Disney Gothic

If there is an opposite to the Gothic, it may seem to be the carefully crafted “family friendly” image of Disney. However, through careful attention to the pervasiveness of Gothic elements in all of Disney’s productions, ranging from its theme parks to its films and television programs, the contributors to Disney Gothic reveal that the Gothic, in fact, serves as the unacknowledged motor of the Disney machine. Exploring representations of villains, ghosts, and monsters, this book sheds important new light on the role these Gothic elements play throughout the Disney universe in constructing and reinforcing conceptions of normalcy and deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity categories. In doing so, this book raises fascinating questions about the appeal, marketing, and consumption of Gothic horror by adults and particularly by children, who historically have been Disney’s primary audience.

In this edited collection exploring Disney’s dark side, attention to Disney’s Gothic clarifies the ways through which Disney media properties construct and reinforce conceptions of normalcy and deviance in relation to shifting understandings of morality, social roles, and identity categories.

"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."

"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."

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.

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is professor of media and cultural studies at Auckland University of Technology.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is professor of English at Central Michigan University and associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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