different genre spaces and, as I have argued, it is very
much in line with the DCOMs’ raison d’être that the one that most closely aligns
with Gothic imagery offers the greatest space for a happy ending.
A very similar scene to Marshall’s interaction with his mother in Under Wraps
plays out in Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, yet subtle shifts in the set decoration
and framing further suggest the DCOMs’ lionization of cinematic Gothic horror
and their tendency to articulate its merits above other horror subgenres. In an early
sequence, Alex’s mother enters his bedroom, clearly nervous. Like Marshall’s room
in Under Wraps’ earlier-discussed sequence, Alex’s room is decorated with horror
movie memorabilia. Yet in this case, he is shown owning a poster of Karl Freund’s
The Mummy (1932), a photograph of Lon Chaney’s infamous unmasking in The
Phantom of the Opera, and a picture of Boris Karloff in full Frankenstein (James
Whale, 1931) makeup. Rather than being emotionally stunted, as Marshall is shown
to be, Alex alleviates his mother’s fears about his father marrying a new woman and,
in the process, attempts to boost her self-esteem, offering the encouragement “you’re
still the bomb.” This nuanced emotional exchange suggests that Alex’s more obvious
engagement with Gothic iconography offers him a level of maturity that Marshall’s
love of B-movie horror does not. The horror DCOM here once again appears to
make distinctions between horror subgenres, framing slashers and B monster movies
as fun distractions and communal experiences, but ultimately lacking in the trans-
formative power of the cinematic Gothic.

THE POWER OF TRUE LOVE, HOW QUAINT: THE

INERT VAMPIRE, THE EMPOWERED MOTHER, AND
THE POWER OF TRUE LOVE

Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire is unusual in the child horror canon in suggest-
ing that the Gothic’s interruption is necessary for the parental figure; the primary
conflict facing the Hansen family does not find its locus in the children but in their
mother’s postdivorce malaise. The film’s first suggestion that the Hansen children
have set their mother up with a vampire comes in a meta-joke that subtly hints at
the dating woes of the post-90s divorcee. The inclusion of the vampire in the horror
DCOM appears to align with a greater trend within cinema. As Bronk and Bacon
argue, “as the millennium turned, the vampire appeared to become more and more
popular in media designed for all ages” (Boylan 2018, 24, emphasis mine). Dimitri’s
 Monsters on the Mouse-Tube 63

(Charles Shaughnessy) online dating profile, which he reads from the comfort of a
coffin in a cutaway scene, insists that he “hates Italian food and turtlenecks,” perhaps
revealing the unease surrounding issues of anonymity in early 2000s online dating
and knowingly winking at vampire folklore. After their initial meeting, in which the
vampiric Dimitri presents himself as a suave doctor, both financially secure and emo-
tionally intelligent, thus aligning with Carla T. Kungl’s assertion that “the modern
media vampire is an attractive, sexy creature often used as a metaphor for human
anxieties around sexuality” (Barker 2003, 114), Lynett frames herself as “someone
who doesn’t date.”
Although Lynett’s aversion to dating is not explicitly articulated through a
reticence to have sex—it would be hard to imagine a DCOM of any era being
this explicit about adult sexuality—the inclusion of a handsome, available man in
her life does cause significant panic. Dimitri’s alignment with “the perverse and
dangerous sexuality of the vampire” (Halberstam 1995, 14) is made clear by his
above-mentioned introductory shot, where he is lying prone in a velvet-lined cof-
fin, wearing a flowing shirt and positioned in front of a roaring fire, all, to varying
degrees, visual signifiers of Gothic cinematic sex.
Throughout Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, Dimitri is shown to use his Byronic
status as a means of embedding himself in Lynett’s life and to curry favor with her;
yet these attempts are continually shown to be ineffective. At an Italian restaurant,
playfully named Renfields, Dimitri’s clear attempts to be seductive are reduced to
a comedic set piece as he is asked to prove that he is not a vampire by the young-
est Hansen child. The antagonist repeatedly attempts to assert his dominance with
lines like “you’re kids, I’m a vampire, I have the power,” yet his authoritarian power
and the romantic union he presents is ultimately shown to be hollow in the face of
a renewed Lynette. Dimitri is unable to succeed because he cannot be Lynette’s one
true love, despite his supernatural, Gothic powers. When musing to herself about
being happy to be “introduced” to someone, Dimitri assumes it is him and that he
can now assert his patriarchal dominance, only to be told “I don’t mean you, I mean
me.” Lynett, like the child characters discussed throughout this chapter, is somehow
reanimated by interacting with an icon of Gothic cinema (if the connection between
Dimitri and Dracula is not obvious enough, he is chased throughout the film by a
character named Malachi Van Helsing). Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire utilizes
one of the central readings of the Dracula figure—that his sexual allure provides
him power—and undercuts it, once again introducing the idea that Gothic forms
are almost solely there to be revelatory for the protagonists.
On the fateful date that makes up the film’s title, Lynette and Dimitri visit a night-
club, despite Dimitri’s protestations. While they’re at the nightclub, it is revealed that
Lynette had been a singer in a popular band, a career that ended when she became a
mother, and that one of the band’s songs has gained a cult following. When asked to
perform the song in front of an enthusiastic crowd, Lynette is shown having the kind
of pleasurable experience that Dimitri assumes his sexual prowess will provide; the
Gothic here is a nudge toward personal freedom and expression, yet it is reconfigured
64 Jay Bamber

to better suit the Gothic DCOMs’ thesis statement. The Dracula proxy does offer the
Gothic’s ecstatic relief from rather fixed social identities (Lynette as single mother,
Taylor as nervous youngest child), yet does so despite his best efforts to harken back
to a time that is shown to be incongruous with 2000s social mores. Lynette is un-
interested in being a bride or minion. Again, this figure of Gothic fright ultimately
offers only a brief threat to the family / friendship unit before being a positive agent
of chaos and then change, as exemplified by a final moment of the family happily
chatting in front of the coffin which now houses Dimitri after his defeat.

CONCLUSION: IT WAS A GRAVEYARD SMASH!

What is striking about Under Wraps, Phantom of the Megaplex, and Mom’s Got a
Date with a Vampire is not only the filmmakers’ confidence that the (presumably)
child audience for these films will have knowledge of iconic Gothic cinema figures,
but that they present them as central in young people’s lives and of great value to
their maturation. These films almost always engage with “typical” childhood fears
such as the loss of a parent or parental divorce, but use Gothic “villains” as targets
for those agitations, suggesting a deep engagement with Gothic’s ability to external-
ize internal cultural fears. These films not only rely on the power of the cinematic
Gothic’s images (which may be understandable, given their prevalence in Halloween
celebrations), but seem deeply wedded to the idea that some of the popular readings
of Gothic literature and cinema can be mapped onto the rather strict formula of the
DCOM. These films though, rather than embracing “the highly gothic revelation of
past secrets” (Blake 2013, 48) transpose the Gothic into the contemporaneous set-
ting and utilize them to help the child characters (and, in Mom’s Got a Date with a
Vampire, their parent) move past what stymies them, with a distinct gesture toward
a more positive future. In the Gothic DCOM, the genre is perhaps unusually seen as
an unequivocally a force for good (even if those most closely aligned with it are not),
offering a new, perhaps particularly Disneyfied, lens through which to appreciate
figures that have haunted cinemas for over a century.

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5
Sinister Surveillance
Threatened Youth in Disney’s Watcher in the Woods
and Something Wicked This Way Comes
Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackson

A common refrain among Disney enthusiasts is that the studio’s family-friendly

image necessarily eschews anything that might undermine a stable sense of hope,
fantasy, or positive wish fulfillment. And yet, as this volume repeatedly demon-
strates, there are enough examples of the Gothic—including its moody atmospheres,
complex narrative situations, and cross-generation conflicts—in Disney media
that the presence of those seemingly negative forces can no longer be ignored. To
recognize those elements is not to suggest that Disney has been making explicitly
Gothic films all along, but that the Gothic is so pervasive that makes up a necessary
part of American culture. As Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock writes, “An understanding of
American culture and character, therefore, must include as part of its consideration
the Gothic impulse as it manifests in both literary and popular culture” (Weinstock
2017, 1). If it is true that the Gothic can inform everything ranging from America’s
unsettled past to its contentious present, then what does it mean to think of
Disney—its burnished reputation, image, and output notwithstanding—offering
something explicitly in that mode?
One could begin answering that question by arguing that many Disney projects
distinctly foreground common Gothic themes, including the ways the past impacts
the present, how secrets undermine stability, and how death informs life. And, as
Elizabeth Bronfen argues, film generally has a “ghostly” quality that implicitly plays
not only with themes of absence and presence but also with disruption, death,
and the wish for resolution (Bronfen 2019, 167). Scholars have also noted that

67
68 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

child-oriented media often draws on Gothic elements to explore themes as various

as addressing interpersonal conflict, heightened emotional situations, and asserting
oneself in difficult situations (Coats 2017, 173).
Much could be said about any of those themes within Disney’s history generally
but, in the early 1980s, the studio pushed beyond small flirtations with Gothic
themes to create extended and complex Gothic narratives aimed at older children
and teenagers. What the studio discovered through this process, however, is that the
Gothic is not something easily invoked, contained, or exploited, as if it were just
another formula. Instead, the Gothic should be understood as a distinctive mode
that introduces a complex of themes and moods built around patterns of excess,
transgression, and darkness (Botting 1996, 1–2). Through this mode, films and
other kinds of storytelling can explore a variety of themes, including the impact
of past secrets on present realities; how darkness and temptation impact identity
formation, particularly in the young and vulnerable; and how the traditional family
seems persistently subject to difficulty and decay. Two Disney films, Watcher in the
Woods (John Hough, 1980) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton,
1983), illustrate this phenomenon, taking up the Gothic in precisely those ways and
suggesting that, for a moment at least, Disney was willing to move past the flashy
brilliance of Main Street, USA, and direct audiences to the shadowy byways and
underground pathways that are filled with dark secrets, alluring but deadly villains,
and the threat of real danger.
Watcher in the Woods quickly takes on the appearance of a classic Gothic tale
through its focus on the Curtis family and their move into a rural English manor
owned by Mrs. Aylwood (Bette Davis), a reclusive old woman with a mysterious
past. Though Mrs. Aylwood is initially reluctant to let the family into her home,
she relents when she meets Paul (David McCallum), his wife, Helen (Carroll Baker),
and their teenage daughter, Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson), who bears an uncanny resem-
blance to her own teenage daughter Karen, who disappeared thirty years earlier. As
the family settles in, Jan begins experiencing unusual sights and sounds, including
strange blue lights, cracking glass that takes the shape of a triangle, and apparitions
of a blindfolded girl in a mirror. Jan’s younger sister, Ellie (Kyle Richards), also hears
whispered voices and falls into a series of trancelike states. After Ellie buys a puppy
from the neighboring Fleming family, she writes out the word “Nerak” on a dusty
window and tells Jan and Mike Fleming (Benedict Taylor), a teenage boy Jan has
befriended, that Nerak is her puppy’s name. But neither Jan nor Ellie initially realize
that Nerak is Karen spelled backwards, a point that others quickly see, thus leading
Jan to investigate more about Karen’s disappearance. Jan begins piecing together
the possibility that all the mysterious events she and her sister have experienced
somehow tie back to Karen. She discovers that Karen vanished while she and her
high school friends—Tom Colley (Richard Pasco), John Keller (Ian Bannon), and
Mary Pierce now Mike's mother, Mary Fleming (Frances Cuka)—were conducting
a makeshift initiation ceremony on the night of a lunar eclipse. Jan believes that if
she can gather everyone together to repeat the ceremony with her taking the place
 Sinister Surveillance 69

of the blindfolded Karen in the center of a circle during an upcoming eclipse that
somehow Karen might be able to return. As the ceremony begins, Ellie, seemingly
taken over by a mysterious entity, explains that Karen accidentally changed places
with a being (the Watcher) from another dimension and that she has been stuck in
that dimension ever since, still blindfolded and still fifteen years old. The film ends
after Mrs. Aylwood enters the chapel and discovers that Karen has returned.
Released three years after Watcher, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
explores the complex relationships between childhood and adulthood; longing and
regret; and pain and healing. Told from the point of view of young Will Halloway
(Vidal Peterson), the film focuses on small-town life in Green Town, Illinois, when
Will and his best friend and next-door neighbor, Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson),
learn that a rare fall carnival is coming to town. Will and Jim are inseparable, but
very different in temperament. Will, who lives with his mother and elderly father,
the town librarian Charles Halloway (Jason Robards), is cheerful and optimistic, but
Jim, whose father left home years earlier and never returned, seems distraught and
searching. One day, after being scolded by their teacher, Miss Foley (Mary Grace
Canfield), for whispering in class, they head home where they encounter a travel-
ing salesman, who sells Jim a weathervane in advance of an upcoming storm. The
storm blows in that night and with it the carnival, headed by the ominous Mr. Dark
(Jonathan Pryce).
When Will and Jim set out to investigate the carnival, they notice that some
townspeople are acting strangely. The town’s affable bartender Ed (James Stacy), who
was once a talented athlete but is now missing an arm and leg, seems mesmerized by
the house of mirrors where he sees his limbs restored. As she exits the same attrac-
tion, Miss Foley, having seen herself in the mirrors as the youthful beauty she once
was, acts increasingly befuddled and flustered. The town’s barber (Richard Davalos),
who misses the scent and touch of women, goes to a fortune teller and sees his future
surrounded by adoring women. Will and Jim then go to a secret part of the carnival,
where they witness Mr. Dark’s redheaded assistant, Mr. Cooger (Bruce M. Fischer),
riding a carousel that moves backward and somehow turns him back into a boy. After
Mr. Dark catches the boys spying, they run toward home, stopping first to check
on Miss Foley, who introduces the newly transformed Mr. Cooger as her nephew
Robert. More odd things happen. Miss Foley becomes young but goes blind, and
Cooger takes her to Mr. Dark. Jim, who has always envied Will because he was born
a minute earlier than he was, wants to get on the carousel to make himself older. Will
intervenes but does not completely dissuade Jim. Later that night, one of Mr. Dark’s
associates, a woman known as the Dust Witch (Pam Grier), also attacks Will and Jim
in their rooms with giant spiders.
The next morning Mr. Dark leads a parade through town, but he is really search-
ing for the boys. When Will calls on his father to help, Charles tells the boys to
meet him later at the library, where he tells them the story of the sinister carnival
that promises to give people what they most desire in exchange for entering their
evil world. Mr. Dark appears at the library and tries to tempt Charles by promising
70 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

to restore his youth, but when the old man refuses, he knocks him out and takes
the boys. Charles comes to and rushes to the carnival, where Mr. Dark continues to
taunt him and lures Jim to the carousel, promising to become his new father and
make him a partner in the carnival. Just as lightning strikes, Will and Charles pull
Jim from the carousel, Mr. Dark turns to dust, and a huge twister creates pandemo-
nium and sucks up the carnival. Charles, Will, and Jim run home through the bright
fall foliage, safe on this sunny morning.
Neither Watcher nor Something Wicked has received much critical attention from
scholarly voices nor in surveys of American Gothic (or even Disney) films. Both
have their champions, but both films brought the studio only modest box office
performances. Despite that, both films represent a distinctive moment when Disney
thought that a specific turn to Gothic themes would galvanize audiences and give
the studio an extra edge in a crowded marketplace. One neglected attempt from that
era, the made-for-television film, Child of Glass (John Erman, 1978), offered viewers
cross-generational scares through a boy’s discovery that his home (a former Southern
plantation) is haunted by the spirit of a murdered antebellum Creole girl. The fol-
lowing year, Disney released The Black Hole (Gary Nelson, 1979), an ambitious
response to Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) that combined elements of the Gothic
haunted house story with broader themes of existential dread.
Like those films, Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked this Way Comes rep-
resent a moment when Disney wanted to take up Gothic themes in the hope that
they would appeal to older children and teens. Obviously, Disney’s approach would
be nothing like the relentless and violent horror films of the time, including The
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974), Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978),
or Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham, 1980). Films like those eagerly stretched
the somewhat conventional Gothic style of the previous decade into the model for
contemporary horror film. But Disney would not go that far. Instead, the studio
embraced Gothic byways just enough to cut across its focus on hopeful narratives.
Whereas mainstream horror thrived on cutting up teenagers, Disney’s Gothic films
would settle for putting them in unprecedented conditions (for Disney) that imply
things like supernatural possession (Watcher) or that introduce sexually charged situ-
ations clearly beyond Disney’s typical fare (Something Wicked). Although both these
films are frequently overlooked, they nevertheless shed light on a fraught period in
Disney’s history and on what happened when the studio took up Gothic forces to
court an audience.
It will come as no surprise that Watcher and Something Wicked appeared dur-
ing Ron Miller’s controversial 1980–1984 tenure as Disney’s president and chief
executive officer. Both films exemplify the studio’s newly aggressive efforts to attract
those increasingly elusive older children and teens who were cutting their teeth in
theaters watching films like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Steven
Spielberg, 1977). Though Miller developed some very ambitious science fiction and
fantasy films with Disney, he also sought mainstream success by turning to more
Gothic-inclining projects targeted to children and emerging teens (shortly to be
 Sinister Surveillance 71

labeled “tweens”) who were increasingly indifferent to by-the-numbers comedies and

predictably sunny wish-fulfillment (Antunes 2020, 31). Miller also understood that
some of the most successful horror films of that era had relatively small budgets but
turned a significant profit. For Miller, capturing some of the enduring popularity
of films like Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968), The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre, and Halloween would be a major coup for the struggling studio. While
Disney was producing Watcher in the Woods, Miller even claimed that Disney is “go-
ing to scare the hell out of [viewers] this summer with a sort of horror story” (qtd.
in Antunes 2020, 31).
Miller’s qualification (“a sort of horror story”) is telling. As noted above, Disney
could not simply dive into the increasingly wild realm of the contemporary horror,
and so it turned to the somewhat subtler Gothic mode. In some ways, this turn
might have seemed consistent with a part of Disney’s history. After all, the studio had
an obvious long-standing connection to the Gothic that stems back not only to Walt
Disney’s interest in fairy tales (a familiar locus for Gothic tropes) but also to the ways
some of his films drew on iconic themes, images, and moods taken from German
Expressionism. As Lorna Piatti-Farnell asserts, “The connection between Gothic
horror and Disney is arguably unavoidable” (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 46). Evidence for
this point can be seen at least as far as the animated short film, The Skeleton Dance
(Walt Disney, 1929) and is readily traced through animated classics such as Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand et al., 1937), Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen
et al., 1940), Fantasia (James Algar et al., 1940), Bambi (David Hand et al.,1942),
and Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi et al., 1959)—all of which feature memorably
scary scenes that appeared within otherwise bright, hopeful narratives.
But Disney’s turn to the Gothic in the early 1980s would take things further. In
fact, both Watcher and Something Wicked showed Disney attempting to extend its
broad use of familiar Gothic tropes by expanding its vocabulary to include elements
drawn from contemporaneous horror films like The Exorcist (1973) and Halloween.
Those films obviously fall outside of Disney’s family-friendly corporate image,
but their impact on popular culture was unavoidable. The Exorcist, for example,
proved that horror films set in the contemporary world could push boundaries
and have significant box-office appeal. Similarly, Halloween took a relatively simple
stalk-and-slash formula and elevated it into a reflection on the nature of evil and
the increasing vulnerabilities of urban teenagers. If Disney could discover a means
of drawing on the power of those films without alienating their core audience, they
could significantly expand their audience.
Disney executives were especially excited about Watcher because it did not shy
away from placing a young girl in situations broadly reminiscent of The Exorcist,
including a handful of scenes featuring a frightened and blindfolded teenager reach-
ing out for help. In fact, when producer Tom Leetch pitched the idea of adapting
Florence Engel Randall’s 1976 original novel to film, he infamously exclaimed,
“This could be our Exorcist!” (qtd. in Antunes 2020, 25). If his comment seems
outrageous, it is because Disney could never release something so controversial and
72 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

boundary-pushing as The Exorcist—it had barely even entered the PG-rated market
by that time. And yet, Leetch wanted the studio to break new ground, not in the
form of violent spectacle highlighted by gore and sexuality, but through a good
enough application of Gothic tropes that was reminiscent enough of more frighten-
ing adult fare to hint at the studio’s newly audacious side. Even better, the Gothic
seemed ready-made for stories featuring young and vulnerable characters to fall in
over their heads and learn to rely on their own pluck to find their way out (Byron
and Deans 2014, 87, 102). By giving teenagers edgier content, Disney could also
appeal to their growing sense that they were no longer innocent children easily en-
tertained by whimsical cartoons built around increasingly dated themes.
In some ways, Ron Miller’s ambitions should have succeeded. The early 1980s
were marked by their own Gothic-like blend of upheavals, relentless ambition,
and the threat of suspected sinister plots, particularly against children. In 1980,
Democrat Jimmy Carter was voted out after one term, thus paving the way for
Ronald Reagan, who ushered in a pro-business environment with fewer protec-
tions. Reagan also fostered a surging interest in conservative values and embraced
the political ambitions of the Evangelical Right, which was quick to resist anything
they understood as leading the country into decay. At the same time, the women’s
movement gained momentum, bringing with it new changes to the workplace and
a renewed effort (and subsequent battle) to ratify an Equal Rights Amendment.
The divorce rate rose, hitting an all-time peak in the 1970s and early 1980s, when
approximately 50 percent of first marriages ended in divorce, revealing a fracture in
the traditional American family (Miller 2014). The plight of the missing child en-
sued, with the photos of missing children printed on milk cartons, pizza boxes, and
billboards. Such images also fueled a growing sense that children were abused and
exploited by secretive satanic cults made up of otherwise everyday seeming people.
As Philip Jenkins writes of the time, “not only were threats to children a familiar
concept, but so was the imagined form of the danger: clandestine rings and secret
organizations, evil predators seeking to seduce or capture them” (Jenkins 2006,
133). Crime stories saturated the newscasts, with murders hitting their all-time high
in 1980 (Asher 2017). In the title to his 1999 book, Barry Glassner termed this
fascination with crime “the culture of fear” (Glassner 1999). In such a tumultuous
time, an interest in Gothic tales flourished as a productive means of making sense
of living in a rapidly changing world. Children and emerging teens often grappled
with a sense that the world was not something they could easily explain even while
they attempted to process their growth, development, complicated emotions, and
life around them.

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

Watcher and Something Wicked arguably function as two sides of the same thematic
coin in that both films share enough narrative parallels to suggest that the studio
 Sinister Surveillance 73

was working out a new approach to Gothic storytelling it could adapt quickly.
Not surprisingly, the concept of youth predominates in both films, even though
it is routinely linked thematically not to brightness and innocence but to a sense
of mystery, the supernatural, the manipulation of time, and the loss of innocence.
Watcher involves two girls, Jan and Ellie Curtis, while Something Wicked features two
boys, Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade. Both are set in the twentieth century in
otherwise safe places: a rural estate in England and the small, idyllic setting of Green
Town, Illinois. Both spaces, however, also harbor secrets that represent adult secrets
and the threat of those secrets coming to light. They also focus on the ways dark
forces can intrude upon the community and the family, a theme consistent with the
fears and sensibilities of Americans in the early 1980s. The youthful protagonists of
both films, Jan Curtis in Watcher and Will Halloway in Something Wicked, confront
supernatural elements that they can neither understand nor control in a world that
is becoming increasingly more bizarre and threatening. Adding to the parallels are
the ways the champions Jan and Will are represented as fair-haired, suggesting a state
of relative innocence and curiosity, while their counterparts, Ellie and Jim, who are
possessed by darker forces, are dark-haired, accentuating the divide and the threats
that haunt them. Both films also feature climactic scenes that incorporate swirling
motions to suggest the passing of time and the threat of larger, even more uncontrol-
lable, forces.

GOTHIC SETTING AND ATMOSPHERE

Watcher and Something Wicked bear other important similarities that suggest Disney
was developing its own take on the Gothic film. Both films quickly establish a
Gothic setting that lends a sense of mystery and menace to everything. Watcher does
this by showing the Curtis family driving toward an old and craggy English coun-
try manor that resembles a classic haunted house in that it offers neither warmth
nor comfort but, instead, a sense of mystery stemming from inexplicable events.
Bordering the property is a dark, wooded area, where the watcher spies on the fam-
ily and draws Jan and Ellie into its sphere by creating strange sights and sounds,
including flashing blue lights and uncanny voices. While exploring the property,
Jan also discovers an empty, crumbling church with a bell tower where, she learns, a
séance once took place that led to Karen’s disappearance. All these settings convey a
sense of vastness and mystery steeped in tales of sorrow and loss. They also place the
characters in this film directly alongside the border of the possible where the rational
and the irrational blur and the prospect of other worlds or dimensions becomes pos-
sible (Botting 1996, 20).
Unlike the relatively static (and traditional) Gothic settings in Watcher, Something
Wicked is characterized by the nearly constant sense of movement and force
Bradbury employed in his original novel. The film opens with a stunning image
of a train bounding headlong into town, disrupting the early morning quiet with
74 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

its shrill horn and hissing steam. The film also expands Watcher’s familiar English
Gothic setting by focusing on the ways Green Town, Illinois could also harbor a
sense of Gothic mystery. Something Wicked takes place in late October, days before
Halloween, when summer has completely faded, darkness settles in early, and a
gloomy pall hangs over everything. As the film opens, an adult Will narrates over
images of the town a little about the setting and how the events he will explain taught
him about “the fearful needs of the human heart.” He also speaks about the threat
of a quickly gathering storm that coincides with the late-night arrival of a mysteri-
ous traveling carnival led by an ominous figure, Mr. Dark; his redheaded partner
Mr. Cooger, who transforms into a young boy; and the Dust Witch, who can bend
natural laws to her will. Although the carnival seems normal at first, its late-season
arrival into town sparks rumors, as does its range of features including unlit spaces
and sinister attractions, such as a carousel that can run backward and a house of
mirrors that seductively shows people as they once were: young, able-bodied, beauti-
ful. In the middle of the town is an old, cavernous library, which harbors the town’s
history and its darkest secrets. It is also the setting where Will’s elderly father (Jason
Robards), the head librarian, spends much of his nights contemplating his mortal-
ity and “dreaming other men’s dreams.” All these elements combine to establish a
Gothic setting where the past haunts the present, where secret desires are exploited,
and where evil quickly takes root.
Also contributing to the films’ distinctive Gothic atmosphere are visuals of cracked
glass and distorting mirrors, both of which reflect the confused state of key charac-
ters. In Watcher, for instance, Jan senses a foreboding when she arrives at the manor,
and upon reaching her upstairs room, she looks out the window into the woods. As
she peers out, she sees a strange light, and suddenly the window breaks, frightening
her. Feeling uneasy, as if something is watching her, she says, “Something awful hap-
pened here. I can feel it. Something awful.” As Jan further explores the old house,
she passes a large, heavy mirror and glances for her reflection, but discovers there is
no reflection to see. The mirror then cracks, falls off the wall, and shatters, suggestive
not only of Jan’s own confused mental state but also of the trapped condition Karen
finds herself in. In Watcher, glass and mirrors take on an uncanny quality that helps
establish a sense of claustrophobia and danger. For Jan, the effect is visceral. She not
only cuts her hand on the glass, but she is also affected physically and emotionally.
When her parents discover what happened, Jan offers to clean up the broken mir-
ror, as if to repair her own fractured psyche. Later in the film, Jan and Mike visit a
local carnival and enter a hall of mirrors, and as Jan feels the room swirl around her,
she sees an image of Karen, blindfolded, alongside the words “Help me”—the same
plea audiences saw carved into Regan’s stomach in The Exorcist. When Jan tells Mike
“[s]he’s trapped somewhere . . . and she needs my help,” she clearly makes the connec-
tion between the image in the mirror and Karen’s entrapment. When Mrs. Aylwood
subsequently shows Ellie Karen’s music box, it features a delicate dancer in front of
small panels of mirrors, fragmenting the image in ways that once again symbolize
the entrapped Karen. Finally, in the film’s climactic scene, the chapel’s Gothic-styled
 Sinister Surveillance 75

stained-glass window provides a striking backdrop for the séance that encloses its
participants until the resolution comes. Linda Bayer-Berenbaum notes that the
“constant presence of polar opposites” in Gothic texts is meant to magnify extremes
(Bayer-Berenbaum 1982, 22). In Watcher, windows, glass, and mirrors, which cap-
ture light, contrast with the darkness of the woods, signifying Karen’s struggle and
Jan’s anxiety.
Mirrors and glass also figure in Something Wicked, as the traveling carnival’s house
of mirrors establishes a sense of mystery, one that is invested in wish-fulfillment.
Here mirrors function as entries to the past, altering and falsifying appearances to
show visitors to the attraction as they once were—younger, able-bodied, more beau-
tiful. Miss Foley exits the house of mirrors so startled by what she sees that Will and
Jim stop by later to check on her. There they find the redheaded boy who was once
Mr. Cooger, who throws a rock at her window, for which Will and Jim are blamed,
the shattered glass signifying the fracture and disintegration to come. Later, Miss
Foley glances at her reflection in her mirror at home, sees the beautiful image of her
in her youth, and becomes blind. The glass and mirrors in Something Wicked capture
the film’s central metaphor: They manipulate time, transporting people to the past
and recalling for them what they had lost long ago but still covet. These devices that
capture light also contrast with Mr. Dark, signaling to Will and Jim that something
is amiss and motivating them to uncover the dark force that is threatening vulnerable
people and disrupting the town. In the film’s final showdown between good and evil,
Charles enters the house of mirrors and, amid Mr. Dark’s jeering, rejects its promises
and lies, as Will proclaims his love for his father. Charles punches the mirror, shat-
tering the glass, finding his resolve, and claiming his dignity. He has triumphed over
the mirrors’ distorted images.

Figure 5.1. The hall of mirrors in Disney’s The Watcher in the Woods
76 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

SURVEILLANCE, PARANOIA, AND THE

SINISTER SUPERNATURAL

Another way Watcher and Something Wicked explore darker themes is by focusing on
an implicit surveillance over children by adults with uncertain or threatening mo-
tives. Watcher establishes this theme immediately through its enigmatic title which
suggests the presence of something unseen and unknown but nevertheless present,
lurking, and potentially sinister. Jan reflects on this when she explains that the eerie
atmosphere feels “like someone is watching us.” This sensation is underscored at
several points in the film through a Steadicam which can create subjective or POV
shots that shift, move, and crouch to suggest the presence of someone watching
them surreptitiously. Considering that these subjective shots are typically focused
on two of the film’s most vulnerable characters, Jan and Ellie, they also build ten-
sion surrounding the watcher and its intentions. These shots in Watcher easily recall
Halloween’s own dazzling opening sequence in which a Steadicam implies the pres-
ence of an unseen figure who stalks a teenage girl into her bedroom and murders her.
In Watcher, the first POV shot begins just after the Curtis family crosses from
the main road onto the Aylwood property. The camera first looks out onto the road
and, seeing the car approaching, pulls back behind a tree until the car passes, sug-
gesting that the figure does not want to be seen. It then follows the car as it moves
up the road until it decides to shift under cover of the woods so that it can continue
to observe the family unseen while they arrive and get out of the car. The watcher
remains under cover of the woods the whole time, but rarely breaks visual contact
with the family and its activities.
Another significant POV shot occurs when Jan and Ellie go to the farm of Jan’s
new friend Mike and get acquainted with him while Ellie buys a new puppy and
explores the area in hopes of discovering a “special name” for the dog. The camera
not only stalks Jan and Mike into the barn, but it also appears to be listening to
their conversation (which comes across as somewhat distant and unclear, suggesting
it is not as interesting to the watcher as something else). Soon, the audience realizes
that the watcher is following Ellie while also keeping a careful eye on Mike and Jan.
After a cut, the shot maintains a long view of Mike and Jan when suddenly Ellie
moves her head (in profile) into the frame from the left, her eyes set forward, and
her movements slow. She holds this posture for several seconds and then slowly and
deliberately begins moving toward a window. She then stretches out her right arm
and begins to write out the word “Narek” on the window. The moment is fright-
ening because Ellie appears to be acting unconsciously, clearly at the behest of the
watcher. When Jan sees Ellie writing on the window and asks her to explain, Ellie
acts surprised by the question, claiming that it was Jan who whispered the name
to her and led her to write it out. She is clearly under the influence of the watcher.
Things progress in a later sequence when Jan enters the woods to look for Ellie,
who has wandered off with her dog, Narek. As Jan leaves, the camera turns to
Mrs. Aylwood (in close-up), who is watching Jan intently. Mrs. Aylwood’s face is
 Sinister Surveillance 77

situated behind part of an iron gate, its spiral pattern casting twisting and circular
images on her face, suggesting the enigmatic and ongoing nature of her pain and
longing. The camera then turns to a subjective shot, presumably from Mrs. Aylwood’s
perspective, that continues to spy on Jan through the same patterns in the gate. After
Jan enters the woods, camera shifts to another POV shot to represent the watcher
pulling out from behind a tree and following her, its intentions unclear. The sense
of uncertainty escalates when Jan, distracted by a blinding light, falls into the lake
and nearly drowns, implying that the watcher could have bad intentions and means
to harm her.
Something Wicked focuses on similar themes, only it is much more overt from start
to finish. Rather than hide behind the camera, Mr. Dark plays up his stark physical-
ity (his body is covered with tattoos that mysteriously move, shift, and transform)
and his lurid sense of mastery and control. From the start, Mr. Dark pursues the
boys not only because they understand some of Dark’s secrets, but also because he
wants to capture their youthful energies and put them in his service. With the town
in his thrall, Dark stalks Will and Jim out in the open by staging a makeshift parade
of carnival performers that moves, menacingly, through the town’s main street, all
the performers on alert for the two boys. At one point, Mr. Dark even walks into
the local bar and proclaims “I’m looking for two boys” as if he were merely ordering
drinks. Later, as discussed below, Mr. Dark confronts the boys (and Will’s father)
directly in the darkened town library after hours to offer them the prospect of a life
outside of convention, tradition, and safety. In this moment, Mr. Dark steps away
from the cartoon villains of Disney’s past and transforms into a personification of
the fears many people saw in the 1980s in the form of predatory adults hell-bent on
manipulating children.

STRESSES ON THE FAMILY

Watcher and Something Wicked also speak to the kinds of stresses on the family and
society that were increasingly common at the time. In Family Fictions: Representations
of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema, Sarah Harwood writes that in the 1980s,
“family became a primary—and controversial—site of political, social and cultural
struggle” that “reverberated specifically within its representations” (Harwood 1997,
3). Of particular concern was that the American family was no longer understood
as something inherently stable and secure but was increasingly a site of conflict and
concern (Patterson 2005, 271). This growing sense of familial struggle and unease
became a staple of several horror movies at the time, particularly in the ways they
represented traditional families buckling under the strain of abuse, addiction, vio-
lence, failure, and relocation (Briefel 2015, 38). In Watcher, this strain primarily
appears through the story of Mrs. Aylwood and her missing daughter, Karen. But it
also appears in the ways the Curtis family, brought to the remote British location so
that the composer father has a quiet place to work, is threatened by Jan’s increasing
78 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

Figure 5.2. Mr. Dark in Disney’s Something Wicked This Way Comes showing his tat-
tooed hands

obsession with finding Karen and with Ellie’s obvious possession by a supernatural
force. The site becomes the antithesis of serenity, as Paul and Helen Curtis attempt
to resolve the tensions growing within the family but ultimately prove ineffective.
Something Wicked develops its own sense of family conflict through Charles
Holloway’s strained relationship with his son. For Charles, a middle-aged man,
life is mostly a series of disappointments constantly overshadowed by the pros-
pect of death. Charles Holloway is getting older, and his heart is weakening. Jim
Nightshade’s mother (Diane Ladd) yearns for her husband, who abandoned his
family, and Jim misses his father; Charles seems to wonder if his own wife and son
will also be alone someday. Other people in the town yearn for things they desire or
have lost—money, beautiful women, a powerful athletic body, extended youth and
vitality. Both films also play to popular fears about childhood abductions, cults, and
dangerous strangers and adult secrets tinged with paranoia and dread.

FAMILY DYNAMICS: MOTHERS AND FATHERS

Watcher and Something Wicked also offer important statements on how mothers and
fathers might respond when their children are in peril. When children face evil,
parents try to help, but their efforts are not always successful. Sometimes, parents
 Sinister Surveillance 79

are distracted by their own fears or are otherwise ineffectual, indifferent, or absent.
In Watcher, a mother’s decades-long search for her missing daughter drives the nar-
rative forward while fathers are absent or oblivious: Mr. Curtis brings his family to
a secluded estate and then leaves them for his work, and Mrs. Aylwood’s husband,
who adored his daughter Karen, has died. It is therefore the mothers who must
confront the problems their children are facing. Decades after Karen disappears,
Mrs. Aylwood believes “she’s still out there” and never stops wandering through
the forest or peering outside in the hope she will return. Acting also as a surrogate
mother, she is there when Jan is blinded by light in the woods and falls into a lake,
saving her from drowning, and then inviting Ellie into her house to show her Karen’s
music box and have tea and cakes. Jan and Ellie’s mother, however, does not want
her children to believe in “fantasies” and attempts to take them away. Her efforts fail
when they get caught on a bridge during a heavy storm and Jan must proclaim “we
have to get off the bridge” before their car is hit by a bolt of electricity (presumably
cast by the watcher) and plunges into the water. In this film, mothers are present,
but they do not always know what to do and so the children must figure things out
on their own.
If Watcher focuses on mothers, Something Wicked centers on fathers, who are also
flawed. As narrator Will Halloway confesses at the beginning, “I suppose this is
really the story of my father” rather than just Will’s story. An older father, Charles
Halloway not only feels distant from his son, but is also depressed about his mortal-
ity, telling his wife, “Tell me I’ll live forever; then I’ll be happy.” This longing makes
Charles a potentially easy mark for the cunning Mr. Dark, who tempts his targets by
promising to give them what they desire most. Charles also lives with the regret that
when Will was four years old and drowning, his inability to swim (because his own
father did not think boys needed to learn to swim) caused him to freeze up, and so
Jim Nightshade’s father jumped in to save Will. Shortly after that, Mr. Nightshade
abandoned his wife and young son, and Jim ached from the loss ever since. This
would later prompt Mr. Dark to tempt Jim with the promise that “I’m the father
you’ve been waiting for, my son.” Although he is not physically strong, Charles has
the resource of books and understands Mr. Dark’s motives and strategies. He also has
the power of love to draw upon, thus enabling him to persevere for the sakes of not
only his own son but also of Jim Nightshade.
Whereas Charles is reluctant and distant, Mr. Dark is flashy and charismatic and
immediately grabs the boys’ attention, especially Jim who is anxious to grow up
and to experience life outside of Green Town. Sensing Jim’s desires, Dark attempts
to lure him with the offer of growing up and becoming “the king of the carnival”
and “the ruler of the rides.” Dark’s offer is to bring Jim into maturity without any
sense of restraint, caution, or delay. He is also keenly aware that Jim and Will are
on the cusp of adolescence and that their expanding interests can be easily exploited
by promises of adventure, ambition, and sex. When Mr. Dark confronts the boys
in the town library, he promises them new powers and insights, including a greater
understanding about “what grownups do behind locked doors when children are
80 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

asleep.” Such promises are not necessarily empty; as the boys know, one of Dark’s
secrets is that he has a carousel that can manipulate time. If the boys follow Dark,
they can use that carousel to grow up or to stay forever young, but they must also
remain in Dark’s thrall.

CIRCULAR MOTION, TIME BENDING, AND RESOLUTION

The endings of both Watcher and Something Wicked center on revolving motion, time
bending, apocalyptic images, and a return home. In Watcher, Jan urges John Keller,
Tom Colley, and Mary Pierce to repeat the initiation ceremony, saying, “Maybe we
can bring her back.” They reluctantly re-create the circle of friendship, joining hands
as John Keller says, “The circle won’t be broken this time.” He commences the cer-
emony with Jan in the middle, as Ellie, possessed by the watcher, says the process
must be reversed to bring Karen back. Fearing for Jan, Mike storms the circle to grab
her as she is thrust upward. Then the wind blows, leaves swirl, glass breaks, and in
an apocalyptic whirlwind, Karen, still blindfolded, returns. The watcher and Karen
have switched parallel universes, and Karen reappears, the same age as she was thirty
years ago. Jan gasps, “It’s Karen,” and an incredulous Mrs. Aylwood welcomes her
daughter home. In this horror film, Disney creates imagery of supernatural mayhem,
but no one dies. In this uncertain and somewhat inexplicable ending, time manipu-
lation replaces demise, offering incomplete closure.
Circular motion, visions of calamity, and time bending also characterize the end-
ing of Something Wicked. The revolving carousel creates the impossible circumstance
in which time can be manipulated to transform the old into the young and the
young into the old. Although the carousel has the power to change bodies, it cannot
return its riders to a former state of innocence, nor can it provide wisdom in age.
Will and Jim begin to sense this in the way Mr. Cooger never quite inhabits the body
of the boy Robert, and Charles and Will fear for Jim when Mr. Dark guides him to
the carousel, promising to age him and make him his partner. Just as Mike thrusts
Jan from the center of the séance circle, Charles grabs Jim from the carousel, saving
him just as Jim’s father once saved Will from drowning. Charles understands what
fuels Mr. Dark—people’s unhappiness and regrets—and he chides Will to be happy
and dance although the boy fears his friend Jim is dead. This defiant act results in
Jim’s revival, accompanied by a swirling tornado, causing total annihilation of the
carnival. Mr. Dark, stuck on the carousel, experiences the ravages of old age and
death, while Charles, Will, and Jim escape to the comfort of home.

CONCLUSION

It is unfortunate that both Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way
Comes were box-office disappointments. Each film offered Disney the opportunity
 Sinister Surveillance 81

to explore Gothic themes in ways it had not done so clearly before. Moreover, both
films expanded Disney’s cinematic vocabulary, first through the Steadicam shots
used in Watcher to the striking visuals and special effects shots in Something Wicked.
Perhaps if the studio had taken more time with each film and given the cast and
crew even more freedom, they might have succeeded in developing groundbreak-
ing Gothic films aimed at older children and teens. At its best, Watcher developed
an atmosphere that was genuinely mysterious and sometimes even frightening, but
it suffered from poor pacing, unclear motivations, and an incoherent conclusion,
especially at first (Antunes 2020, 25). Looking back at the film, Bette Davis sug-
gested that she never knew what Disney wanted from the film; at one point she even
claimed that the film was so muddled that, at the film’s first preview, someone forgot
to run the final reel and nobody noticed (Chandler 2006, 492). Whether Davis was
exaggerating or not, there is no denying that shortly after the film’s official release, it
was pulled from theaters so the studio could tinker with the ending some more. One
moment that was immediately cut was an opening sequence that showed Ellie play-
ing with a doll that is destroyed by a flash of light, as audiences were not prepared to
watch Disney take a symbol of innocence and destroy it before their eyes. But even
a retooling of the film could not fix its various problems and so they rereleased Mary
Poppins (Robert Stevenson, 1964) in the hopes of recouping their losses.
Although Something Wicked earned more at the box office than Watcher, it was
more than twice as expensive to make. Audiences struggled with its uneven qualities,
particularly its unclear sense of purpose and its occasionally sluggish pacing. Unlike
any other Disney film, Something Wicked was unabashed in its implications of adult
sexuality, particularly in the scene when Jim spies into a tent where a middle-aged
man is clearly enjoying the eager touch and attention of multiple belly dancers.
Although Jim’s spying is cut short, the moment’s voyeuristic qualities, including Jim’s
obvious urge to continue watching, is important. Something Wicked is thus unset-
tling in ways that make it unlike any other Disney film. Also, like its counterpart,
Watcher, Something Wicked draws on supernatural elements to frighten audiences
and introduces cutting-edge special effects to traverse the popular limits of Disney
productions, but even those were not enough to garner a satisfying payoff. The re-
sult, then, was a pair of films that failed to achieve blockbuster status and may have
alienated more viewers than they courted.
Turning to overtly Gothic films proved a greater risk for Disney than for other
studios because the studio remained focused on the question “What would Walt
have done?” (Potts and Behr 1987, 157–58). But to find a new footing, Disney
would have to challenge its own reputation for focusing exclusively on child-friendly
movies, one built up so carefully and deliberately by founder Walt Disney that any
major changes seemed impossible. As Walt Disney himself suggested,

Disney is a thing, an image in the public mind. Disney is something they think of as
a kind of entertainment, a kind of family thing, and it’s all wrapped up in the name
Disney. . . . Disney is something we’ve built up in the public mind over the years. It
82 Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackso

stands for something, and you don’t have to explain what it is to the public. They know
what Disney is when they hear about our films or go to Disneyland. They know they’re
gonna get a certain quality, a certain kind of entertainment. And that’s what Disney is.
(qtd. in Wasko 2001, 221–22)

With such a strong vision of the studio’s brand looming over them, how could stu-
dio executives hope to expand their scope without sacrificing their loyalty to their
founder? The answer to that question would prove almost too difficult for the strug-
gling studio. Unfortunately for Ron Miller, his efforts are largely remembered as a
string of failures.
Despite the challenges associated Watcher and Something Wicked, they deserve to
be remembered as more than just fraught productions. While critics tend to dismiss
them as lesser, unsuccessful efforts of a studio struggling through its most dismal era,
they both have cult followings, particularly among viewers enticed by their striking
sense of atmosphere and mystery. But even if both films remain neglected (and nei-
ther one is currently available on Disney+), they nevertheless represent a time when
the studio willingly challenged its own reputation to expand its approach to storytell-
ing. For Disney, both Watcher and Something Wicked are probably best described as
flawed forerunners to better things, but for fans they represent an enticing journey
somewhere underneath Main Street, USA.

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Chandler, Charlotte. 2006. The Girl Who Walked Home Alone: Bette Davis, a Personal
Biography. Waterville: Thorndike Press.
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-surge​-is​-over​-but​-the​-myth​-lives​-on​.html.
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University Press, 1–12.
6
The Game Is Playing Itself
Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher
Gwyneth Peaty

This chapter examines a little-known entry in the Disney cinematic universe: Disney’s
first and only slasher movie, Stay Alive (William Brent Bell, 2006). In this film, the
eponymous video game Stay Alive operates as a digital Ouija board capable of open-
ing a portal between three dimensions: the physical world, the spirit world, and the
virtual world. The narrative is loosely based on the real historical figure of Countess
Elizabeth Báthory, a reported serial killer and renowned “Gothic criminal” born in
sixteenth-century Hungary (Spooner 2010, 253). Báthory’s malignant spirit infuses
the core technologies within this film, inevitably escaping and destroying all who
dare attempt her game. Characters unwittingly engage in a mediated séance in order
to play, reciting an on-screen incantation that begins to dissolve interdimensional
boundaries. Killings that take place within the game are mirrored in reality as digital,
spiritual, and physical spaces intersect. The players/protagonists of Stay Alive must
therefore fight for survival both inside and outside the game as they try to stop the
countess’s reign of terror.
In this chapter, I explore how Báthory’s vessel of choice, the survival horror game,
embodies cultural fears surrounding the intrusive and potentially crippling presence
of popular technologies in the early twenty-first century. Drawing on widespread
debates over the impact of video game violence, Stay Alive suggests its young play-
ers have no way to evade the pervasive influence of the deadly game. Once you
begin to play there is no escape; if you refuse to continue, the game begins to
operate independently, leading to the realization that “the game is playing itself!”
Significantly, the film builds its sense of horror using Gothic tropes and characters,

85
86 Gwyneth Peaty

linking a contemporaneous fear of video games with much older sources of anxiety
and superstition.
In the context of wider cultural dialogues about digital technologies, I argue that
Stay Alive participates in the Gothicization of video games as part of a larger trend of
“mediated hauntings” in horror films of the early 2000s (Reyes 2013, 391). The film
also exemplifies how the slasher genre evolved during this period in history as film-
makers sought to reimagine now-familiar tropes for an increasingly astute millennial
audience (Wee 2005). Stay Alive attempts to break new ground and explore alterna-
tive ways of envisioning mediated horror. Although many critics were unimpressed
upon its release (Anderson 2006; Kirschling 2006), contemporary viewers are begin-
ning to understand the film as an underrated classic, a “quirky little gem of a slasher”
(Larson 2021) that “stands out as something unique in the strange array of horror
movies we were given in the 2000s” (Morrison 2021). As such, this chapter turns
its gaze toward a promising but much-neglected entrant in the Disney filmography.

PLAYING WITH HORROR

The slasher film, as horror scholars and fans alike are quick to emphasize, is well
known for being formulaic (Clover 1992). As a subgenre of horror cinema, the birth
of the teen slasher is often traced to the late 1970s. when Halloween (1978) crystal-
lized a series of narrative conventions that were destined to be repeated again and
again (Rockoff 2002, 55). Carol J. Clover famously itemizes the essential ingredients
of the slasher formula as including a killer, victims, basic weapons (usually a knife),
the element of shock, a Terrible Place in which victims are trapped, and a Final
Girl who must ultimately confront the killer (1987, 194–205). These tropes were
so well established by the mid-1990s that characters in the original Scream trilogy
(1996–2000) could discuss them openly for the audience’s amusement. The police
would save time in their investigation by watching horror movies, argues film buff
Randy (Jamie Kennedy) in Scream (Wes Craven, 1996): “There’s a formula to it. A
very. Simple. Formula.” Although it does not follow the recipe precisely, Stay Alive
engages directly with this formula in its depiction of a group of young friends being
picked off one by one by a mysterious killer.
The film begins, as most slashers do, with violence. Loomis (Milo Ventimiglia) is
playing a video game alone in the dark. The viewer’s first glimpse of him is not in
person, however, but within the game. Stay Alive uses a combination of live action
and animation to represent the characters’ experiences as they shift between their
“real” lives and playing the game. Each character has a customized avatar within
the game that looks exactly like them. Contemporary Gothic preoccupations with
“divisions and doublings of the self ” and “threatened subjectivity” (Punter and Byron
2004, 51) are thus embedded within the structure of the film from the start. In the
opening sequence, Loomis’s avatar stands in the doorway of a huge three-dimensional
mansion. Ominous music begins as the camera swoops down toward the foreboding
 The Game Is Playing Itself 87

building along a dark driveway lined by skeletal trees. Stylized storm clouds hang
overhead, and a pale mist hovers over the dark grounds as Loomis’s avatar cautiously
pushes the creaky door open, holding a single candle for light. Seasoned horror
viewers would immediately recognize this as a Terrible Place—that space described
by Clover as “most often a house or tunnel” or “decaying mansion” in which slasher
victims are trapped and felled by the killer (1987, 197–98). Although simplistic
compared to more recent digital graphics, the film’s animation here closely resembles
the horror games of its time. As one reviewer notes, “the opening of Stay Alive could
be something straight out of [video games] Silent Hill (1999) or Resident Evil (1996),
ensuring that fans of both scary movies and horror video games feel right at home
as soon as the film starts” (Morrison 2021). Fans of the Gothic will likewise feel at
home; or rather, they will recognize the sense of unhomeliness or unheimlich being
generated, epitomizing Freud’s concept of the “uncanny” as that which is not purely
strange but “strangely familiar” (Morris 1985, 307). The film explicitly frames Stay
Alive as a Gothic game, and this only becomes clearer as the narrative unfolds.
Within Gothic tales, that which should be a space of comfort and shelter is in
fact the most dangerous of all. The isolated Gothic orphanage, church, hospital, or
home is characterized by darkness, fear, disorientation, and persecution (Botting
2014, 4–5). Events in the game quickly evidence this as Loomis’s avatar explores
the dark hallways of the mansion, shadowed by ghostly specters that vanish in the
blink of an eye. Barely visible in the gloom, Countess Báthory appears—a white
face and clawing hands in a bloodred dress—and chases him down the corridor
as her undead minions swarm the walls in pursuit. In this way, the opening scenes
position the game as a classic example of “survival horror,” a genre of gaming that
“revolve[s] around the navigation of a vulnerable figure through a three-dimensional
threat-filled landscape” (Kirkland 2012, 107). Unlike, for instance, first-person
shooter (FPS) games in which players are provided with a variety of weapons and
invited to blast their way through enemies, survival horror games emphasize ten-
sion, helplessness, and ongoing pursuit. This genre of gaming is also well known
for incorporating multiple Gothic themes and elements (Kirkland 2013, 457–60).
Heavily informed by horror films and Gothic fiction, survival horror designers have
developed their own blueprint for generating fear (Krzywinska 2002). As Bernard
Perron explains:

Generally speaking, survival horror games follow the same formula, and gamers know
what gaming experience to expect. At the plot level, the hero/heroine investigates a hos-
tile environment where he/she will be trapped (a building or a town) in order either to
uncover the causes of strange and horrible events (Alone in the Dark, Resident Evil, Siren)
or to find and rescue a loved one from an evil force. (2004, 132–33)

A lack of defensive items is often featured in such games in order to ratchet up the
tension. Such is the case in Stay Alive; with no weapon but a candle, the only game-
play option for Loomis is to run. When the front door slams shut of its own devices,
he is trapped in the mansion. He flees upstairs only to be shoved off the internal
88 Gwyneth Peaty

balcony and throttled in midair by dangling chains. The sequence ends abruptly as
the scene shifts to the “real” world, where the real Loomis stares in shock at his ani-
mated avatar hanging dead on-screen. Game Over. Far from being unhappy, Loomis
calls his friend Hutch (Jon Foster) to praise the game and organize a time to play it
together.
From this point, Stay Alive quickly provides signs that the border between game
world and real world is no longer solid. At an extradiegetic level, key audio markers
are continuous between the game and Loomis’s house; a menacing static buzz heard
intermittently in the gaming sequence repeats as the he moves around his home. At
an intradiegetic level, the lightning and thunder that punctuated Loomis’s explora-
tion of the mansion, seemingly generated by the game, now shake his real world.
Playing Stay Alive has transformed the home from a safe haven into a dangerous
Gothic space. Mirroring his explorations in the game, Loomis hears a sound upstairs
and creeps up nervously, looking for his housemates. He walks in on them having
sex, laughing in relief before telling them he saw their characters dead in the game.
“We haven’t played for hours” objects one, offering a first clue that the game may
be acting independently. Later that night, Loomis wakes from nightmares about
Báthory to find the electricity in his house is out. With only a flickering cigarette
lighter to show the way, he shuffles through the dark just as his avatar did in the
mansion. Seeing movement in the shadows, he senses the presence of someone in the
kitchen and flees upstairs, only to find his housemates have been violently murdered.
Stepping back in horror, Loomis is pushed off the internal balcony by an unseen as-
sailant and throttled in midair. In the final scene of this sequence, he hangs dead—an
uncanny double of his avatar in the game.
As a prologue to the main narrative, these events set up a number of genre con-
ventions and expectations for the audience. For a slasher connoisseur, the presence

Figure 6.1. A scene from the video game in Disney’s Stay Alive
 The Game Is Playing Itself 89

of an unknown killer is signaled, a Terrible Place has been shown, and victims have
been savaged. The element of shock has been introduced through multiple jump
scares and violent deaths. Stay Alive also adopts newer tropes drawn from the slasher
canon of the late 1990s, such as the unexpected death of a popular actor at the very
beginning. Scream popularized this device in 1996 by orchestrating the dramatic
death of its apparent leading lady, played by Drew Barrymore, in the opening scenes
(Romano 2021). Like Barrymore, Milo Ventimiglia was a rising star when he ap-
peared as Loomis, having recently found fame through an ongoing television role
on Gilmore Girls (2001–2006). Audiences at the time would likely have assumed he
was the main character of this film, only to be confronted by his sudden death. One
reviewer has described Ventimiglia as having “the Drew Barrymore role,” emphasiz-
ing the ongoing public recognition of this device and its historicity (Gingold 2016).
Scream has been credited with reinventing the slasher genre and setting the tone
for increasingly self-aware and intertextual horror films (Wee 2006; Pheasant-Kelly
2015; Romano 2021). The decision to cast Ventimiglia as the short-lived Loomis
in Stay Alive indicates early on that these filmmakers are aware of ongoing shifts in
the genre and were aiming to impress an increasingly reflexive millennial audience.
Indeed, criticism of the film often focused on its derivative tendencies, with some
grumbling that Stay Alive is “just a high-tech-and-hardware variation on what Wes
Craven did in ‘Scream’” (Anderson 2006). While such a statement is intended to
diminish the film, it is worth unpacking its implications further. Stay Alive is explic-
itly situated in relation to a long history of horror narratives, with shifts in digital
technologies presented as its main differentiating factor. Using the name “Loomis”
is an obvious signal for fans; Billy Loomis is one of the killers in Scream, and was
himself named after Dr. Loomis from Halloween, who was in turn named after the
character of Sam Loomis in Psycho (1960). With ambitions to become part of this
classic genealogy, it is significant that Stay Alive focuses on horror games as its core
point of distinction. Clues as to why video games were selected as the conduit of
death in this film can be found in the wider events and public discourses of the time.

MONSTROUS MEDIA, GRUESOME GAMERS

The video game industry has long been accused of perpetuating real-world violence
and spurring players to kill, especially in respect to shooting deaths in America
(Campbell 2018). The idea that violent video games cause players to commit mass
murder has been described as a recurring “myth” unsupported by research; however,
it emerges like clockwork each time a deadly massacre takes place (Fox and DeLateur
2014). In 2019, US President Donald Trump made reference to video games in
his response to a cluster of mass shooting events, stating that “we must stop the
glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video
games that are now commonplace” (quoted in Voytko 2019). Despite a lack of
supporting evidence (Przybylski and Weinstein 2019), links between video games
90 Gwyneth Peaty

and real-world violence continue to be reinforced by public figures. Perpetrators of

massacres are identified as gamers in the popular press, and their interest in games
is cited as an influencing factor (Ferguson 2014). The first lawsuit blaming video
games for real-world violence was launched in the late 1990s after the 1997 Heath
High School shooting in the United States (National Coalition Against Censorship,
2021). However, controversy over video game violence was stirring as early as the
mid-1970s (Bowman 2015). Stay Alive draws both explicitly and implicitly on this
history in its engagement with the killer video game motif.
The early 2000s were a particularly fraught time in the debate over video game
violence because the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 triggered a resur-
gence of public concern and media attention. Searching for an explanation for why
two young men would open fire on their classmates, the press framed them as “alien-
ated youths” who were “caught up in the seductive virtual world of media violence”
(Frymer 2009, 1391). A 2021 study analyzing the forty-eight hours of television
coverage following the Columbine shooting found that 22 percent of news programs
included content “specifying violent video games as playing a major part in motivat-
ing the two perpetrators’ actions” (Mosqueda et al. 2021). The killers were portrayed
as boundary dwellers who blurred the line between fantasy and reality: “confused,
angry young men drowning in a sea of lurid imagery and frightening violence”
(Duggan et al. 1999). While their actions were abhorrent, the true source of evil was
reattributed to the alluring perversions of an increasingly digitized culture. The boys
were, as Frymer puts it, “depicted as monstrous creations of an American society
unwoven by fragmentation, virtuality, and nihilism” (2009, 1400). Responsibility
shifted to a more comfortable target: the “blood-drenched video games” that had
allegedly corrupted these two growing minds (Frymer 2009, 1399).
The aftermath of the Columbine massacre solidified a perceived link between
young men, violence, and video games that continues to this day. After the
2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting, former US senator Joe Lieberman
argued during a television appearance that “the violence in the entertainment cul-
ture, particularly with the extraordinary realism to video games and movies now, does
cause vulnerable young men, particularly, to be more violent” (quoted in Karlinsky
and Przygoda 2012). The alienated young male gamer stereotype has perpetuated
over time, and Stay Alive can be read as a reflection of anxieties surrounding this
figure. Perhaps not coincidentally, the film’s script writers, Matthew Peterman (who
also coproduced) and William Brent Bell (who is also the director), would have been
close to the Columbine killers’ demographic at the time of the shooting, as white
males in their early twenties. Asked by an interviewer whether they needed to learn
about video games to make the film, Bell demurred: “we didn’t really do research per
se. . . . We play games all the time in our whole lives. . . . We wanted the game in
the movie to be as good or better than anything you could buy—a next generation
horror survival game” (quoted in Fischer 2006). Stay Alive was thus written, directed,
and coproduced by lifelong gamers. As such, the film embodies a unique perspective
for its time. Peterman and Bell explicitly acknowledged that they wanted to present
 The Game Is Playing Itself 91

a different angle on the teen slasher experience. “In some of these horror movies
you’ve got such clichéd characters,” Peterman argues in the same interview, “and I
think people have grown a little tired of that” (quoted in Fischer 2006). Bell agrees
that they wanted to highlight less mainstream identities and “get away from the cli-
chés—the jock with the leather jacket, the cheerleader.” To do this, they focused on
the subculture they knew best: video games and players.
The introduction to Stay Alive places both Loomis and Hutch squarely within the
“gamer” stereotype of the early 2000s; “isolated, pale-skinned teenage boys [sitting]
hunched forward on a sofa in some dark basement space, obsessively mashing but-
tons” (Williams 2006). What this film offers, however, is not a negative portrayal
but an invitation for viewers to identify with gamer heroes and victims. The nar-
rative is full of intertextual references that encourage viewers to exercise a common
understanding of video game lore in addition to horror film conventions. For ex-
ample, when Loomis describes Stay Alive as the “sickest shit since Fatal Frame,” his
words are likely intended for an audience who understand what this means. At the
very least, they denote his status as a dedicated player familiar with the games and
gaming lexicon of his generation. Released in 2001, Fatal Frame is an influential
Japanese survival horror game in which the player must explore a haunted mansion
full of vengeful spirits while carrying only a special camera for defense. Gameplay
is characterized by darkness, tension, and pursuit, as the player must allow spirits
to get close before they can neutralize them using the camera. Acknowledging the
similarities between Fatal Frame and Stay Alive in the film’s opening act can be read
as a nod to viewers who have played the former; it conveys respect, suggesting that
the film offers tribute to games and gamers rather than condemnation. This theme
continues throughout the film as viewers are invited to adopt the subject position of
gaming characters both inside and outside a game.
Gamers are alternative but “cool” in this film—an assortment of quirky people
who, despite their intense interest in games, are well socialized and productive.
Starting from the isolated stereotype, the film moves on to embrace a more diverse
image of gamers as smart young people who hang out in public gaming cafés, have
jobs and other interests, and socialize as a group. Even still, concerns over video game
violence are directly referenced multiple times. For instance, when Hutch attends
Loomis’s funeral, he is given a bag of old belongings by Loomis’s younger sister—a
bag that includes Stay Alive and other games. She explains that she is not allowed to
play them because they are “too violent.” Even more significantly, the possibility that
gamers may confuse fantasy with reality as a result of playing video games is embed-
ded within the game’s narrative. Digital, spiritual, and physical realms intersect and
overlap in frightening ways as the film goes on.
92 Gwyneth Peaty

WHEN THE WALLS CRUMBLE

As Dawn Keetley points out, the horror genre has long been preoccupied with the
dissolving of boundaries. In her analysis of Scream’s historical impact, Keetley (2015)
argues that, “In Scream, the boundary we see dissolving is the one that is supposed to
separate reality and representation, the ‘real real’ and the ‘mediated real’—the ‘medi-
ated real’ being made up of all the technologies that are omnipresent in Scream (TVs,
cameras, films, phones).” Stay Alive pursues a similar vein of concern in reference
to video game technologies. In this film, the boundary presumed to exist between
game world and real world is perforated. As Punter and Byron note, fears about “the
integrity of the self ” and, more specifically, threats to the stability and boundedness
of the human subject are key Gothic preoccupations. In a classic predicament, the
characters in this film are tasked with figuring out if the boundary ruptures they
observe are real or the product of hallucination. “You know what they say,” mut-
ters Miller (Adam Goldberg) after his avatar is killed by Báthory in the game, “you
play the game too long, you start seeing shit.” But his anxious visions are not born
of a fevered imagination. Miller is killed in his office by an unseen assailant as the
game controller vibrates ecstatically; he is stabbed with shears exactly as he was in
the game.
Other players begin to see and hear strange things, observing signs that the
boundary between “real real” and “mediated real” is dissolving (Keetley 2015).
Hutch’s childhood friend October (Sophia Bush) sees an undead girl from the game
reflected in the mirror at work. Swink (Frankie Muniz), the “nerd” of the group, is
fixing a computer when blood appears to gush from inside the keyboard all over his
hands. But it is not only the characters who see things; the audience is also presented
with moments in which the fabric of the film world appears to warp. Glitching
specters appear and disappear, and pixelated ripples disturb the background of some
scenes. If the characters are going mad then so is the audience, for they are repeatedly
presented with “digital ghosts” (Reyes 2013, 391). The dangers surrounding video
games and their impact on players are thus persistently Gothicized in Stay Alive as
the film links Gothic themes and apparitions with advances in gaming technologies.
As Ewan Kirkland has pointed out, a relationship between video games and the
Gothic is far from unnatural. From the “uncanny photorealism” of avatars designed
to resemble real celebrities to monstrous villains and disorienting environments,
video games frequently incorporate Gothic themes and elements as a matter of
course (Kirkland 2013, 456–57). “If there is something distinctly Gothic about the
videogame as a medium,” Kirkland argues, “this becomes more evident in games
which explicitly adopt Gothic narrative themes or aesthetics as their point of depar-
ture” (2013, 457). Stay Alive is clearly marked as one such game. In fact, it is framed
as a kind of digital Ouija board capable of channeling the malignant spirits of the
undead.
When Hutch assembles his small group of friends to play the game in memory
of Loomis, they unwittingly engage in a mediated séance that dissolves dimensional
 The Game Is Playing Itself 93

boundaries protecting them from the game’s Gothic influence. Loomis was beta
testing the unreleased game, which contains advanced “next generation technology”
including haptic feedback and voice activation. In order to play, they must first recite
“The Prayer of Elizabeth” aloud—an on-screen incantation written in cursive script
across digital parchment:

Come to me, clouds.

May you rise as an evil storm
born to rip them open.
Let the cover of night bear witness
and destroy those who resist
so they shall harm me not.
Let the blood of many cleanse me,
preserving beauty eternal, I pray you.

They chant together as the game responds and the words dissolve on the screen. “It’s
like a séance,” observes Hutch, somewhat unnecessarily. Indeed, the film has a habit
of spelling out its Gothic intertextuality in much the same way self-reflexive slash-
ers refer openly to their own genre conventions and heritage. For instance, October
(a stylish “Goth chick”) is a major source of direct information. She decodes the
supernatural elements of the game for her peers by researching old manuscripts and
providing background details about the countess. “This Elizabeth Báthory chick was
sick and twisted—and very real,” she reports:

Guys, every detail of this game is based on her real life. The tower, the cemetery, the
torture chamber. She’d hunt for victims in a black carriage. She’d gut them with silver
shears. . . . As punishment they walled the bitch up in her tower alive—and here’s the
kicker. The last thing she said was that one day she’d be back. So what if she’s back and
killing us one by one after we die in the game?

The idea of a female serial killer who bathes in the blood of young virgins to preserve
her youth has seemingly timeless appeal. As Catherine Spooner points out, Báthory
has become a historical prototype of the “Gothic criminal” in contemporary texts
(Spooner 2010, 253). It is worth noting, however, that while the countess is a real
historical figure, the film does not replicate her story in an historically accurate way.
Instead, Stay Alive reimagines and relocates the mythos of her crimes, shifting the
setting from a castle in Hungary to a plantation in America, conveniently close to
the protagonists’ hometown. The filmmakers do this to orchestrate a more complete
merging of the real and the unreal via a Terrible Place that can be visited in both
realms concurrently.
94 Gwyneth Peaty

In a sequence nearing the finale, Hutch and Swink simultaneously explore the
house in which the Stay Alive game was made. Hutch enters the real house while
Swink (on a laptop nearby) explores its double within the game. The boundary
between media and reality is so porous by now that Swink is able to assist Hutch
by dropping a tool within the game that then appears on the real step below him.
When Hutch can’t get through a door, Swink uses a key within the game, causing
the door to unlock in the real world. At this point, Elizabeth Báthory’s ghost and
her minions are present across both realms; they are specters in pursuit, shifting eas-
ily between the game space and the real world. Although the technologies involved
here are born of the twenty-first century, the anxieties playing out in these scenes are
profoundly historic.
A concern with the effects of new media has characterized the Gothic since the
eighteenth century, when popular magic lantern shows dramatically challenged per-
ceptions of reality. “As an apparatus for projection and as metaphor,” Botting and
Spooner explain, “phantasmagoria suggest the monstrous potential of media in terms
of their spectral effects on consciousness, to the point that consciousness itself is
rendered virtually spectral” (2015, 3). Game worlds offer detailed three-dimensional
spaces in which to project one’s consciousness and experience new mediated realities.
Stay Alive shows that the excitement of this process has been tempered, however,
by a fear that such visions may reach back into us and dissolve the features that
make us human. “A game is just an extension of the mind that created it,” argues a
video game store clerk in the film; “you wouldn’t play a game developed by Charles
Manson would you?” The idea that a game offers the opportunity to climb inside
the mind of another person is decidedly phantasmagorical. Inhabiting the game/
mind of a killer would seem to threaten the line between good and evil, human and
monster, in addition to the integrity of the individual subject. Stay Alive thus links a
fear of mediated consciousness with much older anxieties about possession and the
penetrable boundaries of human selfhood.

THE BLAME GAME

A major difference observed between older slasher films and those produced in the
post-Scream era has been the shift away from nonhuman monsters (Keetley 2015).
As I have discussed elsewhere, killers like Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, while
they hold the shape of men, are consistently depicted as not entirely human (Peaty
2021). They are zombielike in their monstrosity, driven by unnatural forces and pos-
sessed of strength that goes beyond basic human physiology. However, in the new
wave of slashers, “the monster is changed from a supernatural force to a resolutely
ordinary person, human, personally troubled, and usually a member of the heroine’s
close circle of friends” (Trencansky 2001, 71). It is most likely to be your neighbor,
cousin, or even partner under the mask. Despite its dedication to the intertextual
referencing and self-conscious dialogue characteristic of this new slasher era, Stay
 The Game Is Playing Itself 95

Alive does not take this route. Instead, monstrosity is returned to the realm of the
supernatural, albeit in technologized form. The reason for this becomes clearer when
you consider the wider context in which the film operates.
Revealing the killer to be one of the final living protagonists (perhaps even the
main character) would have kept Stay Alive consistent with the popular narrative
trends of its time. To assign responsibility this way, however, would risk reinforcing
the larger cultural stereotype of the alienated gamer as a violent killer. The film toys
with the possibilities of this maneuver on multiple occasions. Seemingly undermin-
ing the supernatural elements of the narrative, Swink broaches the research topic of
“perceptive reality” at various intervals. “It seems the longer you play [video games],
the more your mind perceives the game world to be a reality,” he muses, “it’s really
interesting, but it’s only a theory of course.” Perhaps there is a logical explanation for
the strange events and experiences they are enduring. Perhaps their youthful minds
are unduly influenced by violent media and one of them is in fact the killer. “I can
see how, at your tender age, something like this game might put a scare on you,”
smirks a detective investigating the murders, disregarding any possibility of spiritual
interference. Viewed through this lens, Hutch himself becomes a suspect and is in
fact pursued by the police.
If the intent of the filmmakers was to recoup video games and work against main-
stream public discourse framing gamers as monstrous, they could not follow the new
slasher template. As Sarah Trencansky observed in 2001: “Each decade embraces the
monsters that speak to it: If the villains of popular late 1990s slashers are embraced
by the adolescents of today, perhaps it is because, in a culture of sudden random vio-
lence, exemplified in school shootings that originate from one of their own, a villain
that looks just like them makes sense.” In order to subvert messaging linking violence
and gamers, the film shifts culpability away from humanity and back toward video
games themselves. The Gothic here acts as a useful tool in the process. Any rational,
scientific interpretation of the players’ experiences is swiftly discarded as the uncanny
aspects of each killing are reinforced for both viewers and protagonists. The game
is an independent device possessed by a spirit that, once activated, is as relentless as
any haunted automation of old. Once you begin to play Stay Alive there is no escape;
if the characters refuse to continue, the game begins to operate independently. The
computer turns itself on and the keys indent themselves, leading characters to the
horrified realization that “the game is playing itself!”
Stay Alive ultimately embraces the idea that a video game can be supernaturally in-
fluential. When left alone, the program takes control, revealing that personal agency
was an illusion all along. The narrative therefore slides into a form of regressive tech-
nophobia that is at odds with its apparent ambitions as a future horror classic. This
kind of messaging is not innovative; new technologies have always been haunted
by fear of the unknown (Sconce 2000; Peaty 2018). Gothic horror films of the
late twentieth century were particularly marked by “mediated hauntings” as people
experienced rapid technological development across multiple spheres of life (Reyes
2013, 391). Participating in this “gothicization of new media” (Reyes 2013 391)
96 Gwyneth Peaty

puts a conservative bent on an otherwise innovative slasher film. What threatens to

emerge is a sense of helplessness revolving around young people and new technology
in particular. As Stephen Curtis notes, “the uncanny nature of digital encryption is
exacerbated by its ability to produce identical copies” (2015, 161). While the surviv-
ing heroes of this film are successful in “winning” their game, Báthory ultimately
cannot be stopped due to the infinite replicability of digital texts. Each copy of the
game promises to begin a new cycle of haunting and killing. The film ends with a big
delivery of Stay Alive disks to a video game store bustling with eager young gamers.
The fatalism of this denouement can in part be attributed to genre. After all, good
slashers must leave the door open for sequels. The open-endedness of these final
moments can also be read as a reflection on the ongoing debate surrounding video
games and violence; nothing is settled, only paused until the next public incident
activates the blame game once more.

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Part 2
MONSTERS AND MAGIC
7
Disney’s Tetratologies
Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes
Kevin J. Wetmore

Fantasia (Wilfred Jackson et al., 1940) marks Disney’s most obvious early foray into
monsters (despite the fact that monsters are actually central to Disney’s animated
brand). For the second-to-last sequence in that film, “Night on Bald Mountain,”
animating a brief story to Modest Mussorgsky’s eponymous song, Disney presented
the monster Chernabog—a giant demonic figure whose shadow spreads over the
town next to Bald Mountain, summoning monsters, ghosts, skeletal beings, and
demons. On Walpurgis Night (“the equivalent of our Halloween”), Chernabog
spreads his wings, and the music begins, creating the hellish dance of the nightmare
figures. Disney intended the sequence to be dark and scary. Bela Lugosi served as a
live-action model for Chernabog, the demon named after the god of evil in Slavonic
mythology, and the figures themselves are shown emerging from the shadows and
dancing in circles before being cast down into hell. “Dance of the Sugar Plum
Fairies” it was not. Disney received numerous complaints from parents that the se-
quence was too scary and intense for young children, and indeed it is.
Yet Chernabog proved to be an anomaly for Disney—a monster that simply
exists for its own sake, performs a series of actions, and then seemingly goes back
to sleep with no consequence. At the end of the sequence, the demon folds his
wings around himself and the top of the peak and simply becomes part of Bald
Mountain again. Chernabog may be the sole Disney animated monster that does
that. Otherwise, Disney often offers a tetratology—a study of the abnormal, of the
monstrous. Disney’s monsters in its animated family films, in whatever form they
take, are markers of abnormality—often physical, but just as often psychological or
spiritual as well.

101
102 Kevin J. Wetmore

Figure 7.1. Chernabog in Disney’s Fantasia

We might divide Disney animated cinema into two chronological eras: twentieth
century and twenty-first century, marked by a shift in the representation of mon-
strosity (although the boundary between the two is not so clear-cut as the changing
of the calendar). Twentieth-century Disney monsters are truly monstrous and evil,
their monstrosity a marker of their moral character. The dragon in Sleeping Beauty
(Clyde Geronimi, 1959), a manifestation of Maleficent, herself a monster, is an ex-
ample of what Judith Halberstam refers to as “a beast who is all body and no soul”
(1995, 1). Twenty-first-century Disney monsters are more complicated than their
straightforward older siblings. Yet, ultimately within all Disney films, regardless of
era or mode, the monster serves the same purpose: It exists, whatever it is, to be
overcome and/or defeated.
Halberstam argues contemporary monstrosity is rooted in “an amalgam of sex
and gender” (1995, 6), which is true in adult culture, but not in Disney animated
feature films. While sex and gender can be a part of monstrosity (as we will note in
Turning Red [Domee Shin, 2022], below), monstrosity is also rooted in other issues
of identity, adversity, and conflict, both external and internal. As Jeffrey Andrew
Weinstock observes:

Twenty-first-century mainstream representations of monsters, most notably animated

films oriented towards children, such as Shrek (2001) and Monsters, Inc. (2001) . . .
forcefully develop [the] trend of asking the audience to identify with and even esteem
 Disney’s Tetratologies 103

the traditional monster while resisting or reviling the cultural forces that define mon-
strosity based on nonnormative appearance or behavior. (2020, 360)

More recent Disney films indicate that it is not the abnormal that is monstrous.
Prejudice, corporate malfeasance, and small-mindedness, among other qualities,
are the true monstrosities among us. “Looking different is no longer sufficient to
categorize a creature as monstrous. Instead, such narratives shift their emphasis onto
oppressive cultural forces that unjustly ostracize or victimize those who are physically
divergent,” Weinstock concludes (2020, 259). It is those who judge the physically
divergent who are monstrous, not the physically divergent themselves. Yet, Disney
still uses physical monstrosity to define monstrosity as well. Not everything physi-
cally abnormal is monstrous, but most monsters are still physically divergent from
the main population of the animated feature.
The main theme of most Disney animated films can be said to be restoration
through the defeat of the monster, regardless of what the monster is. Oftentimes in
more recent films, the monster that needs to be defeated is not evil, nor even truly
monstrous, but abnormal. Elsa (voiced primarily by Idina Menzel) from Frozen
(Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) is a monster. She has magical powers, becomes
filled with rage and, like Frankenstein’s monster, flees the central European city
where she was born. She hides in the wilderness, building an ice castle to live in and
creating a monstrous snowman to guard it and fight, defeat, and drive off anyone
who comes to see her, including her own sister. She is a classic Disney witch monster.
She is certainly abnormal. Her parents thought so. She accidentally blinded her sister
Anna when they played as children and only the magic of the trolls saved Anna, but
Elsa had to be carefully monitored and even imprisoned in a sense, so that she could
harm no one. What is that, if not monstrous?
Elsa is both the monster and one of the heroes of Frozen. She most overcome and
master her own monstrousness so that the kingdom of Arundelle can be restored.
This attribute separates her from Maleficent or Madam Mim from The Sword in the
Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963), both of whom are irredeemably evil, as their
magic use indicates. Despite her abnormality (her monstrousness), Elsa is a good,
kind, just individual. Wart (mostly voiced by Rickie Sorensen) must overcome
Madam Mim (voiced by Martha Wentworth), with help from his friends. Princess
Aurora (voiced by Mary Costa) must overcome Maleficent (voiced by Eleanor
Audley), with help from a handsome prince and some friends. Elsa must overcome
Elsa, with help from her friends and sister. The monster, for Disney in animated
film, is that which must be overcome.
This chapter will consider how monsters and the abnormal function within
Disney narratives, and how restoration of what is missing and lost is only possible
through the defeat of the monster. It is the concept of “the defeat of the monster”
that has transformed in the past two decades, while monsters remain fairly mon-
strous. The hero may have to defeat a monstrous villain, for example Hercules in
the eponymous 1997 film (voiced by Tate Donovan; dirs. John Musker and Ron
104 Kevin J. Wetmore

Clements) fights a number of monsters, but Hades (voiced by James Woods) is the
monster he must defeat by film’s end. Ariel in John Musker and Ron Clements’s
1989 The Little Mermaid (voiced by Jodi Benson) has many lessons to learn and
personal qualities she needs to acquire, but the film’s primary antagonist is Ursula
the Sea Witch (voiced by Pat Carroll), made abnormal both by her appearance and
her ambition to become the ruler of the seas. The Beast in Beauty and the Beast (Gary
Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991; Beast voiced by Robby Benson) is a monster but is
one of the first who must be defeated ultimately by himself, and in doing so is trans-
formed into the person he is meant to be. Elsa follows in his footsteps. Even when
the monster is an adversarial one, such as the demon Te Ka in Moana (John Musker
and Ron Clements, 2016), the monster will be defeated when it is redeemed and
transformed when the heart of Te Fiti is returned, as Te Ka is merely Te Fiti without
her heart. She is monstrous, a monster, abnormal, and must be defeated, but not in
the same way as Maleficent or Madam Mim. The monster, whatever form it takes,
must always be defeated. And, in opposition to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s “thesis II” of
“Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” the Disney monster never escapes (1996, 4). “The
monster turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else,” argues Cohen
(1996, 4), except in a Disney film—the monster never, ever escapes in a Disney film
with two exceptions: our friend Chernabog (I said he was unique) and, if the film
merits a sequel, then, maybe the monster escapes and returns. As likely as not, a
new threat is faced in the sequel (more likely if the sequel is direct-to-video). Let us
amend Cohen’s second thesis with the addendum that the monster rarely escapes in
a Disney animated film.
To Cohen’s seven theses, I wish to add three Disney animated feature–specific
theses. First, the monstrous is always present in Disney’s animated films. There is no
Disney animated film that does not have at least one monster, and often more than
one. The monsters can be truly monstrous (Fantasia or Hercules), the monsters can
be human, albeit with monstrous qualities (the Witch in Snow White and the Seven
Dwarves [David Hand, 1937]; the wicked stepsisters in Cinderella), and they can
be natural creatures but presented monstrously (the crocodile in Peter Pan [Clyde
Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1953]; Brutus and Nero, the croco-
diles in The Rescuers [Wolfgang Reitherman, John Lounsbery, Art Stevens, 1977])
but, regardless of form, the Disney animated film requires the presence of one or
more monsters.
Second, the monster exists to serve an adversarial role, even if the monster is also
the protagonist. Even in Beauty and the Beast, Monsters, Inc (Pete Doctor, 2001), and
Turning Red, the monstrousness of the monster is something to be overcome. The
eponymous Beast appears monstrous because he has been cursed so that the ugliness
inside him as a callow youth would manifest as a beastly ugliness in his appearance.
It is only through the redemptive love of Belle that he can overcome his inner mon-
strousness and appear “normal” again (which, of course, turns out to be a handsome,
wealthy aristocrat). And within the monstrous world of Monsteropolis in Monsters,
Inc., some monsters (such as Mr. Waternoose [voiced by James Coburn] and Randall
 Disney’s Tetratologies 105

[voiced by Steve Buscemi]) are revealed to be truly monstrous. The monster, as

Cohen reminds us, exists to define the human by contrast (1996, 7–8). It is the role
of the monster to be different, to be “Other,” and by defining ourselves against the
Other we can establish the boundaries of the normal Self. In a film such as Monsters,
Inc., the “monster” exists to define the normal. Every character in Monsters, Inc.
is literally a monster. The physical monstrousness is “normal.” Therefore, physical
monstrousness is not what makes a monster a monster in Monsters, Inc. Monsters
have been completely normalized in the film (indeed, it is human children that are
the source of greatest terror for Monsterkind—they have special contamination
protocols should anyone come in touch with a human child or bring something
material back from a child’s bedroom.) The viewers must then turn to other markers
of difference to find out who is truly monstrous among the “normal monsters.” The
film reveals that it is the fear generated by and dangerous selfishness and destruc-
tiveness of their actions and attitudes that define the monstrousness of Randall and
Mr. Waternoose, as opposed to the kind and community-oriented other monsters
that work at the eponymous Monsters, Inc. Pace Weinstock, it is not their appear-
ance that makes monsters monstrous; it is their behavior and how they treat others
that determines that.
Another example of what Weinstock proposes is found in Frozen. Her magical
powers would have made Elsa eligible for the villain role in a classic Disney film, yet
she must overcome her own sense of monstrousness to reenter the community and
become the wise and just ruler Arundelle needs. Her ability to create snow and ice,
which makes her abnormal, is a marker of a hero, not a monster. It is her parents
and society that see it as dangerous and shameful. She creates a monstrous, clawed,
and fanged snowman who fights the soldiers who come after her, as well as her sis-
ter Anna. But by film’s end even this monster loses his monstrousness and gains an
adorable name (Marshmallow) and has been domesticated and reproduced (at least
by the end of Frozen II [Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2019]), in which, in response
to Olaf ’s (voiced by Josh Gad) retelling the narrative of the film in a post-credit
sequence, Marshmallow (voiced by Paul Briggs) vocally echoes Colin Clive in
Frankenstein [James Whale, 1931], crying out “We live! WE LIVE!” echoing the for-
mer’s cry of “It’s alive!). Monsters only appear monstrous—they’re not really. In fact,
their alleged monstrosity is often revealed to be a community-benefitting quality.
Similarly, Turning Red features a monster in the form of thirteen-year-old Meilin
(voiced by Rosalie Chiang), who transforms into a red panda whenever she gets
excited, and eventually learns this has happened to all the women in her family.
While crowds are initially afraid of her, she comes to revel in her powers, see them as
self-defining, and uses them to save her family and friends. What could be read as a
sort of lycanthropic-esque curse is instead a form of female empowerment that not
only allows one to connect to family, history, heritage, and generations of women,
it also allows one to become a pop star, should one wish. Turning Red is the natural
outcome of the process Weinstock defines beginning with Monsters, Inc: “Monsters,
Inc. is thus entirely the product of contemporary cultural relativism—the awareness
106 Kevin J. Wetmore

that what one culture considers normal may be considered exotic by another” (2020,
362). While transforming into a red panda is still exotic within Chinese and Chinese
American culture, Meilin normalizes it as part of her overcoming monstrousness.
The monster in Turning Red is defeated by the hero of Turning Red, who are the
same person.
This function is vital and necessary as the hero needs something abnormal or
extraordinary to defeat; otherwise, the hero is also simply normal. Both monster and
hero are thus abnormal. If we define the human against the monstrous, it is their

Figure 7.2. Meilin in red panda form in Disney’s Turning Red

 Disney’s Tetratologies 107

ability to defeat the monstrous, even if simply the monstrousness in themselves, that
makes the hero a hero. Every Disney hero is somehow extraordinary and abnormal,
just as every Disney monster is. This formulation works for both twentieth-century
Disney films and twenty-first-century Disney films. The monster is always present;
the monster must always be defeated; the hero (with help) must defeat the monster.
The key difference between the centuries is that in the twenty-first century the mon-
ster is as likely to be the hero as well. That is not to say the monster is always the hero
in the twenty-first-century Disney film, only that the monster is often regarded more
sympathetically. There are still monsters that are simply evil and must be defeated,
but these are often relegated to the role of secondary antagonist.
Third, in response to Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock’s claims above, the monster is
identified by both appearance and more importantly context and behavior. At heart,
the use of monsters in Disney animated films are not to define the boundaries of the
human but the normal. In the majority of Disney’s human-centered animated films
(i.e., films which feature humans as the protagonist and predominant characters), the
monster is very easily identified by their markers of inhumanity: Ursula has tentacles
when all other underseas characters in The Little Mermaid are mer-people with fish
tails. It is that marker of difference that sets her off as abnormal and, therefore, a
potential monster. Monstrousness thus is less about appearance than function within
the narrative and context. The main role of the monster in Disney narratives is to
provide a thing for the protagonist to defeat, and their monstrousness is linked to
their adversarial role. These secondary antagonists who are clearly monstrous include
characters such as the Titans in Hercules, the various monstrous entities in Moana
(most notably Tamatoa the Giant Shiny Crab), and, for that matter, the crocodile in
Peter Pan (an adversary of Captain Hook, but still presented as monstrous and adver-
sarial to the Lost Boys as well). As always, context matters; the realms of monsters in
Moana and The Black Cauldron (Ted Berman and Richard Rich, 1985) do not ren-
der their monsters as everyday, normal beings, like those of Monsters, Inc. Monstrous
realms in these films are set apart as places where truly monstrous monsters exist
separate and (safely) apart from the normal world, and by extension, normal people.
What make Moana (voiced by Auli’i Cravalho) and Taran (voiced by Grant Bardsley)
heroic is that, although they are normal human beings, they willingly enter realms
of monsters to achieve their goals, recognizing both the danger and the utter abnor-
mality of those worlds. Let us examine three different Disney films to see how these
theses apply to Disney’s releases of the last four decades.

THE STRANGE CASE OF THE BLACK CAULDRON

The Black Cauldron is unique and not unique in Disney. It is unique for being the
first animated feature from the studio that is not a musical and that has no songs
sung by the characters or in the background, for being the first studio feature rated
PG, and for being the one that Disney attempted to bury, declining to release it
108 Kevin J. Wetmore

on home video until 1998. The Black Cauldron is unique in that its monsters fit
firmly within Disney’s standard tetratologies, yet its approach to its monsters is both
darker and more sophisticated than previous twentieth-century Disney animated
films. Perhaps this is because it is based on the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd
Alexander, and, following in the footsteps of such non-Disney animated films aimed
at more mature audiences such as Wizards (Ralph Bakshi, 1977), Lord of the Rings
(Ralph Bakshi, 1978), and Heavy Metal (Gerald Potterton 1981), sought to attract
teens instead of just families.
The film was not popular at the box office and received numerous complaints
from parents about the darker tone and monstrous elements. Roger Ebert, in con-
trast, sung its praises, finding it to be the best Disney film in years and containing
what Ebert claimed were “some of the more memorable characters in any recent
Disney film,” including its monsters and villains (Ebert 1985). The monsters are
varied, and there are several of them. Taran, an assistant pig keeper, must protect
an oracular pig known as Hen Wen from the evil Horned King (voiced by John
Hurt), the primary antagonist and main monster of the film. He certainly appears
monstrous: a skull with red eyes and antler-like horns, claws, greenish skin, wearing
a fur-trimmed red robe. He certainly acts monstrous; he seeks the eponymous Black
Cauldron to create an evil army of Cauldron-born warriors with which to conquer
the land, and he seeks to find and exploit Hen Wen. He has goblin-like minions, in-
cluding the evil Creeper (voiced by Phil Fondacaro), yet another monster, whom he
sends after Taran and Hen Wen as they set out on their quest to destroy the cauldron.
The cauldron itself is held by three witches: Orddu (voiced by Eda Reiss Merin),
Orgoch (voiced by Billie Hayes), and the slightly less malevolent Orwen (voiced by
Adele Malis-Morey). Disney has a long tradition of witch-as-monster that continues
in this film as well.
Thus, most of Taran’s adversaries are monstrous and evil. One by one he can
defeat them, since defeating the monster is the role of a Disney hero. There exist in
the film two monsters that fall outside this rubric. Gurgi (voiced by John Byner) is
a cowardly and strange creature Taran rescues from the woods outside the Horned
King’s castle. Though monstrous in appearance, Gurgi represents that particular
subtype of Disney monster/villain: the obsequious henchman (see Pain [voiced by
Bobcat Goldthwait] and Panic [voiced by Matt Frewer] in Hercules or Iago [memo-
rably voiced by Gilbert Gottfried] in Aladdin [John Musker and Ron Clements,
1992]). Yet Gurgi is more, as he becomes a cowardly henchman to Taran and at the
film’s climax throws himself into the Black Cauldron voluntarily, thus destroying
its powers. We might view Gurgi as a prototypical monster-defeating-themselves
character, in which he overcomes his monstrous qualities and sacrifices himself for
others. He is resurrected by the witches in honor of his bravery and righteous actions.
At film’s end, with his defeat, the Horned King is sucked down into eternal darkness
forever. Like all Disney films, he is not merely vanquished, he is gone at the end of
the film, seemingly permanently, in seeming opposition to Cohen’s second thesis.
 Disney’s Tetratologies 109

What makes the film unique also is that the Black Cauldron itself is a monster.
The opening narration explains its origins and ontology:

There was once a king so cruel and so evil, that even the Gods feared him. Since no
prison could hold him, he was thrown alive into a crucible of molten iron. There his
demonic spirit was captured in the form of a great, Black Cauldron. For uncounted cen-
turies, the Black Cauldron lay hidden, waiting, while evil men searched for it, knowing
whoever possessed it would have the power to resurrect an army of deathless warriors,
and with them, rule the world. (Berman and Rich 1985)

Thus, the cauldron itself is an object of power, like Tolkien’s One Ring, but is also
a sentient being unto itself, with motive, intention, and the ability to cause harm.
One can use the cauldron to make evil soldiers, the “Cauldron-born.” The Cauldron
is a monster and inspires monsters, and thus must also be defeated, which it is when
Gurgi sacrifices himself by jumping into it of his own free will. The Black Cauldron
might be Disney’s only truly inanimate object that is still a monster. The film re-
mains firmly within Disney’s tetratology, regardless, as it distinguishes between a
wide panoply of the monstrous and abnormal, contrasting it with both the heroic
and normal.

HERCULES: MANY MONSTERS, ONE GOAL

Hercules is also monster-filled extravaganza with a monster as its primary adversary

and several monsters serving as secondary antagonists. The chief antagonist is Hades,
who is presented as monstrous: sharp teeth, blue fire for hair, and claws; he com-
mands spirits and monsters from the underworld and is generally represented as evil.
He hates and is jealous of his older brother, Zeus (voiced by Rip Torn), whom he
believes is beneath him, yet Zeus reigns on Olympus and Hades lives in, well, Hades.
The film opens with a birthday celebration for Zeus’s newborn son Hercules, whom
Hades is able to make mortal and place with foster parents in Greece, part of a larger
plan of revenge against Zeus. Hercules grows up as Hades’s long-term revenge plan
begins to work toward a conclusion.
Like many Disney heroes of this period, Hercules must overcome his own mon-
strousness. The accidents and property damage he causes in his youth are extensive.
“That boy is a menace,” one person remarks, “He’s too dangerous to be around
normal people,” replies another. This second comment obviously separates the
young Hercules from “normal” people. Not being “normal” renders him somewhat
monstrous. The key difference is that as a son of Zeus, he is destined to be a hero, a
fighter of monsters. As noted above, this also renders him as abnormal as the mon-
sters he will battle.
Like The Black Cauldron, Hercules is full of monsters in every sense of the word.
The Fates share a single eyeball between them and have abnormal knowledge.
The Titans, presented very differently than the ones found in Greek mythology,”
110 Kevin J. Wetmore

are referred to as a “monstrous band.” Four of them, based on wind, fire, ice, and
earth, are set free by Hades as part of his revenge plan. These Titans are monsters
so powerful they may even be able to overthrow Zeus. One of the first monsters
Hercules must battle (after Pain and Panic manifesting as snakes when he is a new-
born) is Nessus the Centaur, the River Guardian (voiced by Jim Cummings). The
song “Zero to Hero,” describing both the titular character’s training process and
transformation from awkward, dangerous, and clumsy farm boy to classic hero of
mythology centers on fighting and defeating mythological monsters. In an animated
recapitulation of his twelve labors, Hercules is shown fighting a variety of monstrous
animals and mythological beasts: the Nemean Lion, the Erymanthian Boar, the
Stymphalian birds, Medusa and the Gorgons, Cerebus, a Cretan Bull, and a sea
serpent, among others. These monsters are given a few seconds of screen time each.
They literally exist to be fought and defeated in this narrative. He then faces and
fights a Hydra—a four-minute sequence in which eventually Hercules must battle
thirty heads all attacking him at once. Finally, Hercules brags that he has “beaten
every single monster [he’s] come up against,” but that does not make him a “true
hero.” All the monster fighting, however, has prepared him to go up against Hades
and the Titans. It is only by overcoming his self-doubt and his disappointment in
Megara (voiced by Susan Egan), and focusing on helping others instead of just beat-
ing up monsters that he can finally fight the major monsters of the film. Hercules, in
short, is an entire film about fighting monsters. It is by defeating the monsters that
he can join the gods on Olympus and gain a constellation. Hercules is thus one of the
last of the twentieth-century monster films of Disney. The monsters are simply evil;
their monstrousness is marked by their nonnormative appearance. They do not have
redeeming qualities. They exist to be defeated. In defeat, they vanish. No concerns
about oppression or social forces in Hercules, only monsters in need of defeating so
that Zeus’s divine order can be restored.

MOANA: ALL KINDS OF MONSTERS

Moana (2016), like Hercules and The Black Cauldron, is also monster-filled. Moana
begins with Gramma Tala (voiced by Rachel House) narrating tales of gods and
monsters to terrify the children of the village. In the animated opening, telling the
story of Te Fiti and Maui, numerous monsters are shown who will all show up at
various points in the narrative: Tamatoa, the Kakamora, sea serpents, etc. The main
adversary to be overcome, Tala informs the audience (and Moana) is “Te Ka! A de-
mon of earth and fire” (which, we learn, is a manifestation of Te Fiti once her heart
has been stolen. As soon as it is returned, Te Ka becomes Te Fiti again—two sides of
nature: abundance and destruction). It is Te Ka that prevents Moana from reaching
the mother island initially and it is Te Ka that destroys Maui’s fishhook. The chal-
lenge of Te Ka is that her rage and violence cannot be met with rage and violence,
 Disney’s Tetratologies 111

but instead the return of her heart, a solution not applicable to the Horned King or
Hades. Te Ka is not unremittingly evil.
Maui (voiced by Dwayne Johnson) has previously “battled monsters,” as reflected
both in his tattoos and reputation. Grandma Tala relates that when Maui stole the
heart of Te Fiti, one of the effects was that “monsters lurked” everywhere: “Te Ka
and the demons of the deep still hunt for the Heart. Hiding in a darkness that will
continue to spread, chasing away our fish, draining the life from island after island
until every one of us is devoured by the bloodthirsty jaws of inescapable death!” One
child screams, one faints from terror, but Moana is enrapt by the story. The entire
film begins not only with a creation story that establishes the world of the film, but
it also establishes a monster-filled world. Moana eventually encounters the “demons
of the deep,” even as the blight that spreads through the island also represents “the
bloodthirsty jaws of inescapable death.”
Upon leaving Motonui to return the Heart of Te Fiti to the mother island, Moana
first encounters and enlists the aid of the demigod Maui, with whom she will then
face a series of secondary monster antagonists until facing Te Ka twice, the first time
in defeat, the second in victory. The Kakamora, a race of vicious, tiny, coconut-like
creatures, are among the monsters shown in the pictures of Gramma Tala’s narrative.
Moana and Maui encounter them almost immediately, and they attempt to kill the
two and take the Heart of Te Fiti. They use chalk to change their expressions and give
themselves more monstrous visages, as Moana first finds them cute. The Kakamora
almost succeed but are defeated by Moana’s daring and Maui’s sailing.
Maui announces that if they are to have any success in fighting Te Ka they will
need to get his fishhook from the Realm of Monsters, which is literally an area of dry
land under the ocean. One enters it by climbing a mountain, uncovering the mon-
strous face-like gate on the top, saying the magic words, then jumping in. Everything
in the realm is dangerous and deadly. Moana is almost eaten by a succession of vari-
ous monsters, each more terrifying than the last. The filmmakers use an Easter egg
to demonstrate how monstrous the realm truly is: At one point the back of Godzilla
is seen moving through a canyon in the realm.
As with Hercules, it is not for Maui to defeat the monsters of the realm; he is
already a hero, albeit an insecure and selfish one. He relies on trickery and (more of-
ten) brute force. It is Moana who must learn to defeat monsters, and, lacking Maui’s
strength, she must use intelligence and the monsters’ own flaws and shortcomings to
defeat them. On the road to defeat Te Ka she learns to look beyond the monstrous-
ness of the monster and see what the being truly wants or needs. Te Ka needs her
heart. In the Realm of Monsters, Tamatoa needs attention.
Per Weinstock, one of the biggest monsters is the prejudice and fear in Moana’s
father against wayfinding and always seeking safety within the reef. Fear is a monster
that endangers Moana’s people. But Moana defeats that monster the second she
sails beyond the reef. Now she must fight and defeat actual monsters, most notably,
Tamatoa (voiced by Jermaine Clement), a giant, monstrous crab.
112 Kevin J. Wetmore

His appearance is monstrous (giant crab, eyes on eyestalks—“just pick an eye,

babe” he asks Moana when she keeps moving her head back and forth during con-
versation), and he has fastened many shiny objects onto his shell in an attempt to be
“shiny.” His monstrousness, however, is found mostly in his personality. He is both
not bright and very arrogant and needs constant attention. He asserts to Maui, “just
like you I made myself a work of art,” and proclaims that no one else will ever be
as shiny as he is. He is a superficial monster, obsessed with appearance—so much
so that when Moana tricks him and can escape the Realm of Monsters with Maui,
leaving Tamatoa flat on his back, unable to flip back over, the only thing he can think
to ask is, “Did you like the song?”
In addition to the other lessons she learns on the way to being a wayfinder, Moana
has learned to treat monsters with attention and compassion. Like the Beast, Te Ka
became a monster due to a lack, and when the heart is restored, the monster not only
stops being monstrous, but it is also transformed into a beautiful being who restores
the world. Most of Moana’s monsters are similar to twentieth-century Disney mon-
sters. Neither Tamatoa nor the Kakamora are victims of oppressive forces, nor are
we meant to identify them or hold them in esteem. If anything, they are ultimately
figures of amusement, rather easily defeated. In facing the Kakamora, Moana hits
one with an oar and suddenly realizes they’re “coconuts,” and proceeds to bat hun-
dreds of them out of her way. Te Ka, on the other hand, is presented seriously as a
dangerous monster. Te Ka, though, when the audience realizes it is actually Te Fiti
in an angry form, no longer serves as an antagonist in the manner of Maleficent or
Aladdin’s Jafar (voiced by Jonathan Freeman).
No matter the era, Disney animated films contain monsters, and those monsters
must be defeated. It is however, how they are defeated and why they are defeated
that distinguishes the monsters of more recent films (Frozen, Moana, Turning Red)
from their more malevolent (and more one-note) older siblings. “Mad” Madam
Mim, like most villains, delights in being a monster and celebrates her monstrous-
ness. She is happy to be evil and therefore can only be defeated in a manner that gets
rid of her forever. The Beast, Te Ka, the Red Panda, and Elsa, on the other hand,

Figure 7.3. Moana confronts Te Ka in Disney’s Moana

 Disney’s Tetratologies 113

represent monsters that need to be overcome in wholly different ways, much more
in keeping with Weinstock’s configuration. They are no less monstrous for it, but
the kind of monster they are differs greatly. And, if Cohen is correct, that indicates
that the boundary of difference between normal and abnormal has shifted, and
even traditional Disney finds something liberating now within monsters, whereas
before the monster was only an evil adversary. Oddly that puts the new monsters
closer to Chernabog than their older siblings—they exist in and of themselves, and
like Chernabog, they are integrated back into the community at the end of their
monster time.

REFERENCES

Bakshi, Ralph, dir. 1977. Wizards. Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment.
2004. DVD.
Bakshi, Ralph, dir. 1978. Lord of the Rings. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. 2010. DVD.
Buck, Chris, and Jennifer Lee, dirs. 2013. Frozen. Disney + 2019. Streaming.
Buck, Chris, and Jennifer Lee, dirs. 2019. Frozen II. Disney + 2019. Streaming.
Berman, Ted, and Richard Rich, dirs. 1985. The Black Cauldron. Disney +. 2019. Streaming,
Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dirs. 1989. The Little Mermaid. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dirs. 1992. Aladdin. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dirs. 1997. Hercules. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Clements, Ron, and John Musker, dirs. 2016. Moana. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios
Home Entertainment. 2017. DVD.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1995. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading
Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–25. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Doctor, Pete, dir. 2001. Monsters, Inc. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment.
2013. DVD.
Ebert, Roger. 1985. “The Black Cauldron” Accessed February 27. 2022. https:​ //​
www​
.Rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/the​-black​-cauldron​-1985.
Geronimi, Clyde, dir. 1959. Sleeping Beauty. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Geronimi, Clyde, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, dirs. 1950. Cinderella. Disney +.
2019. Streaming.
Geronimi, Clyde, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, dirs. 1953. Peter Pan. Disney +.
2019. Streaming.
Halberstam, Judith. 1995. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Hand, David, et al., dirs.. 1937. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Jackson, Wilfred, et al. dirs. 1940. Fantasia. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Lounsbery, John, Wolfgang Reitherman, and Art Stevens, dirs. 1977. The Rescuers. Disney +.
2019. Streaming.
Potterton, Gerald, dir. 1981. Heavy Metal. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video,
1999. DVD.
Reitherman, Wolfgang, dir. 1963. The Sword in the Stone. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
114 Kevin J. Wetmore

Scanlon, Dan. 2013. Monsters University. Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Studios Home
Entertainment. 2013. DVD.
Shi, Domee, dir. 2022. Turning Red. Disney +. 2022. Streaming.
Trousdale, Gary, and Kirk Wise, dirs. 1991. Beauty and the Beast. Disney +. 2019. Streaming.
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew. 2020. “Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror and Contemporary
Culture.” In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 258–
373. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Whale, James, dir. 1931. Frankenstein. Los Angeles, CA: Universal Pictures Home
Entertainment. 2014. DVD.
8
“Who Is the Monster and Who Is
the Man?”
Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of
Notre Dame
J. S. Mackley

For a company whose animated films are renowned for providing a safe environment
for children, often based on fairy tales ending “happily ever after,” Disney’s decision
to adapt Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame was a surprising move.
However, the “Mouse House” decided it was a good idea to adapt a Gothic novel set
in the Middle Ages, featuring as its protagonist a misshapen, even monstrous, orphan
who was loathed and feared by almost everyone he encounters.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1996) is argu-
ably Disney’s darkest animated feature (see Schwartz 2010a; Finch 1999). This is
partly due to the adult topics explored throughout (including murder, attempted
infanticide and genocide, lust, sin and temptation, and with explicit references to
blasphemy and damnation) as well as the Gothic tropes resonating through the film
including the medieval setting, the Gothic architecture, characters who are grotesque
and/or marginalized, the labyrinthine subterranean world, and the corrupt official,
who appears benign but whose sins lead to his downfall. It will come as no surprise
that the film significantly tones down the scenes from Hugo’s novel; consequently,
the violent elements of the novel are diluted or omitted to avoid upsetting the film’s
younger audience—an action described as “Disneyfication.”
This chapter will consider the complicated process of “Disneyfication” at play
in Hunchback. It will note the film’s indebtedness to Hugo’s novel and the Gothic

115
116 J. S. Mackley

tradition writ large, as well as the ways the film attempts to tone down these ele-
ments, softening them for a younger audience. As such, the film offers an interesting
case study of how Disney deals with Gothic material—making it central to their
cinematic offerings, while at the same time attempting not only to domesticate it,
but often to turn it on its head and use it ultimately to convey messages of tolerance
and acceptance.

GOTHIC DISNEY: FAIRY TALES AND MONSTERS

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is based on Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel, published in
French as Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482. Many readers who approach the novel’s English
translation are surprised by how little Quasimodo features in the first hundred pages.
Frederic Shoberl, translating the novel into English in 1833, gave it a new title: The
Hunchback of Notre-Dame, which changes the focus from the cathedral, the heart of
Paris, to the man. Disney’s animated version takes only a handful of scenes from the
novel, including Quasimodo being whipped on the pillory and claiming sanctuary
for Esmeralda, and tones down the violence of the story’s end. Notably, Frollo does
not practice black magic to seduce Esmeralda, Quasimodo is not brutally tortured
on the pillory, and Esmeralda is not executed at the end.
Anyone familiar with the fairy and folktales written, adapted, or collated by au-
thors such as Charles Perrault and Jacob and Wilheim Grimm will know, as caution-
ary tales, they contain much disturbing imagery. Violence within traditional fairy
tales includes the stepmother in “Cinderella” giving her natural daughter a blade to
“cut off a piece of her foot . . . until she could force her foot into the slipper,” which
works until “the prince saw that blood was spilling out of the slipper” (Grimm 2014,
75–6). In “Little Snow White,” the queen arrives at the wedding where she is forced
into “iron slippers . . . heated over a fire [and] . . . had to keep dancing in them
until she danced herself to death” (Grimm 2014, 178). Such violence became in-
creasingly unpalatable for twentieth-century guardians of children, concerned about
the potential negative effects of such gruesome details. Andrew Lang, for example,
acknowledged the purpose of the fairy tale was didactic, but that many of them were
unsuitable for his early twentieth-century audience, and they were consequently
“translated and adapted to the conditions of young readers” (Lang 1907, ix). Disney
then followed suit, softening or omitting potentially objectionable material. Jack
Zipes summarizes what he perceives as “a marked tendency to infantilize and sani-
tize the genre so that children would not somehow be harmed by some of the more
nefarious fairy tales that might be allegedly too violent for them” (Zipes 2012, 192).
Zipes’s language reveals that he is somewhat dubious about the process of
“Disneyfication.” Other critics, such as Chloé Buckley, discuss “Disneyfication”
directly as a pejorative term, regarding it as “something sanitized, homogenous
and conservative—the perceived parameters of the Disney brand” (Buckley 2019,
149). Bruno Bettelheim similarly argues such changes dilute the original themes of
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 117

the story, making it difficult “to grasp the deeper meaning of the story correctly”
(Bettelheim 1978, 210). The end result is a defanged Gothic. The commercialization
and normalizing of the Gothic, notes Spooner, make monsters commonplace and
less scary, and render the Gothic tropes familiar (Spooner 2006, 130). Consequently
Fred Botting, who observes the Gothic is concerned with excess and transgressions
and belonged in the margins of society, notes this shift in focus means the monster,
“once the exceptions giving shape, difference and substance to the systems that
excluded them, become normal. No longer monstrous, these figures, recognizable,
reiterated, familiar are ‘normal monstrosities’” (Botting 2008, 10).
This is not to say Disney animated films are not without their horrific mo-
ments: In The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994), Scar watches the
hyenas goose-step in a manner reflecting the Nazi Party at the Nuremburg rally,
while at the climax Scar rises from the flames like the devil himself; Hercules (Ron
Clements and John Musker, 1997) contains a disturbing scene of Hercules fight-
ing the hydra and the elemental Titans before prematurely aging as he swims down
among the departed souls to the underworld; and the scene of the toys facing the
incinerator in Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010) was traumatic to many viewers of any
age. However, what this means is that Disneygothic, as Buckley describes it, is now
a thoroughly commodified context in which horror is rendered familiar (Buckley
2019, 5; cf. Botting 2008, 9).
Hunchback, however, in some ways is the exception that proves the rule. Even
though it received a G rating (General Audiences) in the USA and a U rating
(Universal—Suitable for all) in the UK, Hunchback cannot be seen as completely
normalizing the monstrous for children. Stephen Schwartz sees Hunchback as “more
adult-oriented than any Disney animated feature before or since” and explains it
was “not aimed at the core audience for animation, which is obviously younger”
(Swartz 2010a, 2). Christopher Finch suggests “some children . . . were frightened
of [Quasimodo], and that made him difficult to sell as a sympathetic hero” (Finch
1999, 115). This is despite the clever devices used by the animators to make their
protagonist more endearing, or acceptable, to a younger audience.

Quasimodo
At the start of the film, Clopin (voiced by Paul Kandel) tells the audience this
is “the tale of a man and the tale of a monster.” Gothic literature often tells us the
monster is the character with the deformity who operates outside of civilized society,
whether that is the physically monstrous such as Frankenstein’s creature or emo-
tionally or morally corrupt such as Victor Frankenstein or Ambrosio in The Monk
(1796). Richard Bleiler notes humanoid monsters are “exaggerated or altered in such
a way as to make the possessor exceptional” and continues, “if disturbing physical
differences exist, it is not unreasonable to assume these might be accompanied by
mental and moral differences that reveal themselves through aberrant behavior”
(Bleiler 2007, 341–42). Some medieval societies believed a person’s external features
118 J. S. Mackley

reflected their internal characters, and that disability was a punishment for sin
(Eyler 2010, 3; Metzler 2008, 13). As Edwards and Grauland observe, “A deformed
body . . . is a readable text on which is described his deviant character” (Edwards
and Grauland 2013, 51). In the novel, Quasimodo is described as “vicious” and filled
with “malice and hatred” with all the hallmarks of the Gothic monstrous (Hugo
1999, 165–66, 171):

A large head bristling with red hair; between the shoulders an enormous hump, the
effects of which were also visible in front; an assemblage of thighs and legs so strangely
distorted that they touched only at the knees and, from the front, looked like two sickle
blades joined at the handle; big feet, monstrous hands; and with all that deformity a
certain air of fearsome energy. (Hugo 1999, 58)

The film shows Quasimodo’s back twisted by scoliosis; he has muscular forearms
and a disfigured face with an upturned nose and receding chin. His eyes are large,
although a deforming lump mis-aligns his left eye. He also has a large incisor in the
center of his mouth.
In cases like this, the “monstrous,” as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen explains, “incorporates
fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (ataractic or incendiary), giving them life and an
uncanny independence” (Cohen 1996, 4). As a marginalized character, Quasimodo
reflects society’s attitudes toward him. His deformities presented a conundrum to
the concept artists at Disney: How to turn a frightening creature into someone the
young audience would empathize with. The production notes describe Quasimodo
as “symbolically viewed as being an angel in a devil’s body” (cited in Pinsky 2004,
169); indeed, the Cathedral acts as a liminal space for Quasimodo where he is po-
sitioned between heaven and hell, between the bells pealing their spiritual message
and the debauchery of the streets below. Thus, Hunchback blurs the dualities Gothic
literature normally provides, notably, as Botting observes, the boundaries between
self and monster (Botting 2008, 9).
The animators emphasized Quasimodo’s features in a way also used to depict the
Disney princesses. Olga Khazan notes, “Enlarged eyes, tiny chin, and short noses
make them look more like babies, which creates an air of innocence and vulner-
ability” (Khazan 2015). Quasimodo thus ceases to be the Gothic monstrous and
instead becomes a symbolic princess in the tower waiting to be rescued from his
confinement; his exaggerated physical features, reinforced by his positive personal-
ity, make him more endearing to the audience. He speaks in a gentle and clear voice
and we see his caring character from the outset as he nurtures the fledgling bird and
encourages her to fly: a metaphor for his own desires to escape from the bell tower.
These are characteristics normally found in the Disney princesses. Tom Hulce voiced
Quasimodo; despite Hulce being in his early forties when he recorded the dialogue,
critics have commented he sounds like a “schoolboy” in the film (Nalbandian 2011).
Quasimodo’s good nature counterbalances the monstrous behavior of the human
characters who have no physical abnormalities, but who have a moral tempest raging
beneath their supposedly respectable veneer, showing their inhumanity, also seen in
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 119

Figure 8.1. Quasimodo in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame

characters such as Victor Frankenstein, Henry Jekyll, and Ambrosio in The Monk.
The truly monstrous characters are those flawed humans driven by lust and avarice.
Irrespective of their physical appearances, their monstrous characteristics simmer just
beneath the surface of their seemingly righteous exteriors. As Edwards and Grauland
observe, “Grotesquerie can negate the human and simultaneously highlight the in-
human” (2013, 86). Frollo is no pantomime villain as seen in other Disney films, nor
is he evil. Instead, he is “tormented by conflicting passions” (Finch 1999, 115) and
even though he is the antagonist of the film, these traits make him more relatable
and consequently more frightening.
Quasimodo may have the features of a monster, but he has a kind heart. Frollo is
without physical deformity, but in his attempts to be righteous, he loses his human-
ity. Marina Warner explains, “Monsters who manifest their nature . . . clearly present
easier targets than those in disguise” (Warner 1994, 22). However, for Quasimodo,
120 J. S. Mackley

his physical deformity and his Romani heritage make him the object of fear and
superstition. The original storyboards included sequences of Quasimodo lurking
in the shadows and Parisian children terrifying themselves by telling stories of the
monster (Norman 2013, 111). This presentation, arguably a more Gothic tone than
the material, that was finally chosen, may have created an unpleasant first impression
of Quasimodo for the youthful audience, presenting a character of whom they might
initially be frightened. This would present more work to get the audience to empa-
thize with him, rather than presenting him from the outset as a victim of prejudice
and as a nurturing character.
At the start of the film, Quasimodo’s mother (voiced by Mary Kay Bergman) dies
protecting her child when Frollo (voiced by Tony Jay) assaults her on the cathedral
steps. As tragic as this opening is, it shows Quasimodo’s mother loved him and was
prepared to protect him at all costs despite his deformity. The death of Quasimodo’s
mother links him to the Gothic heroine seen in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of
Udolpho, for example, where the death of Emily’s mother leaves her vulnerable and
without a matriarchal protector. In this context, Frollo represents an archetypical
male character, comparable to Montoni in Udolpho who plans to take what he wishes
from the vulnerable heroine.
For Quasimodo, the cathedral acts as both his sanctuary and his prison: He is
protected from society’s prejudices, but, in his loneliness, he wishes to experience
life among the people who fear him. His reticence derives from the behavior he has
learned from Frollo: Under the guise of teaching Quasimodo, Frollo projects his own
attitudes (“abomination”), which are backed up by the oppressive medieval Church
dogma (“Blasphemy, . . . Damnation, Eternal Damnation”)—although, ironically,
Quasimodo himself does not prioritize “forgiveness” and his words betray his
thoughts of attending the Festival of Fools. Furthermore, Frollo makes Quasimodo
repeat phrases such as “you are deformed and you are ugly.” Thus, Quasimodo is
a manifestation of Frollo’s own suppressed guilt. Even so, Frollo’s warning that the
Parisians will “revile [Quasimodo] as a monster” is well-founded. As we have seen,
the animators went to great lengths to establish Quasimodo as a relatable character
from the outset; however, there are two occasions where he reveals his monstrous
nature—aggressive, terrifying, and inhuman—but this is only when Esmeralda is
threatened.
During his isolation in the bell tower, Quasimodo finds company in three
gargoyles (voiced by Jason Alexander, Charles Kimbrough, and Mary Wickes).
Traditionally, gargoyles are an intrinsic part of Gothic architecture, scaring away
evil spirits. Because of his deformities, Quasimodo himself can be equated to these
grotesques with his exaggerated features; however, these characters provide banter to
defuse the film’s dark themes. Animating only when Quasimodo is alone, they could
represent Quasimodo’s psyche coping with his loneliness. They could also represent
his subconscious thoughts. The gargoyles persuade Quasimodo to attend the Festival
of Fools; and when Quasimodo flees from Esmeralda (voiced by Demi Moore) on
her first visit to the cathedral, the gargoyles try to slow him down, suggesting he does
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 121

not want to run from her. This theme of repressed thoughts manifesting themselves
is repeated later with Frollo in the “Hellfire” sequence.
Botting and Spooner note the monstrous is “a general disturbance of subjective
and systemic boundaries” (Botting and Spooner 2015, 2). Although depicted as
deformed and marginalized, as noted above, Quasimodo’s character is endearing to
the audience as they see his sympathetic side and may identify with prejudices he
experiences. While Quasimodo only shows his monstrous nature when Esmeralda is
threatened, the same cannot be said of his guardian, Judge Frollo. The truly mon-
strous is the character who enforces those boundaries.

Frollo
In Hugo’s novel, Claude Frollo is the cathedral’s hypocritical archdeacon, whose
downfall is punctuated by his rejection of his vows and engaging in alchemy and
black magic, practicing his occult learning to secure Esmeralda’s affections (Hugo
1999, 175). His temptation and subsequent fall from his position of authority
and respect are reminiscent of Ambrosio in The Monk and the decadent Caliph in
William Beckford’s Vathek (1782). However, the film’s writers decided to change
Frollo’s vocation to Justice of the Peace to avoid the film being seen as a critique of
the Church. Frollo’s use of black magic was clearly inappropriate for the youthful
audience.
As with other Disney films, in Hunchback, the protagonist attempts to overcome
the machinations of the antagonist. However, in almost every other film, there are
physical features marking the antagonist as “evil,” such as Cruella de Vil’s angular
face in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (Wolfgang Reitherman, Clyde Geronimi,
and Hamilton Luske, 1961), Hades’s sharp fangs in Hercules, and the enlarged nose
and jutting chin of both Shere Khan in The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman,
1967) and Captain Hook in Peter Pan (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and
Hamilton Luske, 1953). Although we have focused on Gothic elements being di-
luted to create a safer milieu for the audience, as judge, Frollo’s character enforces
the medieval attitudes to sin and judicial punishment. He is charged with enforcing
absolute law and meting out capital punishment, secure in the knowledge his ac-
tions are sanctioned. However, his punishments, such as his planned execution of
Esmeralda, are carried out without following due process. Thus, he justifies the death
of Quasimodo’s mother when explaining to the archdeacon: “I am guiltless. She ran,
I pursued.” He is doing what he (and many others) would see as righteous, but this
does not allow room for mercy or compassion.
Following the death of Quasimodo’s mother, Frollo’s guilt leads him to believe the
cathedral itself accuses him. Along with the accusing “eyes of Notre Dame,” Frollo
sees apocalyptic imagery, apostles, saints, St. Michael fighting with Satan (foreshad-
owing his own death), and the Virgin Mary with the Christ child, although she is not
the “meek and mild” girl from Christmas carols, but a deliverer of divine judgment.
The Gothic architecture of the cathedral represents divine retribution, and Frollo’s
122 J. S. Mackley

own conscience makes him fear for his immortal soul, The archdeacon forces Frollo
to care for the infant Quasimodo as his penance. Even so, Frollo believes Quasimodo
“may be of some use to him in the future” (this being when he leads Frollo to the
Court of Miracles). Quasimodo is hidden away in the bell tower, symbolic of Frollo
trying to conceal his own guilt. Indeed, as Valdine Clemens, following Otto Rank,
observes when a character can “no longer accept the responsibilities for certain ac-
tions of his ego” he must “place it upon another ego, a double” (Clemens 1999, 104).
Despite his assertion of being “blameless” for the murder of Quasimodo’s mother,
Quasimodo remains a physical reminder of his guilt, and despite his hated for the
Romani, Frollo’s guilt is transferred to Esmeralda as sexual repression.

“Hellfire”
Even though Frollo is drawn as a secular character, Will Finn, the Artistic
Supervisor on Hunchback, admitted, “we did everything to indicate that he was sup-
posed to be a priest” (quoted in Schweizer and Schweizer 1998, 141). As a layman,
rather than a member of the clergy, Frollo’s battles with his lustful instincts are not as
severe as in the book: As a Catholic priest, he is bound by an oath of chastity where
his actions would be seen as placing his immortal soul in peril. Frollo’s encounter
with Esmeralda in the cathedral forces him to confront his emotions in the song
“Hellfire,” one of the film’s most disturbing sequences. Praying in front of an open
fire in the Palais de Justice, he begins declaring his own (self-) righteousness and seek-
ing to work through his own emotions. Frollo’s conflict is countered by his contrition
as he tries to avoid temptation: “Don’t let the siren cast her spell.”
Frollo negates his culpability by declaring Esmeralda has bewitched him, like
Ambrosio in The Monk accusing Matilda of witchcraft. It is easier for him to accept
he is a victim than to accept he is prone to sin. This latter depiction would align
Esmeralda with Barbara Creed’s description of the monstrous feminine: “her evil
powers are seen as part of her ‘feminine’ nature,” and this “monstrous nature is inex-
tricably bound up with the difference as man’s sexual other” (Creed 1993, 76, 83).
However, any sexual tension and moral guilt is removed from Esmeralda and placed
on Frollo, leaving her to be established as the story’s heroine. His fears are shown
through transgressive taboos and prohibitive behaviors.
In the Hellfire sequence, the flames take the shape of faceless monks in red habits,
but Frollo recognizes “this burning desire is turning me to sin.” He tries to convince
himself “it’s not my fault,” but the sinister monks chant in Latin mea culpa ­(“my
guilt”). The sequence was inspired by the use of choral music in Tosca, itself a story
of passion and jealousy (Schwartz 2010b, 1). Frollo’s final prayer is for the Blessed
Virgin to secure him sexual pleasures with Esmeralda: “let her be mine and mine
alone,” as if she would be willing to engage in a Faustian pact with him.
Frollo sees Esmeralda, a dancing temptress, in the flames. This is an occasion
where Stephen Schwartz notes the animators revisited the imagery to make it less
sexually explicit (Schwartz 2010, 5). Animators were instructed to tone down
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 123

Esmeralda’s sensuality, and told “this is Disney, not the Playboy Channel” (Norman
2013, 111).
The depiction of the Hellfire sequence is akin to Radcliffe’s reflection of terror as
an essential component of the Gothic as the images of temptation and damnation
exist in Frollo’s mind. However, it is Frollo’s later physical actions leading to the at-
tempts of genocide at the Court of Miracles, Esmeralda’s execution, and the murder
of Quasimodo that focus on the horror of the Gothic mood. George E. Haggerty
describes how Gothic elements are “almost always sexual terror, and fear, and flight
and incarceration” (Haggerty 2009, 384). As will be shown later, the only way for
Frollo to deal with his transgressive sexual aggression is to bring to center stage the
aspects of his guilt that have hitherto existed on the margins: both Esmeralda and
Quasimodo.

The Romani
The early scenes of the film establish the citizens’ views of the Romani—referred
to as “gypsies”—as “vermin,” living “outside the normal order. Their heathen ways
enflame the citizens’ lowest instincts”; they will “steal us blind.” Romani people are a

Figure 8.2. Esmeralda in the Flames in Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame
124 J. S. Mackley

staple component of Gothic literature, portrayed as a negative stereotype living out-

side the margins of civilized society, representing lawlessness and seduction, possess-
ing occult powers or foresight. They are the equivalent of the banditti of early Gothic
romances, living deep in the wild and uncivilized forests and planning to endanger
the protagonist. David Mayall remarks they are characterized as “Vagrants, rogues,
beggars, and vagabonds” (Mayall 1995, 31), while Abby Bardi describes them as
belonging to a “culture that was seen as mysterious, closed to outsiders and exotic”
(Bardi 2007a, 40). Many Gothic novels show the Romani in a pejorative manner
including The Monk and the descriptions of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847).
The Szgany in Dracula (1897) show how the Romani function on the margins of
“civilized” society and are forces for evil; they fill the boxes of Transylvanian soil for
the count to take to England, placing “Englishness” in danger. As Bardi observes,
the Romani “disperse infectious foreignness that threatens to destabilize every aspect
of the status quo” (Bardi 2007b, 273, 280). In the novel, Esmeralda is not Romani
herself: It is revealed she was abducted as an infant and her mother, a minstrel’s
daughter from Rheims, expresses her fears they would eat her daughter (Hugo 1999,
509). Thus, the gypsies are not simply thieves and abductors with occult powers,
but cannibals as well.
The film ignores Esmeralda’s backstory, depicting her Romani features: dark hair
and skin and striking green eyes, suggesting a mysterious and seductive nature,
although she does not “lead on” Phoebus (voiced by Kevin Kline) or Frollo. When
she defies Frollo and the city guards, her character is akin to those in some stories
of Robin Hood: outlaws who thwart the oppressive rule of law, but who are “play-
ful” rather than evil. Furthermore, despite the characters’ attitudes to the Romani,
they are shown as victims of prejudice and of the oppressive laws enforced by Frollo.
Consequently, the film takes the Gothic tragic heroine and transforms her into
someone with whom a modern female audience can identify.
Esmeralda’s character is established at the Festival of Fools. This is Epiphany in the
liturgical year (January 6th), commemorating the date when the kings recognized
the infant Jesus as the son of God. In these celebrations, the characters’ roles are in-
verted: The rulers become servants of the child who has himself become king. There
is, however, an unspoken undercurrent of conflict of Christian versus pagan: the
festival is linked to the celebration of Saturnalia, which led to the winter solstice.
Hugo describes how “the saturnalia reverses the normal ordering of society, thereby
producing an unrestrained freedom and a raucous, carnivalistic atmosphere, where
the underlings of society are given temporary power over those more powerful than
themselves” (Hugo 1999, 24). Thus, the festival is the embodiment of Bakhtin’s
discussions around the carnivalesque where the ritual becomes a public spectacle and
is a “means of displaying otherness” (Holquist 2002, 89). It is a time during which
“life is subject only to its laws, that is the laws of freedom” (Bahktin 1984, 7) and
when the monstrous is temporarily marginalized and allowed “a safe realm of expres-
sion and play” (Cohen 1996, 17). The Festival of Fools serves to mock authority
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 125

figures—the people choose someone to be the Fool’s King for the day—so it is little
wonder Frollo despises it, seeing it as an excuse for lawlessness.
Despite his attempts to avoid drawing attention to himself, Quasimodo is found
and forced into the festival. He is chosen as the “king of fools.” It is only when
he is “unmasked”—that is, when it is revealed he is not wearing a mask—that the
characters’ true natures are exposed. Quasimodo initially finds acceptance as having
the “ugliest face” in the context of the Festival of Fools until the mood of the crowd
changes. At this point, Quasimodo is a victim of spite rather than the beneficiary
of Frollo’s charity. Frollo should be righteous, but he is proud and self-serving.
Esmeralda has already shown her seductive side through dancing, and her feisty char-
acter by taunting the city guards, and publicly defying Frollo, but her actions are all
good-natured. Now we see her compassionate nature: She is horrified by the citizens’
treatment of Quasimodo, comforting him and releasing him from his humiliation.
Terrible as this incident is for him, Quasimodo realizes Frollo has told the truth
about how society would perceive him. Frollo warned Quasimodo the world is a
cruel place, and Quasimodo learns this for himself. It is one of the low points in the
narrative for Quasimodo, but is, once again, Disney toning down the source con-
tent. In the novel, Quasimodo (at Frollo’s command) unsuccessfully tries to kidnap
Esmeralda, which leads to his brutal punishment of being whipped on the pillory.
Esmeralda shows her compassion when she brings Quasimodo water after his pun-
ishment. The humiliation in the Disney film, although unpleasant, has a didactic
message concerning obedience.

THE CATHEDRAL AND THE COURT OF MIRACLES

The cathedral is the most recognizably Gothic location in the film, most particularly
with its use of shadow and light (the stained-glass windows and the candles), but
it is almost inconsequential to the plot. As discussed earlier, the English title of the
novel changes the focus of the story from the cathedral to the man. Esmeralda first
enters the cathedral, having evaded the city guards following the Festival of Fools.
The scene does not appear in the novel as it would lessen the impact of Quasimodo
claiming sanctuary on her behalf when he rescues her from her execution. However,
it shows the cathedral acts as a liminal space in which Esmeralda humanizes
Quasimodo, referring to him as a “poor boy.” She also meets Phoebus and Frollo
face-to-face for the first time, and Frollo reveals his barely suppressed sexual tension.
While Catholic dogma may be oppressive and sometimes sadistic in much Gothic
literature, it provides a comfort to Esmeralda: The Archdeacon overrules Frollo’s at-
tempt to forcibly remove her from the Cathedral, reminding him of the privilege of
Sanctuary. Esmeralda’s prayer to the Blessed Virgin for “outcasts . . . less lucky” than
herself further showing her generous nature, especially as she symbolically walks in
the opposite direction to the other penitents who pray for wealth, fame, and love.
When she follows Quasimodo to the bell tower, she challenges his preconceptions
126 J. S. Mackley

concerning gypsies and his own identity of being a monster, all of which are ideas he
has learned from Frollo. In this way she underscores the film’s message of inclusion.
The Cathedral’s sanctity is juxtaposed by the gypsies’ subterranean necropolis,
the Court of Miracles. It represents lawlessness in comparison to Church law. It is
a location rich in Gothic imagery, contrasting the Cathedral’s promise of Eternal
Life by being shrouded with images of death. The name of the Court of Miracles
is ironic: Beggars in the Parisian streets might appear blind or lame, but in the un-
derworld they can “miraculously” see or walk and no longer need to keep up their
pretense. The Court and its inhabitants are on a literal margin of death: The Court is
accessed through a tomb in the graveyard which leads to gloomy catacombs beneath
the city. Here skeletons apparently animate and follow Phoebus and Quasimodo
before the protagonists are captured. They are positioned on a scaffold to be hanged,
with Clopin ready to release the trapdoor. Yet, in the Cathedral, Quasimodo is
verbally abused by the hypocritical congregation whereas in the Court, despite
having a noose around his neck, the inhabitants have no reaction to his deformity.
Quasimodo represents Frollo’s guilt that he wished to bury. By finding his way to
the Court, Quasimodo has passed through death (the graveyard, the tomb, the cata-
combs) to find and warn the inhabitants of their impending danger.
The overwhelming Gothic elements serve to highlight the danger in which the
protagonists find themselves. However, to defuse the horror for the younger audi-
ence, the “court proceedings” where Clopin acts as judge, jury, and executioner are
delivered through song with Clopin adding extra voices through puppets. Despite
the threats to Quasimodo and Phoebus, the true horror comes with Frollo infil-
trating the court leading to Esmeralda’s arrest and sentence to death without trial.
Quasimodo is disillusioned when he realizes how cruel his “master” is.

THE ENDING

The ending of Hugo’s novel is both tragic and poignant: Esmeralda is forcibly taken
from the Cathedral and Frollo offers Esmeralda the choice between a life with him
or her execution. She is unwilling to save herself from death by submitting to Frollo’s
base instincts and thus demonstrates her moral superiority. In the film, she is the
“princess in the tower” trope; in the novel, she is the tragic heroine. Quasimodo and
Frollo witness her execution from the bell tower, from which Quasimodo pushes his
guardian to his death; within the space of a few lines, Quasimodo loses everyone
he cares for. Years later, two skeletons are found in the charnel house, one with a
curved spinal column “clasping the other in a strange embrace” (Hugo 1999, 539).
In a final moment of pathos, it is revealed Quasimodo came to protect Esmeralda’s
corpse for the rest of his life. Such a tragic ending would be unsuitable for a Disney
film. The novel needed closure, but the film needed a climax followed by a “happily
ever after” moment.
 “Who Is the Monster and Who Is the Man?” 127

In the film, Esmeralda is sentenced to be burned at the stake; Quasimodo, chained

in the bell tower, is forced to watch as the flames rise around her, before he discov-
ers his monstrous strength and frees himself in order to save her. Frollo attempts to
murder Quasimodo, but in the melee, Frollo falls from the bell tower. Crucially,
Quasimodo tries to save Frollo, even though the judge continues in his attempts to
kill him. The Cathedral itself rejects Frollo: The gargoyle’s bestial face, which has
been spewing forth molten lead, comes alive, causing him to fall. Frollo is cast out
of Heaven and falls into the apocalyptic fires below.
The imagery of seeing Esmeralda facing execution, and the raging apocalyptic
fires as Frollo attempts to murder Quasimodo are horrific indeed, particularly when
considering this is a children’s film. However, these moments mark the beginning
of Frollo’s ruin: He ignites Esmerelda’s pyre himself when she is to be burned at the
stake. Floyd Norman acknowledges that Disney films often terrorize small children
(Norman 2013, 105).
In the climax of most Disney films, the antagonist receives their comeuppance;
significantly, however, the protagonist does not deliver the killing blow. In Snow
White and the Seven Dwarves (William Cottrell, David Hand and Wilfred Jackson,
1937), when the crone stands atop a mountain and intends to kill the dwarves,
lightning strikes the outcrop where she stands and she falls to her doom, symboli-
cally followed by vultures. Likewise, in The Lion King, Simba hurls Scar away from
him, and he falls in front of the hyenas, and the camera pans away so we see Scar’s
shadow as the hyenas kill him.
In the final scenes, Quasimodo recognizes Esmeralda and Phoebus should be
together, before he is led out into the cathedral square. As Cohen argues, when the
monstrous emerges from the margins of society, it forces us to question our values
and how we perceive the “difference [and] our tolerance towards its expression”
(Cohen 20). The characters have overcome their preconceived ideas of monstrosity,
but they are finally led by a child who touches his face and, by embracing him, em-
bodies society’s acceptance of him. And they live happily ever after . . .

CONCLUSION

Victor Hugo’s novel upon which The Hunchback of Notre Dame is based is a truly
Gothic novel, and some of the imagery translates to the Disney film often in a
modified form. It is stacked with Gothic imagery, from the imposing edifice of the
cathedral to the labyrinthine catacombs beneath the city. Despite the Gothic setting
and tropes—the cathedral and the tunnels, the medieval attitudes, the monstrous
and the marginalized that appear throughout the film—The Hunchback of Notre
Dame dilutes all these elements so the “monstrous grotesque” becomes a sympathetic
hero and the marginalized Romani seductress becomes the feisty protagonist with
whom a modern audience could identify. Quasimodo is illustrated using techniques
128 J. S. Mackley

normally used for princess; he is monstrous, but he is kind and articulate. Frollo is
the lawbringer, but he is proud, self-serving, and lacks compassion.
This subversion of characteristics meant the film could deliver the message of
tolerance and inclusion, which is at the core of the story. Consequently, the film’s
primary message is that beauty is only skin deep and it is the personality within that
is most important. It is about dispelling preconceived prejudices and stereotypes.
The ending of Hugo’s novel presents the reader with closure—the three main char-
acters are dead. However, the film needed to subvert the Gothic mood and provide
a happily-ever-after message with Esmeralda and Phoebus together and Quasimodo
accepted by society.
It was a gamble for Disney to choose a film with a “monster” as its protagonist, to
present and subvert stereotypes, and to celebrate diversity and inclusivity but it paid
off—this despite the fact that, as critic Mark Pinsky notes “it is no more a movie for
young children than Hugo’s novel is a fairy tale” (Pinsky 2004. 173). Perhaps because
of its Gothic features, it didn’t earn the $1.5 billion that The Lion King generated;
however, it was the fifth-highest grossing film of the year and earned an estimated
$500 million, a quarter of Disney’s annual revenue (Schweizer and Schweizer 1998,
136). While Disney can be considered brave to take on such a dark narrative as
Hugo’s novel, ultimately the only bells that truly mattered were the ones that ring
on tills.

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Zipes, Jack. 2012. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
9
Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the
Other Side
Magic, Cultural Echoes, and the Gothic Trajectories
of Difference in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog
Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

In recent years, Disney villains have come to occupy a space within popular culture
that has catapulted them into iconic status. From Snow White’s Evil Queen (David
Hand et al., 1937) to the more recent live-action incarnations as seen in Maleficent
(Robert Stromberg, 2014), Disney villains are known for their boundary-pushing
performances and enchanting intimidation. By virtue of their villainous intents
and unmissable performative Otherness, the villains of Disney’s animated features
seem to fit well into the Studios’ own brand of Gothic suggestiveness, characterized
as it is by “dark and gloomy atmospheres, as well as numerous narratives of body
modification—most often than not caused by magic and sorcery” (Piatti-Farnell
2019, 46). Bodily modifications, in particular, are often the calling card of Disney
villains, and commonly take place in the narrative by way of transmogrification, a
process Nikki Sullivan aptly describes as “(un)becoming, strange, and/or grotesque”
(2006, 553). The 2009 release of Disney’s The Princess and the Frog (John Musker
and Ron Clements) is no exception, with main characters Tiana (voiced by Anika
Noni Rose) and Prince Naveen (voiced by Bruno Campos) being transmogrified into
frogs by way of voodoo magic, performed by the villainous Dr. Facilier (voiced by
Keith David). The latter’s wicked intents are firmly sited in a framework of magic,
which also becomes entangled with his desire for power and possession over the city
of New Orleans, where the film is set. While Disney is not broadly known, at least as

131
132 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

far as the popular imagination goes, for aiming to represent the “human condition”
as such—philosophically speaking—there is indeed no denying that the Studios’
dichotomous characterizations of “good vs. evil” heavily rely on Gothic frameworks
uncovering mysterious plots, the dangerous, and the unknown. This conjunction is
particularly entangled with matters of a magical nature, which provides the founda-
tions for the Gothic narrative. Villains are at the center of this intersectional rela-
tionship and are the fulcrum upon which Gothic characterization depends. Within
this context, a figure such as Dr. Facilier in The Princess and the Frog embodies the
intersections of queer villainy and racialized identity in ways that position him as
“Othered” and, at times within the film, question his corporeal presence. This con-
ceptual entanglement among magic, villainous figures, and cultural identities in the
film should not come as a surprise considering that, as Ruth Biemstock Anolik and
Douglas L. Howard argue, the Gothic narrative is often “marked” by “an anxious
encounter with the dark and mysterious unknown” (2004, 1).
While not necessarily known for their Gothic intentions, Disney animated fea-
tures are often entangled with matters of a Gothic nature. This has indeed been true
since the early days of Disney Studios’ animation journey, from the celebrated short
The Skeleton Dance (1929) to feature-length examples such as Snow White and the
Seven Dwarves. Just as The Skeleton Dance is heavily indebted to Gothic imagery,
openly drawing inspiration from “nineteenth-century Gothic melodrama” (Allan
1999, 25; see also Leeder in this volume), Snow White showcases both in concept
and in style several well-known traditional Gothic tropes, from haunted forests and
ominous castles, to macabre atmospheres and (of course) the focus on a heroine in
distress. Indeed, popular cinematic folklore has it that Walt Disney himself had a
particular penchant for Gothic literature, fairy tales—especially those penned by the
Brothers Grimm—and examples of Expressionist cinema such as F. W. Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), and would instruct his animators and storyboarders to incorporate
many elements from these intersecting traditions into the Studios’ animated features.
This predilection would account for why, ever since their inception, Disney Studios
and their animations have “always had a line of ghosts and graveyards” as part of their
commonly used stock of images (Phillips 2012, 20). One of the most noticeable
aspects of Gothic horror characterization can be perhaps be found in the inescapable
villains, especially those iconic figures inhabiting animated films such as Cinderella
(Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, and Clyde Geronimi, 1950), Sleeping Beauty
(Clyde Geronimi, et al., 1959), The Black Cauldron (Ted Berman and Richard Rich,
1985), and The Little Mermaid (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989), to name
but a few in a long list.
In similar terms, magic is often at the center of Disney’s animated features, and
regularly provides the framework through which the plot can advance, and the
exploits of heroes, heroines, and villains can take place. Indeed, magic is so ubiq-
uitous in Disney’s feature-length films that it has become almost synonymous with
the Studios’ approach to the fairy-tale film, both in its animated form and its more
recent live-action reincarnations. The term “magic” is of course culturally, socially,
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 133

and historically multifaceted and can be difficult to define in universal terms. Chris
Godsen suggests that the idea of “magic” is comprised of “myriad manifestations”;
regardless of its many “experimental, changeable, and inventive” interpretations,
magic is an idea and a practice that emphasizes our “human connections with
the universe” (2014, 2). This multifaceted, individualized, and seemingly porous
interpretation of magic rings true to how this notion manifests and is represented
in Disney’s animated features. At times, magic is rendered as part of whimsical set-
ups, fairy lands, and childhood adventures, as seen in examples such as Pinocchio
(Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, et al., 1940), Alice in Wonderland (Clyde
Germonimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1951) and Peter Pan (Hamilton
Luske, Clyde Geronimi, and Wilfred Jackson, 1953). Other times, magic is inter-
preted as a mysterious power connected to nature and perhaps even mythological
and spiritual forces, and embodied in anthropomorphic creatures and animated
objects, as seen in Aladdin (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1992 / Guy Ritchie,
2019), Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Godberg, 1995), The Hunchback of Notre
Dame (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1996), and Hercules (John Musker and
Ron Clements, 1997). On other occasions still, magic is conceived as witchcraft
and depicted with traditional tropes such as potions, wands, curses, and bubbling
cauldrons, as seen in examples such as Fantasia (Samuel Armstrong, et al., 1940),
Sleeping Beauty, The Sword in the Stone (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1963), The Black
Cauldron, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk
Wise, 1991 / Bill Condon, 2017). It is perhaps in its witchcraft form that magic,
within the Disney world, is most profoundly entangled with the Gothic framework
and notions of villainy. Indeed, it is likely through the use of frightening witchcraft-
inspired magical interactions that Walt Disney Studios have managed to successfully
create the “greatest collection of colorful and intimidating villains found anywhere”
(Johnston and Thomas 1993, 11).
Although it is important to acknowledge the Gothic roots of Disney animations,
especially as connected to the use of magic as an essential part of plot and character
development, this chapter leaves wider discussions of Gothic literature and fairy tales
for another occasion. Rather, this chapter aims to analyze the associations among
Dr. Facilier’s unique brand of voodoo magic, his Black dandy-esque aesthetics, and
his tacitly queer coded manifestations. This analysis reinforces the suggestion that,
at least through the animated lens, there is a certain degree of marginalization that
surrounds the practitioners of magic in Disney, and how it is tacitly interwoven
with matters of “Otherness” related to gender, sexuality, and race. Dr. Facilier can
be therefore interpreted as a transgressive figure within the contextual framework of
Disney’s sanitized narratives, where magic acts as a catalyst for explorations of Gothic
difference. This chapter will analyze his appearance within three pivotal moments
in the film: his formal introduction to Prince Naveen, his interaction with magical
entities halfway through the film, and finally his inevitable demise at the end of the
film. Therefore, it is the intention of this chapter to explore how Dr. Facilier contin-
ues to unveil the Gothic associations among racialized identities, queer villainy, and
134 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

magical practice, as well as dark recesses and desires, in Disney Studios’ animated
films.
The Princess and the Frog is an animation loaded with multiple Gothic, historical,
and racial (con)textual intricacies. The film is seemingly set in the New Orleans of
the 1920s during what appears to be the Jim Crow era, a tacit contextual reference
to a time when laws enforced racial segregation between Black and white citizens.
The historical reality of the Jim Crow era, however, seems to be somehow factually
omitted by Disney, as New Orleans is almost portrayed as a suggestively post-racial
utopia. While the exact year remains unspecified, the prologue features Dr. Facilier
reading a newspaper in which the headline declares Woodrow Wilson winning
the presidential election, which places the opening of the film in either 1912 or
1916. Following this, there is a noticeable time-skip shown through photos and,
thus, the film evokes specific elements that situate it within the 1920s rather than be-
ing grounded in an exact year. This lack of specificity is accentuated by anachronistic
visual modalities, so that, while race features prominently in the characterization and
narrative of The Princess and the Frog, the film divorces itself from the realities of the
African American experience. In doing this, it seemingly proposes a more simplified
color-blind rhetoric that remains apolitical and lighthearted. While the film follows
the story of Disney’s first Black leading character, Tiana, on her journey of both lit-
eral and figurative transformation, it is also a tale of revisionist racialized narratives
juxtaposed with transgressive queer expressions, not to mention the inclusion and
interspersion of voodoo iconography, such as the masks and ritual wooden vessels
that feature in Dr. Facilier’s parlor. These latter ornamental aspects are facilitated
through the construction of Dr. Facilier himself as a magically gifted person. His
penchant for appearing charming and debonair, transposed with his arrogant flair,
further reiterates how Disney “villains often outperform their rivals, setting up a
transparent comparison between ‘normative’ and ‘deviant’ gendered behaviors”; this
renders them sarcastic, selfish, and, at times, cruel (Sharmin and Sattar 2018, 53).
Noticeably, such transgressions and subversions of social expectations are rooted in
the Gothic framework as well as Disney’s formulaic manifestation of the despicable
and, in this case, villainy. Dr. Facilier’s use of magic, in conjunction with his racial-
ized and queer Gothic identity, draws on wider cultural tropes that make him a
character begging for exploration.

VOODOO, HOODOO, AND WITCHCRAFT IN NEW ORLEANS

In order to examine the character of Dr. Facilier across his Black, queer, and villain-
ous trajectories, it is crucial to establish a historical foundation for how New Orleans
and Black Atlantic traditions remain connected to pervasive cultural and religious
stereotypes of voodoo and hoodoo. Popular depictions of New Orleans are informed
by its complex historical and cultural background, but frequently these factors are
used as a vague backdrop for extraordinary narrative exploits. In The Princess and
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 135

the Frog, New Orleans is a cultural mixture of festival and celebration, mystery and
adventure, language and music. The view of the city put forward by Disney here
appears to be one meeting the image popularized by the media and reinforced by
tourism advertisements, and renders it (at least on the surface) as a friendly place,
where one will be treated personably by strangers, where the party never ends, and
where secrets are shared. The city is shown on the eve of Mardi Gras celebrations.
While more extensive and historical explorations of Mardi Gras are needed, it should
be noted that Mardi Gras is a celebration that particularly includes many iterations
throughout the Caribbean basin (Guthrie 2016, 559). A mass spectacle, Mardi Gras
is celebrated annually throughout the Caribbean basin as a prelude to the Catholic
observance of Lent. During such festive revelry, celebrants, revelers, and spectators
alike “mask up” in colorful costumes while parading through the streets in height-
ened merriment, “enjoying to excess food, drink and expressive group culture”
(Guthrie 2016, 559). In New Orleans, however, the carnivalesque festivities embody
new meanings and heighten the significance of the numerous strands of ethnic and
racial heritage that make up the settlement. Residents who straddle the parameters
of Native American and Black Caribbean ancestry engage in “contested terrains of
pleasure and resistance shared through music, dress and cultural-historical tradi-
tions” (Guthrie 2016, 559).
In the film’s opening musical sequence, the lyrics quite literally define New
Orleans as “they got music, it’s always playing, start in the daytime, go all through
the night, when you hear that music playing, hear what I’m sayin’ it make you feel
alright.” Here Disney alludes to the friendly charm of the New Orleans neighbor-
hood through the use of Afro-American jazz, rhythm and blues, and depictions of
interracial fellowship; the scenes are as harmonious in tune as they are in illustrative
depiction. Making palatable the magical qualities of the New Orleans townscape fur-
ther sanitizes the egregious enactments of slavery in the South and their aftermath.
New Orleans is introduced as almost its own stand-alone character rather than
simply a contextual setting. The Princess and the Frog, like many other films set in
this period, (re)constructs voodoo as a “relic of New Orleans’s wild past” (Gordon
1997, 782). New Orleans has therefore, gained a legendary reputation within
popular culture and film as a historical site of the arcane, of excess, and indulgence.
Scholarly investigations have established New Orleans as a Gothic capital (Truffin
2018), known for its “American transplantation” of European Romantic ideals, and
which has come to serve as a vessel for histories both real and imagined, occult and
natural (Kavka 2014, 226). Within this, the concept of witchcraft continues to be
“highly contingent on historical time and place,” and more modern iterations and
movements of Western or European witchcraft seem to have influenced conceptions
of “harmful sorcery” as connected to Haitian voodoo (Bailey 2009, xxvi).
An anomaly in the conservative American South, “attitudes toward New Orleans
Voodoo have run the gamut of abhorrence, fear, condemnation, cynicism, derision,
exploitation, tolerance, and interest” (Long 2002, 86). From witchcraft and vam-
pirism to voodoo and hoodoo, New Orleans remains a fascinating locus, to both
136 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

critically and culturally examine the (in)fringed, the “Othered,” and the marginal-
ized. Taking this contextual and politicized knowledge as a point of departure, the
discussion in this chaper explores how the cultural and representational framework
of voodoo and hoodoo practices in The Princess and the Frog activates a Gothic reg-
ister for its undercurrent of darkness, of implied evil, and sorcery.
In The Princess and the Frog, New Orleans voodoo is not so much represented as it
is alluded to by way of established popular Hollywood voodoo tropes such as curses,
palm reading, divination, and tarot. The sinister elements of New Orleans’ enslaved
past are tacitly suggested through Dr. Facilier and his ethnic and racial ambiguity.
While the portrayal of the film’s Black female protagonist, Tiana, is a deviation
from the Black caricatures of Disney’s early animations, the same cannot be said
for Dr. Facilier and his magical enterprise. As part of his most memorable musical
rendition, Dr. Facilier boasts, “I got voodoo, I got hoodoo, I got things I ain’t even
tried!”. Holding up a grouping of voodoo poppets with pins and a chicken, he brings
attention to Disney’s perpetuation and misrepresentation of magical traditions, con-
flating African American voodoo with that of Haitian vodou and hoodoo among
other fortune-telling, magical, and spiritual practices. In her historical evaluation,
Rachel Patterson defines hoodoo as the “American name for African American folk
magic” (2012, 1). In spite of popular confusion, hoodoo is not the same as voodoo.
Voodoo is a Haitian African religion, relying on the worship of the loas, African dei-
ties who are invoked by priests and priestesses during a variety of rituals (Malbrough
2003, 2). Hoodoo is not a religion in itself, but a suggestively magical practice that
is instead entangled with Christianity and its systems of beliefs. Indeed, hoodoo
magic rituals often rely on the invocation of Christian saints, whose effigies have
been traditionally placed on altars and candles, and to be used as part of the magic.
Hoodoo, as we recognize it today, “was established during the times of slavery in
America, using native plants and items available to the people . . . combined with
chants and rituals. [A] good amount of hoodoo magical practices were brought by
the slaves” (Patterson 2012, 1).
In this context, what is known specifically as “New Orleans Voodoo” is again
a separate diasporic tradition that bears some resemblance to religious aspects of
Haitian Vodou but, as O’Reilly elaborates, is a “‘dynamic subculture” or a “syncretic
religion” practised by a group of people that is constantly developing under a mé-
lange of economic, social and cultural influences (2019, 30). As Perez confirms, The
Princess and the Frog contains several scenes with “artifacts pulled from the material
cultures (2021, 58) of several different Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latin diasporic
traditions. Such synthesis of voodoo and hoodoo representations is not uncommon
within the popular culture landscape, and typically the tropes, based on African
American religious iconography are “a fraction of the allusions made to Black
Atlantic traditions” (Pérez 2021, 58). Dr. Facilier’s portrayal and use of magic calls
attention to the multiplicity of the New Orleans cultural landscape. However, in
compounding and conflating multiple traditions, and the embroidering of religious
and cultural practices, the film appears to also invalidate the histories of both voodoo
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 137

and hoodoo. This also suggestively erases the important threads of Black ancestral
identity from the historical fabric of America’s past. Like the majority of Disney films
that feature a Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color (BIPOC) character, it maintains
“its investment in whiteness” and therefore deliberately omits specific references that
would call attention to its Black exploitation (Gregory 2010, 433). For the purpose
of this analysis, Dr. Facilier’s magical practice is not a reflection of the traditional
Haitian Voudou customs, nor does it resemble traditional New Orleans hoodoo or
voodoo, but rather appears to be a specific blend of iconographies that is particular
to his own character, and the expectations of popular film audiences.
Within the film, Dr. Facilier spends much of his scheming in contact with
what are ostensibly voodoo entities—also referred to as lwa within the religion
(Maldonado 2010). In many of Dr. Facilier’s scenes, he is shown speaking to a higher
power or at times to a group of spirits, accentuating the polytheistic nature of voo-
doo. However, upon closer examination, the inclusion of tarot and fortune telling
melds multiple religious and cultural strands pieced together with what is meant to
resemble some form of popularised, and likely disputable, voodoo practice. With all
its dark trimmings and none of the meaningful connotations or cultural complexi-
ties, Disney's depiction of voodoo magic here is inevitably cast as “bad”. As Perez
suggests, the representation of Dr. Facilier's voodoo magic as devious amplifies “prot-
estant normative bias” denying “the importance of material things in Afro-Diasporic
religions” (2021, 59).
Over the course of the film, no revelation is made about who these dark voodoo-
esque entities actually are, but only that they are evil and unforgiving. Here, the
Gothic connection is revealed through its traditional representations of the “fearful
unknown as the inhuman Other” that inhabits a mysterious space, which in turn
“symbolises all that is irrational, uncontrollable and incomprehensible” (Anolik and
Howard 2004, 1). The monstrous manifestations of Dr. Facilier’s magic are symbolic
of him as an Othered figure within the wider social realm of New Orleans. His
secret place of business, aptly titled “Dr. Facilier’s Voodoo Emporium” literally and
figuratively embodies the Gothic in that it inhabits a mysterious and liminal space
between worlds real and magical.

MAGICAL CHARMS, AND STYLING THE GOTHIC OTHER

Before his formal introduction in the film, Dr. Facilier makes his first appearance as
the town’s voodoo practitioner, reading tarot to customers in the street (Musker and
Clements 2009). As part of this cursory glance, he is also seen facilitating a civilian’s
hair growth by way of magic. However, his joy in earning negligible coins is quickly
overshadowed by the appearance of local wealthy man La Bouff, as he is chauffeured
through town in his luxury vehicle. At this stage in the film, little is shown or known
about the real reason behind Dr. Facilier’s disdain of La Bouff, but it can be inferred
138 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

that his meager earnings from reading tarot and other similar activities are not the
kind of opulence he seeks.
Dr. Facilier is framed in flamboyant fashions, wearing a signature three-piece suit
sans shirt, with his coattails and vest worn revealing a bare midriff; the signature
colors of his outfit black and red, with purple flourishes. Dark hues of color are
often used in Gothic texts as "designating evil"; through their application to Dr.
Facilier's character they represent not only his villainy, but (problematically) his
racial "Blackness" as well (DeLamotte 2004, 19). The selection of fashion items here
is clearly “a pictorial echo of both literary and cinematic horror traditions”: undoubt-
edly, a distinctive element of the villains in Disney animated features is arguably their
flamboyant, over-the-top clothing” (2019, 48). Dr. Facilier accessorizes his suave en-
semble with a bone necklace and his costume is completed with a top hat that bears
skull and crossbones and a purple feather, a symbolic nod to what Monica Miller
refers to as “Black dandyism” (Miller 2009, 5), as well as voodoo iconography—
including the famous top-hat-wearing lwa, Baron Samedi.
Dr. Facilier’s sartorial preferences, penchant for visually striking objects, and
magically driven character arc reveal much about how he is a profoundly Gothic
character in his own right. As it is the case for most Disney villains, “evil, it would
seem, appears to be a small price to pay, in return for power, charm, and savoir faire”
(Piatti-Farnell 2019, 45). Having been relegated to the concealed corridors of the
inner New Orleans townscape, Dr. Facilier creates a name for himself through his
“magical practice,” aided by his charm and suave magnetism Dr. Facilier’s construc-
tion as dandy-esque promulgates his social standing, especially in the suggestively
post-enslavement South portrayed in the film. The dandy, as an icon, has come to be
understood in terms of the semiotics of style, born out the rhetoric of performance
and an incarnation of the ostentatious and distinguished dress (Nelson 2007). The
Black dandy, in particular, impersonates the “fascinating act of self-creation and pre-
sentation” (Miller 2009, 179). Indeed, Dr. Facilier embodies Black dandyism, while
also remaining non-binary in pictorial effect. As Feldman explains, the Black dandy
is a paradox who represents “neither spirit nor flesh,” a figure “who casts into doubt,
even while he underscores, the very binary oppositions by which his culture lives” (as
cited in Miller 2009, 179). Additionally, the figure of the Black dandy exists in the
liminal space "between masculine and feminine, homosexual and heterosexual", and
displays African roots without being "spedifically racialized" (Miller 2009, 5). Such
conceptions of dandyism highlight the Gothic nature of Dr. Facilier’s physical and
cultural presence as his social position remains largely on the fringe. He embodies
the displacement of binaries that his Otherness creates. As Fred Botting contends,
within the Gothic horror narrative, certain objects and features provide the “princi-
pal evocations of cultural anxieties,” and are instrumental in constructing “torturous,
fragmented narratives” related to “mysterious incidents” (2014, 10). Entangled with
cultural perceptions and historical hauntings, Dr. Facilier represents the very act
of nonconformity that resides and is amplified in Gothic spaces. The clothes and
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 139

Figure 9.1. Dr. Facilier in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog

magical paraphernalia that characterize Dr. Facilier as an othered figure are able to
do this precisely because of their tacit interpretation and usage as Gothic artifacts.
The concept of Black dandyism is born from within the wider influence of
European and English dandyism as a way of dress and, coalesced with the cultural
140 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

traditions and aesthetics of people and countries throughout Africa and African
diasporas. The adornments and aesthetic performance associated with Black dandy-
ism are employed, as Wizman and Lunetta describe, as a “blend of detachment and
strength, nonchalance and control” that exemplifies an “ancestral survival technique”
(as cited in Pritchard 2017, 166). A sign of personal cultivation, the figure of the
Black dandy and, in this case, Dr. Facilier, provides a lens through which to “read
the relationship between image, identity, and freedom for American blacks (Wizman
and Lunetta as cited in Pritchard 2017, 166). African slaves often stole clothing
not solely for material possession, or portability, but in the hope that “better” at-
tire would permit them to move more freely or pass as free men (Miller 2009). As
a result, a display of difference through attire would reveal self-professed worth and
aspiration. Dr. Facilier’s enactment of Black dandyism is rooted in both subtle and
overt sartorial choices, which can be read as “as an index of changing notions of
racial identity” (Miller 2019, 19). The use of adornment and display as modes of
distinction signifies a move away from the material deprivations of African captives
who were stripped of their aesthetic agency. Dr. Facilier navigates the New Orleans
landscape with an air of calculated nonchalance, his racially ambiguous identity a
source of his Black dandy performance, embedded in a desire for control over La
Bouff and the wider town. As such, Dr. Facilier’s sartorial flourishes are rooted in
America’s enslaved history, but his sense of freedom comes with a hefty price, hav-
ing to rely on seemingly sinister voodoo entities to make his aspirations for control
come to fruition.
The appeal of Dr. Facilier’s mysterious Black dandy–ish persona, combined with
his racial ambiguity, can be read as part of a wider narrative of racialized Gothic vil-
lainy, which relates difference to Otherness and “conflates enslaved, sexualized dark
people with the damning allure of the Prince of Darkness himself ” (DeLamotte
2004, 19). The stylization of Dr. Facilier’s Blackness as a costume only further adds
to his appeal. In his formal introduction, he navigates Prince Naveen and his helper,
Lawrence (voiced by Peter Bartlett) away from the street dancing into a dark alley-
way. He begins “Gentlemen! Enchanté. A tip of the hat from Dr. Facilier, how y’all
doin’?,” his Southern vernacular combined with the French greeting adding a little
nod to the rich heritage of New Orleans’ French Creole inhabitants. Here, he hands
over his business card to his “victim,” which reveals Dr. Facilier’s list of magical of-
ferings next to what is a drawing of a skull and cross bones within a red target. As
Prince Naveen reads aloud with intrigue: “Tarot readings. Charms. Potions. Dreams
made real”. Dr. Facilier charismatically escorts him further down a dark alleyway
into an abandoned and distinctly macabre courtyard. The representation of villainy
here, seen through the act of seductively ensnaring the Prince and his helper, further
reinforces Dr. Facilier’s Gothicized sexualization. Holding Prince Naveen closely, he
coercively leads him into the courtyard where his “Voodoo Emporium” is situated. In
keeping with how David Punter argues that the vampiric character of Lord Ruthven
“transgresses the social norms but does so with the collaboration of his victims”
(Punter 1996, 78), the same sentiment can be applied to Dr. Facilier’s Black dandy
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 141

characterization. His subversion from displays of normativity is channeled by way of

his enigmatic charm. This tricks a clearly seduced Prince Naveen into cooperating in
his overarching scheme to acquire La Bouff ’s wealth and take over the town with his
voodoo “friends.” Through this interaction, Dr. Facilier both embodies the Gothic
while simultaneously employing his racial ambiguity and sexualized mannerisms
to code-switch into a friendly New Orleans dandy, summoning with it the (quite
literal) trappings of queer villainy.
As Dr. Facilier operates in the cultural margins, as seen through his embodiment
of the Black dandy, his characteristic eloquence also implicitly exploits markers of
queer identity. Although historically the term “queer” has come to signify more de-
rogatory connotations of homosexuality, more recently its ambiguous meaning has
come to be used as an “umbrella term for a coalition of culturally marginal sexual
self-identifications” (Jagose 1996, 1). In connecting queer theory to the Gothic,
Haggerty explains that numerous writers have come to use the word Gothic “to
evoke a queer world that attempts to transgress the binaries of sexual decorum”
(2006, 2). Haggerty also goes on to say that the cult of Gothic fiction rose at the
very same juncture that gender and sexuality were being codified in contemporary
culture. The Gothic presents itself a location for many “unauthorized genders and
sexualities,” which includes but are not limited to feminized males, miscegenation
among other socially subversive acts of sexuality (Haggerty 2006, 2).
While no explicit queer relations are enacted, and keeping in mind that this is a
Disney family film, The Princess and the Frog encodes transgressive desires through
the darker recesses of Dr. Facilier’s “Voodoo Emporium”. Veiled references to rife
prostitution, which New Orleans has been historically famous for, are difficult to
miss here. Upon his introductory encounter, Lawrence is quick to warn the Prince
against Dr. Facilier as he whispers, “Sire! This chap is obviously a charlatan, I suggest
we move on to a less . . . ” Overhearing this line of caution, Dr. Facilier pounces
on Lawrence, cutting him off singing “Don’t you disrespect me, little man, don’t
you derogate or deride. You’re in my world now, not your world. And I got friends
on the ‘other side.’” A soft, multivoiced echo reverberates from within Dr. Facilier’s
voodoo parlor, confirming that, indeed, “He’s got friends on the other side.” At this
point, Dr. Facilier bursts into song with his leading musical arrangement. Alluding
to his bigger scheme, claiming he can read their futures, he instructs his guests to
relax, “I look deep into your heart and soul . . . make our wildest dreams come true.”
While he continues on reading Prince Naveen and Lawrence’s tarot cards, there is an
unsettling atmosphere that they are being watched by voodoo powers. He goes on
to sing, “Are you ready? Transformation central, reformation central, transmogrifica-
tion central,” while his echoes join chanting “You got what you wanted, but you lost
what you had.” At the end of this musical rendition, Dr. Facilier eventually succeeds
in transmogrifying the prince into a frog, while fashioning a talisman for Lawrence
that is impregnated with Naveen’s blood, and which will turn him into the prince’s
corporeal likeness when worn.
142 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

In the context of this event in the film, it is possible to argue that Dr. Facilier’s
character is coded as a villain via a mixture of Gothicized magic, socially transgressive
behaviors, and sexually symbolic meanings. The “Other side” could be interpreted
broadly as a metaphorical place for latent homosexual desires, which—however
repressed in the daylight—forcibly come alive in the darkness of the voodoo empo-
rium. Dr. Facilier’s character is imbued with a transgressive homoeroticism that in-
evitably calls attention to his socially seclusive stylistic choices, and macabre nature,
as he is aptly conferred the titled of “Shadow Man.” He punctuates his speech and
lyricisms with specific queer gesticulations, dancing on his fortune telling table and
holding his magical cane. While he seems at ease within the confines of the Voodoo
Emporium, he is othered in the outside, “normal” world. As Hanson (1999) sug-
gests, the term “queer” can evoke an “impassioned, even an angry resistance to nor-
malization” (4). Dr. Facilier’s Black dandy persona is intrinsically connected to his
racialized and voodooist identity, while his queer self-assurance manifests as part of
his Gothic construction. In the end, through the enactment of magic and a Gothic
trajectory of difference, Dr. Facilier is representative of all that is rendered in the film
as culturally and socially Other.
It might be worth mentioning here in passing that Dr. Facilier’s suggestively queer
persona seems to be placed in stark contract with that of Mama Odie (voiced by
Jenifer Lewis), the voodoo and hoodoo practitioner who lives in the thick of the
bayou, just outside of New Orleans—and who assists Naveen and Tiana in trans-
forming back into their human form. Mama Odie’s magic is portrayed as benevolent;
her grandmotherly approach, which is openly supportive of Tiana and Naveen’s
heterosexual romance, is in stark contrast with Dr. Facilier’s suggestively queer and
sexualized behavior. In this context, sociocultural and politicized approaches to re-
lationships seem to be strangely at the heart of definitions “good” and “bad” magic.
Over the course of the film, Dr. Facilier presents his voodoo flair as a strength, at
times showing both restraint and anger as part of his queer agency and resistance.
This typification of queer resistance is depicted through Dr. Facilier’s desperate plea
to his voodoo “friends.” With his plan of seizing power quickly dwindling, his calm
and enchanting demeanor wears off, revealing a sense of heightened fear. It is clear
that, if he does not provide his “friends on the Other side” with the payment they
expect in exchange for bestowing magical powers, Dr. Facilier will be punished, and
perhaps even killed. At pivotal moments in his plan, he experiences setbacks that
eventually reveal a deep-rooted weakness in his particular brand of evil. In these
instances, he is not only incensed but desperate to show some semblance of control.
While Dr. Facilier enacts his position as magical architect, his reliance on his friends
on “the other side” to gain control over “wayward souls,” and the fear that surrounds
the exchange, suggest a symbolic gesture to the typical characteristics of queer Gothic
narratives that remain “intimately related to the ‘perverse’ or ‘wayward’” (Fincher
2007, as cited in Weinstock 2011, 80). Somewhat ironically, Dr. Facilier’s desire for
control through magic is what exposes his character as socially perverse and makes
him vulnerable.
 Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side 143

Toward the end of the film’s narrative, Dr. Facilier is predictably vanquished, as
the talisman that gave him his power over Naveen is destroyed. He meets his end
screaming into the mouth of an enlivened tombstone, as he is dragged away by his
supernatural friends into what is meant to be perceived as the netherworld. His su-
pernatural debts go with him to the grave, a hauntingly chilling and allegorical nod
to slaves of the South who worked off their forever unpayable “debts” until death.
Although one could argue that good eventually overcomes evil, and Dr. Facilier’s
villainous deeds were inevitably going to be overcome by the protagonists, the true
evil in this instance is seemingly shown as the voodoo entities, the spirits who ma-
terialize from nowhere and rebel against, to some extent, the traumatic history of
New Orleans, which has been marked by greed and the horrors of slavery. While on
the surface the film seems to end on a note suggesting that voodoo is ready to trick
and mislead those who engage with it—further sensationalizing the view of voodoo
practices that often appears in the media—the punishment of Dr. Facilier suggests
a somewhat more complex view: one that uses Gothicized notions of “magic” to
tackle very tangible experiences connected to historical nuances and, perhaps, racial
and generational trauma.

CONCLUSION

A Disney adaptation of the original German fairy tale, The Princess and the Frog, with
its villainous character Dr. Facilier serves as a hauntingly Gothic retelling of margin-
alization, queer-identity, and racialized ancestral debts. As Gordon argues, there are
several factors that render voodoo “a fertile site for white supremacist imagination
and discourse: real voudou’s subaltern existence, its ties to African religious and cul-
tural practices, its widely feared connections to black conspiracy and slave rebellion”
(1997, 772). Although Dr. Facilier is superficially constructed through the lens of
self-assurance, aspiration, and stylistic flair, he is eventually met, like many ostenta-
tious Disney villains, with an ending that is also culturally unresolved. His voodoo
talents are thwarted by way of a froggy protagonist. Voodoo, in this instance, ap-
pears as it does in many popular fictional narratives: as “a dark undercurrent that can
never be quite grasped but informs the lives of its characters” (Schroder 2016, 421).
The film perpetuates enduring pejorative impressions of voodoo-like ritual sacrifices
and blood drawing, while also incorporating strands of witchcraft such as potions
and spell-casting in an effort to disrupt or perhaps dilute Black diasporic traditions.
The distinctions between depictions of witchcraft and voodoo in American popular
culture are not necessarily based on the craft itself, but instead are often shaped by
the racialized power dynamics of the country’s history. As O’Reilly states, this re-
lationship is “divided along both racial and class lines” (2019, 32). While there are
no witches of European heritage in The Princess and the Frog to juxtapose against
Dr. Facilier as a racially ambiguous voodoo practitioner, it is evident that by simply
exercising his magical unorthodoxy, he threatens the dominant social fabric in New
144 Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Orleans. His queer mannerisms and suggestive behaviors are also a tacit nod to the
city’s history as a sexual hub, which remains entangled with racialized politics. In
the end, however, Dr. Facilier’s chaotic disruptions of the social order render him
chastised and rejected, and he is made to disappear into a magical grave. Although
the film is arguably framed through the gloss of color-blind prose, the Gothic con-
textualization of Dr. Facilier places him in a racially constructed position that haunts
those around him. The implications of Dr. Facilier’s theatrical display of power and
eventual punitive action paints long-standing voodoo practices with the same brush
of (im)morality, primitiveness, and savagery. Dr. Facilier’s depiction within the con-
text of New Orleans is part of a Gothic tale in which he embodies the Other in all
his marginalized, monstrous charm.

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Anolik, Ruth Bienstock, and Douglas L. Howard. 2004 The Gothic Other: Racial and Social
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Bailey, Michael D. 2009. The A to Z of Witchcraft. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Castillo Street, Susan, and Charles L. Crow, editors. 2016. The Palgrave Handbook of the
Southern Gothic. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Clements, Ron, and John Musker, directors. 2009. The Princess and The Frog. Walt Disney
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Godsen, Chris. 2020. The History of Magic: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the
Present. London: Penguin.
Gordon, Avery. 1997. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapol
is: University of Minnesota Press.
Gregory, Sarita McCoy. 2010. “Disney’s Second Line: New Orleans, Racial Masquerade, and
the Reproduction of Whiteness in ‘The Princess and the Frog.’” Journal of African American
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Guthrie, Ricardo. 2016. “Embodying an Imagined Other Through Rebellion, Resistance and
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Haggerty, George E. 2006. Queer Gothic. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Halley, Catherine. 2016. “On The Black Skyscraper: An Interview with Literary Critic
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-interview​-adrienne​-brown/.
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Jagose, Annamarie. 1996. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: NYU Press.
Johnston, Ollie, and Frank Thomas. 1993. The Disney Villain. Westport, CT: Hyperion.
Maldonado, Michelle Gonzalez. 2010. “Bad Magic: Voodoo According to Disney.” Religion
Dispatches, February 4, 2010. Accessed August 2, 2022. https:​//​religiondispatches​.org​/bad​
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Marlborough, Ray T. 2003. Hoodoo Mysteries: Folk Magic, Mysticism & Rituals. Woodbury,
MN: Llewellyn.
Miller, Monica L. 2009. Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic
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Patterson, Rachel (2012), Pagan Portals—Hoodoo: Folk Magic, Washington: Moon Books.
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10
The Human/Animal Divide
Feral Children, Liminalities and the Gothic in
Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan
Antonio Sanna

This essay addresses the Gothic aspects of the feral child, tracing it as a focus of at-
tention starting in the Enlightenment and connecting it to the nineteenth-century
Gothic themes of the divided self and the “savage” / civilized dichotomy. These
themes will be examined in detail in the original texts of the two Jungle Books (1894–
1895) by Rudyard Kipling and Tarzan of the Apes (1914) by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
These texts will then be compared to Disney’s cinematic adaptations of the two
stories about feral children. The trope of the feral child is revised in the Disney
films, which erode the human/animal divide, especially through the representation
of human beings as more savage and destructive than the animals; this divide then is
presented as the cause of the adversities the protagonists have to face.

THE FERAL CHILD

Starting in the eighteenth century, wild children became the subject of scientific
and medical research, especially after a number of them were discovered around
Europe. These included Peter the Wild Boy (brought to the English court in the
1720s), the Savage Girl of Epinoy (captured in 1731), Victor, the Savage Boy of
Aveyron (educated by Doctor Jean-Marc-Gustave Itard during the 1800s), and the
two wolf girls (discovered in the Indian jungle in 1920) (Newton 2002). Common
to many of these cases (apart from the impossibility to establish the veracity of the

147
148 Antonio Sann

stories) was the fact that such children had come back to society after having been
abandoned and having wandered in the wilderness for years; all of them were silent,
having forgotten the language of humans, were shy of others, and exhibited animal
behavior and habits.
The discovery of wild children stimulated much curiosity around Europe and
brought forth many questions in the medical and philosophical communities re-
garding innate ideas, the essence of human nature, and the natural state of human
beings outside of society, as well as about the origins of sociality and language.
French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, for example, asserted that there
could be no self and no identity outside the system of signs (how can an individual
think if he/she is without words?). According to him, wild children possess only an
animal awareness that never arrives at the coherence of identity (Newton 2002, 109).
In contrast, in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality Among Men (1755), Swiss
philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau asserted that man [sic] in his state of nature is a
solitary, healthy, free and good being because he is not plagued by the excesses, anxi-
eties, and passions generated by civilization “by which the human soul is constantly
tormented” (1984, 84). Wild children thus exemplified for him an ideal primeval
stage of human beings before society corrupts them.
The category of “feral children” was first established by Charles Linnaeus in his
Systema Naturæ (1735) as Homo ferus, an enigmatic variant of Homo sapiens that
could resemble different animal species, including bears and wolves and bore the
characteristics of the superior primates by being tetrapus (walking on all fours),
mutus (without language), and hirsutus (covered with hair) (Newton 2002, 38).
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Scottish Doctor James Burnett, the
Enlightenment precursor to Darwin, studied feral children through a comparison
with orangutans (Newton 2002, 84). As Giorgio Agamben argues,

At the time when the sciences of man begin to delineate the contours of his facies, the
enfants sauvages, who appear more and more often on the edges of the villages of Europe,
are the messengers of man’s inhumanity, the witnesses to his fragile identity and his lack
of a face. And when confronted with these uncertain and mute beings, the passion with
which the men of the Ancien Régime try to recognize themselves in them and to “hu-
manize” them shows how aware they are of the precariousness of the human. (2004, 30)

In the post-Darwinian intellectual climate, feral children became synonymous with

the studies on the development of human beings from their primate ancestors,
though they were “now placed firmly at the bottom of every possible scale of devel-
opment” (Newton 2002, 94).
Simultaneously, feral children appealed to those intellectuals interested in the life
and development of children in general: the eighteenth century witnessed an enor-
mous production of literary works dedicated to the innocent figure of the child, from
William Wordsworth’s poems in the 1798 collection Lyrical Ballads to the novels of
Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, and Lewis Carroll. Wild adults had already ap-
peared in literary works such as William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1611) and
 The Human/Animal Divide 149

The Tempest (1612), and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), but wild children
became even more prominent during the latter half of the Victorian age and in
the first decades of the twentieth century, when writers such as Albert Robida (in
The Adventures of Saturnin Farandoul, 1879), H. Rider Haggard (in “Allan’s Wife,”
1889), H. de Vere Stackpool (in Blue Lagoon, 1908), and Olaf Baker (in Shasta of
the Wolves, 1919) made them the protagonists of their works. Among the most no-
torious literary representations of feral children from this period are The Jungle Book
(1894) and The Second Jungle Book (1895) by English writer Rudyard Kipling, and
Tarzan of the Apes (1914) by American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs—works that
have repeatedly been adapted into animated and live action films (and series) by the
Disney company. As this chapter argues, these stories and the Disney films adapted
from them focus on the liminality of the human/animal divide that is typical of
both the representation of feral children and the monstrous creatures depicted in
Gothic novels and horror films. Both the original literary stories and their Disney
adaptations utilize Gothic tropes in order to depict the jungle as a Darwinian, life-
threatening environment, but, while the former also focus on the frightening animal
side of the human being, the Disney films present the liminality of their protagonists
as the cause of their struggles and adversities within the surrounding wilderness,
which leads to the characterization of other (supposedly civilized) human beings as
malevolent and adversarial.

THE FERAL GOTHIC

Liminality is a central concept in Gothic fiction, especially in those narratives that in-
volve the representation of a creature or being that does not apparently respect those
classifications that are deemed to be necessary for the definition of what is human.
According to Kelly Hurley, liminal bodies are “bodies that occupy the threshold be-
tween the two terms of an opposition. Like human/beast, male/female, or civilized/
primitive, by which cultures are able meaningfully to organize experience. By break-
ing down such oppositions the liminal entity confounds one’s ability to make sense
of the world” (2002, 190). Monstrous beings such as vampires, mummies (neither
alive nor dead, belonging to both the past and the present), ghosts (material/imma-
terial, visible/invisible), and especially werewolves (human/beast) have always been
considered as frightening because of their liminality. The monsters’ indeterminacy,
their resistance to categorization, is perceived as cognitively threatening.
Liminality and fear of the other are central themes in many Gothic narratives
of the fin de siècle. Moreover, as Linda Dryden argues, those fictions featuring an
atavistic throwback or transformation of the self (such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s
1886 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) “encode an anxiety about ‘oth-
erness,’ about the possibility of a dual self, where the externally moral individual
masks a primitive ‘other’ within that threatens to engulf the civilized” (2003, 9–10).
Indeed, many Gothic tales of the fin de siècle (including Arthur Machen’s 1894 “The
150 Antonio Sann

Great God Pan,” and Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula) express the Victorian anxiety
about the primitive and instinctual side of the human being and a return to the prac-
tice of habits and rituals belonging to an archaic past. As Fred Botting has argued,
“The ghostly returns of the past in the 1890s are both fearful and exciting incursions
of barbarity and, more significantly, the irruptions of primitive and archaic forces
deeply rooted in the human mind . . . Darwin’s theories, by bringing humanity closer
to the animal kingdom, undermined the superiority and privilege humankind had
bestowed on itself ” (1999, 136, 137).
The representation of the animal side of the human being and the liminality of
the human/animal divide during the Victorian age derived from the period’s great
interest in animals, which, as Mario Ortiz-Robles has summarized, was based on

the growing influence of Darwin’s theory of evolution in diverse domains of knowledge;

the reinvigoration of animal rights discourse after the passage of the Cruelty to Animals
Act in 1876; the Victorian predilection for and sentimental attachment to pets; the
expansion of trade in exotic animal species; the confinement and display of animals in
circuses, zoos and other spectacles; the persistent instrumentalisation of animal labour;
the mechanisation of animal slaughter; and the continued use of animals as both objects
and subjects of scientific experimentation. (2015, 16)

MOWGLI AND TARZAN

The creation and representation of Mowgli and Tarzan derive from such a cultural
climate. Both characters represent primitive human beings; they are literal “outlaws”
moved by primal needs and instincts. The human and the animal/primitive cannot
be fully separated into distinct categories in them, precisely as is the case of Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde in Stevenson’s novella (Hendershot 2001, 110). Mowgli and Tarzan
are half-men, half-beasts akin therefore to one of the most notorious creatures repre-
sented in the Gothic genre, the werewolf, though the physical transformation of the
latter and the frightened response of the other characters to it are not involved in the
case of the protagonists of Kipling’s stories and Burroughs’s novels. However, as is
the case with lycanthropes, Mowgli and Tarzan have a natural affinity with the un-
tamed and wild space of the jungle, where they feel at ease and completely free from
any restraints. Furthermore, as with many literary and cinematographic werewolves,
their lives within the wolf pack and the ape troop are dictated by the laws that they
must abide by—the “Law of the jungle,” in the case of Mowgli, which is basically a
network of obligations and a sensible code for the predatory routine of the wolf pack,
for fair play and for the pack’s social cohesion (Amis 1975, 55; Stewart 1966, 142),
and the severe rules and hierarchical structure of the ape troop in the case of Tarzan.
Finally, both Mowgli and Tarzan experience some difficulties in reconciling their
beastly, bad-tempered sides with society’s expectations when they rejoin the human
community, resulting in their subsequent return to the liberating life in the jungle.
Fundamentally, both characters are represented through a construction of the liminal
 The Human/Animal Divide 151

divide between human being and animal, which aligns them with representations
of the monster typical of the Gothic genre, where “the monster always represents
the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries” (Halberstam 1995, 27).
Though Kipling’s most popular works, The Jungle Book and its sequel The Second
Jungle Book, are generally considered children’s books, some of their passages evoke
Gothic atmospheres in their settings and through the representation of the threaten-
ing menace embodied by the more savage animals the young protagonist faces. As
Martin Seymour-Smith argues, “the atmosphere in these stories of the jungle and
Mowgli is very often of a world of willed order menaced by the forces of chaos and
darkness” (1989, 237). Locations such as the abandoned human city populated by
the Bandarlog monkeys, the vaults containing the treasure guarded by the white
cobra, and the swamp at the borders of the jungle are depicted as menacing settings
where the protagonist’s life is in danger. Simultaneously, the tiger Shere Khan repeat-
edly swears to kill the young boy following their first meeting and takes advantage of
any possible occasion to attempt to do it. In The Jungle Book, the depiction of many
creatures living in the jungle, hunting and surviving over inferior, less fit creatures
(as is the case of the python Kaa, who is perennially hungry for other life-forms)
contributes to a representation of nature as cruel, amoral, and unconcerned with the
well-being of the single individual. Such a thematic concern is equally characteristic
of many Gothic narratives of the final decades of the nineteenth century, including
H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896).
Simultaneously, Gothic tropes emerge through a liminal representation of Mowgli,
whose nature is torn between humanity and animality. Kipling was influenced by
reports of wolf children in India (Newton 2002, 189) and the young protagonist
of The Jungle Book epitomizes the representation of feral children. Mowgli, who is
raised by a pack of wolves after escaping the attack on his family by the tiger Shere
Khan, grows up in the Indian jungle interacting with the local animals, either col-
laborating (or quarreling) with the wolves, the bear Baloo, and the panther Bagheera,
or fighting against the monkeys of the Bandarlog and his nemesis, the ferocious tiger.
Mowgli is set apart from the rest of the beasts as not entirely animal: his capacity to
understand the nature and use of fire (“the red flower”) distinguishes him from them.
Furthermore, the pack rejects him after its leader Akela cannot vouch for him any-
more, and the young boy is forced to return to human society. However, the humans
living in the village on the borders of the jungle soon reject him and even attempt
on his life when thinking that he is a wizard capable of communicating with beasts
and perhaps even turning himself into an animal. Twice an orphan, Mowgli assumes
an ambiguous position between the animal and the human realms.
As with Kipling’s works, Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes novel—which was fol-
lowed by twenty-five sequels until 1946—contains several passages that resonate
with Gothic tones for their depiction of gruesome details, violence, and a sinister
atmosphere. Among these are the first chapters on the brutal mutiny enacted by
the crew of the ship carrying Lord and Lady Greystoke to their African destination
and the murderous behavior of the mutineers transporting Jane Porter twenty years
152 Antonio Sann

later, “the horror of absolute solitude” (2003, 19) that the Greystoke couple faces
when they are marooned in the jungle, the depiction of the “gloomy wood” (2003,
18) filled with perils and teeming with animal life, the description of the “weird and
terrifying” (2003, 49) abandoned cabin discovered later by Tarzan, and the portrayal
of the “terrible, half-healed scar” (2003, 112) disfiguring the face of the protagonist
every time he is enraged.
As is the case with Mowgli, Tarzan exemplifies the figure of the feral child and the
uncertain human/animal divide: Burroughs characterizes his protagonist as possess-
ing a sharper mind and “superior intelligence and cunning” (2003, 47) that gives
him an advantage over the other animals, but Tarzan generally tends to behave ac-
cording to the dictates of an animal pack and often compares himself to the brutal

Figures 10.1A and 10.1B. Mowgli and Tarzan from Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan
 The Human/Animal Divide 153

animals surrounding him. Indeed, he initially thinks he is ugly and his features are
unattractive and inferior when compared to those of the apes (2003, 43). Later
on, after learning to read the books left in his parents’ shelter and realizing that he
belongs to another species, he is torn between his membership to one or the other
community (2003, 70).
Nevertheless, the very fact, as in the case of Mowgli, that Tarzan speaks the
language of the animals—which is described as “a strange tongue. It resembled
the chattering of monkeys mingled with the growling of some wild beast” (2003,
135)—until late in the novel associates him with the beasts. Such an association
is further established by the fact that Tarzan is often prone to being guided by his
instincts and ferocity: the law of the survival of the fittest is in force in this novel as
well and the protagonist does not show any signs of remorse, guilt, or moral doubt
when killing the other creatures (thus exemplifying also the white colonizer at large
and the Victorian “sport” of hunting animals in the jungle and the savanna). The
novel therefore depicts the line between the protagonist’s human affiliation and his
animal instincts as murky and uncertain. The text specifies: “Tarzan’s jungle upbring-
ing did not include sentimental notions of the brotherhood of man. . . . to kill was
simply the law of his wild world, the greatest of his primitive pleasures. . . . Killing
was all business, the business of the jungle” (2003, 89–90)—a sentence that clearly
epitomizes the post-Darwinian struggle for existence. At the same time, the jungle’s
animals, especially the apes, are humanized in their social organization, their behav-
ior and affections, and even in their bickering with each other. Not only the apes,
but also several other animal species are described as possessing human attitudes.
154 Antonio Sann

This attenuates the human/animal divide between the white-skinned orphan and
the inhabitants of the jungle.

Both Tarzan and Mowgli exemplify the lost state of nature, before society and
politics began, theorized by Rousseau and embodied by the feral children studied
during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Though some of their behavioral
traits define them as “proper” human beings, many of their violent and instinctual
actions ally them with the animal kingdom where they reside: in the jungle they pos-
sess a double identity by being both man and animal. Such a liminal characterization
of them is resumed in the Disney adaptations of these literary characters. Although
the Disney films tend to generally soften cruel, drastic, and frightening representa-
tions of their characters and events, the liminality of Mowgli and Tarzan sets them
apart from the “properly” human characters depicted in the majority of the films
belonging to the company’s canon. Furthermore, the Disney films on these char-
acters make use of Gothic settings and atmospheres, associating the latter with the
villains of the narratives, who are as ruthless, obsessed, and remorseless as the villains
and monsters of Gothic novels and horror films (though the graphic depiction of
macabre or gruesome details following their murderous actions is generally avoided
in the animated films by Disney).

DISNEY’S FERAL CHILDREN

In the animated version of The Jungle Book released in 1967, which was the last film
Walt Disney actively participated in creating before his death (Metcalf 2016, 117),
Mowgli’s liminality is stressed on a few occasions and generally in light tones. The
young boy mimics the movements of the other animals, tries their food, and enjoys
their company, thus demonstrating his pride in belonging to the animal world. More
importantly, he does not wish to return to the human community until the very
end of the film. His sense of belonging to the jungle is strongly rooted in him: he
wishes to be a part of the animal community and protests against the need for him to
leave it because of the return of Shere Khan to the area where he resides. The whole
narrative is indeed based on his refusal to leave the jungle and his attempts to stall
by making friends among the animals he encounters during his journey toward the
human village. It is only when he casually sees a human girl in the last sequence of
the film and falls in love with her that he joins the human community, but such an
encounter is explicitly characterized as accidental.
However, rather than presenting Mowgli’s liminality as a source of anxiety and
fear, the Gothic aspects of the film focus on the depiction of Mowgli’s adversaries
and the settings. First, the protagonist encounters the python Kaa who, contrary to
the snake’s portrayal in Kipling’s work, is an enemy of the young boy and attempts
to devour him twice after hypnotizing him. Like Satan in the Garden of Eden, Kaa
slyly introduces himself as a friend and verbally seduces Mowgli into trusting him.
 The Human/Animal Divide 155

He clearly represents the devilish tempter leading the protagonist to perdition and
death in Gothic novels such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and Charlotte
Dacre’s Zofloya (1806). The protagonist’s nemesis, Shere Khan, is similarly depicted
as a Gothic villain. Indeed, the tiger is motivated by hatred toward human beings: his
is a personal grudge against and a fixation upon the story’s protagonist rather than
a predator’s natural voraciousness for flesh. Such an obsession could be compared
to the representation of perverse villains in Gothic novels such as Lord Manfred in
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Montoni in Anne Radcliffe’s The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), and the Egyptian priestess in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle
(1897).
Moreover, in keeping with Gothic novels and horror films, the final confronta-
tion between the protagonist and his enemy is located in a Gothic setting. In The
Jungle Book, such a fight occurs in the swamp, a gloomy environment with bare
trees and pools of black, stagnant water. The original directorial choice to set the
encounter with Shere Khan in a swamp (and not a ravine) aligns this sequence
with the location’s association with illness, death, evil, and the fear of “otherness” as
swamps are the natural, “filthy” residence of dangerous creatures in real life as well as
sanctuaries for society’s outcasts, outlaws, and monsters in the popular imagination
and in Gothic fiction (Crawford 2021, 102–4), as in The Creature from the Black
Lagoon trilogy (1954–1956), for example. The Gothicization of the setting is further
achieved by the representation of foul weather in the swamp: lightning strikes pre-
cisely when the tiger jumps toward the boy and when it attacks and severely wounds
Baloo with its claws. The dismal setting, gloomy colors, and foul weather defining
this scene correspond to the mood of the protagonist, who is initially sad at having
having been left alone (and therefore for not having any friends he could live with
in the jungle) and whose life is then in danger. This scene thus exemplifies the “ac-
cordant circumstances” intensifying a character’s mood that characterize the fiction
of Gothic novelist Anne Radcliffe (Norton 2009, 41). Such a device similarly is ad-
opted in many animated films of the Disney canon: several protagonists find them-
selves isolated and in fear for their lives in environments that are visually Gothicized,
as is the case of the forest in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (David Hand, 1937)
and in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (Jack Kinney, Clyde Geronimi, and
James Algar, 1949), the labyrinthine corridors and staircases of the castle in Sleeping
Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959), the subterranean cave in The Rescuers (Wolfgang
Reitherman, John Lounsbery, and Art Stevens, 1977), and the barren wasteland in
The Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, 1994).
John Favreau’s live-action/CGI version of The Jungle Book (2016) similarly does
not represent the liminality of the feral child as properly Gothic, although it portrays
Mowgli (Neel Sethi) as torn between his animal and human sides. This is achieved
through the representation of the protagonist as an actual member of the animal
community. Indeed, the commonality of the animals even among different species,
is established early in the film when, after a season of drought, peace is sanctioned
among them with the prohibition to hunt each other near the main source of water.
156 Antonio Sann

The choice to leave the pack is Mowgli’s (he interrupts the wolves still arguing about
the subject whereas in the novel and in the previous cinematic version the pack de-
cides he should leave). He is so affectionate toward his pack that he does not want
the wolves to get hurt by the tiger, though he would prefer to stay in the jungle as,
in his words, “this is my home.” The young boy further demonstrates his allegiance
to the animals by returning to the jungle after reaching the human village to avenge
Akela’s death and liberate the pack from the oppressive tyranny of the tiger. The
jungle animals then show their cohesion and unity when they all attack the tiger to
defend Mowgli, thus fully recognizing the boy as one of their own.
As in the animated version, in Favreau’s film Gothic tropes are applied to the set-
tings and the characterization of the villains. Here the swamp is the setting where
Mowgli encounters Kaa: it is presented as a foggy and dark environment (the light
barely filters through the trees’ branches) that the protagonist reaches after being sep-
arated from Bagheera. Kaa’s voice (by Scarlett Johansson) surrounds the boy standing
on a tree with intricate branches: Mowgli cannot understand where and what the
creature is (the python is camouflaged among the branches) until it is right in front
of him, closing slowly. The hypnosis of Mowgli is rendered visually through the dolly
zoom, or “Vertigo effect,” of the camera, which has often been used in horror films
to represent an extremely suspenseful moment of fear and panic for the protagonist.
In the 2016 adaptation, Kaa is even more seductive and more insidious than formal
portrayals: the snake represents the typical fatal seducer and enchants/distracts the
boy with the story of his past while actually enveloping his body in its coils and even
saying “trust in me” just before attempting to devour him.
Later on, and contrary to both the novels and the 1967 film version, Louie, king
of the Bandar-log (voiced by Christopher Walken), is presented as a Gigantopithecus,
an extinct simian species: he is menacing in both his appearance and his intention to
rise to the top of the food chain by acquiring fire from the human cub. Surrounded
by great quantities of food and assisted by hundreds of servile monkeys, he admits
having everything he needs, except the “red flower,” which would then give him con-
trol over all the other animals. After being denied such a gift by Mowgli, he expresses
his wrath through loud screams of anger and chasing the young boy through the
interior of the abandoned temple he resides in, which serves as his own palace. The
Gigantopithecus first wanders in search of Mowgli hiding behind the pillars in the
dark and then breaks several pillars and walls until the entire building collapses over
him. Apart from alluding to the sequence of the Balrog inside the mines of Moria in
Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (2001), this scene is undoubtedly based on those
frightening sequences in horror films that depict, with a fast pace, the fatal chase of
the victim(s) by the monster through a dark and dismal environment. The Gothic is
therefore expressed, as is the case of all villains in this film, through the coupling of
a gloomy setting with the malevolent actions of an inimical being.
Finally, Shere Khan (voiced by Idris Elba) is equally presented as a formidable
adversary (feared by all the animals in the jungle and definitely stronger than them)
who is obsessed with the young human. When he first sees the boy at the Peace Rock
 The Human/Animal Divide 157

near the beginning of the film, the tiger asks the gathering of animals: “When was
it that we came to adopt man in the jungle?” reminding them that “man is forbid-
den.” He also inquires: “How many lives is a man-cub worth?” threatening them
in case they decide to defend a member of another species. Such a question could
also be read as an allusion to the loss of numerous animal lives due to the arrival of
human settlers in the jungle, which allows for an interpretation of the tiger’s action
as directed against the process of colonization and exploitation enacted by human
beings. Shere Khan is here specifically alluding to the scar and blind eye disfiguring
his face as the unfortunate consequence of a fight against a human being endowed
with “the red flower,” which is defined as the destructive creation and main power
of humans. The tiger’s grudge against humankind (and particularly against Mowgli’s
father, who was the one who actually wounded him) becomes a personal obsession
with the young boy. Many of his unexpected and sudden attacks against Mowgli
are portrayed through the technique of the “jump scare” typical of horror films and
take both the protagonist and the viewer by surprise. Shere Khan’s association with
the Gothic villain is further established by his decision to kill Akela, the alpha male
of the pack, terrorize the wolf pack, and threaten Mowgli’s wolf mother in order to
force the boy to return to the jungle to kill him. When confronting the protagonist
near the end of the film, he sadistically reminds him of the murder of both his hu-
man and wolf fathers, smiling as he provokes the final fight, which occurs in the
Gothicized setting of the jungle being devoured by the fire. The final confrontation
is depicted as an apocalyptic, fast-paced duel filled with suspense and whose outcome
is apparently uncertain.
In Disney’s animated version of Tarzan (1999)—which followed more than
thirty-five live-action films since 1918, several serials, and more than ten television
films since the 1950s—the eponymous protagonist is equally represented as torn
between his human and animal natures. Tarzan is adopted by a female ape (who
has recently lost her newborn) after his parents have been killed (off-screen) by a
leopard. He considers the simian society as his own, but he is not accepted by the
leader of the apes as a member of the family and suffers for his physical differences
from them. After finding the group of human explorers that includes Jane (“these
strangers like me” recite the lyrics of the eponymous song), Tarzan’s allegiance is
divided between the two communities: the one of the apes he belongs to and can
communicate with and the human one, which threatens the tranquility of the jungle
with its presence and the use of rifles. Tarzan’s behavior is animalistic in the way he
moves on all fours as well as for his great agility, strength, and speed, and the fact that
he does not respect the proper (social) distance from Jane by getting too close to her,
smelling her, and touching her. In contrast, the difference between the animals and
the protagonist is attenuated by the fact that, as is the case with the two Jungle Book
films, the animals are humanized in their facial expressions and gestures as well as in
their behavior, though they can be also completely irrational and occasionally lapse
into ferocious tantrums. Tarzan’s liminality is therefore expressed through both his
behavior and his sense of membership to the animal community.
158 Antonio Sann

The film, however, does not insist on such aspects as liminal in a Gothic sense.
Rather, it advances a discourse favoring the acceptance of those who are different,
of the Other. The use of Gothic (visual) tropes in Tarzan is instead applied to the
inimical animal being—in this case the ferocious leopard. Halfway through the film,
the fast-paced, restless attack of the feline and its scratching of a tree’s roots provid-
ing momentary shelter to the protagonist are portrayed in the style of the attack
of a monster against a human in horror narratives. This scene indeed recalls those
sequences in horror films (such as Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 The Shining, Joe Dante’s
1981 The Howling, and Paul W. S. Anderson’s 2002 Resident Evil) in which the vic-
tim is trapped in a narrow space with no possibility of escape while the monster or
killer is trying to force its way in. The sense of claustrophobia and fear of imminent
death are clearly expressed by Tarzan too, who barely escapes with his life after the
ferocious beast chases him on the jungle trees.
The major sequence utilizing Gothic tropes occurs near the end of the film and
portrays the rest of the humans visiting the jungle (specifically, Clayton and the
crew of the ship that carried Jane and Porter) as treacherous, greedy, and definitely
inhumane, ready to brutalize both beasts and fellow men. In Burroughs’s novel, as
Newton has pointed out, “Tarzan’s jungle exists outside the historical process, despite
the plunderings of European Imperialists. It is an evolutionary origin and a place of
perpetual renewal” (2002, 206–7). In Disney’s adaptation, the jungle becomes in-
stead the scenery for the white men’s predatory actions when they attempt to capture
the troop of apes. It is this scene that is visually and narratively composed through
Gothic tropes: the brutal sailors (whose facial expressions are exclusively aggressive
and enraged) attack the apes’ lair during the night and shoot several flares that light
up the area in red, a color that further emphasizes the violence characterizing this se-
quence (red is associated with violence and its outcome in The Little Mermaid [John
Musker and Ron Clements, 1989], Pocahontas [Mmike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg,
1995], and Mulan [Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, 1998] as well). The use of a red
filter throughout the sequence is interrupted only when Tarzan enters the scene to
rescue the imprisoned apes. Simultaneously, the foul weather marked by clouds and
lightning in the background aligns this sequence with the Radcliffean intensification
of a character’s dismal feelings and the depiction of danger through the Gothicization
of the setting. The scene concludes with the fight between the protagonist and his
nemesis, Clayton, which is portrayed as a swashbuckling duel among the trees,
among bare, twisted branches wrapped with lianas. Such a background is coupled
with the use of dismal colors, ominous music, and a vertical perspective that empha-
size the Gothic aspects of this environment (it is the only scene in which the jungle
is portrayed as menacing). The death of the villain, who inadvertently hangs himself
while attempting to free his limbs from the lianas, is portrayed up until a few seconds
before the very last gruesome moment in a manner that is almost uncharacteristic of
the avoidance of graphic deaths by Disney films.
The Disney films featuring Mowgli and Tarzan therefore utilize Gothic imagery
to depict the animals inimical to the human protagonist. We could interpret such a
 The Human/Animal Divide 159

characterization as an investment in colonial Gothic, that subgenre of Gothic fiction

which, as Philip Steer argues, focuses on the relationships of the settlers against in-
digenous people and primitive savages by depicting “the indigenous population . . .
as violent, savage, superstitious, and impervious to rational dialogue” (2016, 254–
55). Such an argument could be applied if we consider the animal creatures resid-
ing in the jungle as the savage indigenous population reacting savagely against the
invasion of their natural environment by the humans. The animosity of adversarial
creatures such as Kaa, Shere Khan, and the leopard could be interpreted as motivated
by a feeling of violation of their jungle by human beings, whose representatives are
Mowgli and Tarzan. The use of Gothic visual and narrative techniques characterizes
such villains as (unjustly) accusing the human protagonists of these stories of a pro-
cess of settlement, colonization, and exploitation of the natural resources that is not
actually part of their intentions, as Mowgli and Tarzan feel instead they are part of
the animal community. Liminality is therefore treated in these films as a source of
danger for the two protagonists, whose human/animal divide partly separates them
from the rest of the jungle’s inhabitants.
The exploitation of natural resources is instead represented by the brutal men
depicted in the 1999 version of Tarzan, which offers a postcolonial Gothic perspec-
tive of white settlers as inimical intruders and villains. Postcolonial Gothic has been
interpreted as a narrative and visual strategy urging us to recognize a representation
of systemic violence and repressed minority voices in those countries that were
subjected to colonialism (Whisker 2006; Ilott 2019; Rudd 2019). Central to such a
practice is also an ecologically oriented, negative representation of white people raid-
ing the local environment and of the damages suffered by the latter and its original
inhabitants. The Gothic representation of the inimical white men in Tarzan similarly
works as a critique and problematization of the colonizers’ behavior and worldview
in Africa.
Feral children were the subjects of disciplines such as linguistics, sociology, peda-
gogy, psychology, and anthropology. They stimulated a sensational and spectacular
interest in the human community, a fascination that extended to different kinds of
curious, from the medico-scientific milieu to the crowds paying to watch the phe-
nomenon (Benzaquén 2006, 16). The feral children in Kipling’s and Burroughs’s
works equally reveal a dissonance (or disequilibrium) in the assumption that human
and animal are crucial distinctions and that human is the central, superior term.
Similarly, in the adaptations of the novels by Disney, Mowgli and Tarzan do not con-
form to the structure of reality established by their society because they are liminal
beings torn between their animalistic and rational aspects and between their affinity
with and membership to either the animal or human communities. Such a conflict
is not characterized in negative or Gothic aspects, however, in the films, which rather
use Gothic visual and narrative tropes in order to depict the inimical animals and the
human beings as adversaries of the peace and balance in the jungle.
160 Antonio Sann

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Botting, Fred. 1999. Gothic. London: Routledge.
Burroughs, Edgar Rice. 2003. Tarzan of the Apes, edited by Jonathan Kelley. West Berlin,
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Dryden, Linda. 2003. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells.
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Generani, Gustavo. 2016. “Kipling’s Early Gothic Tales: The Dialogical Consciousness of an
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NC: Duke University Press.
Hendershot, Cindy. 2001. The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic. Ann Arbor: The
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Ilott, Sarah. 2019. “Postcolonial Gothic.” In Twenty-First-Century Gothic: A Edinburgh
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Kipling, Rudyard. 2014a. The Jungle Book. Leicester: Ulverscroft.
———. 2014b. The Second Jungle Book. Leicester: Ulverscroft.
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11
Primitive Life and Animated Death
Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” as Ecogothic
Christy Tidwell

“Imagine yourselves out in space, billions and billions of years ago, looking down
on this lonely, tormented little planet, spinning through an empty sea of nothing-
ness.” With these words, music critic and emcee Deems Taylor invites the viewer
into the “Rite of Spring” segment of Fantasia (1940). It begins, as he intimates, with
space—huge and black—but before long arrives at Earth and tells the story of the
planet’s development and the evolution of life from single-celled organisms through
the dinosaurs and their extinction.
The piece moves quickly through Earth’s long history, telling the story of geol-
ogy and evolution through dramatic images and vivid colors. Volcanic explosions
and molten lava end the first section of Earth before life, presenting the planet as a
violent place, marked by constant motion and primarily animated in red and black.
As life begins in the ocean, organisms divide and then multiply, becoming more
complex and even beautiful—jellyfish, trilobites, and nautiluses in blues and greens
and purples—until more familiar fish appear and life, some forms “more ambitious
than the rest” (Fantasia), evolves on land.
After these shorter segments, covering billions of years of evolution in just a
couple of minutes, the film slows down to dwell on the dinosaurs and other prehis-
toric animals. Marine reptiles gather on the shore, Pteranodons swoop down from
their cliffside perches to hunt, and life teems within the tropical atmosphere away
from the ocean. Green life is abundant, and water sources are plentiful. Sauropods
companionably eat together; hadrosaurs and ornithopods gather to drink and eat
at the water’s edge, families of Triceratops pass by and one baby tests out the water
before following its parents. Since, as Taylor explains, “As a rule, [dinosaurs] were

163
164 Christy Tidwell

vegetarians, rather amiable and easy to get along with,” most conflicts are about
shared food and the majority of this section is peaceful. Ultimately, however, a preda-
tor appears: “The worst of the lot, a brute named Tyrannosaurus rex, was probably
the meanest killer that ever roamed the earth,” Stokowski states in the introduction.
Although the other dinosaurs flee when T. rex appears, Stegosaurus is not so quick
and is attacked. Their battle ends this scene of peace and abundance.
After the profusion of life of the Mesozoic era, the final segment of the film is
shockingly apocalyptic. The dinosaurs walk through the desert seeking food and
water, and their search becomes a death march. One dinosaur after another falls and
dies, even the mighty T. rex. And then we are presented with dinosaur skeletons in
every direction, no visible life remaining. The earth is still active, however, and an
earthquake engulfs the bones, the only traces left of this long period of life and evo-
lution. The segment ends with not only earthquakes but a flood and a solar eclipse,
indicating that this is not a small loss but a planetary change.
This story of prehistoric life and death may not be the most obvious source of the
Gothic in Disney film. It is not even the most obviously Gothic element of Fantasia.
For instance, “Night on Bald Mountain,” featuring Chernobog, the demon from
Slavic mythology, draws on more explicitly Gothic elements. Robin Allan’s description
highlights the way “the shadow of Chernobog’s hands falls across the roofs of the sleep-
ing town and the buildings lean towards the source of power as the shadow falls across
them,” noting as well that “the town has the Gothic detailing of German expressionist
cinema” (1999, 162). The history of evolution and extinction provided in “Rite of
Spring” does not come with such overtly Gothic imagery, and it emphasizes scientific
knowledge over demons and natural processes over a battle between good and evil.
Nevertheless, Disney’s story of evolution and dinosaurs is thoroughly Gothic. It
reflects Chris Baldick’s definition, which states, “For the Gothic effect to be attained,
a tale should combine a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic
sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce
an impression of sickening descent into disintegration” (1992, xix). Few topics could
better represent “inheritance in time” than eons of evolution, and the oppressive
red skies of the dinosaurs’ death march provides a distinctly “claustrophobic sense
of enclosure in space,” given their lack of other options for survival. Further, the
narrative does not continue the process of evolution but ends with the extinction of
the dinosaurs, shown as a “sickening descent into disintegration,” a slow process of
starvation and death that illustrates early twentieth-century ideas about their extinc-
tion as gradual rather than catastrophic.
Disney’s “Rite of Spring” is not only Gothic but ecogothic as well. It presents a vi-
sion of the natural world as monstrous, overwhelming, beyond the human. After all,
the narrative shows that the planet itself existed long before any life evolved and then
continued after the life we see here ended, and its most vivid narratives emphasize
dinosaurs as living up to their name, which as Deems Taylor says in the introduction,
“comes from two Greek words meaning ‘terrible lizard.’ And they certainly were all
of that.” Often associated with Nature-strikes-back narratives, the ecogothic is not
 Primitive Life and Animated Death 165

only about the natural world as threatening, though. Stephen A. Rust and Carter
Soles’s definition of ecohorror (which overlaps with but is not necessarily identical
to the ecogothic) offers another way to conceptualize it. Rust and Soles argue that
ecohorror includes “texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world,
or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, repre-
sent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly” (2014,
509–10). This description incorporates a broader range of relationships between
human and nonhuman than revenge or monstrosity. Similarly, Jennifer Schell writes
that ecogothic literature tends “to regard environmental problems with a compli-
cated mixture of anxiety, horror, terror, anger, sadness, nostalgia, and guilt” (2018,
176). With this in mind, the ecogothic highlights how “we fear the loss of nature at
least as much as we fear nonhuman nature itself ” (Tidwell and Soles 2021, 7) and
makes room for both fear of nature and fear for nature. The dinosaurs are not only
impressive, after all, but are often sympathetic (Figure 11.1).
But Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” is neither a revenge-of-nature narrative nor a tale
of environmental harm. There are no humans in it and—because it is set millions of
years before humans evolved—no human impact. Its ecogothic elements are found
elsewhere, specifically in its emphasis on species extinction and loss. The loss of pre-
historic animals has elsewhere been read as ecogothic or ecohorrific, from readings

Figure 11.1. This sauropod and her babies, for instance, present a sympathetic, pastoral
vision of the dinosaurs—before T. rex appears
166 Christy Tidwell

of late nineteenth-century mammoth stories as addressing anthropogenic species ex-

tinction (Schell 2018) to discussions of the Jurassic Park franchise and its de-extinct
dinosaurs as a response to the Sixth Great Extinction (Tidwell 2020). Jennifer Schell
describes “the specters of extinct and endangered animals” as comparable to “the
ghosts of more traditional gothic fiction, as haunting indicators of the unredeemed
vanity, avarice, and wastefulness of humanity” (2018, 178), making a strong case for
extinct animals as Gothic, but this argument directly involves humans while Disney’s
dinosaur extinction narrative does not.
The issue here is not, therefore, the role we humans play in the dinosaurs’ extinc-
tion. The dinosaurs are not our responsibility. Instead, the film prompts us to consider
the possibility of our own extinction. The world existed before dinosaurs and after
them, leaving only bare traces for us to find millennia later; the world existed before
us and—analogously—will exist after us, too. In a very Gothic sense, Fantasia could
function as a kind of cross-species memento mori, a reminder of death not only on the
individual level but on the species level. The age of the earth reminds us of our in-
significance and the disappearance of the dinosaurs potentially foreshadows our own.

PREHISTORIC NATURE: SEPARATE AND MONSTROUS

Fantasia’s dinosaurs—denizens of a distant past—are “symbols of the ‘extinct’”

and “regarded as evolutionary failures” (Debus and Debus 2002, 8). Their story
is a Gothic one of decay and disintegration, and in this telling they are primitive
monsters. In the early twentieth century, dinosaurs were often “viewed as brutish
monstrosities” (Debus 2006, 15), as “mindless beings” (Nabavizadeh 2021, 22),
and as simultaneously “pathetic, tragic victims and ruthless killer predators” (Sanz
2002, 35). These visions of dinosaurs echo ideas of the Gothic as “barbarous, rude,
cruel” (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.), in stark contrast to “the triumph of
Technological Man” and the idea that, “through evolutionary processes, we ascended
to Creation’s summit” and “seemed to have ‘conquered’ our evolutionary com-
petitors in dim prehistoric ages, symbolized by the bones of the most gigantic and
fearsome dinosaurs mounted in museums” (Debus and Debus 2002, 8). From this
perspective, dinosaurs represent a distant past, closed to us.
Further, this attitude toward prehistoric Earth reflects a kind of ecophobia, defined
by Simon C. Estok as “an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world”
(Estok 2009, 208). In this case, the natural world is represented by obsolete yet threat-
ening prehistoric creatures. Taylor’s introduction describes them as coming “in all
shapes and sizes, from little crawling horrors about the size of a chicken to hundred-
ton nightmares.” They are monsters that exist in contrast to humans, beings to fear
(whether they’re large or small), whose primitivism reinforces our own superiority.
This emphasis on the primitive connects with the Gothic in meaningful ways
and is reinforced within the opening lecture of this segment. As Robert Miles has
argued, the Gothic aesthetic is “primitivist” (1991, 48), built on a tendency to
 Primitive Life and Animated Death 167

value and cultivate “the instincts of nature, our true self ” (Miles 1991, 50). Igor
Stravinsky’s composition builds upon primitivist images and ideas, depicting pagan
Russian rituals celebrating the coming of spring, and his goal, Taylor says, was to
“express primitive life.” “Walt Disney and his fellow artists have taken him at his
word,” Taylor continues, although, instead of tribal dances, they tell “the story of the
growth of life on Earth.” Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” maintains Stravinsky’s sense of
the primitive—applied to prehistoric nonhuman life rather than primitive human
rituals. As an aesthetic movement, primitivism is often defined “in terms of the ap-
propriation of African and Oceanic art” (Connelly 2015, 2); however, this narrow
definition, Frances S. Connelly argues, includes “an implicit suggestion that African
art is truly ‘primitive’ in some way that medieval or archaic art is not” and “dismisses
nineteenth-century debates concerning Europe’s own historical ‘primitives’” (2015,
3). Defining primitivism more broadly and emphasizing common visual traits, in-
cluding “a rudeness, or naïveté, a profusion of ornament, a tendency toward (what
Europeans saw as) grotesque distortions and monstrous forms” (Connelly 2015, 4),
links Stravinsky’s primitivism and the Gothic elements of Disney’s Fantasia.
Disney’s use of The Rite of Spring was controversial, however, and Stravinsky
himself rejected it after his initial endorsement of it. He disliked its artistic interpre-
tation, although he “was too polite to share his real opinion with Walt. It was only
later that he would call the studio’s work ‘an unresisting imbecility’” (Holt 2019,
65). After the film didn’t get the positive reception they had hoped for, “Stravinsky
had second thoughts about his admiration for the former cartoon king. In an inter-
view he complained that Disney’s treatment of his work was ‘terrible’ and that he
‘saw part of it and walked out’” (Allan 1999, 128). Instead of applying narrative,
Stravinsky “wanted to suppress ‘all anecdotal detail’ in order to re-package the Rite
as a purely ‘musical construction’” and encouraged listeners to hear the music “as
absolute, pure and structural” (Chua 2007, 60). But this was “a retrospective claim,”
Daniel K. Chua argues, not his initial intention.
Regardless of Stravinsky’s intentions or his reaction to Disney’s use of the music,
The Rite of Spring seems to fit the content well, the primitivism of the music itself
reinforcing the sense of the prehistoric as primitive and powerful. Disney com-
mented on the desire to “do something like this in a symphony where we could let
Nature be something . . . the whole earth is full of rhythm” (quoted in Allan 1999,
131). And Stravinsky’s music is rhythmic more than melodic. In fact, “at one point
in the sketches for the Rite, he [Stravinsky] scribbles ‘music exists if there is rhythm,
as life exists if there is a pulse’” (Chua 2007, 77), and Stravinsky claimed that the
rhythmic accents of the piece “were ‘the foundation of the whole [work],’ as if it were
the biological pulse of the ballet” (Chua 2007, 63). This rhythm or pulse has power
on its own (as Stravinsky appeared to desire), but it also reflects ideas about pagan
practices (as in the ballet) and supports the film’s representation of prehistoric earth
and dinosaurs as fierce, forceful, and frightening. Given these resonances, as Daniel
Albright writes, “It is strange that Stravinsky despised Disney’s cartoon of this ballet,
in Fantasia (1940) . . . for by making the action a minuet of dinosaurs and volcanos
168 Christy Tidwell

Figure 11.2. The “Augurs” chord spelled out: E-flat dominant seventh with an
F-flat-major triad

Disney succeeded in eliminating the human presences that were always to some
extent an embarrassment to the spectacle” (1989, 15). In some ways, then, Disney’s
prehistoric drama does precisely what Stravinsky wished by removing the human.
And it is not only the rhythm of the music that fits the content; one recognizable
element of Stravinsky’s composition is what is known as the “Augurs” chord, a dis-
sonant chord (Figure 2) that is played more than two hundred times in the second
section of The Rite of Spring. Its dissonance is unnerving and remains unresolved; as
a result, Chua writes, “this chord is a not a neutral category. It shocks. It provokes.
. . . the chord riots by defining itself against the prevailing order” (2007, 69). Further,
the chord is “at once brutal and banal, . . . deployed to attack the foundations of the
past, trashing its signifiers with a Neolithic hedonism that is both a form of ridicule
and iconoclasm in the modernist urge to shock and negate” (Chua 2007, 73). It is
also, according to Chua, “an act of barbarity against Western civilization” (2007,
73) and “an assault on the human subject” (2007, 74). The Augurs chord appears
early in Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring,” timed to the irregular bursts of volcanoes during
Earth’s early periods, before life evolved, associating the sound with an inhuman vio-
lence and destruction and making it easier to perceive this past Earth as monstrous
or even alien (Figure 3). Associated with the prehistoric—whether Neolithic rites,
early volcanic Earth, or Mesozoic creatures—the chord demonstrates a rejection of
contemporary life, widening the divide between Disney’s audience and the past. This
chord and its rhythmic use throughout the piece underscore the music as Gothic for
twenty-first-century listeners, too: “Stravinsky was known to complain that reaching
for his work had become a shortcut solution for those needing to invoke horror and
tension. The orchestral slashes from the shower scene in Bernard Herrmann’s score
for Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) wouldn’t exist without the repetitive violence of The
Rite,” for instance (Moore 2019). Watching the film decades later, we hear this music
through layers of later horror movie references and potentially experience it as even
more Gothic than the original audiences would have.
 Primitive Life and Animated Death 169

Figure 11.3. Volcanoes erupt dramatically, timed to the Augurs chord and its power

Both the dinosaurs and the prehistoric Earth reflected in Fantasia’s “Rite of
Spring” are primitive, barbaric, Gothic, and presented in stark contrast to humanity’s
civilization and modernity. The prehistoric world and its creatures are simultane-
ously powerful and—fortunately for us humans—safely in the past. Despite mo-
ments of beauty and sympathy, this world is frightening and too harsh for human
survival. Fantasia was released during a period that, as Robin L. Murray and Joseph
K. Heumann have observed (2011), saw many cartoons emphasizing conflict be-
tween humans and the natural world. Even though it does not feature humans, the
“Rite of Spring” in Fantasia relies on violence and warlike imagery (from fights be-
tween dinosaurs to its final images of devastation), and it implies a more conceptual
conflict between dinosaurs and humans, since only one of us can rule the world at
once. As long as the dinosaurs exist—“lords of creation for about 200 million years”
(Fantasia)—there is no room for mammals like humans to become dominant species.

DINOSAURS AS RELATIVES:
EVOLUTION, SCIENCE, CONNECTION

This emphasis on fear and brutality tells only part of the story, however. Fantasia’s
“Rite of Spring” also reveals a real desire to understand the prehistoric past and to
present it accurately. In fact, Taylor’s introduction to the segment describes it as “a
170 Christy Tidwell

coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few
billion years of this planet’s existence.” Its accuracy and realism were created in
part through consultation with expert paleontologists, including Roy Chapman
Andrews, Barnum Brown, and Julian S. Huxley (Sanz 2002, 32). Taylor goes on to
note that “Science, not art, wrote the scenario of this picture.” This underestimates
the role of art and imagination in order to defend its scientific accuracy. As Allen
Debus argues, “paleontology is inherently like time travel because in their recon-
struction of prehistory, scientists and artists (‘poets with brushes’) must see through
time, visualizing the deep past” (2006, 85). Reconstructions of prehistory must
therefore be a combination of science and art, and—despite Taylor’s denial of art’s
role—the segment reflects the necessity and value of both.
The film’s realism also made possible an acknowledgment that although dino-
saurs can be violent or frightening, they are also simply animals. As Thomas Joseph
Rossbach notes, the “Rite of Spring” in Fantasia is “one of the few (if not the only)
dinosaur epics that does not have humans as the subjects of some time-displaced di-
nosaur’s dining plans. . . . And, unlike other dinosaur cartoons, the dinosaurs do not
talk. In the ‘Rite of Spring’ the dinosaurs are allowed to be dinosaurs” (1996, 13). In
the interest of making them realistic, cartoonists were asked to use real animal move-
ments for the dinosaurs, not like those used for Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and
Snow White’s dwarfs. This was a major shift in style, an “elimination of one of the
trademarks of the Disney factor: the anthropomorphizing of animals” (Sanz 2002,
32). This realism gave Disney the chance to “contribut[e] to science by providing
the first recreation of how dinosaurs might have moved” (Clague 2004, 98) and to
popularize science even more effectively than natural history museums were able to
(Sanz 2002, 32).
This treatment of the dinosaurs as animals rather than monsters emphasizes
the connection between this prehistoric past and our present. In fact, “Disney’s
original idea was to continue to tell the story of life up to the origin of humanity,
but this was made an impossible task as a result of the threats from some religious
fundamentalists” (Sanz 2002, 32). An outline of the film from 1938 included three
parts: “Part 1 Volcanoes, cooling earth, first life bacteria, dinosaur. Part 2 Age of
mammals and first man. Part 3 Fire and the triumph of nature” (quoted in Allan
1999, 127). Only the first part made it into the film, but the filmmakers’ assump-
tion of evolutionary theory’s truth and value is worth keeping in mind. To them, the
dinosaurs were separated from humans by time but connected by the workings of
evolutionary processes and shared life itself.
Fantasia therefore values science in multiple ways, from its attempt to get the
paleontology right and its matter-of-fact representation of evolution to its approach
to filmmaking and animation. Mark Clague notes that

Fantasia is an early example of Disney’s “imagineering.” This term was coined by Walt
Disney in the 1950s to refer to the creative process used to plan Disneyland, later be-
coming a central management paradigm for the company as a whole. Yet more than a
 Primitive Life and Animated Death 171

decade earlier, with studio research labs exploring the animation of natural phenomena
such as the motions of bubbling liquid for The Rite of Spring segment, Fantasia exempli-
fies the combination of science and creativity, engineering and imagination that Disney’s
term represents. (2004, 96)

Walt Disney’s goal was to have his animators draw natural processes so that it was
beautiful but also “better than a photograph” (quoted in Allan 1999, 129). Its sound
was innovative, too; for Fantasia, Disney introduced “Fantasound,” a new system
with a range of seventy-five decibels rather than conventional films’ thirty-five deci-
bels. This allowed it to better approximate the range of a symphony orchestra and
“with this greatly increased volume range [went] a correspondingly increased range
of tonal frequencies and hence quality of reproduction” (Peck 1941, 28). Fantasia’s
use of Fantasound and new animation techniques made it “an example of relentless
scientific advance” (Clague 2004, 98).
Disney’s technological advances combined with the popularity of dinosaurs to
create real mass appeal for Fantasia and the “Rite of Spring,” and this appeal con-
nects the film once again with the Gothic. Gregory Paul points out that by the
1930s, “dinosaurs had become so popular with the public that the subject had
taken on something of a circus air” and they “became reptilian curiosities, good for
drawing crowds into the museum, but evolutionary dead ends of little theoretical
importance” (1988, 24–25). Just as in later dinosaur films like Jurassic Park (Steven
Spielberg, 1993) and its many sequels (Tidwell 2020), Fantasia’s dinosaurs are first
and foremost spectacular, as much entertainment as education. Geoff King notes
that Jurassic Park’s “dinosaur special effects were singled out as the main selling and
discussion point” of the film (2000, 42), and Fantasia was similarly promoted as a
highly technological spectacle. John Ruskin argued that “Gothic is not an art for
knights and nobles; it is an art for the people” (quoted in Connelly 2015, 15), and
Fantasia shares this approach. The film’s conductor, Leopold Stokowski, wrote about
his ideal for Fantasia that “the beauty and inspiration of music must not be restricted
to a privileged few but made available to every man, woman, and child” (quoted in
Clague 2004, 92). Stokowski and Disney used new technology and dinosaurs’ popu-
larity (as well as the spectacle and drama of the other segments of the film) to draw
people to the theater—and then to show off new animation techniques, introduce
them to classical music, and (of course) make money.
Animation as a form further allows a sense of connection to the prehistoric. As
Robin Allan writes, “Animation invests these prehistoric creatures with tragic dignity
as they lift parched heads to the sun, eyes glazed, tongues lolling” (1999, 131). Their
animation, their liveliness, connects us to the dinosaurs rather than Othering them.
Similarly, Thomas LaMarre argues that animation as a form affects the way we might
see the creatures being animated:

The delight of animation comes of the experience of movement, and the art of anima-
tion is, above all, that of movement. Attempts to characterize animation, to gauge its
marvels, usually speak about the magic of something inanimate coming to life, an object,
172 Christy Tidwell

a drawing, strips of paper, a lump of clay. . . . This experience in which “moving” and
“coming to life” become synonymous has encouraged commentators to see in anima-
tion an animistic worldview, a world in which everything is endowed with life force or
spirit.” (2013, 117)

The process of animation, of representing other lives on film, gives life, and Disney’s
dinosaurs are not only real, therefore, but alive in ways that other (non-animated)
paleoart was not and in ways that encourage connection with and concern for the
creatures. For instance, the death of the stegosaurus in the jaws of the T. rex encour-
ages sympathy for the fallen herbivore, as we watch its body collapse and its eyes
slowly close. The T. rex’s victory, accompanied by dramatic lightning strikes as the
red-eyed carnivore is seen from below, is more horrifying than triumphant.
This scene therefore highlights both fear and connection, indicating that dino-
saurs are, as W. J. T. Mitchell observes, “marked by ambivalence. The dinosaur is
monument and toy; monstrous and silly; pure, disinterested science, and vulgar,
fraudulent commercialism” (1998, 82). They are both monster and animal (Tidwell
2020) and “have a tendency to escape the kind of ideological programming that
would stabilize their meaning” (Mitchell 1998, 152). Fantasia’s dinosaurs are no dif-
ferent. They are primitive beasts representing a lost past; they are also animals who
shared the same world as us and whose fate we may share.

Figure 11.4. Ultimately, even the fiercest predators end as only skeletons
 Primitive Life and Animated Death 173

Esther Leslie writes that animation “reminds us of the life in other things that is
like and unlike the life in us” and “reinvents not only nature but our relationship
with nature” (Leslie 2041, 29–30). Disney’s animated dinosaurs and prehistoric
Earth, therefore, provides an opportunity to reconsider our relationship with the
natural world and with our evolutionary past. It opens the door to something other
than an ecophobic response. If these creatures are encountered as lively, as connected
to us, then maybe we can feel something other than fear or hatred toward them.
Maybe the prehistoric past is more than just a primitive setting where we do not be-
long; maybe it is also something we can see as similar to our own world. And perhaps
the dinosaurs are more than long-dead monsters; perhaps they are our precursors,
predictions of our own possible fate.

EXTINCTION THEN AND NOW

The dinosaurs’ animacy may not seem particularly Gothic, but, ultimately, Fantasia
gives dinosaurs life only to dramatize their death and extinction. The more lively
and sympathetic they seem, the more of an impact their loss can have on viewers.
And the more powerful they seem before their fall, the more fear or anxiety their
extinction can cause (Figure 4). After all, “if they—the mighty Mesozoic gods—were
exterminated, what chances of survival had we?” (Debus 2006, 146).
The specific form their extinction takes is worth considering, too. Fantasia’s vi-
sion is based on Barnum Brown’s ideas about the dinosaurs’ extinction (Mitchell
1998, 167) and contrasts with Victorian ideas about extinction, which demanded “a
catastrophic transformation of the environment” fit to destroy one of God’s creations
(Mitchell 1998, 210), and twenty-first-century ideas, which return to catastrophe
after the discovery of the Chicxulub crater. During the early twentieth century,
extinction was seen as “gradual, a kind of entropy, fatigue, or energy loss,” an idea
that “living creatures, like machines, wear out or run down” (Mitchell 1998, 210).
One common speculation of the early twentieth century, although not the whole
story, resonates with contemporary ideas about climate change. Mitchell writes, “If
thermodynamics was postulating the eventual heat-death of the universe, perhaps
our waning sun had shone brighter and hotter during the Age of Reptiles, and the
dinosaurs had died out from slow changes in the weather” (1998, 210). Although
contemporary climate change is not simply the result of thermodynamics but is
instead anthropogenic, the possibility that dinosaurs died from “slow changes in the
weather,” from climate change, connects their end in Fantasia to our own possible
future (Figure 11.4).
Revisiting the “Rite of Spring” section of Disney’s Fantasia with this in mind
and placing it within the ecogothic “re-horrors” it (Barclay 2021, 134). It gives the
film more weight for twenty-first-century audiences and “engages the film with
new types of horror even as the film remains haunted by midcentury fears” (Barclay
2021, 143). Although Fantasia’s “Rite of Spring” isn’t exactly horror, its Gothic
174 Christy Tidwell

sensibilities and emphasis on decay, death, and extinction make it horror-adjacent.

Just as Barclay argues of The Monster That Challenged the World that “images of the
Salton Sea’s ruin are more haunting than the irradiated prehistoric creature emerging
from its depths” (2021, 145), so Fantasia’s setting, its world that can no longer sup-
port life, may be more haunting and more frightening to us now than the dinosaurs.
They cannot hurt us, but we find ourselves looking forward to a world not unlike
the dead and dying world that kills them.
Ultimately, Fantasia is a story of climate change, the loss of an environment in
which the dinosaurs’ life can be sustained. It is a story very similar to our contempo-
rary concerns about our environment failing to support us in the future. As a result,
“the danger is not removed or far off but even more tangible than perhaps originally
intended. The horror is real” (Barclay 2021, 145). The dinosaurs’ death march across
the desert and the world without them is a bleak vision of both past and future, but
even more powerful might be the zoom that follows this scene of destruction. Here,
the viewer is left with an image of the earth from space that provides a sense of scale,
showing both how much larger the world is than us and how much deeper time is
than our history.
“Everything is haunted,” Barclay writes (2021, 146), and even an animated film
can become a source of environmental anxiety. Fantasia as ecogothic puts human
existence in context and hints at the possibility of human extinction, serving as a
reminder that all creatures risk extinction, even powerful dinosaurs. Even us.

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the World.” In Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene, edited by Christy
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Part 3
SOMETHING WICKED
12
Maleficent
Monstrosity, Truth and Post-Truth in Disney’s
Transmedia Fairyverse
Joan Ormrod

Of all of the Walt Disney fairy tale villains, Maleficent, the wicked fairy in Disney’s
animated film Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, et al., 1959), is the most allur-
ing. The animation depicted her as powerful and elegant, reveling in her power
and wickedness. Recently, however, there have been live-action spin-offs from the
animated film in a prequel Maleficent (Robert Stromberg, 2014), and a sequel,
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (Joachim Rønning, 2019) both starring Angelina Jolie as
the antiheroine. These two films revise the truths of previous narratives, reveal truths
of Maleficent’s motivations and origins, and show the ways that individuals and
groups of people can be “othered” in contemporary culture, often through the twist-
ing of the truth and reality (Justice 2014). Post-truth is generated through political
opinion and ideologies in the mass media and social media. Such warped attitudes
to truth can be identified in the twenty-first century notion of post-truth where facts
are either reinterpreted or discarded in favor of truth as perceived through the emo-
tional responses of certain groups of people. In social media, for instance, people may
operate within a social bubble of like-minded groups, with no counterarguments,
where fake news and conspiracy theories can be regarded as “facts.” This chapter ana-
lyzes Maleficent through the ways she is represented in the three films to show how
she is othered through the narrative revision of her story in media and transmedia,
who controls her story and her ambivalent classification as neither monstrous nor
human. I first provide an overview of issues of truth in the three films before discuss-
ing the generation of monstrosity and otherness in Maleficent. Although the fairy

179
180 Joan Ormrod

tale is not generated from one but many sources, in the twenty-first century Disney
is often regarded as the prime source. Although Disney’s ideological construction
of goodness and villainy is important in how Maleficent is represented within the
texts, the voice-over and recurring tropes within the films direct Disney’s ideological
agenda within its sociohistorical context.

MALEFICENT: FROM EVIL FAIRY TO

PERSECUTED ANTIHEROINE

In the three films, Maleficent is culturally and historically constructed through race
and gender; Sleeping Beauty is produced in the height of the Cold War and truth
is based on perceived American ideological values of democracy, family, freedom,
and the individual versus values based on communism, the state, and the collec-
tive. Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil present truth as fluid based on point
of view and emotions. These films are contextualized within twenty-first-century
sensibilities such as historical revisionism where national myths of heroism, gender,
and race are revised. One can identify these issues in how truth is revised in the
three films. Maleficent’s otherness and evil are unquestioned in Sleeping Beauty and
truth is constructed through Cold War ideology. In this film she is represented as
the antithesis of ideal womanhood; powerful, assertive, and vengeful. In Maleficent
and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil she is othered by falsehoods, paranoia, and intoler-
ance. The role of King Stefan is revised from a noble monarch in Sleeping Beauty to
a paranoid, ruthless tyrant in Maleficent. In Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Maleficent’s
otherness is foregrounded through her origins as one of the Dark Fey and the film
explores how truth can be manipulated through stories.
Charles Perrault’s story from which Disney’s Sleeping Beauty was adapted told of
a wicked fairy who curses a princess that on her sixteenth birthday she will prick
her finger on a spindle and die. The curse is moderated from death to one hundred
years sleep by a good fairy who says the princess will be awoken by a prince. In
Perrault’s version of the story, the prince and the princess are not named. The spell
only requires her to be awakened by a prince after one hundred year’s sleep. Disney’s
other major source for the adaptation was the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1890) with
music composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, which named the princess Aurora.
Disney adopted the princess’ name from the ballet and used Tchaikovsky’s music as a
soundtrack to his animation. Disney changed some of the elements of the fairy story
for his animated film; time was collapsed so the prince and princess could meet and
fall in love. The princess could then be awoken with “true love’s kiss.” Disney also
named the wicked fairy Maleficent, an amalgamation of “malevolent,” “malicious,”
and “magnificent.”
Disney’s Sleeping Beauty opens with the fairy-tale book trope presenting the
story as a fiction starting with the christening of Princess Aurora (voiced by Mary
Costa), which is attended by three aged but inept fairies, Flora (Verna Felton),
 Maleficent 181

Fauna (Barbara Jo Allen), and Merryweather (Barbara Luddy), who bless the child
with gifts of beauty, grace, and song. Maleficent (Eleanor Audley), who was not
invited, appears in a fury and curses the princess to die when her finger is pricked
by a spindle on her sixteenth birthday. The curse is mitigated by the intervention of
Merryweather, who revises the curse from death to sleep until Aurora is awakened by
“true love’s kiss,” an invention of Disney taken from Snow White and presented as the
antidote to evil magic. The fairies hide Aurora in the forest until her sixteenth birth-
day, when the threat of the curse will lapse. On the eve of her birthday, Aurora meets
and falls in love with Prince Philip (Bill Shirley). She learns that she is a princess and
returns to her father’s castle. There, Maleficent hypnotizes her, and Aurora pricks
her finger on a spindle and falls into a deep sleep. Maleficent locks Prince Philip in
a dungeon to prevent him from saving Aurora, but he escapes and, helped by the
fairies, he kills Maleficent. Prince Philip then rescues Aurora with true love’s kiss.
Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil are live-action, CGI-augmented films
and they focus on Maleficent as the protagonist, showing her journey from evil fairy
to persecuted antiheroine. Maleficent is a prequel, telling how Maleficent (Angelina
Jolie) transformed through betrayal from a carefree loving girl into a vengeful fairy
who is redeemed by love. The voice-over in the introduction of Maleficent describes
the Kingdom of the Moors as containing “every manner of strange and wonderful
creature.” Maleficent is one of these “strange and wonderful” creatures who takes
joy in the world and her freedom through flight. She saves the life of and befriends
Stefan (young Stefan is played by Michael Higgins, teen Stefan by Jackson Bews,
and adult Stefan by Sharlto Copley), a peasant boy, but, in his ambition to become
king, Stefan drugs her and cuts off her wings to prove to the king that he has killed
her. The film follows traditional myths and fairy tales, in which the peasant boy
kills a monster, marries the princess, and becomes king. His betrayal infuriates
Maleficent, who erects a hedge of thorns dividing her kingdom of the Moors from
that of mortals. She curses Stefan’s daughter, Aurora (the grown Aurora is played
by Elle Fanning), to prick her finger on a spindle when she is sixteen and fall into
the sleep of death that can only be awoken by true love’s kiss. Three fairies renamed
Flittle (Lesley Manville), Thistlewitt (Juno Temple), and Knotgrass (Imelda Stauton)
are charged by Stefan, now king, with taking care of Aurora and hiding her from
Maleficent’s fury. Maleficent discovers Aurora’s hiding place, stalks her, and gradually
comes to love the child. In her innocence, Aurora identifies Maleficent as her fairy
godmother. Maleficent is unable to rescind her curse, and when Aurora discovers
Maleficent cursed her, she flees to King Stefan and reveals herself as his daughter. By
now, Stefan, filled with paranoia, has ordered defenses in the castle against invasion
by Maleficent. Aurora pricks her finger on the spindle and falls into a deep deathlike
sleep. Prince Phillip (Brenton Thwaites) kisses her, but she does not awaken. Only
when Maleficent, who truly loves Aurora, kisses her does she awaken. Stefan traps
Maleficent with iron nets, but she is saved by Aurora, who releases her wings from
their glass case. Stefan falls from a tower and dies and Maleficent declares Aurora the
Queen of the Moors, thus uniting the two kingdoms.
182 Joan Ormrod

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil develops these ideas to reveal how truth is generated
through ideologies and stories. Despite Maleficent saving Aurora with true love’s
kiss, people believe in the fairy-tale version, the propaganda narrated in Sleeping
Beauty. In Mistress of Evil, these stories are circulated by Ingrith (Michelle Pfeiffer),
Phillip’s mother (Phillip is portrayed here by Harris Dickinson), who hates magical
folk. Ingrith poisons her husband, King John (Robert Lindsay), with the cursed
spindle and blames it on Maleficent. Ingrith also attempts to estrange Aurora (played
again by Fanning) and Maleficent with lies. Maleficent flies off and is shot down
with an iron arrow by Lady Gerda (Jenn Murray), Ingrith’s servant. However, she is
saved by Connall (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Dark Fey, and taken to the isle of the Dark
Fey. On the Isle of the Dark Fey, Maleficent learns they are in hiding after being
driven to near extinction by humans. Connell reveals that Maleficent is the last de-
scendent and custodian of the powers of life and death, rebirth, and transformation
of the Phoenix, and asks Maleficent to broker peace. However, Connell’s deputy
Borra (Ed Skrein) and his Dark Fey soldiers attack Ulstead. Ingrith has had tomb
bloom flowers manufactured into weapons to poison the Moors and bomb the Dark
Fey. Aurora, Philip, Maleficent, and other sympathetic soldiers and magical folk
defeat Ingrith. The film ends with Aurora and Phillip’s wedding uniting the magical
folk and humans.
From this brief overview of the three films, one can identify how the stories told
of Maleficent change her from evil fairy, to antiheroine, to persecuted heroine.
In convincing the audience of the truth, the films use Angelina Jolie’s star image
as aligned with her Maleficent representation, the construction of the character’s
storyworld through CGI and convincing imagery and the implied truth of identity
through knowledge through Aurora as a preferential point of view. The choice of
Angelina Jolie to play Maleficent is significant because her star image (Dyer 1986)
bears similarities to Maleficent: she is independent, nonconformist, can be consid-
ered humane and inhumane, glamorous, beautiful and sexy. She is an older woman
and femme fatale, breaker of marriages, the mother of six children, a feminist who
often flouts societal condemnation in her personal relationships. But she has won
humanitarian awards for her work with refugees, women’s rights, conservation, and
education. She is courageous: her preventative double mastectomy and preventa-
tive salpingo-oophorectomy in which her ovaries and fallopian tubes were removed
raised awareness of female cancer and the consequent loss in femininity that many
women feel after such surgery and was much admired and praised. All of these
aspects of her star image—her controversial behavior, her courage, and her care for
marginalized people—make her ideal to play Maleficent. Her role and star power in
playing Maleficent also made the change in Maleficent’s identity from evil to good
more important as it gave Jolie the opportunity to tell the story from a different
and marginalized point of view. However, in doing so she revealed cultural issues
regarding truth.
The changing story prompts questions of evil/good, human/monster and it shows
how, in these films, monstrosity is constructed through gender and race. Disney fairy
 Maleficent 183

tales promote a specific set of values about monstrosity and villains (Piatti-Farnell
2019). The three films in this chapter promote Disney’s values and notions of truth
from the Cold War to the twenty-first century and together they show how notions
of truth are fluid. Indeed, in these stories, the 1959 adaptation could be regarded as
the post-truth version of the story, a concept explored in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil.
To analyze how truth operates in these films, I first look at the development of fairy
tales from oral storytelling to literature and media and how Disney fairy tales have
become regarded as source texts.

ONCE, TWICE OR MORE UPON A TIME: MONSTROSITY,

ADAPTATION AND THE VILLAIN INTERTEXT

There is no ultimate “true” story in the fairy tale; they are products of many storytell-
ers over hundreds of years and change dependent on the teller and the cultural con-
text. As such, they have no identifiable sources (Verevis 2006). Fairy tales developed
from oral storytelling and from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were writ-
ten down by collectors of the tales. As noted above, Charles Perrault collected several
tales for his Tales of Mother Goose which included many of the stories regarded as
classic, including Sleeping Beauty (Zipes 2006; Bottigheimer 2006; Bacchilega 2014;
Zipes 2012). In recording fairy tales, the storytellers often had an agenda; Perrault’s
stories were meant as morality tales for the proper conduct of people (mainly
women) within the French court of the seventeenth century (Warner 1995; Zipes
2006). Writing a century later, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm promoted the national
ideology of an emerging German nation and notions of ideal femininity based on
beauty, passivity and domesticity (Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz 2003; Rowe 1979).
In the twentieth century, Disney fairy-tale animations also promote a specific set of
rules and ideologies, but they are so widely disseminated that they are often regarded
as the “source text” (Zipes 1995). Disney appropriated the fairy tale, transforming
it into “a peculiarly American” fable in which true love’s kiss, heterosexual love, and
male heroism save the princess (Zipes 1995). It is claimed that Disney fairy-tale
animations reinforce notions of female passivity, the need to be rescued, and toxic
female relationships for instance, the aging versus the young woman in Snow White
and female rivalry in Cinderella (Whelan 2012; Garlen and Sandlin 2017; Hynes
2010; Gazda 2015; Hecht 2011).
In the twenty-first century, Disney fairy tales have been transmitted in sequels,
prequels, adaptations, and spin-offs in films, television, and video games. The devel-
opment of these tales through transmedia has been designed to appeal to marginal-
ized audiences in their representations of race in The Princess and the Frog (John
Musker, Ron Clements 2009), disability in Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee,
2013) and Frozen II (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2019), and strong female charac-
ters (Mulan (Barry Cook and Tony Bancroft, 1998), Cruella (Craig Gillespie, 2021).
In addition, characters previously regarded as evil have been revised to suggest more
184 Joan Ormrod

complex story arcs in narratives that cross many media. Maleficent, for instance,
has been included in comics, television shows, spin-off films, and video games. Like
many other Disney villains, Maleficent can be regarded as an intertextual figure.
Lorna Piatti-Farnell describes as, “the villain intertext,” in which villains are “con-
tinuously remade and reborn across narrative and media spectrums” (Piatti-Farnell
2019, 42). Even though there are many iterations of the characters, Piatti-Farnell
argues that “the Disney villain can . . . be considered as its own category: a special
blend of aesthetics, behaviors, and motivations that collectively propose a very spe-
cific, culturally informed, notion of wickedness” (43). Despite this Disney villains
appeal to broad audiences and, as Andrew J. Friedenthal (2017) argues, transmedia
universes offer companies such as Disney the opportunity to tell diverse stories and
sell merchandising arising from these narratives in which villainy is reclaimed and
tamed.
The diversity of the stories is important for, in these times of post-truth when, if
we do not like a “truth,” we can seek out a different, more acceptable story. Thus,
the Disney villain aesthetic makes them attractive for cosplay and merchandising
(Forbes 2011). Maleficent, for instance, wears a long, flowing black cloak with a
high collar influenced by Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and has devil’s horns. This aesthetic
was adopted in Disney’s depiction of Maleficent in Disney’s Descendants franchise
(Kenny Ortega, 2015) and even in spin-off fairy tale adaptations that are not Disney
such as Once Upon a Time (Greg Beeman, 2011), which depicts Maleficent as Mal, a
fairy-tale character living in suburbia. The changing nature of princesses from passive
and bland in the mid twentieth century, to feisty in the early twenty-first century,
is mirrored in the representations of villains which are revised in films showing how
they became monstrous. In “rescuing” the reputations of villains like Cruella and
Maleficent, contemporary revisionist narratives show these characters expressing
agency in their group identities. Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil follow
a trend in contemporary narratives such as Wicked (Winnie Holzman 2003) and
Cruella where the story is told from the point of view of the villain. The revision of
these characters is produced within changing notions of truth as a more ambivalent
concept.
Maleficent’s monstrosity changes from the 1959 version of the story to the
contemporary live-action versions such that one could argue the 1959 version is
post-truth rather than truth. Her original monstrosity was constructed through her
transgression of Cold War perceptions of ideal femininity. In the live-action films,
her monstrosity is constructed through femininity and race. The two monstrous
aspects of Maleficent’s identity in these two films reflect contemporary notions of
truth in history, race, and gendered identities. The perception of monstrosity can be
made of Maleficent because of her identity as a fairy.
 Maleficent 185

CONSTRUCTING OTHERNESS: MONSTROSITY

AND POST-TRUTH

Maleficent is othered in several ways in the two live-action films. She resists clas-
sification either as a fairy or human. In the three films, fairies and magical folk
are regarded as monstrous and distrusted by humans. Monsters are unclassifiable
because of their somatic diversity (Cohen 1998). Fairies, like monsters cannot be
classified as their bodies are racially diverse and range from tiny to gigantic, pixies to
goblins and Dark Fey. The fairies in these films are unlike the cute miniature fairies
in Disney’s Tinker Bell line of adaptations and merchandising. In Maleficent’s world,
fairy races are diverse, ranging from cute characters like Pinto through to the racial-
ized, persecuted Dark Fey. Maleficent bears little resemblance to the creatures she
commands in Sleeping Beauty and Maleficent. It is only in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
the audience discovers why she looks different because she belongs to the ancient
race of the Dark Fey.
Fairies are also othered and considered monstrous because of the places they
inhabit, which, like the monstrous races of archaic folklore, exist on the margins of
the civilized world in unknown realms (Cohen 1998). Jerome Cohen argues that
monsters act as a warning to travelers to stay with known territories. Fairies exist
in burial mounds and tombs, places that are dangerous and often associated with
abduction and death (stealing children, spreading disease, changelings, disabilities)
(Briggs 1970; Eberley 1988; Sugg 2018; Purkiss 2000). In the three films the magi-
cal folk exist in the Moors and the hidden Isle of the Dark Fey away from human
cruelty. Maleficent and the Dark Fey are the only magical folk who, like monsters
of Classical tradition, act as a warning to prevent travelers from entering; Maleficent
erects a great thorn barrier to protect the Moors from humanity and the Dark Fey
conceal themselves on a secret island.
Maleficent also resists classification because her identities intersect with a multi-
plicity of monstrous elements including her gender, her ethnicity, and her location
at the margins of human society (Cohen 1998). In all three films she is described as
a creature or something that is not quite human. When Maleficent curses Aurora in
Sleeping Beauty King Stefan states “seize that creature” to his guard. In Maleficent, the
voice-over suggests, “you might take her [Maleficent] for a girl.” Stefan, shows his
distrust of magical folk when he describes the Moors as “hideous” but he is unsure of
what Maleficent is and describes her as “just a girl, I think.” His betrayal suggests he
is willing to revise this opinion to monstrous as an excuse to betray her. This attitude,
based on emotions, could be interpreted as a sign of post-truth.
The negative aspects of post-truth became a significant factor in the early
twenty-first century when political honesty was challenged by leaders such as
President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. These lead-
ers and their followers created cultural environments where “objective facts [were]
less influential in shaping public opinion, where theoretical frameworks [were]
undermined in order to make it impossible for someone to make sense of a certain
186 Joan Ormrod

event, phenomenon, or experience, and where scientific truth [was] delegitimized”

(Bufacchi 2020). This post-truth turn also takes place in the second and third films
that show the world from Maleficent’s point of view.
Post-truth is argued as a factor in contemporary challenges to truth (McIntyre
2018; Fuller 2018; Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook 2017). Reasons noted above
include the rise of social media, a suspicion of facts in political and social discourse
but these issues were also developed through skepticism of the essentialism of truth
in postmodern and poststructuralist scholarship. Postmodern sensibilities tend to
question prevailing truth, arguing that truth is a linguistic and discursive construc-
tion and there cannot be one truth but versions, sometimes of an individual truth
and sometimes the collective truth of a group (Lyotard 2004; Foucault 1995). The
rise of social media and mass media ideological biases have changed the ways people
regard stories and construct their own truths that seem to disregard facts.
Social media groups operate without editorial regulation and social media groups
act as echo chambers to confirm the views of their participants. Despite the claims
of truth in democratic media, contemporary journalism is not objective. The major-
ity of the British press is owned by multimillionaires, and newspapers reflect their
right-wing bias. In America, news channels like Fox and newspapers are also not ob-
jective and in broadcast media sensationalism overrules objectivity (McIntyre 2018).
An instance given by Lee McIntyre is the presidential election of 2016 in which
negative reports of Hillary Clinton sold more copy compared with positive reports of
Donald Trump. McIntyre argues that sensationalism and bias result in the evolution
of fake news (McIntyre 2018). An example he gives is Trump’s denial of the result of
the 2020 American presidential election leading to a group of his supporters storm-
ing the Capitol building, on January 6, 2021, refusing to believe their candidate had
been defeated. Other examples emerge from the rising number of anti-vaccination
groups in the COVID pandemic and misinformation regarding the Ukraine/Russian
conflict. The Capitol insurrection noted above is the result of a distortion of truth.
Donald Trump consistently denied his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, de-
spite his advisers informing him he lost the election. His supporters persist in believ-
ing he was victorious despite facts to the contrary.
The notion of essential truth is disputed by Friedrich Nietzsche, who argues that
truth is dependent on “perspectivism” (Nietzsche 1968, Papazoglou 2016, McIntyre
2018). Perspectivism is founded on narratives circulating in culture that are told
from different perspectives. These varying truths confound the notion of one objec-
tive truth. There are several perspectives on truth and manipulations of truth in the
three films analyzed and, as noted above, each film retells the previous stories cast-
ing doubt on their reliability. The examples range from the truth of the storyteller
and the strategies used to manipulate the truth to the scapegoating and vilification
of characters hitherto regarded as good or, at least, benign. The three films present
various views of reality that are worth considering, from that of the omniscient nar-
rator of Sleeping Beauty to Maleficent’s backstory and the stories told of her by King
 Maleficent 187

Stefan and Queen Ingrith. This retelling revises the way we understand truth and the
source text making it the post-truth version of the story rather than the “original.”

TRUTH IN SLEEPING BEAUTY, MALEFICENT,

AND MALEFICENT: MISTRESS OF EVIL: ONCE,
TWICE, OR MORE UPON A TIME

The ideological aspects of Disney tales are significant. As the prime teller of the fairy
tale in the twentieth century, his versions of the fairy tales are often regarded as the
source material (Wood 1996). Disney’s story was underpinned by notions of truth
at the height of the Cold War. The Cold War was a war of ideologies; American and
Western capitalism and democracy against Soviet and Chinese communism. From
the American perspective democracy and capitalism were regarded as right and
natural, the truth, in contrast to communism which was regarded as unnatural and
sustained through propaganda and lies.
The film contains many of the paranoid and secretive elements of the era and can
be read as a Cold War narrative. The heterosexual bonding of prince and princess
accords with the idealized notion of marriage and the family as the “happy ever after”
of Cold War life. There are other oblique references to the secrecy and paranoia of
the Cold War in the film, most arising from the actions of Maleficent, who attempts
to follow Aurora’s development with her “fatale gaze,” the gaze of a woman on an-
other woman with the intent to harm (Ormrod 2020). Fauna proposes the fairies
hide Aurora away, but she cautions that “walls have ears” so their plans must not be
expressed in the open. They hide their and Aurora’s identities in their pretense of
an ordinary peasant family in the woods. Meanwhile King Stefan orders the burn-
ing of all the spinning wheels in the land in a chilling analogy to book burning and
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “witch hunts” of the 1950s. The analogies with Cold
War ideology continue in the film when the fairies return Aurora to the palace to
her royal birthright. Here, one might argue, the film references the malign effects
of propaganda promoting communist ideology on truth, for Maleficent hypnotizes
Aurora into doing her bidding and pricking her finger on the spindle. Maleficent
further imprisons Philip to prevent him from kissing Aurora. Philip escapes and the
fairies arm him with the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue. Maleficent trans-
forms herself into a fire-breathing dragon and fights Philip, who kills her with the
Sword of Truth. The metaphor of Maleficent and her alignment with an antithetical
ideological system represented as false could not be clearer.
The two Maleficent films alter the perspective of Sleeping Beauty: the two king-
doms are described in the opening of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil as “two kingdoms
with different values. A great hero or terrible villain might bring them together.”
In his analysis of the films, Benjamin Justice (2014) notes how the red realm of
men is patriarchal, warlike, and marked by the presence of crime exacerbated by
disparities of wealth. The blue realm, inhabited by the Moors (Justice notes the
188 Joan Ormrod

racial implications of the “Moors” here) is democratic, multicultural, multispecies,

nonhuman, and magical.
Truth is further suggested in the construction of rich storyworlds portrayed
through CGI and extensive planning by Disney. This saturation of detail and expo-
sition is one of the features of contemporary transmedia storytelling and the ability
of such narratives to immerse audiences. Audience immersion, according to Lisbeth
Klastrup and Susana Tosca (2016) is produced by the construction of convincing
imagery and backstories in which competing cultures are planned through their
mythos (the histories and conflicts), topos (geographies), and ethos (values, religions,
philosophies). The exposition of the cultures is further enhanced by sophisticated
CGI and in-depth planning of the various settings for human and fairy worlds in
which color, texture and materials play crucial roles. These values can be identified in
feudal power/diffused power, excess in consumption/industry/nature, order/chaos,
uniformity/diversity, war/peace, culture/nature.
In Sleeping Beauty, the human kingdom is a consumer society, rich and opulent.
The imagery, by Eyvind Earle, is based on medieval manuscripts as a chivalric
world of knights and royalty. King Stefan’s castle is filled with rich tapestries and gold
furnishings rendered in the primary colors of an illuminated manuscript. In contrast,
Maleficent’s Forbidden Mountains mirrors her anger and sterile existence. The main
colors are black, green, and purple, there are barren rocky landscapes filled with
ruins, black and glooming skies that “thunder . . . with her wrath and frustration.”
Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil take a more sophisticated approach,
as the fairy and human systems connote polarized types of excess. Fairy excess is
aligned with ecology and sustainability. Human excess is aligned with consumerism,
greed, and control. Ingrith and the Ulstead society are feudal and display the huge
disparities between the wealthy and the poor. Ingrith dresses in pale colors, but her
richly adorned clothing and the trappings of the castle are predicated on luxury and
artifice. Ingrith’s antipathy toward nature and the natural is expressed in her allergy
to flowers, and she attempts to remake Aurora in her own image by insisting she
wear her formal, stiff wedding gown rather than the soft, floral gown created by the
fairies. Ingrith’s drive to control nature and diversity is realized in the baroque castle
gardens, which feature topiary and rigid borders. These highly controlled gardens
form an instant comparison with the exuberant excess of the bridge that Maleficent
creates from the earth and tree roots and branches. The sign that Ingrith is defeated
at the end is in the rampant growth of flowers spreading across the gardens and
swamping the castle.
The values in the human versus fairy kingdoms can be identified in the erection
of thorned barriers. In the fairy tale by Perrault, thorns grow up around the castle
to protect the princess until the prince arrives to break the spell. In Disney’s Sleeping
Beauty, Maleficent conjures up the forest of thorns around the castle to prevent
Prince Philip from saving Aurora. In Maleficent, she separates her kingdom from
humanity with a spiked forest. Stefan erects a similar wall of thorns, although made
of iron to prevent attack from fairies. The spinning wheels in the castle basement
 Maleficent 189

form a barrier that echoes the barrier of thorns only in metal. This barrier parts when
the spindle calls to a hypnotized Aurora to meet her doom. It is significant that the
curse takes on a life of its own centered on the power of the spindle. Maleficent is
powerless to overcome the curse until a pixie, Lickspittle, gives her the spindle which
she can destroy.

“I KNOW YOU”: NARRATION, TRUTH,

POST-TRUTH AND PERSPECTIVISM

What is significant about convincing audiences of the truth is in the perspective of

the narrator (Marvin Miller), omniscient and male in Sleeping Beauty, females (Janet
McTeer in Maleficent, Aline Mowat at the beginning and Aurora at the conclusion
of Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) in the live-action remakes. As I argue, Aurora is the
only character with the authority capable of telling the true story, but it is a story
told through Disney’s values.
The storyteller of fairy tales controls their ideological values and messages. In the
revisions of each of the films, audiences are directed to change their perceptions
because of the authority of the narrator (Hammond 2017). Sleeping Beauty, in ac-
cord with Cold War notions of an essential truth, begins with the voice-over of the
omniscient male narrator, positioned as a reliable narrator (Booth 1961) who reflects
Cold War assumptions of truth as essential, directing the audience’s perception of
good and bad. Miller sets the scene for the christening as a joyous day of celebration
of Aurora’s birth and describes King Stefan as “good.” As there is no discordant voice
opposing such a view, the encoded message is one ideal audiences would be expected
to approve where the family is ruled by the father who owns the capital.
The narrators in Maleficent (Janet McTeer is the narrator) and Maleficent: Mistress
of Evil are female (Aline Mowat is the narrator) and, from the beginning of the
films, the essential truth of the 1950s film is challenged. Maleficent begins with
a knowing voice-over “Let us tell an old story anew and we will see how well you
know it.” Having introduced a note of caution, the film then debunks the story of
Sleeping Beauty, suggesting “the story is not quite as you were told.” The story reveals
the treachery of Stefan and contrasts the differing values of the Moors from human
culture. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil begins with a voice-over that implies there is more
than one truth: “Once upon a time, or twice upon a time, you may remember this
story, there was a powerful fey named Maleficent.” The voice-over observes that,
although Maleficent broke the curse with true love’s kiss, “as the tale was told over
and again, that detail was mysteriously forgotten. Maleficent became the villain once
more.” This film maps how different identities can be constructed as monstrous and
othered by stories. It introduces the diversity of the Moors and Maleficent’s origins
of which even she is unaware.
Maleficent shifts identities over the three films, but this is in keeping with the
many ways she is regarded by other characters. In Sleeping Beauty, she is a powerful
190 Joan Ormrod

creature and inspires awe and fear in her “minions,” yet she is unique and does not
resemble any of them. Her backstory is inferred by the fairies when Fauna states she
is an unhappy person, and throughout Sleeping Beauty she possesses “all the powers
of Hell,” including the ability to spew green flames, mesmerism, hurling electrical
bolts, flight, and conjuration. In this version of the story, Maleficent is defeated by
truth and truth is at the heart of some repercussions of the many versions of her
story/ies but truth can be fluid and ambivalent.
In Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, she is described as “a killer of men and destroyer of
armies” by General Percival, repeating the lies spread by Ingrith. In this film she is
also described as “a creature” by Ingrith and Gerda (after shooting Maleficent, when
asked what happened to her Gerda responds she was saved by “another creature—it
pulled her from the depths of the sea.” “What did it look like?” “Her,” indicating
Maleficent). Maleficent is one of the Dark Fey, but she is also different from them
because she is the last descendent of the Phoenix. Her heredity makes her a potential
leader of the Dark Fey. However, her care for Aurora, according to Borra, under-
mines her leadership to the Dark Fey, and it is a role she is unwilling to assume. The
only character who believes in Maleficent’s potential for good is Aurora, who regards
her as a mother figure.
Aurora is the only character in the stories who can tell the truth of Maleficent not
only because of their mother/daughter relationship but also because their stories bear
similarities. Both are placed in a deep sleep and subjected to a potential rape situa-
tion. Both are awakened by true love’s kiss, but not as Sleeping Beauty would have you
believe. Aurora is not awakened by Prince Philip’s kiss, but that of her metaphoric
mother, Maleficent. Maleficent is awakened by Aurora’s kiss. Aurora can understand
Maleficent better than any of the other characters and she can be regarded as a
reliable narrator more than any other character. Stefan and Ingrith’s stories would
position Maleficent as irredeemably monstrous. Philip and her fairy protectors are
bystanders and peripheral to the main story. As monstrous and the subject of the tale,
Maleficent cannot tell the story. However, in telling the tale, Aurora can provide a
reliable perspective on the story as truth. Aurora’s point of view and her position as
arbiter of truth is crucial to notions of truth and post-truth that can be associated
with the figure of Maleficent, whom she describes as “both hero and villain.” In tak-
ing this stance, Aurora also shows her understanding of Maleficent’s liminal position.
Aurora is instrumental in recovering Maleficent’s reputation in both films through
recognizing that knowing one’s own identity is central to understanding the truth.
Notions of truth and reality can be identified in Aurora’s song from Sleeping
Beauty, “I Know You,” in which she pretends to dance with her dream lover. In retro-
spect, the lyrics in which Aurora tells of her fantasy “once upon a time” lover, locate
her prince in a fantasyland. The echoes of this song in the sequels are also located
in fantasy. Maleficent is the embodiment of Aurora’s fantasy in Maleficent when,
on their first meeting, Aurora says “I know you” dubbing Maleficent her fairy god-
mother. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil adds a traditional fairy tale trope that of the battle
between the good mother (Maleficent) and the bad mother (Prince Philip’s mother,
 Maleficent 191

Queen Ingrith), and this conforms to the earlier Perrault tale in which the prince’s
mother is an ogress who attempts to harm the princess. In Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
when Maleficent looks like she will attack Ingrith, Aurora again invokes the mantra
stating, “I know you ‘you’re my mother,’” again a wish fulfilment rather than reality.
In all three films, Aurora’s truth informs the story’s perspective.
Aurora’s perspective is not the only one in the narratives. Queen Ingrith’s actions
are informed by her childhood envy of the fairies, whom she considers the source
of her parents’ kingdom’s poverty. She attempts to cut Aurora off from Maleficent
and the Moors and to destroy all fairies. She reveals how she spread the stories of the
evil fairy and the princess she cursed: “It didn’t matter who woke Sleeping Beauty.
They were all terrified. And the story became legend.” This statement echoes that
of the narrator at the beginning of Maleficent “the story [of Sleeping Beauty] was not
quite as you were told.” Ingrith’s evil goes deeper than merely spreading false truth.
The manipulation of the truth, her truth, has its sinister origins in Nazi propaganda
and aggression in World War II. It can be likened to that of the Minister for Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, who instigated
the Holocaust and whose methods Ingrith uses in her project against the Moors: pro-
paganda which rationalizes her use of poison gas against the more passive Moors and
outright war to destroy the powerful Dark Fey. Ingrith’s malevolence goes further,
she plots to destroy the Moor folk in the wedding chapel, using poison gas. This is
doubly horrific as it not only flouts the sanctity of the church and wedding but also
attempts genocide.
However, the film is paradoxical in its notions of truth. There is an essential truth,
and that is being true to your identity. Maleficent is forced to deny her true identity
in Maleficent when Stefan cuts off her wings. In Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Aurora
directs her to cover her horns to meet Ingrith. However, Aurora realizes that she had
also asked Maleficent to be a different person to fit in.

CONCLUSION

The recurring tropes concerning truth in the films that destabilize truth have two
implications about the nature of truth and the story that call into question the truth
of a story. First, they suggest that Maleficent and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil are not
adaptations. Rather, it is Sleeping Beauty that is a post-truth text. However, the story
of Maleficent is in continuous flux and has many versions of truth within each revi-
sion and throughout the adaptations. There is truth in the fairy-tale book and its
omniscient narrator of Sleeping Beauty. There is truth in the CGI of the prequel and
sequel. There is truth in Aurora’s understanding of truth as narrator. Each version of
the story changes or expands our understanding of Maleficent, is also expands the
potential for the audience to understand there are many notions of truth.
Truth in Sleeping Beauty is essential, eternal, and cannot be disputed, reflecting
notions of truth in the Cold War. The two adaptations of the story reveal more fluid
192 Joan Ormrod

aspects of truth including post-truth. Stefan and Ingrith’s concept of Maleficent as

monstrous and evil are based on emotions, in the case of Stefan guilt and fear, for
Ingrith childhood trauma and envy. They are truths that they know to be false but,
based on emotion, are willing to overlook. In broader culture, as noted above, such
emotions; acceptance of fake news and the inability to detect truth from fake, are
now so pervasive that any story circulating in culture is accompanied by any number
of conspiracy theories. Truth is subverted by the manipulation of post-truth in war,
and by politicians and political commentators. One can make an analogy to social
media here which continuously update their stories to accommodate new informa-
tion. Thus, as Andrew J. Friedenthal argues, “Citizens of the digital age are . . . made
increasingly aware of the fact that history, on Wikipedia (and, by extension, on much
of the Internet in general), is not an ossified body of fact, but rather a constantly
evolving set of interpretations of the past” (157). The instability of history and the
stories that underpin our cultural identities challenge the assumptions we make
about truth.
Despite the claims of truth and post-truth in the films, Disney clings to the notion
of essential truth underpinning the story. Maleficent may attempt to find her own
truth, but this is undermined by the truth of Aurora as the ideal narrator. Even this
truth is fluid, as her conclusion to her proposal that “either a great hero or terrible
villain might bring [my kingdoms] together” in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is “my
kingdom was united not by a hero or a villain, as legend had predicted, but by one
who was both hero and villain.” In changing the plural to the singular “my king-
dom,” Aurora unites the plural into a singular truth.

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13
Mother Knows Best
Questioning the Moral and Immoral in Disney’s
Tangled
Angelique Nairn

Fairy tales perpetuate moral understandings by presenting certain behavioral norms

as socially accepted courses of action (Bilandzic 2011), which regulate individual
behaviors and permit self-condemnation and social sanction (Bandura 2002). As
Zipes argues, fairy tales are “socially symbolical acts and narrative strategies” that are
comprised of civilizing discourses that inevitably contribute to the moral underpin-
nings that shape societies (1994, 19). Fairy tales, then, can be a means of control that
emphasize what constitutes right and wrong (Zipes 1982) and can enforce duties and
responsibilities that people abide by to develop and maintain social order (MacIntyre
1999). Among the values of fairy tales is the capacity to entertain while encouraging
moral reasoning (Haidt 2001) or, as Zipes (1982) suggests, fairy tales offer an op-
portunity to grapple with the plight of humanity.
The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm explore this plight of humanity in similar
ways to those associated with the Gothic literary tradition. Although not always cen-
tered on the uncanny, sublime, and supernatural usually associated with the Gothic
(Botting 2012), the Grimm fairy tales pivot on what Piatti-Farnell (2021, 286)
describes as “experiences of suffering, punishment and isolation” observed in Gothic
spaces. The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm tend to focus on the “dark recesses
of the human mind” (287) and, therefore, can delve into feelings of powerlessness,
isolation, and entrapment that can influence moral learning and understanding.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the story of Rapunzel, the fairy tale at the
center of this chapter. It is a fairy tale that has been retold and repurposed over time,

195
196 Angelique Nairn

variously highlighting the consequences of stealing and premarital relations, and can
act as a cautionary tale for those inclined toward excess and moral transgressions
(Cashdan 1999). In other words, the fairy tale of Rapunzel is rife with moral lessons,
and in some instances, Gothic undertones.
In the iteration of the fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm (1812), which purports to
adapt Friedrich Schulz’s (1790 as cited in Loo, 2015) original story (among others), a
married couple is forced to forfeit their child (Rapunzel) to a sorceress as punishment
for stealing from the sorceress’ garden. Rapunzel is locked in a tower, which aligns
with the Gothic theme of entrapment (Piatti-Farnell 2021). Rapunzel spends her
days in the tower until she attracts the attention of a passing prince. Using her long
hair to climb into the tower, the prince regularly visits Rapunzel, with the two ulti-
mately falling in love and, depending on the version, they engage in premarital rela-
tions. At the time of its original publication, Rapunzel’s behaviors were considered
immoral and breached the conservative conventions of society. Finding Rapunzel
to be “pregnant” (this is implied rather than clearly delineated), the sorceress cuts
Rapunzel’s hair and casts her out of the tower to fend for herself. The sorceress then
waits for the prince to return, informs him he will never see Rapunzel again, and
then pushes him out of the tower, where he lands in a thorn bush that renders him
blind. The prince wanders for a time and only when he hears Rapunzel singing to
their twins do they reunite. Rapunzel’s tears of joy at seeing the prince restore his
sight, and they relocate to the prince’s kingdom to live happily ever after. Despite
the obvious happy ending common in the traditional fairy tale (Zipes 1982), the
story demonstrates the potential of fairy tales to hold moral messages that address “a
specific failing or unhealthy predisposition in the self ” (Cashdan 1999, 13). Here,
the failure lies in pursuing one’s desire and betraying the commands of authority
(represented in the character of Gothel). Interestingly, the Gothel character was
originally constructed in the fairy tale as morally ambiguous. Her actions, although
harsh, speak to her feeling betrayed by her daughter, rather than adhering to the
prototypes of a bad mother (Cashdan 1999). This raises questions, then, about the
more recent retelling of the Rapunzel story, Disney’s Tangled (Nathan Greno and
Byron Howard, 2010).
According to Leader (2018), Disney’s Tangled is considered a postfeminist attempt
to engage youth in discussions of autonomy and finding oneself. Kapurch (2016),
too, suggests that the story of Tangled is an exploration of Rapunzel (young Rapunzel
is voiced by Delaney Rose Stein while older Rapunzel is voiced by Mandy Moore)
separating from her mother and developing her avowed identity. Instead of holding
to the anxieties of sex before marriage and teen pregnancy characteristic of its prede-
cessors, Tangled focuses on the other themes of the originals, such as safeguarding the
young and the desire for freedom (Magunusson 2016). Its plot has shifted: Rapunzel
is still trapped in a tower by Mother Gothel (voiced by Donna Murphy), main-
taining the Gothic undertones of entrapment and isolation, but the motivations
for imprisoning Rapunzel have changed. Rapunzel wrongly believes staying in the
tower will protect her from the threats posed by the outside world. In reality, the
 Mother Knows Best 197

viewers are aware that Mother Gothel abducted Rapunzel and hides her in the tower
so that Gothel has sole access to the revitalizing power of Rapunzel’s magic hair.
The story becomes about Rapunzel’s desire and adventure to see the floating lights
that are released every year and about the tensions that exist between daughter and
“mother” as one strives for personal growth while the other acts in overbearing and
manipulative ways. As the story unfolds, a cast of characters is introduced including
Rapunzel’s love interest, Flynn Rider (voiced by Zachary Levi), who helps Rapunzel
on what becomes her journey of personal development and independence. The film
culminates in Rapunzel finding out she was kidnapped and is the lost princess, and
Mother Gothel’s ultimate demise. Rapunzel’s freedom becomes entwined with the
“good overcoming evil” theme.
Not unexpectedly, the Disneyfication of the Rapunzel fairy tale has seen the
content sanitized (Zipes 2011). Disney is burdened with developing creative con-
tent that is, by and large, designed to present a responsible moral vision to its
predominantly vulnerable audience of children across the globe (Ward 2002). Such
an expectation inevitably leads to Disney creations that are homogenized, simple in
their narratives, and devoid of moral complexities that were apparent in the often
culturally appropriated texts they are based upon (Hastings 1993). Yet, despite being
punctuated with the good always emerging over evil storyline (Piatti-Farnell 2019),
Tangled retains some of its deeper moral underpinnings and grapples with Gothic
themes by exploring the tendency toward excess: namely through Mother Gothel’s
obsession with youth, and as her character becomes increasingly more monstrous,
themes of selfishness, kidnapping, gaslighting, authoritarian parenting that subverts
personal growth, coercion, and murder are explored. In essence, the film responds
to the Gothic adage of depicting the “dark side of humankind” (Piatti-Farnell and
Beville 2014, 1).
The following chapter contends that as one of the most “human” villains in the
Disney universe, Gothel is among the most monstrous, and her actions function as
a commentary on troubling human practices of narcissism, inappropriate parenting
styles, the exploitation of children, and psychological manipulation. Her actions of-
fer a window into traits that humans are expected to suppress (Piatti-Farnell 2019)
and, in so doing, can prompt moral intuition and reasoning, where viewers will have
an automatic response to the good or bad actions of others, and in some cases, con-
sciously process that information to make informed judgements about society (Haidt
2001; Nairn and Matthews 2019). Therefore, Tangled is encoded with meanings that
can construct for audiences expected moral and immoral behavior in society and, in
so doing, extols these behaviors as a type of unequivocal standard communicated by
a commercially driven, patriarchal powerhouse.
198 Angelique Nairn

GOTHEL AS THE IMMORTAL NARCISSIST

Throughout Tangled, audiences witness Gothel’s narcissistic tendencies, particu-

larly as they pertain to her desire for youthfulness and immortality. The very act
of kidnapping Rapunzel so that Gothel has regular access to the healing and
youth-imbuing properties of Rapunzel’s long tresses speaks to Gothel’s near-ob-
session with aesthetics and appearance at the expense of another’s autonomy and
personal growth. Describing Gothel’s behavior, Elnahla (2015) contends that “she is
passive-aggressive, manipulative, vain and arrogant” because Gothel seeks to main-
tain her immortality by acting in contemptible ways. As she proceeds to kidnap, lie
to, and imprison Rapunzel, Mother Gothel’s behavior increasingly exhibits Gothic
tendencies identified by Botting (2012)—namely a loss of reason and morality in
favor of personal motivations. As Sanna (2015) puts it, Gothic villains are driven by
their own appetites dismissing social rules and, in so doing, act monstrously by mak-
ing what Six (2015) refers to as conscious decisions to pursue evil over good. Gothel’s
behavior and ideologies tend toward choices of evil and are morally corrupt. She is
aligned with Disney’s typical brand of evil—“villains who display an unreliable moral
code, a self-centred nature, and a distinct desire for power and destruction” (Piatti-
Farnell 2019, 43)—with Gothel’s actions and attitudes engaging adult audiences, at
least, in reflection and moral reasoning on the trend toward narcissism and ageing in
contemporary Western culture.
As Pajak (2011, 2020) argues, “narcissistic preoccupation has become a dominant
and defining theme of our culture” with humans becoming increasing self-absorbed
and self-indulgent, lacking empathy, and becoming what Lasch (1978) considers
obsessed with youthfulness and the denial of ageing. To have an aged body is to
be ugly, asexual, and undesirable, and is seen as punishment for balking against
consumerist and anti-aging movements (Clarke 2011). Therefore, while her actions
are clearly morally and legally remiss, the depiction of Gothel raises questions about
the plight of humanity and the prejudices, discrimination, and institutional policies
that exist within a society that ultimately disadvantages older people (Butler 1980).
Given that the dominant cultural imperative in Western society is to “stay young
as long as possible” (Toriajada, Dhaenes, and Willem 2018, 2), Gothel’s behavior
is not entirely unlike people continuing to pursue a youthful appearance at all costs
(Anton, et al. 2005). Today, it is not uncommon to observe women in particular
turning to cosmetic treatments, disciplined regimes, diets, and exercise (to name a
few) because these interventions are disseminated by media as solutions to slowing
the ageing process (Brooks 2017).
By offering a commentary on the perils of narcissism and obsession with ageing,
Disney can be seen to be disseminating a message of self-acceptance and body posi-
tivity; however, they could equally be accused of acting immorally by continuing to
villainize older characters (Zurcher and Robinson 2018). Because fairy tales assist in
children’s development by providing frames of reference that shape what character-
izes a villain or monster (Piatti-Farnell 2018), the regular unflattering representation
Figure 13.1. Gothel in her young form in Disney’s Tangled
200 Angelique Nairn

of older women acts as a means of socializing children into adopting the patriarchal
views that advantage the dominant elite (Hastings 1993). Unaware of the pressure
to stay young that often governs individuals’ beauty regimes, children are instead
led to believe that older women, and especially those with power and independence,
are “evil femme fatales or ugly hags” (Wohlwend 2009, 114). Older characters in
Disney films and animations have been known to be willing to sacrifice everything
for eternal youth, beauty, and influence (Perry 1999; Elnahla 2015)—the classic
example being the evil queen with her need to be “the fairest of them all.” Such
critical portrayals of older figures lead people in society to deny or mistrust those
no longer youthful (Perry, 1999), keep adults fearful of the aging process, and shape
the attitudes of children who are easily influenced by the narrative and persuasive
strategies in Disney fairy tales (Atkinson and Plew 2017; Zurcher and Robinson
2018). Instead of educating the youth by challenging and altering their conscious-
ness, Disney continues to do a disservice to older people by constructing unfavorable
attitudes among the young (Elnahla 2015). In fact, Zipes (2014) asserts that Tangled
is an act of demonizing older women.

GOTHEL AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL MANIPULATOR

Though likely unintentionally, Tangled maintains Gothic traditions by creating a

narrative that depicts Rapunzel as fearful and subject to psychological torment. As
Piatti-Farnell (2021, 286) puts it, “the scenarios of Grimm fairy tales are distinctly
Gothic, and pivot on human experiences of suffering, punishment, and isolation,”
and in the narrative of Tangled, it is no different when considering the gaslighting
behavior of Mother Gothel. To gaslight is to “emotionally manipulate a person into
believing that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mis-
taken, but utterly without grounds” (Abramson 2014, 2). In the case of Rapunzel,
Gothel makes offhand remarks such as “you know I hate leaving you after a fight,
especially when I have done absolutely nothing wrong.” She also uses the “mother
knows best” reprise to try and tell Rapunzel that she has deluded herself into think-
ing that Flynn is romantically interested in Rapunzel and convinces her that she
has misunderstood what the floating lights are by suggesting they are actually stars.
These are but a few instances where, by gaslighting Rapunzel, Gothel has achieved
what Abramson considers the main objective of gaslighters: to make the victim
feel oversensitive, paranoid, and invalidated, thereby becoming disregarded “as a
full member of the moral community” (16). In other words, Rapunzel is made to
doubt herself and, accordingly, be unable to differentiate between right and wrong,
becoming dependent on Gothel to instruct and therefore control her. Gothel, then,
has acted immorally by breaching the recognition of respect that is core to morality
and emphasizes that a person should not harm or ill-treat others (Haidt 2001). She
has had the opportunity to denigrate Rapunzel because fault-finding contributes
to making the victim feel weak, powerless, and worthless (Pajak 2011). Children
 Mother Knows Best 201

are susceptible to gaslighting by their parents because they rely on their parents for
honesty and validation (Durvasula 2019), and this can mean that Disney reinforces
the perception that children should pursue neoliberal ideologies of freedom and
autonomy from their oppressors, here presented as the controlling parent.
The psychological manipulation observed in Tangled is not just limited to gaslight-
ing but is also explored by parental expressions of disappointment. Miller-Day and
Lee (2001, 113) state that disappointment is a strategic tool used by parents to “ma-
nipulate a child’s sense of self, engender a child’s emotional dependency on parental
validation, inhibit individuation, and serve as a means for psychological control.”
The expression of disappointment by parents, and especially if they are coupled with
little digs (Miller-Day and Lee 2001), can appear to children as the withdrawing of
love or of children not meeting the high moral standards their parent expects (Patrick
and Gibbs 2012). It can produce guilt responses and a conscious need to please be-
cause children come to view the love of the parent as conditional (Miller-Day and
Lee 2001; Patrick and Gibbs 2012). Disappointment, then, can leave children feel-
ing self-doubt and is considered a means of emotional abuse enacted by narcissistic
parents (Durvasula 2019) that ultimately negatively impacts a child’s moral develop-
ment. The consequences of disappointment and other psychological abuses such as
coercion, manipulation, and blackmail are evident in the experiences of Rapunzel.
Having been on the receiving end of Gothel’s narcissistic parenting approach, where
the child essentially becomes an obedient subject (Pajak 2011), Rapunzel struggles
with her decision to pursue the floating lights and break her mother’s rules. On leav-
ing the tower she makes comments such as “Mother would be furious,” “I am a hor-
rible daughter,” and “Mother was right, I never should have done this,” and is forced
to acknowledge her failure to Mother Gothel, stating, “You were right, Mother, you
were right about everything.” These observations continue to signal to audiences the
perils of inappropriate parenting. To act in such negative and limiting ways prevents
children from overcoming what Freud (as cited in Yorke, 1988) describes as the
preoedipal stage of separation, where the ties between parent and child need to be
broken or reduced to allow for the child to undertake personal growth.

GOTHEL AS MONSTROUS MOTHER

Much like constructed expectations around youth and beauty and ideal parenting,
media messages have also disseminated the image of the ideal mother (Daniel 2006).
These mothers are said to engage in self-sacrifice (Health, O’Malley, Heath, and
Story 2016; Nelson 2018) and adhere to an ethics of care, where attending to the
needs of others is privileged above all else (Gilligan 1982). In the case of children,
exhibiting an ethics of care means mothers do whatever they can to ensure the sur-
vival of their children (Health, O’Malley, Heath, and Story 2016). They are to go
about their duty acting with sympathy, compassion, and friendship so that children
feel supported (French and Weiss 2000). In Tangled, Mother Gothel sometimes
202 Angelique Nairn

acts with an ethics of care. She buys paints for Rapunzel, offers to make hazelnut
soup—which is evidently Rapunzel’s favorite—and ensures Rapunzel’s basic needs,
as Maslow (1943) refers to them in his hierarchy of needs, are met: After all, the
audience sees the character progress from birth to a young adult. As Kapurch (2016,
45) contends, “in their secluded tower domesticity, Mother Gothel appears tenderly
devoted to Rapunzel—positioning herself as a sacrificial mother who braves the
outside world to keep Rapunzel safe inside.” Yet, Gothel is not a “good mother.”
Whether she actually “cares” for Rapunzel is contentious given whenever she tells
Rapunzel, “I love you most,” she is often touching or kissing Rapunzel’s magical
hair. She does not meet the high standards that have been constructed for mothers
because she breaches the conditions of moral respect (Ainley 2001). That is, she
exploits Rapunzel’s magic for her own desires, thereby creating a transactional rela-
tionship that ignores Rapunzel’s humanity. As Kant asserts, people should never be
used as a means to an end and to do so is to act immorally (as cited in Misselbrook
2013); thus, Gothel is failing at motherhood (O’Reilly 2021) and is also morally
deficient (Health, O’Malley, Heath, and Story 2016).
If Mother Gothel is not a good mother, it stands to reason that she is a bad mother
because she transgresses the ideal standards attributed to motherhood. The bad
mother does not adhere to the dominant ideology of motherhood, which emphasizes
a child-centered approach and predisposition toward intensive mothering (Health,
O’Malley, Heath, and Story 2016; Moir 2021). Such an approach entails mothers
being required to invest time, money, and energy in raising their children (Chae
2015). Rather, the bad mother archetype is “evil, possessive . . . destructive [and] all-
devouring” (Daniel 2006, 97), verging on monstrous by acting in heinous, unethi-
cal, and brutal ways that deviate from societal norms (Beville 2013). In the case of
Mother Gothel, her bad mothering is typified in her threatening and manipulating
of Rapunzel and the hiring of ruffians to antagonize her “daughter,” while her mon-
strosity culminates in blackmailing Rapunzel and stabbing her love interest Flynn
Rider. It is these actions and others that align with those attributed to the figures of
mothers written by male writers of Gothic texts. Much like the Gothic mothers of
Walpole and Lewis, Gothel is constructed as an “oppressive victimizer” driven to do
wrong by her child because of her irrational and maligned impulses (Kipp 2003, 55).
Her actions are driven by a thirst for eternal youth, breeding ruthlessness that marks
Gothel as what Six (2015) refers to as a moral monster. Furthermore, her parasitic
relationship with Rapunzel leads Rapunzel to experience what Taylor-Brown (2015)
considers social degeneration: Rapunzel is consumed, her life is forfeit to her host,
and she does not experience full personal growth. In short, whether intentionally or
unintentionally, Disney has drawn upon Gothic constructs to highlight the implica-
tions of vices that should repulse audiences by making monstrous “proper human
and maternal sympathies” (Botting 1994, 191).
Maternal identity is not the act of giving birth but rather the commitment to
the child (O’Reilly 2021), and given a lack of true commitment to Rapunzel,
Gothel’s character contributes to the representation of mothers as villainous in the
 Mother Knows Best 203

media (Creed 1993; Gibson 2020). That is, to celebrate female agency and growth,
daughters are often depicted in popular cultural texts as being pitted against their op-
pressive and villainous mother figures, and it is only by distancing themselves from
their mothers or the demise of their mothers that they gain full agency (Kapurch
2016). Such representations typify Jung’s (1967) dual mother argument that sug-
gests that the “hero” has two mothers: the ideal-nurturing mother and the terrible
or devouring mother. Gothel is the latter, as the discussion above suggests because
she functions as a parasite does, exploiting Rapunzel and taking from her everything
required for personal development. It is only by overcoming her that Rapunzel finds
independence and reasserts her identity. Here, the viewers see righteous behavior
rewarded (Tamborini 2011): Gothel is killed, and Rapunzel’s life is made whole
again. Gothel’s demise conforms to audiences’ moral judgments of deservedness and
victim sympathy because to veer from the expected courses of social order could lead
to audience dissatisfaction with the narrative (Raney 2005). However, to create these
moral distinctions, Disney contributes to degrading mothers, solidifying what it is
to be a good mother, and inadvertently condemning those who might, on occasion,
bribe, control, and assert their authority over their children. Of course, Gothel is an
extremely bad mother, but that does not mean her behavior is not, at least in some
ways, exhibited by parents in contemporary society. Children, with their lack of
media literacy (Nelson, Atkinson, Rademacher, and Ahn 2017), may not understand
the distinction between Gothel’s cruelty and the reprimanding behavior of their
mothers, causing confusion at best, and tension between parent and child at worst.
As an aside, although the fairy tale of Tangled adheres to what is expected of a
liberating story, where the “oppressed protagonists learn to use their powers to free
themselves from parasitical creatures” (Zipes 1982, 317), it should be noted that it is
not Rapunzel’s actions alone that free her from Mother Gothel’s dominance. Flynn
Rider contributes to the separation of mother and daughter by cutting Rapunzel’s
hair and the perceived ties to her magic, and it is her pet chameleon Pascal that trips
Gothel so that she falls to her death out the tower window. In other words, Rapunzel
gains agency by removing Gothel’s ability to control her, but this only eventuates
because Gothel’s influence is diluted by the people and animals with whom Rapunzel
comes into contact. Rapunzel’s agency is, in part, a product of the interventions of
others.
For much of the film, Rapunzel believes Mother Gothel is her mother, but Gothel
lacks maternal inclinations, becoming a passive-aggressive nightmare (Elnahla
2015). Her lack of maternal motivations, despite being called Mother Gothel, are
just some of the problematic aspects of her character which, nevertheless, reinforces
Creed’s (1993, 118) position that “whenever a woman is represented as monstrous
it is always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions.” Of particular
concern to both Nelson (2018) and DelRosso (2015) is the potential to view Gothel
as Rapunzel’s adopted mother, because Gothel can be said to “reify the stereotype of
the inadequate, disturbingly intense, morally compromised, or unhinged adoptive
mother” (Nelson 2018, 103). This can potentially shape the reactions of children to
204 Angelique Nairn

their adoptive parents. Gothel’s depiction as bad and even monstrous, then, main-
tains unhealthy stereotypes that can adversely impact how children perceive their
mothers given that the cumulative effect of exposure to such ideas can distort un-
derstandings (Gerbner, 1970; Zurcher and Robinson 2018). For instance, Gothel is
not the first, nor is she likely to be the last bad mother depicted in Disney narratives.
One need only look at the Disney back catalog or recent releases for evidence of the
proliferation of bad mothers, the condemning of mothers, or even their absence: the
evil stepmothers of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (David Hand, 1937) and
Cinderella (Hamilton Luske, Wilfred Jackson, Clyde Geronimi, 1950) (Fraustino
2015) and the smothering mothers in Brave (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman,
2012) (Kapurch 2016) and the latest Pixar and Disney collaboration Turning Red
(Domee Shi, 2022). As Do Rozario (2004) asserts, Disney has a habit of repressing
and victimizing children by pitting women against women, or as is the case here,
mother against daughter, and in so doing “preserves long-standing cultural anxiet-
ies . . . about smother-love and adoptive mothers’ selfishness” (Nelson 2018, 111)
that can negatively impact the attitudes and moral understandings of generations
to come.
The portrayal of Gothel as a bad mother also offers a commentary on what con-
stitutes appropriate parenting styles. Gothel asserts her parental power in exchanges
with Rapunzel. She is quoted as saying, for example, “Don’t ever ask to leave this
tower again,” “we are done talking about this,” and she threatens Rapunzel by stat-
ing, “You want me to be the bad guy? Fine, now I’m the bad guy.” She refuses to
negotiate with Rapunzel, relying on the ideological premise that “mother knows
best.” According to Baumrind (1991), there are four parenting styles: authoritarian,
authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved. The authoritarian style is characterized
by a demanding and unresponsive parent; the authoritative style sees parents bal-
ance demands with open communication that encourages some autonomy in their
children; the permissive style is where parents lack any control, and the uninvolved
styles are where the parents are negligent (Klein and Ballantine 2001). The “ideal”
parenting style is one where the parents are authoritative, which, as the examples
above suggest, Gothel is not. Her approach to “parenting” Rapunzel can function
as a cautionary tale for parents about what they should avoid doing to allow their
children to flourish. Again, Disney is setting prototypical standards for what is right
and wrong when it comes to the raising of children, implying through the progres-
sion of the narrative that the company’s expertise and approaches are correct on
this parental matter. That is, Disney does not condone the authoritarian parenting
style, which may produce obedient children (Joseph and John 2008). They ensure
parents receptive to their message reject such an approach by emphasizing how it
can lead to children who are often antisocial, low in social competence, lacking in
self-esteem, and suffering from anxiety and depression (Hart, Bush-Evans, Hepper,
and Hickman 2017; Joseph and John 2008).
The demure way Rapunzel carries herself when interacting with Gothel sup-
ports Disney’s objection to authoritarian parenting, especially when the unfolding
 Mother Knows Best 205

narrative also captures the consequences of such a parenting style. The tale of Tangled
demonstrates how being controlling, directive, and a hostile parent inhibits the
growth of a child (Hart, Bush-Evans, Hepper, and Hickman 2017) and, as a result,
rebellion will ensue (Tapia, Alarid, and Clare 2018). Whether intentional or not,
the movie challenges adults to reflect on their parenting approach, but it is worth
noting that “these types of messages may affect children’s views of the roles parents
undertake” (Zurcher, Brubaker, Webb, and Robinson 2020, 146), and at the very
least, could influence the parent-child dynamic for the sake of a plot device. Much
like the discussion on ideal mothers referred to above, Disney offers a commentary
on the role of parents, the styles parents should adopt, and the techniques deemed
appropriate in the upbringing of children. In other words, they act as an authority
on what should and should not be the right and wrong ways to raise a child.

CONCLUSION

Although Tangled is riddled with classic tropes of good versus evil, love conquer-
ing all, and acting on free will, it clearly still has Gothic undertones clothed in a
Disneyfied fairy tale. As Byron (2012, 187) articulates, Gothic stories seek to “define
and categorize the features of culture and crisis . . . to re-establish the boundaries that
the threatening other seems to disrupt and destabilize.” In Tangled, the threatening
other manifests in and around Mother Gothel. Her “hidden and forbidden desires”
(Piatti-Farnell 2018, 92), such as an obsession with youth, her negative parenting
styles, and general narcissism, challenge societal conventions and highlight what is
deemed deviant and in need of rectifying for consensus and civic harmony to be
returned to equilibrium. Her treatment as the monster or villain of the story fulfills a
cautionary function and, as Botting (2013, 9) attests, can help people to distinguish
“norms and values from deviant and immoral figures.” In essence, Gothel acts mon-
strously, psychologically abuses Rapunzel, imprisons her in a tower, and accordingly
stunts her personal and emotional growth, all for the sake of her own narcissistic
agenda. Gothel’s actions transgress boundaries of appropriate behavior and offer an
insight into the dark recesses of the human psyche, thus exploring norm violations
that have far-ranging consequences for herself and others. The unfolding narrative
helps viewers, both adults and children alike, to undertake moral reasoning, develop-
ing for themselves a clear understanding of how to be a good parent, mother, and
child. What is key is that Mother Gothel meets her demise at the end of the film,
ensuring that any moral reasoning and reflection encountered by the audience is
directed toward understanding that to transgress is to be condemned and to breach
the moral conditions that ensure social order: the not-so-subtle assertion that if “you”
act in these ways, you too will be ostracized, denounced, and criticized. Tangled is
instructive then, educating people on the prevailing concerns of contemporary soci-
ety while socializing impressionable youth on the governing moral codes of Western
society.
206 Angelique Nairn

Tangled may be an act of fiction, but much like other media offerings, it can
generate discussions of the “cultural anxieties of the times” (Botting 2013, 14) by
exploring contemporary issues in the narrative. Here, these concerns seem to cen-
ter around an increase in individuals’ narcissistic tendencies, practices of smoother
love that subvert neoliberal ideologies of freedom and autonomy, and the tendency
toward the psychological manipulation and gaslighting that appears to be more com-
monplace within society. By documenting these immoral acts, Disney inevitably uses
narrative fidelity to act as a moral educator (Ward 2002), but the concern is that the
Disneyfication of such cultural anxieties prompts a loss of nuance and complexity
that might offer explanations for immoral behaviors. That is, Disney tends to, as
Piatti-Farnell (2019, 43) argues, develop their “own brand of evil,” which sees a lack
of consideration for social factors that may prompt villainy and monstrosity. For
example, a propensity toward narcissism in real life is communicated and perhaps
encouraged by the media, with reality television (Collins 2017; Hill 2022) and social
media (Singh, Farley, and Donahue 2018), as examples, encouraging viewers to en-
gage in excessive self-love. Yet these contextualizing factors that explain the problems
of narcissism in society are not able to be adequately explored in a children’s film.
All that is made clear is narcissism is bad. In essence, Disney attacks those who are
narcissistic within society but does so in a morally simple rather than morally com-
plex way that sees the raising of concerns about cultural ills with little to no context
(Hasting 1993).
Disney has privileged certain dominant views about parenting that can see the pit-
ting of children against parents as a means of gaining independence and advocating
for individuality but by being sanitized and prescriptive, stories like Tangled limit op-
portunities for children to explore their “infantile curiosity” (Zipes 2011, 198) and
moral imagination. As Hastings (1993, 83) attests, Disney has long been “criticized
on ideological grounds for reinforcing and/or contributing to dominant patriarchal
and capitalist systems.” In further criticizing Disney, Zipes (2011) suggests that fairy
tales such as Tangled developed by the Disney corporation establish the conditions
for what is right and wrong, good and bad, and communicate these to a global audi-
ence as if they are true, which can undermine the messages of the original texts, on
which many of the Disney feature animation films are based. The mark of Disney is
to insist upon “taming if not instrumentalizing the imagination to serve the forces of
law and order” (Zipes 2011, 198) and, as a corporation with a global reach, they have
access to the eyes and ears of vulnerable and easily influenced audience members.
Accordingly, Disney has the resources and ability to churn out content, which means
exposure to certain messages is regular and can have cumulative effects on impres-
sionable youth (Gerbner 1970). Not all of those effects may be negative but, at the
very least, films such as Tangled tell stories that can shape the moral understandings
of children and consequently, how they relate to the world around them.
 Mother Knows Best 207

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14
The Vampire Queen of the Disney
Scene
The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The
Little Mermaid
Simon Bacon

Walt Disney is famous for its animated adaptations of well-known fairytales

with their popular roster of Disney princesses. Opposite the princesses is a list of
equally well-known Disney villainesses made up of stepmothers, evil witches, and
power-hungry women that have a vendetta against their respective princesses or, al-
most as frequently, their fathers. In many ways, these villainesses are descended from
the original Disney female villain: the Evil Queen from Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937); however, there is also a deeper, darker influence on
both the queen and those that followed in her wake: the female vampire. As shall be
argued here, the popular, early Hollywood figure of the “vamp” and its supernatural
counterpart, the vampire, were integral to the creation and Gothicization of the
Disney villainess and their ongoing popularity within the Disney universe.
This “vampyness” of Disney’s female villains arguably reaches its apotheosis in
the character of Ursula in The Little Mermaid (John Musker and Roger Clements,
1989). Ursula is a creature of intersections, of different threads coming together to
produce something greater than the sum of her parts. Disney’s take on this sea witch
villain derived from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale not only fuses the figures
of the vamp and the female vampire, but then—unique within Disney’s pantheon of
female villains—transforms her into part cephalopod, which foregrounds her exotic
strangeness and unbridled animalistic nature. In this, she is the exception that proves

211
212 Simon Bacon

the rule: Disney’s female villains are all monstrous figures, defined by hunger and
lacking in humanity.

URSULA THE VAMP

It is worth noting from the start that female villains in Disney films for many are
often the most interesting part of the narrative because they are forces of disruption
within otherwise familiar or bland worlds. The villains are interesting because they
are rule-breakers. Disney, of course, is well known for changing, or “Disneyfying”
narratives so that they more clearly promote the importance of heteronormativity
and “family” values (Putnam 2013, 147). Disney villains, in contrast, are constructed
as opposed to these values; their inevitable vanquishing at the end of the stories thus
vilifies their difference while reenforcing the heteronormative order. Disney’s female
villains tend to be represented as more mature women who refuse to be pushed aside
by a society that values pliant youth and beauty over age, experience, and knowledge.
Particularly in early iconic female villains such as the Evil Queen from Snow White
and Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi, 1959), the Gothicization
they undergo is powered by the intersection of their advanced age and their vampish-
ness, which often sees them feeding on youth and beauty for their own selfish ends.
Vampishness here is specifically related to the idea of the vamp that was some-
thing of an early Hollywood affectation of the femme fatale or fatal woman (see
Weinstock 2014, 37–43). The term itself appears to have originated in reference
to Philip Burne-Jones’s painting The Vampire (1897), which depicts the figure of
a triumphant woman atop that of a prone, possibly dead man on a bed—and for
which the artist’s cousin, Rudyard Kipling, wrote an accompanying poem of the
same name. The vamp then was a woman that took pleasure in destroying men and
had “the mark of the predator upon them” (Dijkstra 1986, 348). More specifically,
the vamp was a woman who lived only for pleasure, had no interest in being a wife
or a mother, and even purposely brought about destruction of the family unit. As
noted by Kriss Ravetto, the vamp was “the evil twin of the ‘good’ woman” (2001,
67), where the latter was an extension of the Victorian idea of the “Angel in the
House” that, according to Carol Senf, was the source of familial and “domestic bliss”
in the nineteenth century (Senf 1988, 99). As a reaction to late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century agitation on the part of women for extended rights and increased
autonomy, the vamp and the closely connected figure of the femme fatale had some-
thing of a golden age in the popular imagination of the fin de siècle, particularly in
work by artists Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, Gustav Klimt, and Lotte Pritzel,
among others, depicting scenes in which unbridled female sexuality brings about the
ruin of men (Dijkstra 1986, 348).
American film of the early twentieth century took to the trope with gusto as it
allowed for audience-pleasing displays of titillating female sexuality while simultane-
ously enforcing a message of the importance traditional morality. The various studios
 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 213

quickly found actors, such as Alice Hollister and Theda Bara, whom they could
market as “vamps” or “vampires” and featured them in films such as The Vampire
(Robert G. Vignola, 1913) and A Fool There Was (Frank Powell, 1915) respectively.
These films invariably showed their main “vampy” character making men fall in love
with them, forcing them to sacrifice their families, and leading them to financial ruin
in what is depicted as a direct attack on the notion of family. In Disney films, female
villains are cut from this cloth as they are represented as either “anti-family” or as de-
termined to displace their new man’s previous family. As noted by Tracey L. Mollet,
this is an important part of the Disney villain’s construction as it clearly conveys the
message to women that choosing a path other than marriage and motherhood will
“end badly” (2020, 25). Since, however, Disney cannot depict unbridled sexuality
in animations meant for children (although, as we shall see, Ursula comes closest),
these vampish qualities of female villains are then redirected into a self-obsession and
a hunger for beauty and youth.

THE DISNEY VILLAINESS

The Evil Queen in Snow White borrows from the vamp in being constructed as a
self-centered woman with no interest in family who is obsessed by being the “fair-
est of them all” and plans to kill her stepdaughter to achieve this aim. However,
her quest for beauty is not one that is aimed at sexual power over men, but rather
immortality and “sucking” the life of those around her to accomplish this—a
Gothicized representation of female villainy that fuses the figure of the vamp with
that of the vampire. While it is never made explicit, the film implies that the Evil
Queen wants to suck the youth out of Snow White so that she herself remains young
and beautiful; indeed, her transformation into an old crone as she delivers the poi-
soned apple to Snow White can be taken as implying that, not unlike the portrait of
Dorian Gray, her true self is a haggard old woman.
Cinematic folklore claims that Disney envisioned the Evil Queen to be short and
round—one imagines something a little more akin to the Red Queen in Alice in
Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, and Hamilton Luske, 1951), but
after a trip to Europe Walt Disney decided on a taller figure with more noble bearing.
It is purely conjectural—though in line with Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s observation about
the convergence of the creation of the original Disney villains with the popularity of
Depression-era horror films such as Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein
(James Whale, 1931) (2019, 47)—but it is interesting to note that the year previ-
ous to Snow White, Dracula’s Daughter (Lambert Hillyer, 1936) had been released,
which features a tall woman of noble bearing and European descent, the Countess
Marya Zeleska (Virginia Holden). Like the Evil Queen, Countess Zeleska also likes
to draw the life out of young, innocent girls—though their respective relationship
to mirrors is very different. This relationship between female vampires and female
214 Simon Bacon

Disney villains then continued to strengthen, as demonstrated by Maleficent in

Sleeping Beauty.
Maleficent is of particular significance in the journey to Ursula as she more ex-
plicitly references the figure of the female vampire, and in a way that directly feeds
into the vampyness of the sea witch.1 Although Maleficent isn’t trying to steal the
youth of a young girl, she is out for revenge on a man, King Stephen, who failed
to invite her to the celebration of his daughter’s birth and, as observed by Mark

Figure 14.1. The Evil Queen from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty

 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 215

Helmsing, her transgressive queerness is diametrically opposed to the “straight”

heteronormativity of the King (2016, 70–71). Maleficent herself is largely dressed
in black and often flowing robes along with her distinctive horned headdress. While
she doesn’t obviously look like a vampire, her distinctive features and makeup, along
with details of her clothing, are arguably influenced by Vampira (Maila Nurmi),
the well-known host of a popular horror-film show in the Los Angeles area between
1954 and 1955. The dramatic makeup and face-shape of Vampira are very like that
of Maleficent and, although the former’s clothes were more often tight to her body,
the tendriled sleeves and dress hems very much resemble the edges of the flowing
cloaks and sleeves of the Disney villain.2
Also of importance here is Maleficent’s ability to transform—a characteristic
that, ever since Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), is often associated with the vampire,
and was also part of the Evil Queen’s repertoire in Snow White. For Maleficent and,
indeed, the Evil Queen, this is largely attributed to her positioning as a witch, yet
for the former this has more symbolic resonance to the vampire. Indeed, this trans-
formative ability resonates with her inherent queerness as a vampire—Weinstock
notes how vampires are inherently queer in their ability to highlight the culturally
constructed nature of normativity (2012, 53). In her final battle with the prince,
Maleficent turns into a dragon—itself having a vampiric resonance in relation to
the name “Dracula,” which means “son of the dragon” in Romanian and can also
connote the devil—and is then killed by a sword to the heart, which replicates the
idea of staking a vampire and which causes her to disintegrate into nothingness.
Significantly, this is done by a virile young man, again mirroring Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, where only men are seen to kill vampiric women.
Following in Maleficent’s wake are Cruella De Vil from One Hundred and One
Dalmatians (Wolfgang Reitherman, Clyde Geronimi, and Hamilton Luske, 1961)
and Madame Medusa from The Rescuers (Wolfgang Reitherman, John Lounsbery,
and Art Stevens, 1977). Less magical than Disney’s fairytale witch-derived female
villains, Cruella is nevertheless every bit as vampy—and is, as Elizabeth Schiffler
describes her, the “godmother of goth” (2019, 248). With her distinctive black
and white hair, she copies many of the vampire traits of a black dress and red-lined
coat/cloak. Her skinny frame makes her appear almost skeletal and, upon occasion,
even like Count Orlok, the feral vampire from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece of
German expressionism, Nosferatu. Of note is the fact that her canine teeth are often
shown as being quite pronounced, a feature of many of the more Gothic-oriented
villains in Disney.
Madame Medusa is, like Cruella, human, but provides some more obvious points
of comparison to the later Ursula. She is presented as a “grande dame” who wears
excessive makeup, has a fuller figure and snakelike tresses of hair (hence her name
Medusa), and she has two “pets,” Brutus and Nero, who are alligators. Like Cruella,
she is very driven to her goals and reveals often elongated canines and clawlike fin-
gers, yet is unable to wield magic and is ultimately left to the recriminations of her
216 Simon Bacon

pet alligators. Importantly, both figures reflect the essential quality of the vamp in
positioning their own selfish desires in direct opposition to family and motherhood.

MYTHIC BEGINNINGS

Disney’s casting of female villains as vamps who seek to undermine conventions of

normative heterosexuality and the nuclear family arguably culminates in Ursula,
who borrows from her spiritual forbears the Evil Queen, Maleficent, Cruella,
and Madame Medusa, and then out-vamps them all. This represents a significant
rescripting of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairytale that serves as the film’s
source text, which itself is derived from a well-developed corpus of mermaid “tales.”
Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” first published in 1837, follows in a long tradi-
tion of European tales about mermaids or, more specifically, water nymphs. Among
the best-known tales of these creatures is that of Melusine, the story of which spread
across Europe from Northern France down to the Mediterranean beginning in the
tenth century (Kemmis, Elmis, and Urban, 2017). The core of the narrative involves
the marriage of Melusine, a part human, part water-nymph/mermaid, to a nobleman
who later discovers she is part fish/serpent. Melusine’s story interestingly lacked an
evil antagonist until Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 novella Undine. Here, the
water nymph, Undine, needs to get married so that she can receive a soul from her
husband—she doesn’t take his but rather shares it. She marries a knight but, after she
vanishes, he breaks his oath to her by marrying another, so Undine returns and kills
him. Fouqué’s version of the tale also introduces Kuhleborn, Undine’s shape-shifting
uncle, who interferes with his niece’s plans.
Andersen, some twenty-six years later in 1837, made the nymph a mermaid,
kept the idea of soul-sharing, but exchanged Kuhleborn for a sea witch. Also, in
Andersen’s version, the onus is far more on the Little Mermaid, who is nameless, to
facilitate her own transformation into a human and secure the love of the prince.
To undergo this metamorphosis not only does the Little Mermaid have to disobey
her father, but procure the services of a sea witch. The witch, who is also nameless,
is Gothicized more by the descriptions of her surroundings than of herself, and she’s
shown to live in the underwater version of “the land beyond the forest”—just as
Transylvania is described in Dracula: a place so dangerous and foreign this it is liter-
ally beyond the life and civilization of her father’s kingdom. This aquatic vampire’s
lair is in a barren part of the ocean floor, beyond dangerous whirlpools and bubbling
mud, with the witch’s hut located in the middle of a forest of polyps whose tendrils
are like dead man’s fingers. The house is surrounded by writhing sea snakes and is
“built of the white bones of shipwrecked human beings” (Andersen 1837, 7). While
the setting is forbidding, the witch’s motives are not altogether clear, and Andersen
gives no real description other than she let “a toad to eat from her mouth” and
that “horrible fat water-snakes she called her small chickens” are allowed to “romp
around on her large, spongy breast” (Andersen 1837, 7) She also cackles “loudly
 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 217

and horribly” (Andersen 1837, 8). She has been described variously as “benevo-
lent” (Prošić-Santovac 2014, 31), “an ambivalent mother” (Fisk 2014, 173), and a
Faustian “devil” (Bane 2013, 298).
For the mermaid’s transformation to happen, special blood magic is required,
and so the witch takes a cauldron and makes “a deep scratch in her breast and let[s]
her black blood drip down in it” (8). From this, a potion is made that will give the
mermaid legs in exchange for the girl’s tongue. This is the last we see of the sea witch
in the story, although she is mentioned later near the story’s end when the mermaid’s
plan has gone awry and the prince has married another. The mermaid’s sisters have
visited the witch and, in exchange for their lustrous hair, they receive a knife with
which the mermaid could kill the prince and get her tail back.
Unsurprisingly, Disney’s adaptation of The Little Mermaid in 1989, some
152 years after Andersen’s story, changes the details yet again, replacing a soul and
heaven as the mermaid’s goal with love and perfect domesticity and, in keeping
with Disney’s template for female villains, giving the witch a far more prominent
role. In the Disney version, the young mermaid, Ariel, falls in love with the human
Prince Eric, and so goes to a sea witch who swaps her tail for legs so she can follow
him onto the land, but at the cost of her voice. However, Ariel only has three days
within which to receive a “true love’s kiss” or she will return to being a mermaid and
belong to Ursula. Unlike Andersen’s sea witch, Ursula gets actively involved in trying
to make the mermaid fail as she is seeking revenge on Ariel’s father King Triton. Of
course, because this is a Disney film, the ending sees the girl get her man and live
happily ever after.
The Disney version thus positions Ursula as the primary antagonist and even gives
her a backstory. She used to live in the palace of King Triton, but because of her greed
and use of dark magic was banished. Now she lives inside the skeleton of a levia-
than, shrouded in darkness and surrounded by polyps, not unlike Andersen’s witch’s
lair—but here they are the remains of her victims after Ursula has consumed their
souls. When Ariel arrives to ask for Ursula’s help, she instantly begins to glamour and
seduce the innocent girl into signing away her soul in return for transforming her tail
into legs. Ursula undulates and swirls around the girl performing a cabaret-style song
(“Poor Unfortunate Souls”), convincing her to accept the deal that will surely fulfill
her deepest desires and suggesting she is doing Ariel a favor with only the slightest
possibility of failure. This first stage of the deal requires Ariel’s voice, which Ursula
draws out and places in a shell around her own neck, with Ariel’s soul being forfeit
should she not receive her true love’s kiss in the allotted time period. Of course,
Ursula fully expects Ariel to fail, which will allow her not only to take her revenge
on King Triton for banishing her, but also possibly to allow her to exact something
even more precious from her father, the kingdom of Atlantica itself.
Ariel goes to the beach where she had earlier saved and fell in love with Prince
Eric, and where he finds her now and takes her to his castle. Even though she can’t
speak, things are going very well until Flotsam and Jetsam tell Ursula what’s going
on, and she feels compelled to intervene. She transforms into a beautiful human girl,
218 Simon Bacon

Vanessa, who appears on the same beach singing, but with Ariel’s voice. Eric, recog-
nizing the singing voice that he heard after being saved from drowning, goes to her,
and Vanessa/Ursula quickly glamours him to fall in love with her. Pressing her advan-
tage, Vanessa gets Eric to arrange their marriage for the following day on a barge at
sea. However, Ariel discovers that Vanessa is actually Ursula, pursues the couple, and
boards the wedding barge together with all manner of sea creatures. In the ensuing
hubbub, the shell containing Ariel’s voice is broken so that the mermaid can once
again speak and the glamouring spell over Eric dissipates. However, Ariel’s three
days are up, so the witch grabs her and begins dragging her down to her watery lair.
Triton intercepts them and, sensing the metaphorical blood in the water, Ursula
becomes more vampiric in appearance with her canine teeth looking increasingly
like fangs as she cajoles and glamours the sea king into offering himself in place
of his daughter. Once this is done Triton becomes a polyp, and his golden crown
and triton fall to the ocean floor, where Ursula picks them up, assuming the power
over the ocean that they confer. Ariel attacks her, causing Ursula to accidentally kill
Flotsam and Jetsam. Now enraged, Ursula’s monstrous and excessively vampiric self
erupts from her body, causing her to get bigger and bigger until she assumes the size
of the gigantic mythological cephalopod, the kraken, and towers above the ocean
like a colossus. Here, her “fangs” are even more pronounced and, like her vampire
forefather, Count Dracula, she has control over the weather and the sea, and conjures
a storm to try and kill both Ariel and Prince Eric. Using the trident, she creates a
huge whirlpool that lifts all the wrecked ships from the ocean floor back up to the
surface, where Eric manages to board one. As the ship crests the top of the water fun-
nel that Ursula is in the middle of, he steers it directly at her so that its broken fore-
mast literally stakes her through the heart. Ursula’s body, jolted by electric charges,
disintegrates into ash, which slowly sinks to the ocean floor and, as it does, the souls
released from her vampiric body return to the polyps in her lair allowing them to
transform back into their former selves. The ending is particularly typical of vampire
stories in which, upon being killed with a wooden stake, the vampire disintegrates
and those who were “turned” by it become human again. This detail in particular
shows us that Ursula’s monstrosity is fueled by her representation as being a vampire.3

THE VAMPIRE QUEEN

As the overview of the film above suggests, Disney’s sea witch is very different from
the unnamed one described in Andersen’s story. While the original mentions she
has an ample bosom and keeps fat water snakes as pets, there otherwise is not much
other concrete description of what she looks like. We assume she is probably not
unlike the mermaid in having a tail rather than legs but that is all. In many senses
then, Ursula is a completely new creation, taking the slight details of Andersen’s
story and creating a larger-than-life character who quite literally wants to consume
the whole world. The most cited influence on the look and character of Ursula is the
 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 219

performer Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead, 1945–1988), who was a larger-than-life

figure well known for an over-the-top drag persona in theater, music, and film.
Sporting a peroxide wig and garish eye and face makeup, Divine was known for
sexually explicit and tasteless humor, especially in various films by the director John
Waters, including Mondo Trasho (1969), and Pink Flamingos (1973). Disney toned
down Divine’s “on-screen persona of sex-mad, evil-loving, big-bosomed sex goddess”
(Prono 2008, 94), of course, but also infused it with a large dash of the over-the-hill
movie-star character of Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) from Sunset Boulevard
(Billy Wilder, 1950), making Ursula even more theatrical in her interactions with the
mermaid—and more threatening in terms of the hatred for youth and beauty that
might steal the limelight from the sea witch’s show. Drag is an important reference
point here, if largely due to the connection to Divine, and much has been written on
how many of the Disney villainesses are based on drag queens or “women in female
drag” (see Griffen 2000, 72). In Ursula’s case, this presents as a form of excess—her
exaggerated, almost operatic performance of femininity—which more clearly limns
the cultural construction of normativity that exists outside her own realm.
Ursula is presented as an amply proportioned figure with a large bosom, upper
arms, and neck, and a shock of shortish white hair that waves upright on her head

Figure 14.2. Ursula from The Little Mermaid showing her tentacles
220 Simon Bacon

like a watery crown. If Madame Medusa is depicted as a sagging image of a fading

star, Ursula, in contrast, is one still bursting with life. As with Divine, she has a large
mouth, which is emphasized by bright red lipstick, and dramatic eye makeup topped
off by a beauty spot on her cheek. She wears diamond-shaped earrings and a golden
shell round her neck with curiously gray skin—which can also seem to change color
emphasizing her magical nature and her connection to Cephalopoda. She is outfitted
in a tight black evening dress, which seems as much part of her skin as it is a separate
garment, as where the hem of the skirt should be there are octopus tentacles (she ac-
tually has six rather than eight, which does not seem to have any significance). This is
an important detail of her construction not only for the fact that it intimates that her
“look”—as in the clothes she wears—are an inherent part of her material being (not
unlike Dracula’s cape and clothes that take part in any physical transformation he
undergoes), but also for how it reinforces Ursula’s vampy and vampiric credentials.
Indeed, her part-octopus nature is central to the queerness and Gothicization of her
body, manifesting as an excess that does not just make her an other, in the way that
the mermaid is an other to humanity, but sees her (suggestively) as the “other of the
other” (where the latter is the mermaid, and seen as “normal” in underwater world).

THE INHERENT QUEERNESS OF THE OCTOPUS BODY

The sea witch’s connection to the octopus is curious as this association is found no-
where in the Andersen story and certainly does not feature prominently in other lore
around either merfolk or sea witches. Indeed, while octopi and giant squids are often
depicted as huge monsters from the deep, linked to the idea of the classical kraken
located off the coasts of Norway and Greenland, it is possibly their connection to
the monstrous feminine that is most at play here. There is evidence to suggest that
early myths around the figure of Medusa were shaped by knowledge of octopuses
that lived in the seas around Ancient Greece (Wilk 2000, 100). The decapitated
head of Medusa, who was the daughter of the sea-gods Phorcys and Ceto and whose
“feminine gaze” could turn men to stone (Newman 1997, 451), looked distinctly
like an octopus when held aloft by Perseus—the creature’s beak approximating the
dead gorgon’s protruding tongue.
Alongside this is the eroticization of the octopus in relation to the female body,
which combines to emphasize the monstrous nature of both. This is most notable
in Japanese erotic art (shunga), which depicts women in highly sexual encounters
with the sea creatures, thereby equating the otherness of female sexuality with the
undulating and amorphous nature of the octopus. This, in turn, constructs an as-
sociation between monstrosity and female desire and sexual gratification. Although
it is highly unlikely the Disney creators were aware of shunga—though potentially
Hans Christian Andersen might have been due to increased commerce between
Japan and Denmark in the eighteenth century—heightened sexuality and the un-
bridled pursuit of personal gratification are major characteristics of Ursula in the
 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 221

story, and her transgressive monstrosity is to a large extent symbolized by her highly
sensualized tentacles that are constantly moving and caressing her victims. This
positions her in stark contrast to Ariel the mermaid, who, for all her youth, beauty,
and semi-nakedness, is naive and chaste, and whose fish-tail substitutes for geni-
tals.4 More than anything else, Ursula’s tentacles make her monstrous, rendering her
as a Gothicized body that knows no borders as it penetrates the space and boundaries
of those around it. As with the female vampire, the hybrid human-octopus body ex-
presses a queer monstrous femininity that is simultaneously masculine and feminine,
human and other, sensual and deadly. Ursula directly parallels the female vampire,
the latter synonymous with aggressive and transgressive sexual behavior.
In addition to Divine, and with these vampiric associations in mind, another
influence on the creation of Ursula may have been Morticia Addams, played by
Carolyn Jones, from the highly popular Addams Family television series from
the 1960s. Although Morticia is a witch, her aesthetic in particular connects her
with Vampira and the female vampire tradition as exemplified by Gloria Holden’s
Countess Zaleska in Dracula’s Daughter and Carroll Borland’s Luna in Mark of the
Vampire (Tod Browning, 1935). Of special interest in relation to this is a well-known
publicity photograph from the series in which Jones is seen sitting in a high-backed
raffia chair wearing a black, long-sleeved dress. The cuffs on the sleeves feature sev-
eral strips of fabric hanging from them, but more striking is the hem of the dress
itself that reaches the floor and then divides out into multiple tentacle-like append-
ages that are eighteen inches to two feet long and out spread across the floor.
The connection between this and Ursula’s dress/legs is obvious, with her inherent
monstrosity increased by the fact that the fabric appendages on Morticia’s dress are
here living, fleshy limbs of the sea witch (see figure 2). The inherent malignancy of
Ursula’s limbs is increased by their almost autonomous movement, which, in part,
sees them as a separate entity to Ursula’s top half. Just like those of a real octopus,
they slither, grasp, and undulate across the ocean floor—a characteristic further em-
phasized by Ursula’s two devious pet moray eels, Flotsam and Jetsam, that move in a
similar fashion to her tentacles, making them an extension of her own monstrosity.
This hybrid nature of Ursula amplifies her otherness and monstrosity beyond that
of her predecessors as she visually always more-than-human. Although both the Evil
Queen and Maleficent can transform into other creatures, they present as human;
in contrast, Ursula is essentially monstrous in being both human and cephalopod.
When Ursula assumes human form, this is purely a means of deception, a screen
with which to mask her monstrosity. Her monstrosity is then reinforced by the sea
witch’s connection to dark forces and the destruction of male power.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Ursula is the apotheosis of a long line of Disney female villains, bringing together
traits from many of those that came before her, including the Evil Queen, Cruella,
222 Simon Bacon

Madame Medusa, and especially Maleficent, but with a kind of campy excessiveness
that makes her more villainous, more imposing, more threatening, and more danger-
ous than all of them. This excess is specifically fueled by her “vampy vampireness”—a
kind of monstrous femininity that comes from the figures of the fin-de-siècle “vamp”
and the female vampire on film that overwhelms and/or emasculates all those around
her. She drains those around her, supplementing her own sexual energy with that of
her victims—her potency is directly linked to her sexual power as represented by her
phallic tentacles and feminine bosom. In this sense she is the culmination of all the
female Disney villains who have preceded her. Ursula reigns supreme as the undis-
puted and undying Disney Vampire Queen.

NOTES

1. This is of course separate from the recent live-action films that see her more as a “warrior
mother” (Frankel 2022, 176).
2. Vampira herself, it is worth noting, was based on Morticia Addams from the popular
cartoon strip by Charles Addams in the New Yorker magazine that began in 1937—coinciden-
tally, the same year Disney’s Snow White was released.
3. Ursula’s death can be seen to be influenced by that of Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty,
where at its denouement she transforms into a huge dragon, the colors of which—black and
purple—are very similar to those of the gigantic monstrous Ursula, just before she is “staked”
in the heart by Prince Philip’s sword, causing her to disintegrate into a black smear on the
ground.
4. The film The Lure [Córki dancingu] (Smoczynska: 2015) completely changes this sym-
bolism of the tail by providing a vagina of sorts at the base of the tail so that it becomes a
sexual organ in its own right.

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https:​//​andersen​.sdu​.dk​/moocfiles​/littlemermaid​.pdf.
Bane, Theresa. 2013. Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Botting, Fred. 2008. Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Idols of Diversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-De-Siecle Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fisk, Anna. 2014. Sex, Sin, and Our Selves: Encounters in Feminist Theology and Contemporary
Women’s Literature. Eugene: Pickwick Publications.
Frankel, Valerie Estelle. 2022. The Villain’s Journey: Descent and Return in Science Fiction and
Fantasy. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Griffin, Sean P. 2000. Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside
Out. New York: New York University Press.
 The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene 223

Helmsing, Mark. 2016. “‘This is No Ordinary Apple!’: Learning to Fail Spectacularly from
the Queer Pedagogies of Disney’s Diva Villains.” In Disney, Culture, and Curriculum, edited
by Jennifer A. Sandlin and Julie C. Garlen. London: Routledge, 59–72.
Kemmis, Deva, Melissa, Ridley Elmes, and Misty Urban. 2017. Melusine’s Footprint: Tracing
the Legacy of a Medieval Myth. London: Brill.
Mollet, Tracey L. 2020. A Cultural History of the Disney Fairy Tale: Once Upon an American
Dream. London: Palgrave.
Newman, Beth. 1997. “‘The Situation of the Looker-On’: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in
Wuthering Heights” (1990). In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism,
edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 449–66.
Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. 2019. “Evil, Reborn: Remaking Disney and the Villain Intertext.” In
Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media, edited by Lorna
Piatti-Farnell. London: Palgrave, 41–60.
Prono, Luca. 2008. Encyclopedia of Gay and Lesbian Popular Culture. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.
Prošić-Santovac, Danijela. 2014. “Happily Ever After: (De)Constructing Cultural Values
across Centuries.” In Values Across Cultures and Times, edited by Biljana Mišić Ilić and Vesna
Lopičić. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 23–36.
Putnam, Amanda. 2013. “Mean Ladies: Transgendered Villains in Disney Films.” In Diversity
in Disney Films: Critical Essays on Race, Ethnicity, Gender, Sexuality and Disability, edited by
Johnson Cheu. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 147–62.
Ravetto, Kris. 2001. The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Schiffler, Elizabeth. 2019. “The Park as Stage: Radical Re-casting in Disney’s Social Clubs.” In
Performance and the Disney Theme Park Experience: The Tourist as Actor, edited by Jennifer
A. Kokai and Tom Robson. London: Palgrave, 247–64.
Senf, Carol A. 1988. The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature. Madison: The University
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Weinstock, Jeffrey A. 2014. “Sans Fangs: Theda Bara, A Fool There Was, and the Cinematic
Vamp.” In Dracula’s Daughters, edited by Douglas Brode and Leah Deyneka. Lanham, MD:
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———. 2012. The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema. New York: Wallflower.
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Press.
15
Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little
Bit Mad”
Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella
Blair Speakman

The Gothic has had a long-standing fascination with deviance and the transgression
of sociocultural norms. It frequently negotiates questions of normality through the
marked disruption of norms. The Gothic’s transgressive figures are those who are
outliers within a social system, and their failure to conform is an act of transgression
(Karschay 2015; Madden 2017). Disney’s films have long employed hallmarks of the
Gothic, evident with the depiction of vainglorious and “flamboyant” villains who of-
ten “push the boundaries of expectation and acceptability” (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 42).
These villains exhibit a “monstrous” and “predatory” desire for power and fulfillment
(Westengard 2019, 4) and are willing to go to truly extreme lengths to sacrifice those
around them to further their own goals (Piatti-Farnell 2019). This “predatory desire
for power” arguably renders Disney villains as both Gothic and queer in that their
behavior disrupts or challenges “the social order” and “threatens the conventions and
mores of the time” (Westengard 2019, 4).
One of Disney’s most iconic and recognizable villains, Cruella de Vil, is frequently
depicted as an excessive Gothic figure with a “fashionably elongated“ but grotesque
body, “hysterical laughter, brash arrogance, and trailing cigarette ash” (Tang and
Whitley 2017, 166). In Dodie Smith’s novel, The Hundred and One Dalmatians
(1956), as well as the 1961 animated adaptation and the 1996 live-action film
featuring Glenn Close, Cruella is depicted as having a “mania for fast driving, fash-
ion,” and, of course, dalmatian fur (Tang and Whitley 2017, 166). Cruella (Craig
Gillespie, 2021), set in the mid-1970s, serves as a prequel and an origin story for the

225
226 Blair Speakman

villain and chronicles Estella Miller’s (played by Emma Stone) gradual transforma-
tion from a young orphan into her alternative personality and alter ego, Cruella.
Estella’s fashion ambitions lead her to work for Baroness von Hellman (Emma
Thompson), a renowned haute couture designer who is also an equally excessive,
extreme, and even monstrous personality. At first, the baroness is a mentor of sorts
for Estella and provides the young designer with opportunities to hone her craft at
the von Hellman fashion house. However, the two soon become rivals after Estella
discovers the baroness’ involvement in her mother’s death. It is at this point in
the film’s narrative where Estella has a “coming out” moment and transforms into
“Cruella de Vil,” who displays a truly terrifying, overwhelming, and consuming
hunger for revenge.
This chapter will examine how Cruella can be read as a transgressive, queer, and
even trans character who indulges and revels in pursuits considered lurid and per-
verse. First, the intersections between the Gothic and the queer (and queer theory)
will be explored, and the chapter will provide a theoretical framework for the Queer
Gothic as a mode that can embody sociocultural anxieties arising from transgressive
social-sexual relations (Zigarovich 2018). Scholarship on the connections between
the Gothic and Disney, and the queer and Disney, will also be explored, noting that
current academic inquiry specifically on the Queer Gothic in Disney’s films (and
especially its villains) remains an area ripe for further exploration. After discussing
existing research on Cruella de Vil as a Queer Gothic villain, the chapter will explore
how, in Cruella, the titular character is depicted as being “born bad” and required to
repress her excessive desires and queerness to please her adoptive mother, Catherine
(Emily Beecham). Moreover, this chapter will examine how after “coming out” and
transforming her appearance and personality, Cruella can arguably be read as an
analogy for the idea of the closet and of queer and trans rediscovery of the self. In this
way, Disney reinforces the narrative that people are born queer while also appearing
to allow a queer and trans character, Cruella, to be the protagonist of the film and
save the day. Finally, this chapter will also consider how ultimately, through Cruella,
Disney still plays into stereotypes around queerphobia and transphobia as those who
are born queer are inherently marked as other.

APPROACHING QUEERNESS, THE GOTHIC,

AND CRUELLA DE VIL IN DISNEY

To explore Cruella de Vil as being a Queer Gothic character, it is first important

to provide a foundation for the Queer Gothic, as well as the broader connection
to Disney and Disney villains. Queer is a nebulous term with a range of different
meanings, sometimes used as an umbrella term for a “coalition of culturally marginal
sexual self-identifications“ from the LGBTQIA+ community (Jagose 1996, 1). At
other times, the term can also refer to an interdisciplinary theoretical model—queer
theory—which developed out of traditional gay and lesbian studies. Rather than
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 227

providing a strict and straightforward definition of queer theory, it should instead

be seen as a complex and highly mobile form of critique on the “historical contin-
gency of sexuality“ as well as the shifting rhetoric of “sexual politics“ (Hanson 2007,
176). As Jagose (1996) notes, this field of inquiry is often employed to examine the
“gestures or analytical models which dramatize incoherencies in the allegedly stable
relations between . . . sex, gender, and sexual desire“ (3). More specifically, it inter-
rogates a broad range of “oppositions that have traditionally characterized sexual
politics” including “heterosexuality/ homosexuality, masculine/ feminine, sex/gen-
der, closeted/out, centre/margin, conscious/unconscious, nature/culture and normal/
pathological” (Hanson 2007, 176).
Similarly, the Gothic is also a nebulous and fluid term, with a complex and rich
history; while Gothic fiction emerged in the mid to late eighteenth century with
Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), it has “found embodiment in vari-
ous cultural trends and behaviours, from fashion” to subcultures, and even Disney
villains (Piatti-Farnell and Beville 2014; see also Lloyd-Smith 2004). As Lloyd-Smith
posits, the Gothic is about a push toward extremes, excesses, and transgressions,
whether they be of cruelty, fear, or passion and sexual degradation (2004). By explor-
ing such extremes, the Gothic can provide a space to voice the suppression of past
traumas and guilts, as well as anxieties around gender and sexuality. The late 1990s
and 2000s saw the “queering” of Gothic studies alongside the emergence of queer
theory as a mode of inquiry; however, as many Gothic scholars have already acknowl-
edged, the Gothic has always been inherently queer (Zigarovich 2018, 3; Haggerty
2006; Hughes and Smith 2017; Sedgwick 1985; Hanson 2007).
In one of the seminal texts exploring the Gothic as being queer, Queer Gothic,
George Haggerty traces the historical representation of queerness in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Notably, Haggerty suggests that, at its core,
the Gothic is about desire and how that desire is then “expressed as the exercise of
(or resistance to) power,” which itself is “charged with sexual force” (2006, 2). For
Haggerty, transgressive social-sexual relations are a fundamental aspect of the Gothic,
and “terror is almost always sexual terror” (2006, 2). Similarly, Zigarovich draws
on Haggerty’s work on queerness and Gothic fiction and posits that the Gothic
frequently indulges in thoughts and behaviors often considered lurid, noting that
“extreme” and “perverse” desires can find a “home in the Gothic” (2078, 2). In
Queer Gothic texts, all normative configurations of human interaction—especially
heteronormativity—are insistently challenged and disrupted/subverted.
Although there has been increased scholarly attention on Queer Gothic, the inter-
sections between the Gothic, queerness, and Disney have not received the same level
of research. Consequently, there has been little focus on depiction of Disney villains
and their perverse and transgressive desires in relation to a Queer Gothic framework.
Despite this, there has been some scholarship on Disney villains and their relation-
ship to the Gothic. Notably, Piatti-Farnell explores the connection between the
Gothic, Disney, and Disney villains, and argues that Disney incorporates and com-
bines elements of Gothic literature and horror with fairy tales and folklore to create
228 Blair Speakman

“its own cultural product” (2019, 43). Through the figure of the Disney villain, it
becomes especially clear how Disney films themselves are “instantly recognisable”
and have distinctive characterization and outcomes (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 43). Disney
employs a Gothic horror framework as well as recurring narrative setups, character-
izations, and tropes to highlight Disney villains as having the ability to channel both
fear and desire. They are ultimately figures of “Otherness” because of their alienation
from the everyday world and inability to coexist with the “apparent boundaries of
normality” (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 56).
Connecting Disney villains to queerness, McLeod developed the term “quillain”
to refer to a “specific set of characteristics” present in Disney films which “destabi-
lise [the] ‘normalizing regimes’ of heternormativity.” In “the Disney universe queer
is someone pathologized and ostracised” (2016, 13). Because of their capacity to
threaten institutions of heteronormativity and patriarchy, these “quillains”—Cruella
de Vil, Ursula, the Evil Queen, and Maleficent, to name a few—are typically de-
picted as being grotesque women who make their queerness visible through their
“vanity, cruelty, sarcasm, and self-preservation” (Helmsing 2016, 63; Footit 2013).
In exploring the language associated with Disney villains as queer, McLeod draws
on Richard Dyer’s work on the relationship between queerness and monstrosity in-
cluding “notions and feelings of immortality, deviance . . . degeneracy” (2016, 44).
This connection between queerness and monstrosity, as McLeod suggests, becomes
especially apparent in the final act where the villain will often transform from human
to monster. McLeod provides Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty as an example, argu-
ing that when Maleficent is called a “creature” by King Stefan, it represents a shift
in transformation from human to monster, by aligning Maleficent with monstrosity
and queerness.
Although the 1961 animated adaptation, One Hundred and One Dalmatians
(Wolfgang Reitherman, Clyde Geronimi, and Hamilton Luske, 1961), largely
focuses on the dalmatians, Pongo, Perdita and their puppies, Cruella is arguably
one of the most memorable parts of the film (Berlatsky 2021). While Cruella is
also associated with monstrosity and queerness like Maleficent, before even making
her first dramatic appearance on-screen, Cruella is already introduced as a monster
through Roger Ratcliffe’s performance of the song “Cruella de Vil” (1961). The song
associates Cruella with several Gothic figures, describing her as a “vampire bat,” an
“in-human beast,” and a “devil,” evoking notions of the monstrous. The connection
between Cruella and the monstrous is further reinforced when she enters the screen,
with her vividly divided black and white hair, “Betty Lou Gerson’s vocals dripping
with bile, greed and twisted sensuality” (Berlatsky 2021, para. 2). With her long fur
coats, hysterical laughter, trailing green cigarette smoke, cruel insults, and flagrant
disregard of social norms, Cruella is depicted as an excessive Gothic, monstrous,
and grotesque figure (Tang and Whitley 2017). As Edwards and Graulund note,
monstrosity and the grotesque both merge in hybrid forms that “disrupt the borders
separating what is acceptable within the categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’”
(2013, 39). Cruella is the grotesque antagonist because she plots to murder puppies
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 229

for her own selfish luxury and excessive and extreme desire for fur—the dalmatians
are reduced to material for fur coats.

“BORN BAD . . . AND A LITTLE MAD”: THE

REPRESSION OF A QUEER IDENTITY

Cruella serves as an origin story which explores how Estella becomes the cruel and
vicious Cruella de Vil. One of the most notable changes between Cruella and the
Dodie Smith novel—as well as previous film and television adaptations—is the

Figure 15.1. Cruella di Vil from Disney’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians
230 Blair Speakman

introduction of the Baroness von Hellman (Emma Thompson). The true villain of
the film, the baroness is Cruella’s birth mother and functions as a darker and more
extreme double of her daughter. According to Piatti-Farnell, Disney’s villains “have
an unreliable moral code . . . [and] . . . a self-centered nature” (2019, 43). These
villains, as Piatti-Farnell elaborates, exhibit a truly monstrous and predatory desire
for power and fulfilment, willing to go to extreme lengths to sacrifice those around
them to further their own goals. A woman with significant status, wealth, and power
in London high-fashion society, the baroness is portrayed as an egotistical individual
who is unrestrained in her aggressive and even grotesque pursuit of her own desires
and self-fulfillment.
There are several parallels between Emma Thompson’s portrayal of the baroness
and Glenn Close’s Cruella in the live-action adaptation, 101 Dalmatians (Stephen
Herek, 1996). Notably, like Close’s Cruella, the baroness is also a wealthy, older
woman who inherited her title, wealth, power, and status from her late husband, and
is the head of a leading fashion house in London. Throughout Cruella, the baroness
is incredibly cruel and demeaning to everyone she encounters. She takes delight in
calling people “incompetent” and “idiots” while also insulting people for their physi-
cal appearance. The baroness even goes as far as to physically assault her employees
by using Tasers on them and is implied to have murdered several fashion rivals with
impunity. In this way, Emma Thompson’s character pushes the boundaries of expec-
tation and acceptability to not only further her own goals, but because she genuinely
relishes harming those around her, whether it be physically, verbally, or emotionally.
The depiction of the baroness as cunning, ruthless, and having a flagrant disre-
gard for social norms is, arguably, not surprising, given that Disney’s early animated
features have often associated evil with “female nature out of control” (Zipes 1998,
44). In Disney’s films, female villains are frequently depicted as being uncontrol-
lable women “positioned in deviant opposition to patriarchal norms of femininity”
(Tang and Whitley 2017, 166). Although these villains—like Cruella de Vil—can
subvert patriarchal institutions and structures like marriage by remaining single and
childless, they are subsequently also depicted as being “unmotherly” in an attempt to
“undermine their independence and present them as undesirable women” (Schuchter
2019, 53). This can be clearly seen in the latter half of the film when it is revealed
that the baroness is Estella’s birth mother. As Estella was the true heir to the family
fortune, the baroness wanted her daughter “taken care of ” to maintain her status as
the head of the “von Hellman” fashion empire and estate. However, unbeknownst
to the baroness, Catherine, a maid at the von Hellman estate, rescues and raises the
baby as her own. The baroness’ wealth and social status allow her to “manipulate oth-
ers and disconnect themselves from patriarchal and societal expectations” (Schuchter
2019, 50).
The film opens with a voice-over of Estella introducing herself to the audience
as someone who was “born bad” and “from the very beginning I’ve always made a
statement. Not everyone appreciated it. But I wasn’t for everyone.” Similar to many
Disney villains, the depiction of Cruella as being “born bad” suggests that “the
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 231

notion of evil” is “an inescapable natural characteristic” (Piatti-Farnell 2019, 56).

Despite Catherine’s attempt to nurture Cruella, the film explores the notion of evil
as something one cannot escape but is born with. This can be seen with Cruella not
only in her transgression of sociocultural norms, institutions, and parental rules,
but also in her appearance as she was born with her iconic black and white hair.
Discussing the flamboyant and over-the-top clothing of Disney animated villains,
Piatti-Farnell suggests that there is a connection between Disney villains’ “uncon-
trollable and often compulsive personalities and their sartorial preferences” (2019,
48). As Piatti-Farnell notes, hairstyles and accessories are particularly well-suited to
represent the “out-of-bounds personalities and desires” of Disney villains (2019, 48).
That Cruella immediately introduces us to the titular character already born with her
black and white hair works as a visual counterpart to Cruella’s claim she was “born
bad,” while establishing her “otherness” and deviation from notions of “normal.” The
connection between Cruella’s appearance and personality is further emphasized by
the baroness’ reaction—as well as the midwives who were present at the birth—who
gasp in surprise and horror at the newborn baby, giving Cruella away to her adoptive
mother, Catherine.
The association between Cruella’s hair and sense of otherness and the notion
of evil as being inescapable is further developed throughout the opening montage
scene. Following Cruella ten years later, the audience is then introduced to “Estella,”
a young girl who resists authority and relishes in compulsively breaking rules.
According to Botting, transgressive figures often serve a “useful social and regulative
function” by “distinguishing norms and values from deviant and immoral figures and
practices” (2008, 8). For Botting, the excesses of the Gothic include “the breaking
of codes of law or knowledge” as well the indulgence of “immoral desires and ap-
petites”; these displays of excess and transgression can bring norms and limits more
sharply into focus (9). Estella’s monologue frames her as being a young girl born
with the innate desire to “challenge the world,” and who revels in breaking rules and
challenging the authority figures around her. Notably, this can be seen in a montage
scene of Estella at school, where she is ostracized and bullied by her classmates and is
repeatedly sent to the principal’s office—and is eventually expelled—for standing up
for herself. A close-up shot of the principal’s leather-bound book shows an extremely
large number of black marks stamped next to Cruella’s name, which reveals that
Estella’s need to challenge and even disrupt the expectations set of her is compulsive
in nature, further reinforced by her smug smile and seemingly cavalier attitude about
being in trouble.
Estella’s desire to question and disrupt the social expectations of her as a young girl
who should be, as her own mother states, “good and polite,” hints to the audience
that she was always destined to be the grotesque figure with a bloodlust for fur coats.
Catherine tries to raise Estella as a “good” and “polite girl,” attempting to control
Estella’s transgressive behavior and desires by raising her to follow the sociocultural
norms expected of a young girl growing up in 1960s England. Estella is taught from
a young age that to be a good and polite girl, she must repress her innermost desires
232 Blair Speakman

Figure 15.2. Actress Glenn Close as Cruella in Disney’s Cruella

and behaviors, which Catherine aptly names “Cruella.” This can be most explicitly
seen when Catherine asks Estella “what do you say to Cruella when she tries to get
the better of you.” Estella responds, “thank you for coming, but you may go now . . .
Goodbye, Cruella.” In his work on the unconscious, the ego, and the id, Freud argues
that at its simplest “the essence of repression lies simply in turning something away
and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious” (1915, 147). That Estella must
actively tell Cruella to “go away” represents repression as being an active process,
and one which requires Estella to continue to repress emotions, desires, and aspects
of herself which Catherine has deemed inappropriate. Initially, the more Catherine
and her school principal implore Estella to “be good. And polite,” the more Estella
disobeys their orders, as she increasingly desires to be Cruella, her “inner self.”
Discussing the Freudian concept of “willed forgetting” and repression, Billig
argues that “if we have secrets from ourselves, then not only must we forget the
secrets, but we must also forget that we have forgotten them. . . . The secrets must
be repressed: and the fact that we are repressing them must also be repressed” (1999,
13). We see this idea of willed forgetting play out on-screen, as Estella’s need to
repress Cruella becomes extreme and excessive after Catherine is abruptly and sud-
denly murdered. Blaming herself—and her Cruella alter ego—for Catherine’s death,
Estella forgets the true circumstances of what actually took place, as forgetting the
traumatic memory allows her to—for the most part—repress Cruella. Estella is ini-
tially quite successful in forgetting Cruella and her past. After landing a job at the
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 233

prestigious House of Baroness, headed by the Baroness von Hellman herself, Estella
visits Regent Park to tell Catherine’s spirit: “I’m really trying to be the Estella you
wanted. Mostly. It’s working.” However, after witnessing the baroness commanding
her three dalmatians to attack Estella’s adoptive brothers Jasper (played by Joel Fry)
and Horace (played by Paul Walter Hauser) at a fashion gala, Estella’s memory of the
true circumstances of Catherine’s death suddenly returns, and through a flashback it
is revealed that the baroness murdered Catherine.
The shocking revelation of the baroness’ involvement in Catherine’s death is em-
blematic of one of the staple features of Gothic narratives—the discovery of buried
secrets. In Gothic narratives, the past returns with a sickening vengeance and is
frequently depicted as being a site of terror and of an injustice that must be resolved
(Spooner 2007). Exploring the representation of the past and memory in Gothic
fiction, Beville suggests that the Gothic offers perspectives on the past as being inac-
cessible and memory as unreliable (2014). In the Gothic, memories of past events
are frequently transmitted through the use of artefacts, and this can clearly be seen
when the baroness uses her whistle to command her dalmatians to viciously attack
both Cruella and her companions. After Catherine’s death, Estella blames herself
for her mother’s death and attempts to be a good and polite girl as was expected of
her; however, the use of this device suddenly unlocks Estella’s memory of the night
her mother was murdered. That Estella only remembers the true circumstances after
seeing the whistle and the dalmatians supports Dent’s contention that the Gothic
highlights how access to the past is mostly conditioned by textuality (2016). Estella
can only reconstruct her own past, identity, and trauma through the textual traces
that have survived.
While examining the Gothic and the uncanny, Morris draws on Freud’s work on
repression, suggesting that the uncanny “achieves its strange and disquieting power
by confronting us with a part of ourselves which we have denied and disowned, but
which we can never entirely expunge or escape” (1985, 307). As Morris posits, the
terror of the uncanny is released as we encounter the disguised and distorted but
inalienable images of our own repressed desire. Following this revelation, Estella be-
comes extremely distraught and enraged, and is no longer able to repress her double
and alternative personality. This shift in personality from Estella to Cruella can first
be seen when Cruella steals a luxury car and drives extremely recklessly through-
out the streets of London in a similar manner to the villain in the 1961 animated
adaptation and the 1996 live-action feature. In the scene, Cruella appears almost
unresponsive to her friends Jasper and Horace, as she is seemingly compelled to drive
recklessly, sliding the stolen vehicle into other cars parked on the street and showing
a blatant disregard for the road rules. Cruella’s mania for fast driving, fashion, and
luxury items exemplify her “unrestrained aggression in pursuing her desires” and
“types her as an uncontrollable woman (Tang and Whitley 2017, 166).
234 Blair Speakman

Coming out of the Closet: Cruella (2021) and the TransGothic

While there are glimmers of the iconic and grotesque nature of Cruella from pre-
vious adaptations in the first half of the film, it is at this point in the narrative where
Cruella completely resurfaces and takes over Estella. Alongside the reemergence of
Cruella—and therefore, the repression of the good and polite Estella—there is a
marked transformation of her appearance and perverse and obsessive desire for re-
venge. Moreover, the reintroduction of Cruella can arguably be read as an analogy for
the idea of the closet and of queer and trans rediscovery of the self and can be con-
nected to Zigarovich’s concept of the “TransGothic” (2018). Building upon a range
of seminal Queer Gothic readings—including Sedgwick (1985), Haggerty (2006),
Hanson (2007), and Hughes and Smith (2017)—Zigarovich developed the term
TransGothic to approach transgender—or “trans”—identities and embodiments as
transient or in-between, as well as transformation and reconstruction. Transgender is
an umbrella term which can be “capacious and flexible” with the “capacity to unify
formerly marginalized concepts, cultures, and groups” (Zigarovich 2018, 7).
For Zigarovich, a TransGothic approach is concerned with how the Gothic can
illuminate the boundaries “constructed by a culture to define and contain gender and
sexuality” as well as how transgender bodies “mark or disrupt this boundary crossing”
(2018, 4). Zigarovich’s edited collection on the TransGothic marks one of the few
comprehensive and interdisciplinary studies on the Gothic and transgender identi-
ties. However, it is important to note that transgender scholarship itself has long
made use of Gothic conceits and tropes. As Zigarovich suggests, bodies, gender vari-
ance, embodiments, and identities are all trans aspects which have been aligned with
Gothic elements, tropes, and rhetoric. In exploring the connection between seminal
and foundational transgender scholarship and the Gothic, Zigarovich argues:

From Stryker’s intersection of transsexual and transgender experience with monstros-

ity, to Sandy Stone’s posthuman concepts, to Gayle Salamon’s rhetorics of materiality
that explore the “phantasmatic” trans body, trans theory has always been rhetorically
haunted. This shouldn’t be a surprise given the fact that gender and sexuality have always
informed interpretations of the Gothic. (2018, 2)

By taking a TransGothic approach, we can acknowledge and explore queer and other
border-crossing concepts, primarily focusing on the transgender spectrum. While
Estella attempts to be “normal” and fit in to everyday society by blending into the
background—wearing a red wig to hide her natural black and white hair, an obvious
indicator of her otherness—Cruella eventually returns with a vengeance. As Cruella
tells her closest friends—Horace, Jasper, Anita, and Artie—“Voilà, Cruella was in a
box for a long time. Now Estella can be the one who makes guest appearances.” That
the titular character comes out as Cruella to her friends and asks them to refer to her
as such mirrors the experience of many trans individuals who change their name and
pronouns after coming out as transgender.
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 235

According to Zigarovich, the Gothic body is a space that both challenges and
reasserts the organization and control of bodies and spaces. The ways in which trans
bodies migrate not only between genders, but also undergo other transitions includ-
ing “national, cultural, economic, and geographical migrations” is often described
or depicted in Gothic terms (2018, 6). Moreover, through this transition, trans-
gender people can produce “alternative temporalities” that fall outside of middle-
class hetero- and cisnormative institutions including (heterosexual) marriage and
reproduction (Haefele-Thomas 2018, 97). Cruella metaphorically kills Estella by
changing her name and identity in order get revenge on the baroness. Not only does
she undergo a transition in identity, but also in status and fame as she becomes an al-
most overnight celebrity because of her highly stylized and dramatic fashion designs.
Cruella challenges the expectations that others, including Catherine and her friends,
to transition to an identity and body where she can start to indulge in the perverse,
excessive, and compulsive desires she had harbored for years while living as Estella.
Cruella’s transition goes further than a change in name and identity, and this
transformation is also marked by a dramatic shift in Cruella’s body, fashion, and
accessories. Exploring the body and transgender embodiment, Salamon argues that
the “material body” is “more plastic and labile than . . . body image” and can change
“size, shape, behavior, and degree of coherence” (2010, 182). This is evident in how
after her transformation, Cruella wears a red wig and thick black glasses and contin-
ues to hide in the background while continuing to work for the baroness. To protect
her identity and her wish to enact revenge on her birth mother, Cruella must wear
Estella as a costume and negotiate the tension between her identities as Estella Miller
and Cruella de Vil.
Piatti-Farnell argues that flamboyant, over-the-top, and dark-colored costumes
mark the villain as not only different and “other,” but also as a “figure of transgres-
sion” who “crosses the boundaries of conduct and normativity” (2019, 50). The use
of costumes as a sign of otherness is illustrated when Cruella dyes her hair back to its
natural black-and-white color and begins wearing excessive and extravagant outfits.
This marked change in appearance works as a visual representation of the return of
Cruella—and the repression of Estella—as the titular character has completely em-
braced her alter ego to pursue her lurid desire for revenge on the baroness. Alongside
their costumes and hairstyles, Disney villains are also depicted as “other” through
props, dialogue, and nonverbal gestures seen in how they often move in a particular
way, whether it be “deliberate and elegant movements” of Maleficent and the Evil
Queen, or the neurotic and erratic gestures of Jafar and Ursula (Piatti-Farnell 2019).
Estella is quiet, meek, and gentle and often shown either hiding in the background,
wearing disguises (large coats, scarves, and sunglasses), while, in contrast, like
Maleficent and the Evil Queen, Cruella also moves in a deliberately elegant fashion.
This can clearly be seen when she walks into Artie’s (John McCrea) secondhand
designer and vintage clothing store, as Cruella struts in her black leather outfit and
black scepter.
236 Blair Speakman

After “coming out,” Cruella expresses a compulsive and obsessive desire to upstage
the baroness and destroy her reputation as the leading haute couture designer of
London. According to Westengard, the Gothic is excessive and indulges in thoughts
and behaviors typically considered lurid and perverse (2019, 13). The Gothic’s
“tendency to dismember cultural norms” can offer queer ways of being for those
who are “Other” and “driven to resist normativity” (Westengard 2019, 13–14). This
indulgence can be seen with Cruella, as she is essentially “driven” to pursue her desire
for revenge, engaging in compulsive and destructive behaviors until she is ultimately
satisfied. Specifically, Cruella spends an extraordinary amount of time devoted to
destroying the baroness’ reputation as London’s leading haute couture designer,
starting her own fashion house as well as gate-crashing several of the baroness’ media
appearances, wearing her own brand of over-the-top costumes. However, this com-
pulsion for revenge leaves her almost unrecognizable to her friends Jasper (Joel Fry)
and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser), who reminisce that they miss Estella and consider
working with Cruella to be a “nightmare.”

CONCLUSION

Serving as a prequel and an origin story to the 1996 film adaptation, Cruella en-
courages viewers to sympathize with the titular character as the film chronicles the
events that ultimately lead to Cruella’s “embrace of wrongdoing” (Smith 2021,
para. 13). Following her transformation into Cruella, she displays a truly terrifying,
overwhelming, and consuming hunger for revenge, and kidnaps the baroness’ three
dalmatians with the intention of killing them. As Piatti-Farnell argues, “only a villain
would want to slaughter little puppies for their coats” (2019, 48). Despite her initial
desire to murder the dalmatians, Cruella grows fond of the dogs, eventually adopt-
ing them after the baroness is arrested. Although Cruella is born with excessive and
extreme desires, unlike Smith’s novel and previous adaptations, in the 2021 film, she
feels a sense of obligation to do the morally “right” thing in refraining from harming
the dalmatians. As such, rather than being regarded as monstrous and transgressive
for her penchant for fur coats, Cruella is depicted as a villainous figure because she
is queer.
Throughout Cruella, there is a sense of impending inevitability because regardless
of her actions, Estella is fated to become the wicked and flamboyant villain with
a ravenous lust for fur. While queer right activists have achieved several milestone
legal victories in recent decades, including the legalization of same-sex marriage in
the United States in 2015, many young LGBTQIA+ people struggle to come out
to family and friends (Ball 2019). Mirroring the experience of many LGBTQIA+
people, Cruella initially represses and hides her queerness as she feels uncomfortable
in acknowledging her queer and trans identity. After transforming into Cruella, she
displays a disregard for social norms and is willing to jeopardize her relationship
with her adoptive brothers, Jasper and Horace, and even risks her own life to enact
 Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad” 237

revenge. While the baroness is ultimately arrested and removed from her position
of power for her grotesque disregard of boundaries of expectation and acceptability,
Estella is redeemed, as she is a character conflicted with the desire to be a “cruel
devil” while also feeling obligated to do the “right” thing and honor her adoptive
mother. Rather than needing to mask her queer and trans identity by wearing red
wigs and disguises, Cruella is finally able to live her life openly as an excessive and
over-the-top personality with an extreme lust for fashion. By depicting Cruella as
being born “bad and a little mad,” it can be argued that Disney reinforces the nar-
rative that people are born queer and are unable to change their identity. However,
Cruella also implicitly constructs a link between the titular character’s excessive and
transgressive personality and her queer and trans identity. In this way, by depicting
Cruella as being born “bad” and “mad,” Disney continues to reinforce stereotypes
around queerness as being deviant, excessive, and transgressive through their villains.

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Index

1980s, 57, 68, 70–73, 77 body, xii–xiii, 4, 8, 10, 23, 30, 38, 58, 77,
78, 80, 102, 118, 131, 156, 171, 192,
abnormal/abnormality, xvi, 101, 103–7, 198, 215, 218, 220–21, 225, 234–35
109, 113, 118 body horror, xii–xiii
adaptation, 16, 27, 41, 53, 58–59, 116, Britain/British, 20, 77, 185, 186
143, 147, 149, 180
African American, 134, 136–38, 140, 143 cauldron, 28, 133, 217
America/American, 6, 15, 23, 34–36, 38, Chernabog, 15, 101–2, 104, 113
44, 45–47, 67, 70, 72–73, 77, 89–90, child/children/childhood, xi–xiii, xiv, xvii,
93, 106, 134–37, 140, 143 5, 15, 16, 18, 23–24, 35, 53–60, 62–64,
American Gothic. See America/American 68–70, 72, 76–79, 81, 92, 101–3, 105,
animal, xii, xvi, 7, 9–10, 29, 110, 147–61, 110, 111, 115–17, 120, 121, 124, 127,
163, 166, 169–72, 203, 211 128, 133, 147–49, 151–52, 154–55,
animal/human divide. See animal 159, 171, 181, 185, 191–92, 196–98,
animation (medium), xiv, xv, 3–4, 6, 8–10, 200–206, 213, 230
12, 25, 86–87, 117, 132–36, 170–72, celebrity, 24, 235
180, 183, 200, 206, 213 clothes/clothing, 138, 140, 188, 205, 215,
220, 231, 235
beasts, 102, 104, 110, 112, 149–51, 153, colors, 8, 44, 133, 138, 155, 158, 163, 188,
158, 172, 228 220, 222, 235
Beauty and the Beast, 104, 112, 133 Cruella (character), xi, 121, 184, 215, 216,
Black Cauldron, The, 107–110, 132, 133 222, 225, 226, 231, 232, 234–38
Black dandy, 133, 138–42 Cruella (film), 183, 225–237
Black (ethnicity). See African American culture/cultural, xiv, xv, xvii, 4, 5, 42, 44,
blood, 27, 34, 36, 57, 90, 92–93, 116, 141, 48, 54, 55, 64, 67, 71, 72, 77, 85–86,
143, 217, 218, 90–91, 95, 102–3, 105–6, 124, 131,
132, 134–39, 141–43, 150, 179, 180,

239
240 Index

182–86, 188, 192, 198, 203–6, 215, 131–44, 154–59, 163–73, 179–92, 197,
219, 225–27, 231, 234–36 200, 205–7, 212–19, 225–37
Frozen, 103, 105, 112, 183
danse macabre, 6–7, 16–17
death, xi, 4, 6, 15–20, 24, 27, 30, 34, 36, gags, 7, 9–10, 12, 15–30, 36, 44
38, 44, 47, 56, 67, 78, 80, 89, 111, games/gaming, 4, 11, 19, 85–96, 183, 184
116, 120–21, 126, 142, 154–56, 158, gender, 102, 133–34, 141, 180, 182,
163–69, 171–75, 180–82, 185, 203, 184–85
222, 226, 232 genre, xv, 21, 27, 42, 53, 54–58, 60, 62,
digital, 85–87, 89, 91–93, 92–93, 96, 192 64, 66, 86–89, 92–93, 96, 116, 150–51,
dinosaurs, 163–66, 168–75 159
Disney Channel, 53–56, 60 ghosts, xi, xii–xiv, 3, 5–6, 15, 20, 27, 30,
“Disneyfication,” 10, 115–16, 197, 206 33–34, 37–39, 40–42, 44–48, 59, 67,
Disneyland, xi, 5, 34–39, 45–49, 82, 170 87, 92, 94, 101, 132, 149, 150, 166
Disney, Walt, 5, 15–16, 30, 35–37, 45–46, god/gods, 19, 23, 27, 30, 101, 109–111,
71, 81, 132, 167, 170, 211, 213 124, 172, 220
Disney World, 34, 48 Gothic literature/novels, xi, 36, 41, 44, 54,
drag queen, 219 64, 117–18, 124–25, 132–33, 165, 183,
Dr. Facilier, 131–44 227
Gothic melodrama, 19, 20, 27, 41, 132
ecogothic/ecohorror, 163–166, 172–173 grotesque, 17, 19, 21, 26–27, 40, 44, 57,
ecology, 159, 165, 188 115, 119–120, 127, 131, 167, 225, 228,
ethnicity/ethnic, 135–185, 136 230–31, 234, 237
Evil Queen, 29, 116, 131, 200, 213, 215,
216, 228 Haunted Mansion, The, xiii, 33–48
evolution, 150, 158, 163–164, 166, haunting/haunted, xii, xiii, xv, 3–5, 9–11,
169–172 15, 20–22, 30, 33–38, 41–43, 70, 74,
extinction, xvi, 163–166, 172–175, 182 86, 91, 95, 132, 139
Hercules, 103, 104, 107, 109–111, 117,
fairies, 101, 179–85, 187–91 121, 133
fairy tales, 2, 71, 115–16, 132–33, 181, hilarity, 27–30
183, 187, 189, 195–96, 198, 200, 206– history, xv, 6, 11, 22, 34–36, 38, 44–47,
7, 211–16, 227 56, 58–59, 68, 70, 86, 89–90, 105, 140,
family, xiii, xiv, 5, 23, 36, 54–58, 64, 67– 143, 143–44, 164, 169–70, 184
68, 71–74, 76–79, 81, 101, 105, 108, hoodoo, 134–37
141, 157, 180, 187, 189, 213, 216, 236 horror, xii, xiv, xv, 3–5, 16, 19, 21–24, 41,
fandom, 54, 60–61 42, 54–62, 70, 71, 77, 80, 85–95, 117,
Fantasia, 15–16, 71, 101, 104, 133, 163–74 123, 126, 132
fashion, 138, 226–27, 230, 233, 237 Hunchback of Notre Dame, The, 115–28,
feral, 147–59, 215 133
female vampire. See vampire
feminine/femininity, 122, 138, 182–84, iconography/iconic, xiv, 3, 4, 11, 22, 27,
219–22, 227, 230 41, 54, 58, 59, 61–64, 131–32, 134,
film (medium), xi, xiv, xv, 5–7, 9–10, 15– 136, 138, 212, 225, 231, 234
16, 20, 41, 42, 44, 46, 53–64, 67, 86– immoral. See morality/moral
87, 89–96, 102–5, 107–112, 115–29, intertextual/intertextuality 56, 89, 91,
93–94, 183
 Index 241

Jungle Book, The, 121, 147–59 octopus, 220–21

One Hundred and One Dalmatians, 121,
LGBTQIA+, 226, 236 215, 225, 228, 230
liminal/liminality. 58, 118, 125, 137–38, Otherness, 124, 131, 133, 138, 140, 155
149–51, 154–55, 157–59, 190
Little Mermaid, The, 104, 107, 132, 133, paleoart, 171
158, 211, 216–22 patriarchy/patriarchal, xvi, 63, 187, 197,
200, 206, 228, 230
magic, 6, 27, 30, 40, 41, 58, 94, 103, 105, Pinocchio, xii–xiii, 71, 133
111, 116, 121, 131–40, 142–44, 171, Pocahontas, 133, 158
181–82, 185, 188, 197, 202–3, 215, popular culture, 4, 44, 48, 58, 67, 131, 203
217, 220 primitive, 144, 149, 150, 153, 159, 166–
Magic Kingdom, 34, 37–39, 41–43, 45–49 67, 169, 172
Maleficent (character), 102–4, 112, 179–92 Princess and the Frog, The, 131–44, 183
Maleficent (film), 131, 179–92
mansion, 86–88, 91 Quasimodo, 116–28
masculine/masculinity, 138, 221, 227 queer/queerness, 132–34, 141–44, 215,
medieval, 7, 17, 19, 26–27, 30, 44, 118, 220–21, 225–29, 234, 236–38
120–21, 127, 167, 188
memory, 44, 58, 232, 233 race/racial, xi, 46, 132–36, 138–42, 143,
Mickey Mouse, 3, 7, 9, 10–11, 15, 20–25, 185, 188
28–29, 34, 47, 170 revisionism, 179–80, 184, 189
Miller, Ron, 70–72, 82 Rite of Spring, 163–74
Moana, 104, 107, 110–12
monster/monstrosity, xi, 3, 4, 8, 9, 17, 27, sexuality, 63, 72, 81, 133, 141, 212–13,
30, 36, 44, 55–57, 59–62, 89, 90, 92, 216, 220, 227
94–95, 101–113, 117–28, 137, 149, Skeleton Dance, The, 4–8, 11, 15–16, 18,
151, 154–58, 164–73, 181–89, 190, 26, 71, 132
192, 197–98, 201–6, 212, 218, 220–22, skeletons, 3–11, 15–21, 26–28, 30, 36, 61,
225–26, 228, 236 126, 173, 217
morality/moral, xi, xiv, 27, 102, 117–18, slasher, 55, 57, 62, 85–96
122, 126, 144, 149, 151, 153, 183, slavery, 45–46, 135–36, 140, 143
195–98, 200–6, 212, 230 Something Wicked This Way Comes, 67–82
Mother Gothel, 196–205 spirituality/spiritual, 30, 85, 91, 95, 100,
mother/motherhood, 54, 56–57, 61–64, 133, 136
68–69, 78–79, 110–11, 116, 120–24, stereotypes, 46, 90–91, 95, 124, 128, 134,
157, 190–91, 196–98, 201–5, 212, 213 203–4, 225, 237
Mowgli, 150–59 Stravinsky, Igor, 167–68
style/stylistic, 6, 8, 11, 35, 42, 44, 59, 70,
narcissism, 197–98, 201, 205–6 132, 137–38, 140, 142–44, 170, 217,
narrator point of view, 189–92 231
New Orleans, 34, 35, 38, 45, 46, 48, 131, supernatural, 3, 5–7, 15, 22, 27, 40, 63, 70,
134–38, 140–44 73, 76, 78, 80–81, 93–95, 142, 195,
nightmares, 10–11, 15, 22–25, 30, 88, 101, 211
166
normality/normalcy, xiv, 225 Tangled, 195–206
Tarzan, 150–59
242 Index

technology, 6, 33, 56, 86, 89, 92–96, video games. See games/gaming
170–71 villain (Disney villain), xii, xiii, 24, 64, 68,
tentacles, 107, 219–22 77, 92, 105, 108, 112, 119, 131–34,
time travel, 168 138, 140–41, 143–44, 154, 156, 159,
transmedia storytelling, xiv, 179–92 179, 183–84, 197, 198, 206, 211–22,
truth/post-truth, 17, 180, 181–92 225–28, 230–31, 235–37
Turning Red, 102, 104–6, 112 villainess, 211, 213, 219
villain intertext, 183–84
uncanny, 16, 17, 68, 73, 87, 92, 95–96, violence/violent, 57, 60, 70, 72, 85–86,
118, 195, 233 90–91, 95–96, 110, 115, 158–59, 169
unheimlich. See uncanny voodoo, 134–38, 140–44
Ursula, 104, 107, 211–22, 228, 235
USA. See America/American Watcher in the Woods, 67–82
witchcraft, 133, 134–35, 143–44
vampire, 53–56, 62–65, 149, 213–18
About the Contributors

Simon Bacon is a writer and film critic based in Poznań, Poland. He has written and
edited more than thirty books on various subjects including Gothic: A Reader (2018),
Horror: A Companion (2019), Eco-Vampires (2020), Nosferatu in the 21st Century
(2023), 1000 Vampires on Screen (2023), The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire
(2024), and The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie. He also runs the book series
Vampire Studies: New Perspectives on the Undead at www​.peterlang​.com​/series​/vsu.

Jay Bamber is a PhD candidate and visiting lecturer at Roehampton University. His
thesis focuses on the relationship between the horror genre and Disney media, and
he has previously published work on the romantic comedy and teen television. He is
also the author of three novels from Less Than Three Press.

Kathy Merlock Jackson is professor of media and communication at Virginia

Wesleyan University, where she teaches courses in media studies and children’s
culture. She is the author of over a hundred articles, chapters, and reviews and has
authored or edited fourteen books, five of them on Disney-related topics. She is the
former editor of The Journal of American Culture and past president of the Popular
Culture Association.

Nancy Johnson-Hunt is a former brand strategist turned PhD candidate at the

Auckland University of Technology (AUT). After a decade-long career within the
advertising and marketing industry in New Zealand and North America, she returns
to AUT to conduct her doctoral thesis through the Popular Culture Research Centre.
Her thesis critically examines the conundrum of authenticity on popular reality tele-
vision dating show Love Island USA. Her presented and published works include the

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244 About the Contributors

intersections between advertising and the construction of ethnic identity, as well as

more recent explorations on the Gothic and racial representation.

Murray Leeder is adjunct professor in the Department of English, Film, Theatre

and Media at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical
Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of
Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of
Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era
(Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University
Press, 2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, and The Journal of Popular
Film and Television.

Terry Lindvall holds the C. S. Lewis Chair of Communication and Christian

Thought at Virginia Wesleyan University. His published books include God Mocks: A
History of Religious Satire (NYU Press), God on the Big Screen (NYU Press), Animated
Parables: A Pedagogy of the Seven Deadly Sins and a Few Virtues (Lexington Books),
and Divine Film Comedies (Routledge Press). His most recent documentary feature
film is Hollywood, Teach Us to Pray (2023), a history of Hollywood’s depiction of
prayers in a century of films. He is presently working on Soul-Making: The Pleasures,
Vices, and Virtues of Pixar Films. He just became a grandfather for the first time with
Joy Joseph, with whom he plans to share Gothic Mickey cartoons.

J. S. Mackley graduated from the University of York with a PhD in medieval

literature. He has taught at the University of Northampton, where he was senior
lecturer and program leader for the BA English degree, and at Richmond University,
the American International University in London, where he was adjunct assistant
professor, teaching British fantasy literature. He has published a monograph on the
Latin and Anglo-Norman versions of The Voyage of St Brendan, as well as articles on
English folklore, mythology, and popular culture, and medieval, Gothic, and fantasy
literature. He recently completed the seven-volume Spring-Heeled Jack Library.

Angelique Nairn is associate professor in the School of Communication Studies at

Auckland University of Technology, where she teaches courses in the public relations
department, specializing in digital public relations and persuasion. Angelique has
been involved in a myriad of research projects that have hinged on organizational
communication, identity construction, rhetoric, and/or the creative industries. She
is also interested in popular culture and particularly the representation of women,
creative people, and morality as they appear on screen. Her recent work has explored
issues of racism, sexism, and technological determinism.

Joan Ormrod is an independent scholar who edits Routledge’s The Journal of

Graphic Novels and Comics. Her research is in popular culture, American and British
 About the Contributors 245

comics aimed at girls, fantasy, and science fiction. Her monograph Wonder Woman,
Popular Culture and the Female Body (Bloomsbury Academic 2020) maps the chang-
ing female body from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century. In addition, she
has published articles and chapters in edited collections on mid-twentieth-century
girlhood, pop music, Wonder Woman, time travel, and 1950s science fiction. Her
current research is in 1950s–1970s UK comics aimed at the teenage girl market.

Gwyneth Peaty is a research fellow in the Centre for Culture and Technology
(CCAT) at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia. She completed her PhD
in English and cultural studies at the University of Western Australia. Gwyneth’s
research interests include popular culture, technology, video games, disability, horror,
and the Gothic. She is the reviews editor of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
and the Australian representative of the Gothic Association of New Zealand and
Australia (GANZA). Recent publications include “Complicating Feature: Gender
and Disability in Mad Max: Fury Road” (with Katie Ellis and Leanne McRae) in
Antipodes 36.1 and “Hauntify the World: New Directions in Video Game Horror”
in The Evolution of Horror in the Twenty-First Century (Lexington Books).

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is professor of media and cultural studies at Auckland University

of Technology, where she is also director of the Popular Culture Research Centre. She
is president of the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (GANZA), and
coordinator of the Australasian Horror Studies Network (AHSN). In addition, she
is a research fellow at Falmouth University (UK), and an adjunct professor at Curtin
University (Australia) and the University of New England (Australia). Her research
interests lie at the intersection of popular media and cultural history. She has pub-
lished widely in these areas, including volumes such as Consuming Gothic: Food and
Horror in Film (Palgrave, 2017), The Gothic and the Everyday: Living Gothic (editor,
Palgrave, 2014), Gothic Afterlives: Reincarnations of Horror in Film and Popular Media
(editor, Lexington Books, 2019), and The Superhero Multiverse: Readapting Popular
Icons in Twenty-first-century Film and Popular Media (editor, Lexington Books, 2021).
She is currently working on a new edited project titled Eco-Horrors: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Health and Environmental Anxieties in Media and Culture (Routledge).
She is sole editor of the Routledge Advances in Popular Culture book series, as well
as coeditor (together with Prof. Carl Sederholm) of the Horror Studies series for
Lexington Books.

Antonio Sanna completed his PhD at the University of Westminster in London in

2008. His main research areas are English literature, Gothic literature, horror films
and TV series, epic and historical films, superhero films, and cinematic adaptations.
In the past sixteen years, he has published over one hundred articles and reviews in
international journals and attended over thirty conferences. Antonio is the coeditor
of the Lexington Books series Critical Companions to Contemporary Directors, which
includes his volumes focused on Tim Burton (2017), James Cameron (2018),
246 About the Contributors

Steven Spielberg (2019), Robert Zemeckis (2020), Julie Taymor (2023), and Mel
Gibson (2024). He has also edited the volumes Pirates in History and Popular Culture
(McFarland, 2018), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave, 2019),
Arthur Machen: Critical Essays (Lexington Books, 2021), and Alice in Wonderland in
Film and Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2022). Antonio is currently a teaching assistant
at the Università degli Studi di Sassari.

Carl H. Sederholm is professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young

University. He is currently the editor of The Journal of American Culture. He has pub-
lished essays on Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Jonathan Edwards,
Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and is the coauthor of Poe, “The
House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. Sederholm has also coedited several vol-
umes, including The Age of Lovecraft, Lovecraft in the 21st Century, Forgotten Disney,
and Adapting Poe: Re-Imaginings in Popular Culture.

Blair Speakman is a popular culture scholar who works primarily in the intersect-
ing areas of Gothic and queer studies, with a particular fascination on representa-
tions of sexuality and deviance. This interest led Blair to start his PhD at Auckland
University of Technology, focusing on the representation of time and adolescent
characters in contemporary Gothic television shows, which he completed and was
awarded in 2023.

Christy Tidwell is professor of English and humanities at the South Dakota School
of Mines and Technology. She works at the intersection of speculative fiction, envi-
ronmental humanities, and gender studies. She has been published in Gothic Nature,
ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Extrapolation, and
Pedagogy, as well as multiple edited collections, and she is also coeditor of Gender and
Environment in Science Fiction (Lexington Books, 2018), Fear and Nature: Ecohorror
Studies in the Anthropocene (Penn State University Press, 2021), and a special issue of
Science Fiction Film & Television on creature features and the environment (2021).

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University

and the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books. He
is also the founder and director of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic
and founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Gothic Studies
Forum. He has published thirty books and more than one hundred articles and book
chapters, the majority of which address Gothic horror and related subjects. Among
his book publications are Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety
(Fordham University Press, 2023), Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema
(coedited with Regina Hansen; Fordham University Press, 2021), The Monster
Theory Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), The Cambridge Companion
to the American Gothic (2018), and The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (Columbia
University Press, 2012). Visit him at JeffreyAndrewWeinstock.com.
 About the Contributors 247

Kevin J. Wetmore is professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University, a

five-time Bram Stoker Award nominee, and the author and/or editor of over thirty
books, including Eaters of the Dead, Devil’s Advocates: The Conjuring, The Streaming
of Hill House, and Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema. He has also contributed
over one hundred book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries on topics
from African drama to the theology of Godzilla. He is also an actor, director, and
stage combat choreographer.