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.

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.

• Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockPart 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies Chapter 1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney Murray LeederChapter 2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death Terry LindvallChapter 3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockChapter 4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the Disney Channel Original Movie Jay BamberChapter 5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney's Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock JacksonChapter 6: The Game is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher Gwyneth PeatyPart 2: Monsters and Magic Chapter 7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes Kevin J. WetmoreChapter 8: ’Who is the monster and who is the man?’: Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame J.S. MackleyChapter 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-FarnellChapter 10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities, and the Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan Antonio SannaChapter 11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as Ecogothic Christy TidwellPart 3: Something WickedChapter 12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth, and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia FairyverseJoan OrmrodChapter 13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and the Immoral in Disney’s Tangled Angelique NairnChapter 14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little MermaidSimon BaconChapter 15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella Blair Speakman

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.

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.

• Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockPart 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies Chapter 1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney Murray LeederChapter 2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death Terry LindvallChapter 3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockChapter 4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the Disney Channel Original Movie Jay BamberChapter 5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney's Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock JacksonChapter 6: The Game is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher Gwyneth PeatyPart 2: Monsters and Magic Chapter 7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes Kevin J. WetmoreChapter 8: ’Who is the monster and who is the man?’: Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame J.S. MackleyChapter 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-FarnellChapter 10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities, and the Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan Antonio SannaChapter 11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as Ecogothic Christy TidwellPart 3: Something WickedChapter 12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth, and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia FairyverseJoan OrmrodChapter 13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and the Immoral in Disney’s Tangled Angelique NairnChapter 14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little MermaidSimon BaconChapter 15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella Blair Speakman

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.

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.

• Introduction: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockPart 1: Dark Beginnings and Gothic Technologies Chapter 1: Silly Spookiness: The Skeletons of Early Disney Murray LeederChapter 2: From Gothic to Gags: Disney’s Comic Deconstruction of Death Terry LindvallChapter 3: Hidden Histories: The Many Ghosts of Disney’s Haunted Mansion Jeffrey Andrew WeinstockChapter 4: Monsters on the Mouse-Tube: The Gothic Horror Cinematic Tradition and the Disney Channel Original Movie Jay BamberChapter 5: Sinister Surveillance: Threatened Youth in Disney's Watcher in the Woods and Something Wicked This Way Comes Carl H. Sederholm and Kathy Merlock JacksonChapter 6: The Game is Playing Itself: Fear, Technology, and the Disney Slasher Gwyneth PeatyPart 2: Monsters and Magic Chapter 7: Disney’s Tetratologies: Animated Discourses on Monsters and Heroes Kevin J. WetmoreChapter 8: ’Who is the monster and who is the man?’: Disney’s Medieval Gothic in The Hunchback of Notre Dame J.S. MackleyChapter 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-FarnellChapter 10: The Human/Animal Divide: Feral Children, Liminalities, and the Gothic in Disney’s The Jungle Book and Tarzan Antonio SannaChapter 11: Primitive Life and Animated Death: Fantasia’s ‘Rite of Spring’ as Ecogothic Christy TidwellPart 3: Something WickedChapter 12: Maleficent: Monstrosity, Truth, and Post-Truth in Disney’s Transmedia FairyverseJoan OrmrodChapter 13: Mother Knows Best: Questioning the Moral and the Immoral in Disney’s Tangled Angelique NairnChapter 14: The Vampire Queen of the Disney Scene: The Vampiric, Gothic Excess of Ursula from The Little MermaidSimon BaconChapter 15: Gorgeous, Vicious and a “Little Bit Mad”: Queer-Gothic and Excessive Desire in Cruella Blair Speakman