The Best Spooky Moments Brought to You By Disney

Hey guys, I'm sorry- I just got so bored out of my butt with Halloween movies, but here's one more for the holiday:
In spite of their oft-derided image as the conservative, family-friendly company of "Uncle Walt", even the Walt Disney Company, and more specifically in this case, the Walt Disney Studios, have a subversive and occasionally dark streak themselves and have been responsible for many great chilling moments in cinema from even their early years. 

THE SKELETON DANCE  (ANIMATED SHORT, 1929, Not Rated)
Great Spooky Moment: Skeletons Have a Danse Macabre in the Graveyard at Night
After the explosive success of nine animated shorts starring Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney, with his top animator and Mickey Mouse co-creator Ub Iwerks, made the first of the "Silly Symphonies", a ghoulish showcase of animation set to music called THE SKELETON DANCE.  In scenes that have been referenced or payed homage to in many films and television series, a party of skeletons emerge from their graves and take part in a series of activities typical of such early Disney cartoons like funny dancing, playing music and mistreating animals.  Most famously, one skeleton uses another skeleton's thighbones to play him like a xylophone.

SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1937, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: The Transformation of the Evil Queen
In the early years of the Walt Disney Studios' history, Walt would encourage his artists to be well-versed in the cinematic art form, sometimes even screening the films at the studio, such as the silent German expressionist horror films NOSFERATU and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI, where were strong stylistic influences on the studio's first animated feature film, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.  Scenes such as Snow White's terrified flight through the forest full of gnarled, glowing faces and grasping branches earned the film an 'A' classification in the UK (at the time there were three classifications available from the British Board of Film Censors; U-Universal, A-Adult, and H-Horror (there was particular concern over "horror themes")), indicating that it may not be suitable for children, and in some regions necessitate that anyone under the age of 16 had to be accompanied by an adult.  In a popularly reported account, the Radio City Music Hall in New York City had to replace their red velvet seat upholstery after showing the film because the seats were ruined by frightened children who wet their pants.  Each scene featuring the Evil Queen is particularly flavorful in the horror tradition, with the Magic Mirror bordered by the signs of the zodiac, and a skeleton reaching futilely for a water jug in the castle dungeon, but the terror truly peaks in the Queen's laboratory.  "Mummy dust, to make me old.  To shroud my clothes the black of night."  Into her glass she drops a black drop the blackens the contents of her goblet.  "To age my voice, an old hag's cackle." An orange, bubbling, cackling liquid boils through the swirling glass tubes.  "To whiten my hair, a scream of fright!"  A cloud of white pours from a spigot, rising up in the shape of a screaming wraith.  Holding her glass up to the window, the Queen proclaims, "A blast of wind to fan my hate!  A thunderbolt to mix it well."  Staring into her reflection on the goblet, bubbling violently in a sickly shade of green, she lifts the glass to her lips, "Now, begin thy magic spell."  Orchestral strings whir and her surroundings spin about her in a haze of red, yellow and green.  Her hair spills out in a shock of white, her feminine hands warp into gnarled, warty claws, the shadow of her bones illuminated by a flash of lightning.  Finally, her voice turns high-pitched and raspy, with a wheezing cackle (both the Queen and her haggard alter ego were voiced by Lucille La Verne, who achieved the effect by removing her dentures to record the transformed hag), completing the classic Jekyll/Hyde-esque scene. 

PINOCCHIO  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1940, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: Lampwick is Transformed Into a Donkey
It's generally agreed upon that Walt Disney and his artists honed their craft to perfection with the financially unsuccessful PINOCCHIO, their follow-up to the studio's feature debut, SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS.  It wouldn't be out of line to suggest that it contains the most frightening scene of any animated Disney film; at the very least, it's in the top three.  After a night of bacchanalian fun and games, Pinocchio and his cocksure new friend Lampwick find themselves inexplicably alone on Pleasure Island, where hours before was swarming with young boys.  Smoking cigars and playing billiards, Pinocchio is told off by his put-out "conscience" Jiminy Cricket, "Go ahead, make a jackass out of yourself!"  Lampwick dismisses Jiminy's warning, just as he sprouts long donkey ears and a tail, to Pinocchio's confused disgust, prompting him to put aside the beer and cigars.  Neither of them is really scared though until they hear their own bray-like laughs.  In a horrifying moment, Lampwick runs around the room panicking, screaming for his mother as his hands, clawing at Pinocchio, morph into hooves, and in shadow, appearing painfully, Lampwick is bent over on all fours and his screams devolve into chaotic, illegible braying.  Adding to the sickening display, Jiminy discovers what happened to the rest of the boys; transformed into donkeys, they're being shipped out for sale to a short, agonizing future in the salt mines.

FANTASIA  (ANIMATED/EXPERIMENTAL, 1940, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: Chernabog's Sabbat in Night on Bald Mountain

The final sequence in Walt Disney's grand experiment blending folk and high arts depicts a religiously-charged battle between good and evil, and as we all know, depicting evil is almost always more interesting than depicting good.  Walt Disney's artists certainly thought so, and they've perhaps never been so uninhibited in the depiction of darkness than they are in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence, whereas the immediately following Ave Maria scene, where the power of good overcomes evil, is beautiful but obligatory.  To the tune of Modest Mussorgsky's sinister composition, aggressively arranged and conducted by Leopold Stokowski, the hulking devil Chernabog (based on the dark Slavic deity Chernobog, meaning black god), masterfully animated by Vladimir "Bill" Tytla, rises up from the top of Bald Mountain and oversees a satanic sabbat.  Surrounded by swirling Hellfire, Chernabog holds assorted hellish creatures dancing in the palm of his massive hand, at one point smiling as he watches curvaceous nude women writhing before transforming them into swines.

DUMBO  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1941, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: "Pink Elephants on Parade"

DUMBO may be a lot lighter than the other films of Disney's Golden Age (SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS in 1937 through BAMBI in 1942), but it does have one little, unforgettable sequence that happens to be the stuff of nightmares.  After the baby elephant Dumbo and his friend Timothy Q. Mouse accidentally drink from a barrel of water that's been spiked by Champagne, the intoxicated pair begin blowing bubbles, one of which comes out shaped like an elephant.  Then they multiply, and what follows is a grand showcase of surrealist animation.  Too "see pink elephants" was a euphemism back in the day for hallucinating while drunk, and "Pink Elephants on Parade" gained popularity when hallucinations themselves became more popular with the drug-addled flower children of the 1960s, which sounds much too scary.

THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1949, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: Ichabod Encounters the Headless Horseman on Halloween Night

Walt Disney Pictures hit a creative slump during and following WWII when it came to feature filmmaking, thanks to the failure of expensive prestige pictures like PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA and the commissioning of propaganda films to support the war effort.  The result was a series of "package films", feature-length productions comprised of less-expensive animated segments, such as MAKE MINE MUSIC (1946) and MELODY TIME (1948), which were little more than the disappointing bastard stepchildren of FANTASIA, and the more amusing FUN AND FANCY FREE, a partially live-action double feature of two longer short films.  The last of the so-called package films finally hit the right note with THE ADVENTURES OF ICHABOD AND MR. TOAD, comprised of two adaptations, one of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows and the other of Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, both of which were initially intended as feature films, but proved to be too short and it was less expensive to make package films anyway.
Narrated, and occasionally sung, by Bing Crosby, the Sleepy Hollow portion of the film is surprisingly faithful to the short story, about an obnoxious schoolmaster and a brawny country boy vying for the affections of a pretty, rich coquette, until a phantom tips the scales in the country boy's favor.  In the most famous scene, following a Halloween party where the country boy Bram Bones sings of Sleepy Hollow's most famous local spook, the Headless Horseman, the superstitious schoolmaster Ichabod rides home through the woods and encounters the sword-swinging specter himself, and the Horseman wants a head.  The scene, with a frog croaking the name "Icha-bod! Icha-bod!", cattails beating on a log to sound like galloping hooves, and the Horseman hurling a flaming jack-o-lantern at Ichabod was later recreated in Tim Burton's very gory 1999 retelling, SLEEPY HOLLOW.

THE MANY ADVENTURES OF WINNIE THE POOH  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1977, Rated G)
Great Spooky Moment: "Heffalumps and Woozles"

Assembled from three previously-released 25-minute animated shorts, filled in with segments of new animation to connect them together into a full feature, the film is an adaptation of A.A. Milne's children's stories.  The middle section, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short when released as a short in 1968, showcased a musical sequence, "Heffalumps and Woozles", which is a spiritual cousin to DUMBO's "Pink Elephants on Parade", but arguably even creepier.  On a stormy night, after encountering the one and only Tigger, who informs him about "Heffalumps and Woozles," which "steal honey," Winnie the Pooh dozes off and has a nightmare about them, transforming between a variety of incarnations.  It's another showcase for surrealist information, set to a spooky tune by Robert and Richard Sherman.

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES  (FANTASY-THRILLER/HORROR, 1983, Rated PG)
Great Spooky Moment: Verbal Sparring Between Mr. Holloway and Mr. Dark in the Library

SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES is a largely forgotten Disney film, because it came during the studio's awkward stage, in the years following Walt's death, as the animated features were becoming unprofitable, and there was a distinct lack of creative direction.  Walt's son-in-law and successor, Ron Miller, wanted to move the company's film division into a more varied direction, specifically, to make movies with greater appeal to older audiences.  This would ultimately result in the creation of the "Touchstone Pictures" label, which appeared on the studio's films with less family-friendly material starting in 1984, so the Disney brand still represented more benign fare.  SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES isn't merely a Disney film with some surprisingly scary parts; it is a full-on horror film, one of only two definite horror films made and released under the Disney label (the other being 1980's THE WATCHER IN THE WOODS).  There's one scene where one of the main young boy characters sees himself beheaded by a guillotine, the bloody head tumbling into a basket.  Note that the film was released a little over a year before the creation of the PG-13 film rating.  The film is based on the book of the same name by iconic science fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury, who also wrote the screenplay for the film, about two boys, Will Holloway and Jim Nightshade, best friends but polar opposites, coming of age in a small Illinois town in an unspecified year of the early half of the 20th-century.  With the onset of autumn, a strange carnival rides into town, Mr. Dark's Pandemonium Carnival, which soon proves to promise certain of the townsfolk their greatest desires, but always at a terrible price.  It's not a great movie, clearly being made at the wrong studio at the wrong time (even while much darker and mature than you'd expect from a Disney film of the time, it always feels bound from really achieving the proper tone), and while there's some moments of greatness, the whole never comes together.  There one scene in particular that fires on all cylinders, a four-star scene in two-star movie; when Jim and Will discover the secrets of the carnival, they are pursued by Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce, best known to today's Disney audience as Governor Swann in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN series), who tracks them to the library.  Charles Holloway (Jason Robards), the town librarian and father of Will, hides the boys among the many shelves.
Sensing Dark's approach, Charles quotes Shakespeare while looking off into space, "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes."
Reading from one of the books, Dark answers, "Then rang the bells both loud and deep; God is not dead nor doth he sleep."
Charles continues the hymn: "The wrong will fail, the right prevail, with peace on Earth, goodwill to men."
"It's a thousand years to Christmas, Mr. Holloway," Dark retorts.
"You're wrong.  It's here, in this library tonight, and it can't be spoiled."
Charles identifies Dark: "I know who you are.  You are the autumn people.  Where do you come from?  The dust.  Where do you go to?  The grave."
Dark confirms: "Yes.  We are the hungry ones.  Your torments call on us like dogs in the night, and we do feed, and feed well."
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES is worth seeing, even if for this scene alone.

TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS  (ANIMATED-MUSICAL/FANTASY, 1993, Rated PG)
Great Spooky Moment: "This is Halloween"

The story goes that Tim Burton's imagination was inspired by seeing a store display halfway between the Halloween display being swapped out for a Christmas one.  While employed at Walt Disney Animation Studios in the early 1980s, Burton penned the poem The Nightmare Before Christmas, which has since been published in a children's storybook with Burton's illustrations.  Burton planned a television special of the story, something of a parody on the stop-motion animated Rankin/Bass specials of the 1960s (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town; they aren't good, but baby-boomers grew up with them and love them), before it was decided to make as a feature film, directed by Henry Selick.  In THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, Halloween Town is where the holiday of Halloween is created each year by its assorted ghoulish citizens, including various monsters, witches, ghosts, werewolves, goblins, zombies and the like.  Their greatly beloved leader, Jack Skellington (voiced by Chris Sarandon, singing voice by Danny Elfman), "The Pumpkin King", has secretly grown weary of this yearly routine, of the same old doom and gloom, and yearns for something more.  Thematically, NIGHTMARE is primarily a Christmas film; the main characters may represent Halloween, but Christmas is the holiday integral to movement of the plot.  The opening number (songs written by Danny Elfman), "This is Halloween" is Halloween straight-up though, a spectacular introduction through a graveyard and into the German Expressionism-styled town square, where Jack Skellington is presented in gruesome fashion atop a horse like a condemned man, then setting himself aflame and diving into a murky decorative fountain.  Triumphantly he emerges upright from the water and smoke, while the assorted creepers of Halloween Town sing in chorus.

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL  (ACTION-ADVENTURE, 2003, Rated PG-13)
Great Spooky Moment: The Black Pearl Holds a Moonlight Serenade
Even though it was initially derided for being based on a theme park ride, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN turned out to be a huge success, providing Disney with their #1 franchise.  None of the films are perfect, but I'm a staunch defender of the two Gore Verbinski-directed sequels (especially AT WORLD'S END, which I have a particular fondness for), and I was even on board with the fourth film in the series until I watched it a couple of more times, and realized it didn't hold up at all.  When THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (a subtitle added late in the game, to the director's chagrin) started development, it was meant to be a straight pirate movie, but producer Jerry Bruckheimer gave the script to the writing team of Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio, who rewrote it with a supernatural twist.  Referencing an early section of the Disneyland attraction, where the skeletons of pirates appear alongside heaps of treasure, one drinking wine, one holding fast to the helm, and a voice-over cautions: "No fear of evil curses says you, properly warned be you, says I.  Who knows when that evil curse will strike the greedy beholders of this bewitched treasure," the story of a young man who teams up with a roguish pirate to rescue his beloved from an evil pirate crew was modified to involve a curse.  The pirate crew of the Black Pearl is cursed in an undead state for spending a treasure of cursed Aztec gold, and only in the moonlight can they be seen in their true, cursed state.  The scene is set in the captain's cabin, where the aristocratic Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley) is given a prisoner's feast, while Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) tells her why there's "no sense in killing her".  He relates the story of the Aztec gold, which she dismisses, but in an attempt to escape, she plunges a knife into his chest.  He painlessly pulls out the bloody knife, but with know blood on himself.  "I'm curious, after killing me, what was it you were planning on doing next?" he muses.  Horrified, Elizabeth stumbles out of the cabin onto the deck, now inhabited by skeletal versions of the crew (however, if you have a bunch of bare bones walking around, it looks silly, but if you leave a bunch of heavily decayed bits of flesh, tendons and hair hanging off the bones, you have something scarier).  The events of the scene, as skeletons scrub the deck, tie the sails and do other naval chores in perfectly organized choreography is a little silly, especially in a moment when Elizabeth is thrown into the air by pirates billowing a sail, so it's not necessarily all that frightening, but more fun.  Capping it all off is Barbossa's chilling monologue, part lament, part threat; and recited to rhythmic profession by Rush: "Look!  The moonlight shows us for what we really are.  We are not among the living, so we cannot die, but neither are we dead.  For too long I've been parched of thirst and unable to quench it.  Too long I've been starving to death and haven't died.  I feel nothing.  Not the wind on my face nor the spray of the sea.  Nor the warmth of a woman's flesh."  At this, he reaches a hand out towards Elizabeth, extending it into the moonlight, where it decays into a bony appendage.  "You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... You're in one!"  He walks fully into the moonlight, revealed to be rotted away, bites the cork off of a wine bottle and drinks, the red wine visible spilling down through his exposed ribcage.