The scene in Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree where Pooh gets stuck in the hole has inspired more than a bit of claustrophobia in young kids.
Then there's the "Heffalumps and Woozles" nightmare scene from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, which crosses over with Ear Worm for some. "Beware, beware, beware!" indeed.
The singing honey pots in that scene may be a lot creepier than the heffalumps and woozles themselves? They just look... wrong, somehow.
The stop-motion ending to any of the original Winnie the Pooh shorts. You know, when the book closes, and the stuffed Pooh Bear is there and OH MY GOD WHY IS HE WINKING?!? Whenever it came on, she ran out of the room until she heard the cue "ding" that let her know when it was safe to go back into the room. For your viewing pleasure.
The "Pink Elephants On Parade" segment of Dumbo really is quite creepy. None of the elephants in that sequence have eyes; they walk through each other and snap! before they explode and swell and pull monstrous faces and then the elephants who they're being monstrous at have no eyes.
And when that giant humanoid made out of elephant heads comes stomping toward the screen:
Chase 'em away! Chase 'em away! I'm afraid, I need some aid! Pink elephants on parade!
A pyramid turning into a ginormous eyeball that covered most of the screen.
The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad: There was an earlier scene where all the characters are singing a disconcertingly cheery song (led by Bing Crosby no less) about the Horseman at a Halloween party - which suddenly cuts to one really really withered old dude singing the line, "And some don't even wear their skin!!!" Man, never mind the Horseman, that guy was horrifying enough.
How about the Weasels from Mr. Toad? Or the Stepford Smiler Mr. Winky?
The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The "Court of Miracles" scene and musical number was fairly alarming. Gypsies disguised as skeletons bind and gag our heroes and damn near lynch them. Esmeralda rescues them in the nick of time, but just when you think everything is going to be okay, BAM! Frollo rolls in with his stormtroopers and captures everybody. Mood Whiplash in a BIG way.
What creeped me out about the "Court of Miracles" is how Clopin, who previously was seen as a friendly clown-like person, takes a sinister turn as he prepares to hang Quasi and Phoebus and the song he sings is darker than the "Topsy Turvy" number he sings earlier in the film.
Some of the wacky faces The Genie pulled during the "Friend Like Me" number. Too much. All the bright lights and colors, and wacky/crazy-fast stunts he pulled don't help.
And let's not forget Genie's brief Peter Lorre imitation ("I can't bring peeeple back from the deaad. Eet's not a preety peecture. I don't like doing eet!!"). The silly veneer doesn't really tone down the Came Back Wrong aspect...
The Jungle Book: Children who are a bit Genre Savvy will notice that Kaa sounds just like Winnie the Pooh. Which only makes things worse and puts a whole new spin on Silly Ol' Bear.
The Three Caballeros scene with the SINGING DISEMBODIED MOUTHS always has made it difficult to watch the film in its entirety.
The Little Mermaid gave us Ursula's transformation into Vanessa! Then later when she changes back!
And her death by impalement with a ship's bow!
None other than Gerald Scarfe designed the characters for Hercules. Yes, that's right, the man whose artwork on Pink FloydThe Wall's gatefold artwork gave me nightmares ever since second grade.
"Uhhhh...thirsty?"
"Bumble Boogie" from the package film Melody Time. A surrealist assortment of flowers, piano keys, and horns with eyes, all trying to destroy an adorable little bumblebee who simply wants a safe place to rest.
In The Aristocats, the fact that Edgar is so bloody cheerful about what he plans to do that he's singing to himself as he puts the sedatives in the cat's milk is just so creepy. The scene when Marie falls off the bridge into the water too. Also there was the scene where lightning flashes just as the cats' owner discovers they're missing that creeped me out for some reason I don't even understand. And the scene where Edgar is sneaking around in the dark and Lafayette and Napoleon can only hear his squeaky shoes made me irrationally afraid of both squeaky noises and of footsteps in the dark.
Jafar provides this in The Return of Jafar with his Family Unfriendly Death; when Iago kicks his lamp into the lava, Jafar starts glowing uncontrollably, then flickers between his body and his skeleton, and finally fades and spins around really fast before violently exploding into a cloud of dust. Yup - definitely enough to scare the little kids.
The black hole in Treasure Planet. Mr Arrow's fate has always terrified me.
Woody: We toys can see evvverythiiiing... (Sid holds him away from face in fear) ...so play nice!
When Buzz and Woody first meet Sid's mutilated toys.
While we're on Toy Story, the sequel had a dream sequence where Woody is thrown in a garbage can, and when he tries to crawl out, he is pulled back by a mass of discarded toy parts working together to form a giant AKIRA-style tentacle.
Also serves as a subversion to this trope, as we see him again during the end credits at the "Cool and Groovy" Sunnyside, wearing star sunglasses and happily playing his cymbals. Kind of cute: [1]◊
The monkey wasn't even the worst part. The baby doll looked like it came straight out of The Exorcist, and the Toddlers in the daycare will be giving OTHER toddlers nightmares.
The scene where Buzz listens in to the daycare toy's secret conversation over a roulette game of See N Say. The See N Say voice is frighteningly disturbing already, but combine this with the other toys discussing how the "new recruits" (Andy's Toys) are likely to die in the daycare, while laughing about it....
Horrifying music plays whenever Buzz and co. are being "played with" by the toddlers.
Monsters, Inc.: Randall. He's a creepy ten-foot lizard-type thing with a mouth full of crooked, pointy teeth. The worst part, though, is the fact that he can blend into any background. When he does, it's impossible to figure out where he is.
It's also worth mentioning that [[spoiler: Sulley and Mike get rid of him by throwing him though some kids door in a mobile home, and smashing it. Presuming the kid's mom didn't kill him with that shovel, he's essentially been trapped forever in our world.
Ratatouille - some reviewers found that the otherwise - cartoonish rats moved the way real rats do, triggering phobias when they appeared in mobile swarms.
The Incredibles: Seeing people die because of a fashion choice is pretty creepy. Especially considering that the deaths were pretty bad. Suffocating, being blown up, being sucked into a jet fan. *shivers* The DVD extra describing said cape victims is pretty creepy too: Dead in action - suit malfunction.
When WallE and Eve first meet WALL-A? True, they are shown to be extremely friendly later on (like Sid's Toys), but we only see this side until after they notice WALL-E, EVE, and M-O. They're gigantic tank like robots that could instantly crush WALL-E and EVE without even noticing, have little to no facial expressions, and to top it off there's nightmarish music playing when we see them "cube" our heroes.
TYP-E has the same creepy HAL-esque eyes as the Big Bad, only BIGGER. Also, it works very slowly, makes this really unnerving noise.
It does take the edge off seeing him learning how to wave from WALL-E and even jumping at the chance to do it to him the next time they see each other.
How about giving credit to James and the Giant Peach? There's a lot of scary stuff there —- giant rhinos that attack people out of the sky, those aunts, the nightmare...
That scene when Pooh gets trapped all alone in that echoey cavern filled with giant crystals that reflect and distort Pooh's figure as he softly calls, "Christopher Roooobin. Christopher Roooooooobin..."
At the beginning of A Goofy Movie, Max has a nightmare where he's in an idyllic meadow scene with the girl of his dreams, and suddenly turns into a giant, lumbering copy of his dad. All sorts of weird emotions going on there, since up until that point, Max has been having what's as close to a wet dream as a Universal rating would allow.
Another episode had Piglet experience an awful nightmare where he is chased down a dark terrain by a gang of Heffalumps and Woozles (for no reason) while they chant "Beware! BEWARE!" (basically a scarier version of Pooh's nightmare in The Blustery Day). Piglet ends up locked inside a police Heffalump's body. That's just twisted.
The fourth season premiere of Kim Possible gave us this◊ lovely image. Context doesn't help: Kim and Ron dance at the junior prom and kiss. She pulls back and melts.
While Walt Disney Presents... was an exceptional series for its time, there were some episodes that were... a bit disturbing. Specifically the Life on Mars short.
My God, this is Disney?? This is Pink Floyd animation meets a Calvin and Hobbes "Spaceman Spiff" cartoon.
Well, Gerald Scarfe did go on to work on Hercules...
It's a very intriguing piece of speculative animation... until it starts talking about the unearthly phenomena that might take place in Mars, that's when it deranges into a bizarre show of light and colors. On the forms of life themselves, there's something disturbing about the plant that eats itself and the flying lens creature that uses sunlight to hunt. What doesn't help is that the narrator is the same guy who was the voice of the aliens in the "To Serve Man" episode of The Twilight Zone.
The kid's series Rolie Polie Olie. Every object in their house - including the headboards of their beds - has a life of its own, and eerily silent, watchful eyes.
Phineas: Heh heh, yeah. [several seconds later] Yeah, where did that come from?
There was an entire universe of baby heads. AN. ENTIRE. UNIVERSE.
Does anybody else get a... creepy vibe from the manatee in the 'All Terrain Vehicle'?
The end of the episode "Canderemy", in which Candace and Jeremy get combined. At the very end of the episode, after the molecular splitter has been destroyed and separated everything that was combined throughout the episode, one last beam combines Phineas and Ferb. Not just joined at the hip like Candace and Jeremy, either, but with limbs sticking out and Ferb's face stuck out of the back of Phineas's head. They have this conversation:
Phineas: Does this mean we can all go to the movies?
Ferb: *stretching back Phineas's mouth so it becomes his* Yes. Yes it does.
Animated Shorts
The Mickey MouseshortRunaway Brain, in which a mad scientist swaps Mickey's brain with that of his Frankenstein's Monster-like creation. Note that Disney's response has just been to pretend that this doesn't exist.
Mickey's eyes at one point in the beginning are rather unsettling...
It depicted Mickey having a three-pronged brain with two parts of his brain located in his ears.
Oh, come on, what about what possibly inspiredthis short? The Mad Doctor was an old Disney short based off an old Mickey Mouse comic, where Pluto is captured by the titular Mad Doctor, who's somewhat over the top, but is regardless scary, planning several torture research devices for his experiments... he cuts Pluto's shadow in half and Pluto howls in terror or possibly pain?
"Donald's Ostrich". Specifically the radio screaming as it got devoured.
The Toy Story Shorts that aired on ABC had one episode where Woody has a nightmare in which he and Buzz swap heads (both of them saying "Howdy!" in unison), then Woody has another one where Buzz is some sort of fly, at the end he wakes up from it all and Buzz is behind him.
There was a series of Donald Duck shorts made during the tail end of World War II where Donald joins the Army. Most of these are fun, classic Disney stuff, but there are a couple episodes...
"The Old Army Game": Donald falls over a barbed wire fence into a hole, and looking down and seeing no lower half to himself, believes himself to have been cut in half. What follows is the most intense two minutes of Donald's career as he sobs and attempts to commit suicide, oscillating between abject "no, no!" misery and perverse "yes, yes!" mania. The most nightmarish part is around the five minute mark with Donald holding a pistol to his temple, pulling anxious faces that really don't make him look like Donald Duck anymore.
Donald Duck's shorts always have a little darker humor than his Disney troupemates. For instance, Donald's Gold Mine has him falling into a rock crusher. The thing is, it's not just some Rube Goldberg Device with cartoonish gears that ignore all physics and spin for no reason, but a very realistically designed crusher with creepily realistic sound effects.
You forgot Der Fuehrer's Face, the one where he has a nightmare that he's a factory worker in Nazi Germany. It's all well and funny in a dark way until he goes to work at the factory, where the combination of making bombs and saluting Hitler on an ever-faster conveyor belt starts Donald going into insane hallucinations, with some of the most terrifying tortured expressions EVER. Dammit, Disney! Stop doing weird things with Donald Duck's faces!
"Mickey's Garden" is downright disturbing. The scene in which the bugs devour the potato with eyeballs in it, leaving only the eyes, is nightmare fuel like little else.
Then there's the Pixar short"Tin Toy," which features the titular character being chased around by a (to him) gigantic and extremely hideous infant. Every single one of its movements were just... Non-human. No wonder all of the toys were scared...
Donald's Dilemma (which would more properly be called "Daisy's Dilemma") features Donald getting hit on the head by a flowerpot, causing him to develop an excellent singing voice but lose his memory of Daisy. The girl soon degenerates into a suicidal (literally!) Yandere. One scene showed her sitting down to dinner with the voiceover, "I didn't want to live anymore!" Her food then transformed into poison, her fork into a gun (which she pointed at her head), and a hanging lamp into a noose. This scene was cut from most American versions.
Minnie's Yoo Hoo, a short apparently developed for a 30's version of the Mickey Mouse club. Mickey's old man voice, the over-exaggerated animation, the creepiness of the song itself...
Even Disney's live-action films weren't exempt from this, like the sequence from Herbie Rides Again where Corrupt Corporate Executive Alonzo Hawk is tormented in his dreams by evil Volkswagen Beetles.
Anyone see the The Santa Clause movies? There's a fireplace in the third film shaped like a face. The fire goes in the gaping mouth. Eerie and a little creepy. The scene goes on and all of a sudden HOLY SHIT IT'S TALKING AND MOVING AND OH GOD WHAT THE LOVING KANEKALON IS GOING ON HERE.
There's also a scene later on in which Jack Frost sings. It's basically like Narm only instead of "dramatic" it was intended to be funny and instead of "funny" it was deeply disturbing.
Hocus Pocus. The witches curse Binx turning him into a cat. You don't actually see it, but the sounds of shifting bones and muscles is... * shudder* Watching his body re-inflate later creeps me out to this day, especially seeing as, once again, you can hear the ribs un-cracking themselves.
"Come little children, I'll take thee away...."
In the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians, the farm animals assisting the dalmatians plunge Cruella de Vil into a vat of molasses. It was probably supposed to be funny. The problem is that Cruella decides to pick this exact moment to have a Villainous Breakdown, and thus she bursts out, covered in molasses, screaming and raging. It looks like Gloppy from Candy Land gone completely mental!
The Rocketeer: I was always frightened by Neville Sinclair - who was clearly British - suddenly screaming in German, alerting his Nazi Mooks. Not the revelation that he was a Nazi sympathizer - suddenly revealing that he was bilingual.
In TRON: Legacy, as Sam is being transported by the Recognizer, one of his fellow prisoners has a hood, concealing most of his face. Then when Sam asks him a question we get to see his face - in that he's missing half of it, and makes a sort of digital animalistic growling sound.
The "down the well" scene in Enchanted, with Giselle falling through space screaming (while blue glittering holes start to appear all over her body as she appears to disintegrate)? At least one child in the theater was crying after that.
Comics
Then there's Carl Barks' The Many Faces of Magica DeSpell, in which the titular witch wreaks havoc with a potion that will change someone's face to that of the person they're looking at. This would lead to enough creepy images as-is, but to escape her schemes, Uncle Scrooge flees to an "unknown valley" that turns out to be an uncanny valley, inhabited by utterly faceless people. In theory, it's whimsical, but in execution, it comes across as distinctly unsettling.
Even more disturbing in this story is the reaction of first Ratface, then Scrooge and finally Magica when treated to the potion. They get desperate to regain their actual faces. With none of them aware of a cure. Probably taps into fears of loss of identity.
In a Sing Along Songs video there is a very unsettling sequence with singing blue trees in a dark forest. Obviously, they were actors in costumes but there was still something extremely creepy about it.
Also on a Sing-Along tape (the Heigh-Ho one) was the penumulate song Let's Go Fly A Kite. At the ending of the song, with the song and singing becoming very loud and bombastic, it cut to the birds in the little class singing, and they suddenly wave their arms about on the last word of the song, ("Fly a KIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITE!). Then it cut to the Blue Owl Guy, holding something and saying something, then he threw what he was holding and it was this creepy little thing (possibly a musical term) appeared as the huge fanfare from the song finished out.
I used to have nightmares of Tigger. Well, when you're four years old, minding your own business at the Breakfast with Disney Characters in Walt Disney World and swept into a bear hug from behind by a six foot tall Tigger, who wouldn't be a little scared of him?
This page has not been indexed. Please choose a satisfying and delicious index page to put it on.
alternative title(s): Walt Disney Pictures; Disney; Walt Disney Pictures
