'From The Skeleton Dance (1929) to the dancing skeletons of Coco (2017)

: How have the aesthetic, themes, and narrative forms of the horror genre influenced The Walt Disney Studio?'

Abstract

This thesis explores the visual media of The Walt Disney Studio to examine its relationship with cinematic horror, a genre to which it is often presented as antithetical in media coverage and the public consciousness. By contextualising the history of the studio within the lineage of the horror film, this work builds a cultural history which reveals the integral role horror imagery and narratives have played in the studio's film and television output, beginning with short films that predate the studio, but which illuminate its founder's interest in the macabre and frightening. By locating several origin points for this research, I contend that rather than the inclusion of horror themes and images being accidental or unusual in the work of the studio, they are actually integral and foundational; aiding in its construction of The Disney Villain, providing recurring visual motifs and helping create its narrative formulae. The central thesis statement for this work is that the cultural construction of The Walt Disney Company as the antithesis of the horror genre is a largely imagined one that reveals instructive information about how audiences and society feel about the Disney brand and the horror genre but is not borne out in the visual media itself or in how it advertises and merchandises that media.

This thesis begins by examining the relationship between child audiences and horror media, surveying a cultural landscape which has largely approached young people's access to, and enjoyment in, the genre with trepidation, as a means to discuss how The Walt Disney Studio has been framed within these (seemingly never-ending) debates. I then consider how Disney (both the man and the studio he founded) has been framed as a source of consternation in classic horror texts like The Stepford Wives (Levin, 1972), to reveal an ambivalence regarding the role of what some have termed Disneyficiation and the studio's ever-expanding cultural reach. This work suggests that the horror genre is not only an important influence for films produced by the studio, but that those films have since reverberated in horrific ways in the work of others. Subsequently, my analysis extends to the animated films of the Golden Era, defined as the period between 1937 and 1942, where I discuss how the accoutrements of cinematic horror find their greatest purchase in the construction of The Disney Villain, a figure closely aligned with the genre and one who offers multiple instructive angles by which to unpack the studio’s complicated notions of good and evil as well as its relationship to changing socio-political landscapes. To account for radical changes in the studio's approaches to horror, the shifting media terrain and changes in viewing practices, this thesis ends with two chapters which situate television as a lucrative and powerful medium by which The Walt Disney Studio has embraced traditional horror forms, with additional discussion of horror’s influence in its theme parks and extra textual media to demonstrate the powerful impact of horror on Disney’s branding.

Date of Award	8 Apr 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Supervisor	Deborah Jermyn (Director of Studies) & Stacey Abbott (Supervisor)