Editors Piatti-Farnell and Weinstock and their 15 fellow contributors take a different approach to Disney, showing that its family-friendly fare has had many gothic elements since the studio was established nearly a century ago. Analyzing an assortment of Disney films, television shows, video games, theme parks, and animation, they discovered many instances of perversion, violence, eroticism, transgression, melancholia, loss, death, horror, and morbidity carried out by monsters, ghosts, skeletons, and villains and set in haunted houses, cemeteries, or spooky castles. They discuss nightmarish plots where a human skeleton scares the fur off the backs of two fighting cats or a mad scientist schemes to produce a Pluto-headed chicken, sawing off the animals’ heads and joining them to non-matching bodies. There is merit in this madness, the authors argue, claiming that such chilling, almost dead-end scenarios are set up for favorite characters (e.g., Mickey Mouse) to make heroic interventions that lead to restoration, reconciliation, and the usual Disney happy ending. Disney Gothic brings light to a topic rarely studied, using an assortment of adequately documented story lines (some not well-known). Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through graduate students.

Choice Reviews

In Disney Gothic, Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock disrupt the truism that Disney embodies sanitized storytelling for kids by showing how central Gothic horror is to the studio’s brand. From The Skeleton Dance to the Haunted Mansion, ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ to Turning Red, the outstanding essays in this collection examine a delightful and macabre spectrum of Disney creations, revealing the extent to which the Gothic lurks beneath the surface and within the shadows of the House of Mouse. Disney will never look quite the same again.

Stacey Abbott, Northumbria University

This new collection mines Gothic gold, as it demonstrates how the best Disney films, both live and animated, have crafted a complex world of good and evil that speaks meaningfully to a broad audience. Thanks to Piatti-Farnell, Weinstock, and their insightful contributors for revealing how horror, excess, menace, and a sense of helplessness are woven into so much of the Disney ‘family’ tradition.

J.P. Telotte, Georgia Tech