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In honor of my favorite holiday I’m going to look at the scariest moments in Disney movies. I’m not as well-versed in all of their live action flicks, so I’ll limit my focus to the animated features.
The first movie that immediately popped into my head was “Pinocchio.” Believe it or not, it wasn’t the mammoth Monstro that most frightened me. It was anything to do with Pleasure Island, particularly the donkey transformations. Even at my young age I sensed something sinister about the crowds of boys pushing and scrabbling at one another to get at the attractions on Pleasure Island, especially once they began fighting and throwing rocks.
But the donkeys did me in. I’ve loved animals since a tender age, and the images of the once-humans, still partially dressed in their clothes, shoved into caged crates and with tears leaking from their wide donkey eyes caused me to press my face into the couch cushions. The coachmen’s enforcer was especially frightening, presented as just a dark figure with glowing green eyes.
Perhaps I was never that afraid of Monstro because I’m honestly not sure how often I made it that far into the movie. Braying voices, quivering tails, and shuddering donkey ears appear on young children, and before they know it they’re huddled in a dark cave, their human clothes draped cartoonishly about them, as the Coachman cracks his whip about their ears and the shadowed enforcer intimidates them along. I think I usually stopped watching around here.
Even though I immediately knew I was scared of “Pinocchio,” I had to take a moment to conjure the specific scary scene (perhaps because I’d buried it). Another scene in the Disney movie immediately following “Pinocchio” leaped to me as the most frightening: the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment from “Fantasia.”
Walt Disney’s atmospheric experimental music-and-animation piece featured heavily in my childhood. I adored it, mostly for its Pastoral Symphony section replete with Pegasus horses, fauns, and dryads in a classical Greek setting that perhaps first awakened my love for mythology and fantasy. I watched “Fantasia” over and over, but in order to get to the end I first had to get through “the scary devil part,” as I thought of it.
It didn’t help that before the short viewers are told about the coming segment’s story, focusing on forces of Satan and the creatures of evil. I was already shaking before the chilling strings began sweeping up and down, and the giant bat humanoid Chernabog unfolded his wings and opened his glowing eyes to reveal a massive demon. Soon skeletal ghosts rose from the earth to fly upwards towards his call, and the villagers below the inhabited mountain fled the demonic procession.
Why on earth would Disney include such a horrifying piece in his film? Perhaps because he didn’t see “Fantasia” as exclusively a children’s movie. It was only his third and the “Disney for children” idea hadn’t quite been established, and “Fantasia” especially was an experiment in a new art form that was not limited to kids. But that doesn’t help my young terrified self.
Here’s a bonus: the most frightening Disney villain in my childhood was Ursula. She’s not as scary as many of Disney’s earlier baddies, but I never saw them much. I constantly watched “The Little Mermaid,” and whenever the “Poor Unfortunate Souls” song started I hid behind the couch. I couldn’t fast forward because that would have meant watching the scene, even if it was at higher speeds.
What were the Disney movies, scenes, or villains you found most frightening as a child?
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*(This image by andres.moreno is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.)
