Disney isn’t all sweetness and light. Here are some of the strangest, creepiest movies to come of Walt Disney Studios.
Oh, Disney, you massive corporation. I know that as a wildly successful conglomerate, you are aggressively uninterested in much more than making money. There are certainly individual Disney artists of all kinds that care about the product they put out, but there are also endless merchandising opportunities, no? And yet, I truly enjoy much of what you put out there. Especially when it gets strange.
Disney has had a long time to produce some weird movies, too. Its first feature-length film was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. It’s been around for nearly eight decades. With a bevy of animated movie, live-action films, and its own television channel, there have been plenty of opportunities.
Quite a few of the films on this list were created during something of a lull in the studio’s history. Honestly, Disney had a real problem during the 1980s. The studio was experiencing a significant backslide from its glory days under the leadership of Walt and Roy O. Disney. Films produced after Roy’s 1971 death underperformed at the box office, while talented animators such as Don Bluth left the company and started their own competing animation businesses.
After a near-miss in which businessman Saul Steinberg very nearly completed a successful hostile takeover, Disney needed to restructure. It did and eventually worked its way back up to the top, starting the so-called “Disney Renaissance” with the release of 1989’s The Little Mermaid.
As a result, many of us now remember Disney as a bastion of high-quality, family-friendly entertainment. After all, why would it have invaded the realm of children’s entertainment as readily as it has if it wasn’t squeaky clean?
Certainly, few people think that the massive animation giant is capable of scaring the pants off of you. And yet, you would be wrong. Since its early days in the 1930s, Disney writers, directors, and animators have been producing some particularly weird stuff.
Some of these entries contain spoilers. To be fair, many of these movies are also decades old, but here is your fair warning. Otherwise, read on and learn about some of the weirdest, creepiest, and downright frightening stuff to come out of Disney through the years.