Disney Gothic: Dark Shadows in the House of Mouse

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.

Murray Leeder is Assistant Lecturer in Film & English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author of Horror Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2018), The Modern Supernatural and the Beginnings of Cinema (2017) and Halloween (Auteur, 2014), and editor of Cinematic Ghosts: Haunting and Spectrality from Silent Cinema to the Digital Era (Bloomsbury, 2015) and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (2018). He has published in such journals as Horror Studies, The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture and The Journal of Popular Film and Television.

Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock is Professor of English at Central Michigan University, USA, and the author or editor of 25 books. He is a world expert on monsters and his relevant book publications include Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema (2021, co-edited with Regina Hansen); The Monster Theory Reader (2020); The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic (2018); The Age of Lovecraft (2016, co-edited with Carl Sederholm); The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (2014); The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema (2012); Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women (2008); and Spectral America: Phantoms and the National Imagination (2004).

Kathy Merlock Jackson is Professor of Media and Communication at Virginia Wesleyan University, USA.

Lorna Piatti-Farnell is Academic Dean at SAE Creative Media Institute in Auckland, New Zealand.

Joan Ormrod is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. She is editor of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, co-author of Superheroes and Identities (2014) and has an extensive journals publication record.