Miss Dawn’s Musings – When Disney Gave Us Some Scares

Blog-MDMIn the interest of today’s holiday, I wanted to revisit a few scary movies I loved as a kid that have fallen off the radar. In part, these flicks aren’t as well known these days because Disney no longer promotes them – they don’t like acknowledging that they made spooky kid flicks once upon a time. 

witch_mountainFirst up is Escape to Witch Mountain from 1975. It’s about a brother and sister with powers – telekinesis and telepathy – who are hunted by the government (because, of course, they want to do research on them). Spoiler alert: they’re actually aliens and need to get to their real family at Witch Mountain. Trust me, this seemed pretty harrowing as a kid, especially when you consider the fact that you’re siding with the aliens. There was a sequel in 1978 (Return From With Mountain) that pitted the siblings against each other.

blackholeThen there was The Black Hole (1979), my first introduction to dark scifi. It’s about a ship found adrift in space that had gone missing. It was sent to study a black hole and “something” happened. There is actually a crew left on board, but it’s a mad scientist-type doctor (played incredibly effectively by Maximilian Schell) and his robots. There are a couple of comic relief robots (of course), but they don’t relieve much tension. This movie is so creepy and has death and evil… and really shouldn’t have been watched by kids (then again, I’m not positive it was considered a kids movie anyway).

something_wickedBut top of my list, a movie I watched multiple times, is Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). Based on a Ray Bradbury novel, Bradbury actually adapted the story for the movie so none of his storytelling elements were lost. It is creepy from start to finish, following a couple of kids who discover the carnival visiting their town is run by the Devil. Jonathan Pryce is a suitably mysterious and creepy Mr. Dark granting wishes that, of course, don’t always play out as hoped. And the carousel is something you won’t soon forget. It was years later that I read the novel and images of the movie played in my head the entire time.

None of these films has real jump scares and they’re not hack/slash flicks. But watching these as a kid might explain why I love the creepier horror movies now. And as sure as I am that these will look dated, I think they’re still worth watching.

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