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Disney Gothic

Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse

Edited by Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock - Contributions by Murray Leeder; Terry Lindvall; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock; Jay Bamber; Carl H. Sederholm; Kathy Merlock Jackson; Gwyneth Peaty; Kevin J. Wetmore; J.S. Mackley; Nancy Johnson-Hunt; Lorna Piatti-Farnell; Antonio Sanna; Christy Tidwell; Joan Ormrod; Angelique Nairn; Simon Bacon and Blair Speakman

Despite Disney’s carefully crafted image of family friendliness, Gothic elements are pervasive 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.

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  • Author
  • Author
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  • TOC
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  • Reviews
Lexington Books
Pages: 266 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-66690-720-9 • Hardback • May 2024 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
Series: Lexington Books Horror Studies
Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / Media Studies, Performing Arts / Animation

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.

Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse

Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Part 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies

Chapter 1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney

Murray Leeder

Chapter 2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death

Terry Lindvall

Chapter 3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

Chapter 4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the Disney Channel Original Movie

Jay Bamber

Chapter 5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney's Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes

Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackson

Chapter 6: The Game is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher

Gwyneth Peaty

Part 2: Monsters and Magic

Chapter 7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes

Kevin J. Wetmore

Chapter 8: ’Who is the monster and who is the man?’: Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

J.S. Mackley

Chapter 9: Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side: Magic, Cultural Echoes, and the Gothic Trajectories of Difference in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog

Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

Chapter 10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities, and the Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan

Antonio Sanna

Chapter 11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as Ecogothic

Christy Tidwell

Part 3: Something Wicked

Chapter 12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth, and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia Fairyverse

Joan Ormrod

Chapter 13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and the Immoral in Disney’s Tangled

Angelique Nairn

Chapter 14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little Mermaid

Simon Bacon

Chapter 15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella

Blair Speakman

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


Disney Gothic

Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse

Cover Image
Hardback
Summary
Summary
  • Despite Disney’s carefully crafted image of family friendliness, Gothic elements are pervasive 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.

Details
Details
  • Lexington Books
    Pages: 266 • Trim: 6¼ x 9½
    978-1-66690-720-9 • Hardback • May 2024 • $120.00 • (£92.00)
    Series: Lexington Books Horror Studies
    Subjects: Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / Media Studies, Performing Arts / Animation
Author
Author
  • 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.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents
  • Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse

    Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

    Part 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies

    Chapter 1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney

    Murray Leeder

    Chapter 2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death

    Terry Lindvall

    Chapter 3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion

    Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

    Chapter 4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the Disney Channel Original Movie

    Jay Bamber

    Chapter 5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney's Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes

    Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock Jackson

    Chapter 6: The Game is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher

    Gwyneth Peaty

    Part 2: Monsters and Magic

    Chapter 7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes

    Kevin J. Wetmore

    Chapter 8: ’Who is the monster and who is the man?’: Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame

    J.S. Mackley

    Chapter 9: Voodoo, Hoodoo, and Friends on the Other Side: Magic, Cultural Echoes, and the Gothic Trajectories of Difference in Disney’s The Princess and the Frog

    Nancy Johnson-Hunt and Lorna Piatti-Farnell

    Chapter 10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities, and the Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan

    Antonio Sanna

    Chapter 11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as Ecogothic

    Christy Tidwell

    Part 3: Something Wicked

    Chapter 12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth, and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia Fairyverse

    Joan Ormrod

    Chapter 13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and the Immoral in Disney’s Tangled

    Angelique Nairn

    Chapter 14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little Mermaid

    Simon Bacon

    Chapter 15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella

    Blair Speakman

Reviews
Reviews
  • 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


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