This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New"
gathers up many of this site's published writing on the
subject of extremely obscure Walt Disney World history. This label was created for use on the now-deleted Disney blog 2719 Hyperion, and shortly branched out to this blog as well. Everything on this page constitutes, for me, the "premium" historical content I've written.
It was last updated on June 30, 2018.
Marc Davis' Adventure House - June 2018 - extensive overview of an unbuilt attraction intended for Fort Wilderness, a sort of walk-through Haunted Mansion.
Chasing Captain Cook - March 2014 - Just where was Captain Cook's Hideaway? And what happened to Saltwater Express?
Snapshot: The Plaza Ice Cream Boat Shuffle - March 2013 - Disney: A-Z informs us that the Plaza Swan Boats opened on May 20, 1973. The problem is, that's not really true.
Johnny's Corner - January 2012 - A truly obscure piece of Walt Disney World history, at Johnny's Corner a man can cuss loud, peel eggs, play pin ball, argue about the Union, eat
sardines out of the can and hand wrestle by the gas pumps.
Return to the Golf Resort - January 2012 - Extended version of the "Buena Vista Obscura" post linked below. New photos and expanded information.
Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village - August 2011 - One of the most puzzling and obscure Walt Disney World events, based on the "national craze" of Frapping.
Snapshot: Olde World Antiques - August 2010 - Revisit the dim, varnished interior of the Magic Kingdom's real antique shop.
Captain Cook's Hideaway (plus followup) - June 2010 - Revisit the dark den of tropical drinks and folk music which once haunted the Polynesian Village.
The Lake Buena Vista Story - April 2010 - Extensive article covering the plans, development, re-development, and ultimate fate of one of Disney's most ambitious ideas and the true predecessor to EPCOT Center: the town of Lake Buena Vista, Florida. Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.
Snapshot: Great Southern Craft Company - April 2010 - Profile of one of the Village's most distinctive shops, including when it moved and what later became of the space.
The Golf Resort - March 2009 - Do you remember the first and only Disney hotel themed to... golf?
Since 2006, Passport to Dreams Old & New has been a leading voice advocating for intelligence and respect for design run the theme park community. This portal prioritizes the "meat and potatoes" of this site, the famous deep design dives and scholarly overviews of elements critical to the theme park industry of today.
It was last updated on March 1, 2021.
Lists! - Everyone loves list articles, right? Here's a few to get the conversation started!
Narrative Design and Themed Spaces - how and why theme parks tell stories is a central point of contention in the fan community and industry. Here's a few looks at how other designers cracked the problem.
Harold's Lost World of Snow - Disneyland's Matterhorn and its nearly invisible narration. Marc Davis and Pirate Gold - An update of "The Case For the Florida Pirates", with a new discussion on Marc's intentions on this ride and a new way of thinking about the story it tells. Conflict in Theme Parks - How does the standard Western narratives of conflict play out in dimensional entertainment? How could it play out? Nintendo's Universal Worlds - Why was Nintendo so successful, and will theme parks be able to emulate the charms of Nintendo games? The Theme Park Trope List - An extensive taxonomy. Sarcastic. The Branch Beyond the Window and Other Details - What effect does tiny, nearly subliminal details have on our experience of the parks? The Awkward Transitions of Disneyland! - Close look at the areas where one theme collides with another at Walt's original theme park and how this contributes to the sensation of "charm".
Theme Parks in Cultural Context - Essays prioritizing the intersection of cultural history and art history in themed designs spaces.
Design Deep Dives - Long profiles of particular case studies, some of the most famous attractions ever built.
Marc Davis' Adventure House - Extensive overview of an unbuilt attraction intended for Fort Wilderness, a sort of walk-through Haunted Mansion. All the Lights of Main Street, U.S.A. - A deep look into the light fixtures around the greatest park entrance ever built: the Main Street of Disneyland Paris. A Day at the Columbia Harbour House - History and extensive documentation of Magic Kingdom's best little food court. Go Away Green: Three Years Later - A lot has changed since 2012, and it's time to give this subject a through update. What's in a Sign? - How do signs help set expectations inside theme parks? A case study of Magic Kingdom's Adventureland. Stitch's Great Escape: Ten Years - What does the most widely detested Walt Disney World attraction reveal about itself, about Disney, and about us? Universal's Magnum Opus: Spider-Man - One of the best rides around that isn't a Disney ride, but just as good. Death of a Moonwalker: Captain EO - Captain EO: the best 3D show? Or the worst? Or the best-worst? Lightning in a Bottle? Storybook Circus - Thoughts on the Magic Kingdom's newest "Land", analysis of a surprising and unlikely success story, as well as thoughts on areas "for kids" in general. Go Away Green - How Disney hides (or doesn't hide) its huge warehouses which contain its attractions, called "Show Buildings", in plain sight. All the Lights of the Kingdom - Exhaustive study of the light fixtures of the Magic Kingdom, and how they contribute to theme, design, and fantasy concerns. Part One and Part Two. Fire in the Night - Why is the original Pirates of the Caribbean so often cited, and
seems to be, the greatest attraction ever built? A far-reaching
analysis. The Case for the Florida Pirates - On the Florida incarnation of the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction, a case for what it got
right and how it has been compromised. The "flip side" of "Fire in the Night", above. An Aesthetic Profile of Caribbean Plaza - Getting into details on Caribbean Plaza, The Magic Kingdom's most deceptively complex area. An Aesthetic Profile of Adventureland - How does the Magic Kingdom's Adventureland area subtly visually
prepare for and reinforce the anchoring Jungle Cruise attraction?
Older Stuff - Older articles either displaced by newer approaches, or just plain not that well written. Maintained here for, uh, history. :)
A New Approach - Two of Imagineering's least loved children of the 90s - The Enchanted Tiki Room: Under New Management and Journey Into Imagination with Figment - as a form of corporate protest. From Paris to the Provinces - How one small store at EPCOT Center includes dozens of little details which take us on a cross-country tour. Futures with No Future - The decay of the Tomorrowland myth. Phantoms of Influence - Gaston LeRoux novel The Phantom of the Opera and how it was adapted into the Haunted Mansions sister attraction, Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris. Taking Apart World Showcase - Courtyards, streets, and alleys structure the most fully-formed area of EPCOT Center, and its least changed. The Long, Lonely March - An essay covering the narrative, tone, structural and artistic
successes of Disney's original fully-themed pre-boarding queue
experience at the Walt Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean. The Anti Food Court - Approaches to the most brilliantly evocative of the Magic Kingdom's interior spaces, the Columbia Harbour House Restaurant. Walt Disney's America and Keep the Light On For Me - Disneyland and its synthesis of the "American Myth" into a realized place. All Hail Toad. - Reflecting on ten-plus years of the closure of the Magic Kingdom's fantastic Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. Verticality - The Magic Kingdom and her curious obsession with skylights. Fake ones. Two Shows by Marc Davis - Analysis of Marc Davis' two most fully realized projects, The Country Bear Jamboree and America Sings. Part One and Part Two.
This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New"
gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of the Disney-designed town of Lake Buena Vista, Florida, including the Walt Disney World Village.
It was last updated on March 1, 2021.
The Weird History of Ports O' Call - December 2020 - the amazingly bizarre story of one mall in San Pedro, CA, that was pretty brazenly knocked off to build Lake Buena Vista.
Cap'n Jack Casts Off - August 2013 - history and overview of Lake Buena Vista's oyster bar, from its early beginnings to decline in the 90s and eventual closure in 2013, the final component of the original Shopping Village to be abandoned.
Lake Buena Vista's Lost Crescent City - July 2012 - Chronicle of a truly inspired Village expansion that was cancelled in the wake of the expense of EPCOT Center.
Other Kingdoms to Conquer - November 2011 - Remember when Disney actually advertised other things to do in Florida? You probably don't remember the bus services to Sea World and Cypress Gardens either, then.
Snapshot: Frap-Off at the Village - August 2011 - Profile of a true Walt Disney World history obscurity, the weekend a "new craze" called Frapping overtook the Village.
Palate Cleanser - April 2011 - Includes some unusual photos of the Village.
The Host Community - July 2010 - a few print advertisements for Lake Buena Vista's "Motor Inn Plaza" hotels in the early 70s.
Snapshot: Great Southern Craft Company - April 2010 - Profile of one of the Village's most distinctive shops, including when it moved and what later became of the space.
See the Village. Tonight. - September 2009 - A "Virtual Tour" of the Village as it existed in the 1970s with many rare photos. Part One and Part Two.
Iconography - March 2009 - Overview of the design complexities of the original core group of Walt Disney World icon logos, including the Walt Disney World Village logo used between 1977 and 1989.
The Walt Disney World Village List - February 2009 - An exhaustive list detailing every shop that existed at the Village and its location from 1975 to 2009.
This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Jungle Cruise attraction - primarily the Florida version, which I worked at and remains an obsession.
It was last updated on July 25, 2015.
What's in a Sign - July 2015 - an overview of the Jungle Cruise's attraction sign from 1971 until now and how attraction signs help set expectations.
The Year of the Frog - October 2014 - photos and videos of some elusive frogs who flew the coop from the Jungle back in 1973 finally surface!
The Jungle Cruise and AWOL Airwaves - May 2014 - the style, history, and playlist of the Jungle Cruise's distinctive waiting area music. Hear the original recordings!
The Jungle Cruise: the Early Years - July 2011 - comprehensive history of the Florida Jungle Cruise, including a full photo tour of the attraction under refurbishment in 1973.
Rubber Spider Revue - March 2011 - those darn Jungle Cruise rubber spiders, and where they have and can still be found.
Nine Shrines of the Magic Kingdom - November 2010 - including a section on the "Sunken Temple" in Florida. An Aesthetic Profile of Adventureland - November 2009 - How does the Magic Kingdom's Adventureland area subtly visually prepare for and reinforce the anchoring Jungle Cruise attraction?
The Jungle Cruise Florida: Behind the Scenes - November 2006 - a collection of photos from early Disney publications showing the construction of the ride. Jokers in the Wild - October 2006 - Early, early attempt to write out the history of the Jungle Cruise attraction at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Warning: juvenilia. Read at your own risk. Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four
If you're looking for the ultimate journey through Pirates of the Caribbean - the history, the attractions, the films, all of it - check out my new book Scoundrels, Villains & Knaves. You'll never think of the classic ride the same way again.
Hello!
This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean attraction.
It was last updated on June 29, 2017.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Two Soundtracks - June 2017 - full attraction audio mixes for the original version of the attractions at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
Marc Davis and Pirate Gold - November 2016 - A update of "The Case For the Florida Pirates", with a new discussion on Marc's intentions on this ride and a new way of thinking about the story it tells.
2015 Year-End Report - December 2015 - covers the refurbishment of pirates and briefly discusses the impact of the 2006 movie tie-in refurbishment on the logic of the attraction.
Fire in the Night - August 2011 - why is the original Pirates of the Caribbean so often cited, and seems to be, the greatest attraction ever built? A far-reaching analysis. Should also be read with the following article:
The Case for the Florida Pirates - June 2010 - On the Florida incarnation of the attraction, a case for what it got right and how it has been compromised. The "flip side" of the above article.
Structuring the Experience - February 2009 - How arches, walls, portals and doors help make themed attractions into artistically satisfying experiences.
Two by Yale Gracey - February 2008 - How two key effects for Pirates of the Caribbean were accomplished.
The Long, Lonely March - August 2007 - An essay covering the narrative, tone, structural and artistic successes of Disney's original fully-themed pre-boarding queue experience at the Walt Disney World Pirates of the Caribbean.
Caribbean Plaza: Romance of the Tropics - August 2006 - The first post on this blog discusses early approaches to the area and attraction which inspired it.
Visual Structure in New Orleans Square - Mid 2004 / Early 2005 - Revised version of my first essay ever about themed design and the area that made me aware that theme parks could also be art.
This hub page at the web blog "Passport to Dreams Old & New" gathers up all of this site's published content covering the topic of Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction.
Marc Davis' Adventure House - June 2018 - extensive overview of an unbuilt attraction intended for Fort Wilderness, a sort of walk-through Haunted Mansion.
Raising - Or Lowering? - the Dead - October 2013 - a full overview of the design evolution, style, and technical details of the Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion facade and stretch rooms.
Riding the Haunted Screen - January 2013 - covers details of the attraction's antecedents in the form of popular horror films from 1915 to 1965. Begins with an expansive outline of the development of the genre, before proposing two key films as inspiration.
On Integrity - February 2012 - includes a section on changes made to the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion in Summer 2007.
Passport to Dreams Year-End Report for 2011 - January 2012 - includes a section on the controversial interactive queue added to the Walt Disney World Haunted Mansion in March 2011.
Start to Shriek and Harmonize - October 2011 - on the origin and details of the infamous "pop up ghosts" in the Haunted Mansion's attic and graveyard scenes. Also on the classic dark ride origins of the Haunted Mansion in general.
History and the Haunted Mansion - May 2010 - essay on the visual and historical influences of the Haunted Mansion, placing it inside a larger American phenomenon of Spiritualism. Thoughts on the Haunted Mansion - December 2008 - on the attraction's balance of tone between funny and scary.
Phantoms of Influence - May 2008 - the Gaston LeRoux novel The Phantom of the Opera and how it was adapted into the Haunted Mansions sister attraction, Phantom Manor at Disneyland Paris.
Two by Yale Gracey - February 2008 - two special effects used in the Haunted Mansion and how they are done.
"We saw every ballet, every film. If a film was good we would go and see it five times. Walt rented a studio up in North Hollywood and we would see a selection of films - anything from Charlie Chaplin to unusual subjects. Anything that might produce growth, that might be stimulating - the cutting of the scenes, the staging, how a group of scenes was cut together... The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Nosferatu, were things we saw. (...) We didn't miss a trick, really."
Marc Davis, Crimmer's Harvard Journal of Pictorial Fiction, Winter 1975
Disney and World Cinema
It may come as a surprise to some who have grown up in the digital age, but once upon a time, Walt Disney's films were very serious business. Today it's hard to imagine the reams of praise heaped upon Disney not just in popular and trade publications, but in higher, official forums of "cultural taste". One famous admirer was Robert Benchley, a crony of American wit Alexander Wolcott ("Everything I like is either illegal, immoral or fattening") and dean of the "Algonquin Round Table", a group of New York upper crust luminaries which included Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert E. Sherwood, and sometimes Harpo Marx. Robert Benchley is the star of the Disney feature "The Reluctant Dragon", a bizarre film made by Walt to publicize his production methods and brand-new Burbank Studio. The fact that Disney could do something like that and not be critically savaged speaks volumes to the respect he was afforded at the time.
Disney took from everything, watched everything, and was loved for it. The early Disney features are some of the most astonishing blends of popular culture and high art in American cinema. It doesn't take much probing about in World Cinema classics before you start turning up influences:
Faust, F.W. Murnau, UFA, 1926
Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940
Faust, F.W. Murnau, UFA, 1926
Fantasia, Walt Disney Productions, 1940
Haxan, Benjamin Christensen, Svensk-Film, 1922
World Cinema returned the favor. One conspicuous example is Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, who left Europe in 1930 to make a film for Paramount. On his tour of Hollywood he met Walt Disney, who was by then already an unlikely cultural hero in the Soviet Union. Disney himself was later in life a staunch conservative and so the Walt Disney Company has largely swept this fact under the carpet and it has received little attention in English writing on the subject.
Before 1930, Eisenstein's famous Soviet agit-prop action spectacles like Battleship Potemkin and Strike! are filmed with the shaky, nervous, hyper-kinetic camera which recalls both amateur film and the documentary newsreel of the era. After Eisenstein's Hollywood period during which he accumulated techniques and ideas, his films become hyper-surreal, stately paced things which revel in bizarre pictorial symbolism. If early Eisenstein films create meaning famously by juxtaposing shots which represent ideas, by the sound period he's using every element in the film frame - actors, decor, lighting, camera placement - to juxtapose ideas against each other. The editing becomes slower because each inch of the exposed image is now steeped in symbolic concepts.
Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky, 1938
Eisenstein, Ivan the Terrible Part One, 1944
This sort of crazy, chock-a-block imagery has only really survived in popular films in the medium of animation. Because animated films are created a frame at a time using an incredibly expensive process, every character on screen, every gesture, and every brush stroke works to create meaning and often employ symbolic staging and expressive images to help create mood and sensation in a way that would look quite strange in "reality". This is what Eisenstein took from Disney.
Around the same time, two filmmakers on the (literal) Other Side of the World were grabbing the ball left in the air by the Disney studio and creating their own eye-popping movies. These men were Michael Powell and Emmerich Pressburger, and instead of copping from the Burbank lot the hand-crafted, symbolist nature of the studio's output, they went after the visual spectacle, the impression of art, music, form and color all flowing freely and as one.
This still from their 1946 A Matter of Life and Death speaks for itself:
As do these stills from their famous The Red Shoes, which itself seems to be constantly straining against being a live-action film and attempting to move into the realm of animation or moving painting:
And their own effort at topping Fantasia, the 1949 Tales of Hoffmann:
As if to make the link clear, in 1956, after splitting with Pressberger, Michael Powell went on to make his own short film - of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, in a similar style! So there.
Look at how much of those stills above are painted representations - moving illustrations, animation with live actors instead of Mickey Mouse. All through the 40's Disney worked again and again at perfecting a process for seamlessly inserting live action actors into animation, but Powell and Pressburger simply bypass the technical trickery of something like Three Caballeros and Song of the South and create their animated landscapes the old fashioned way - using super impositions and stage sets.
In fact, it's really just a short imaginative leap from the sort of crazy, distorted, but still real sets found in Tales of Hoffmann to Disneyland in 1955. Very often the film Hoffman reminds us of the sort of thing Claude Coats would've dreamed up for Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
Which brings us around to our point of entree today, which is my old muse, The Haunted Mansion. Haunted Mansion is an exemplary model of the bleed-over points between film and theme park, and this has to do with the fact that the Mansion itself is one of the thickest soups of cultural melanges in the whole Disney back-catalogue. Haunted Mansion draws on dozens of influences, references, and deeply ingrained concepts to produce a heady blend of horror and comedy. It sometimes seems to be the apotheosis of the entire cycle of Gothic horror pop culture.
After 1969, popular horrors would steer less in the direction of the traditional Gothics and more towards things like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween. This shift reflected the Vietnam War, the rise of tabloid culture, and increasing cultural disillusionment. In fact, if we want to look for cultural signposts that point us away from the Haunted Mansion and towards the sea of gore we all float in today, there's one of the very same weekend - in fact the very same official day of the attraction's opening - the Sharon Tate murders of August 9, 1969.
Of course, we all know this already. The films which influenced the development cycle of the attraction have been extensively covered on the Internet because the Haunted Mansion is the ultimate Disney ride and the Internet is the ultimate depositary for minutia. But instead of glossing over the typical still images and trotting out the same old titles, I'd like to approach The Haunted Mansion from a different perspective: as just another branch in a very large family tree of popular horrors. To trace that tree we have to start below ground - at the seed. I'd like to map a road to the Haunted Mansion from film history instead of taking the typical approach, which traces from the Haunted Mansion to popular films.
By taking the long route we can see the prehistory and history of the ideas that went into the attraction as it came together - why it throws so many deep, deep switches in the dark places of our minds. And to do that, we have to take a leisurely tour of the entire phenomenon of what we now know as the "horror film". This means I'm going to spend the entire first half of this article digging through film history that will appear to be of little direct consequence to the Disney ride. But when we reach the Mansion and the influences begin to converge, I believe it will be beneficial to have all that background information at your fingertips instead of having to elide or summarize concepts that had been building through decades of genre films.
I put "horror film" in quotes above because, like me when I was younger, you've probably at some point gone back to the "elemental" classics of horror cinema and come away pretty disappointed. Those early films just don't seem to be all that scary. This is because those films were made before the concept of a horror film existed. And if we trace the influences we can find those points of connection where the web of cultural history - of which the Haunted Mansion is just one interlocked strand - becomes clearer.
So let's begin. It was a dark and stormy night.... Proto-Horror and the Great War
One hundred years ago, there was no such thing as a horror movie.
Would anyone today call this film a "pictorial melodrama"?
The style is actually an even more recent phenomenon than that; a quick search through the archives of the New York and Los Angeles Times reveals that it's difficult to even get relevant results for periods predating 1936. The earliest mention I found of a "horror film" in the generally accepted sense of the term is in a 1932 article by Grace Kingsley of the Los Angeles Times - "New Horror Film Planned" - announcing the start of production on Murders at the Zoo. To put it another way, the early 30s cycle of Hollywood shockers seems to have established the genre as a viable format, and with that viable format came a recognizable name.
This makes the horror film unique, in that it was a late bloomer in the pantheon of film genres. When you go back far enough in film history it's easy to uncover, say, early dramas, comedies, action movies, heist movies, Western, nature documentaries... all of the essential colors which are blended in modern cinema to form various hues and tints which make up our tradition of popular entertainment. But what you don't find is horror movies.
There was a one-off abnormality, the Edison Company's 1910 film of Frankenstein. Although it's since been rescued and promoted by genre enthusiasts as an early example of the horror film, Frankenstein was a creative dead end. The film did not establish the genre and was in its own day quickly forgotten. Edison themselves advertised that anything unpleasant in the source story had been removed!
Frankenstein may be a dead end, but if you go forward a few years to 1914 and across the Atlantic to France, you'll find more fruitful roots in the form of Louis Feuillade, who initiated his famous cycle of serial crime thrillers with Fantomâs. Fantomâs is a 6 hour set of 5 films which chronicle the unending search for a ruthless criminal terrorist who kills and robs to no apparent end and uses disguises and modern technology to hide his identity. These films, which by film standards were shockingly violent and suspenseful in their day, were a runaway success - in one case inciting a riot. French film authorities unsuccessfully tried to ban the films - you couldn't stop people from seeing these things.
Fantomas - the man without a face!
In some ways I'm cheating by including Fantomâs in here because these films were so successful and popular that they initiated their own cycles of influences and remakes -- except for the fact that these influences and remakes intersect tremblingly often with our own discussion today. Fueillade's films, especially his followup to Fantomâs, Les Vampires (calm down, there's no vampires in the movie, it's the name of a gang) influenced an Austrian kid named Fritz Lang, who would go on to start his own cycle of Fueillade-influenced mystery and crime thrillers both in Germany and America. Lang then influenced Alfred Hitchcock, who would go off and start a cycle of Lang-influenced mystery and crime thrillers in England and America.
Lang made a handful of movies that are commonly discussed as having relevance to the horror genre - M (1931) and Metropolis (1927) are often brought up, but easy to overlook but just as clear is Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922-23) and its sequel The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933), which are paranoid conspiracy thrillers involving mind control, ghosts, hallucinations and messages from beyond the grave. Hitchcock himself eventually branched out beyond Lang-style pulp thrillers, directing Psycho (1960), The Birds (1962), and Frenzy (1972), whose influence is such that Hitchcock's name alone is synonymous with stylish film terror. So although it's a sidebar to our discussion, you deserve to know and recognize Fantomâs as the source point for what we would eventually call the horror film.
And then, friends, World War I happened and the horror film really got underway.
In the wake of the Great War, much of Europe's male population had been killed or disfigured and were now limping back to the ruins of their cities and towns - where innocent citizens had been bombed and gassed - and it was clear that nothing would be the same. During the war, Hollywood film exports had conquered the hearts and minds of the world, and America had won the war for the Allies. Americans suddenly were exerting both economic and cultural dominance over the Old World. And now we need to introduce a new major player on our landscape: Erich Pommer.
Erich Pommer
Pommer started off as a producer of educational and cultural films for German audiences as part of the "Decla" film company. After the war, Decla absorbed one company - Meinert-Film-Gesellschaft - and merged with another - Bioscop AG - to form what we would today called a megacorporation, Decla-Bioscop. Decla-Bioscop was then purchased outright by UFA, a massive film production company owned and controlled by... the German government. To put it another way, in the span of about five short years, Pommer went from being a production executive to a CEO to the head of the biggest film production company outside of Hollywood.
Pommer's problem was this: Hollywood had institutionalized production, distribution, and star making techniques into a cultural powerhouse that was leaving Europe in the dust. How do you compete with that? Pommer's solution was to do the opposite of what Hollywood was doing - if Hollywood films were naturalistic, shot against the rolling hills of California, then German films would be anti-naturalistic, shot in artistically conceived fake studio interiors. And if Hollywood had institutionalized a top-down executive committee whose main focus was on making popular, successful, predictable films, then German films would be artistically uncompromising and controlled by artful film directors. Pommer, in effect, would find major film talents and throw seemingly unlimited amounts of money at them, giving them carte blanche to put their dreams on film.
If, when you think of German silent cinema, you think of lavish, strange, visually dense spectacles of expressionism and doom, you are thinking of Erich Pommer's vision for films. Hollywood's trademark was light and fun, Pommer's was artistry and fatality. He branded German cinema as "Expressionistic" for the posterity of world culture, so much so that the words are now inseperable - German Expressionism.
Pommer's breakout production was the 1919 Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Today we know it was cinema's first true horror film, but in 1919 it was somewhat different. The story tells of a bourgeois Herr Docktor who appears in a small town as part of a carnival act where he induces a spooky comatose man to step out of a coffin and voice pronouncements of doom. His predictions always come true, because the Docktor then sends the hypnotised Cesare out to stab townspeople to death under the cover of darkness. Eventually the entire story is revealed to have been told by a lunatic in a asylum.
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a parable of World War I, where the rich send the poor off to kill and maim while they remain at home, guilty but innocent. Not only were the upper class insane to start the war, the film tells us, but the entire exercise was madness. And the entire film, which did not have a popular message given that the war dead were still fresh in their graves, was then shot in a style which was guaranteed to upset people: decadent, indecent, ugly modern art.
Albin Grau art for "Nosferatu" (1922)
Although at the time it was unknowable, Caligari set the groundwork for all proto-horror films to follow: madness, shadows, violence, suspense, even a twist ending. Today it's synonymous with "German Expressionism", but at the time the set design was seen as something of a gimmick and the sociological concerns of the film on the effects of the Great War were commented upon - nobody at the time missed the metaphor. Today, the gimmick is the part most likely to be celebrated and the film's reason for being is all but invisible. Caligari has been absorbed into the horror pantheon.
Here, due to the chronological nature of this account it's incumbent on me to mention the short but potent film career of Albin Grau, a real, honest-to-goodness Occultist who had dealings with, amongst others the Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. Grau found a company in 1921 - Prana Film - to produce what he called "truly occult movies". He hired talented director Friedrich Wilheim Murnau, who was then making adaptations of successful novels for Erich Pommer, on his first low-budget venture: Nosferatu. Grau designed the production himself, including supplying the famous "occult paper" that the crazed Knock receives from Count Orlock with instructions to send Thomas Hutter to Transylvania - supposedly written with real Occult symbols. Grau produced a great deal of art to promote the film, often filled with menacing images and shadows, and probably conceived (or prompted Murnau to conceive) the famous shots of the shadow of Nosferatu sliding across walls and people.
Prana-Film was forced out of business, but Grau went on to form another company with the same mandate: Pan Film, which produced his second feature, Warning Shadows (1923). Directed by Arthur Robison, the use of shadow play is even more extreme. The film begins with a curtained stage with a candle sitting nearby. A disembodied hand grasps the candle and retreats, and the curtains open on a blank movie screen on which huge hands create shadows (exactly like a movie projector) from which emerge the various characters who will populate the narrative. One pivotal scene finds shadows vanishing as space within a room transforms. Grau writes that:
"In film, shadow is more important than light. Cinema is the language of shadows. Through shadow, the hidden and dark forces become visible."
Murnau and Robison went on to make excellent films but would never again use shadow in the same way with the same meaning - Grau is clearly the auteur of these remarkable films. And while Caligari caused a great deal of consternation in the United States as just another scandalous example of the decadence of European art, Nosferatu wasn't released until 1929 and Warning Shadows was - and remains - an obscurity. Despite the fame of Nosferatu, it would not become an influential force in the development of horror films abroad until much later. American horror was going to have to be home-grown.
What would an American horror film look like? The United States, victorious after the Great War, had returned home to an economy that was shortly booming, remarkable modern inventions, and the jazz music that scored the whole crazy era. The cinema was owned by stars like Charlie Chaplin's sentimental comedies, Mary Pickford's "fish out of water" romances and Douglas Fairbanks' astonishing action spectacles. American popular culture was relentlessly optimistic, and those weird movies from overseas were just yet more proof that those Europeans were still mostly in the dark ages.
And then there was Lon Chaney.
Lon Chaney was called by film historian Scott MacQueen "...a shapeshifter who gave voice to the jazz age's darkest impulses", which is pretty much true. Beginning as a bit and character actor in dozens of short subjects and quickees, Chaney slowly made a name for himself as a superb actor of roles which other performers could not or would not portray. He played a sympathetic Chinese cook in Shadows (1922) and a quirky Fagin in Oliver Twist (1922), and memorably doubled his legs up behind his back and hobbled around on crutches to play a legless gangster in the still-shocking The Penalty (1920). By the time he changed his whole body to play Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), audiences were convinced Chaney's makeup and performances amounted to magic. They began to go to Chaney pictures to see his next over-the-top, gruesome character, and Hollywood began to deliver on the expectation.
But none of these films are horror films. Hunchback is a straightforward historical spectacle, The Penalty is a morality play, and Shadows is a straight drama. Chaney's next film, the frightening He Who Gets Slapped (1924), is a revenge drama that resists classification. What all of these films have in common is a remarkable performance by Chaney as an unloved outcast. Chaney played characters who failed to conform to American society, and audiences lined up to watch him menace, and suffer, and watch sadly as the girl of his dreams walks away with the "hero". This was the Chaney formula which made him possibly the greatest and most mysterious star of his era. Chaney's elaborate disfigurements don't look forward to Horror Cinema so much as they look back to the horrors of the Front.
So it's important to see how his next film got green lit - Phantom of the Opera was intended to match Chaney with a gruesome makeup in a historical action spectacle where his monster dies of a broken heart. The source novel, a florid potboiler by Gaston LeRou, is an abnormality - mixing fairy tale with a Fantomâs-style masked villain who has assumed the identity of a ghost so his thefts and murders will go unpunished. LeRou was part of the very same cultural moment as Louis Feuillade and Fantomâs, and he wrote breezy serial adventures starring detectives and super criminals, the best remembered of which is the excellent Mystery of the Yellow Room. His novel is structured like a detective story, making the link even clearer, and had Chaney not played the Phantom in 1925 and sparked a cycle of influences and remakes, both the novel and its author would today very likely be totally forgotten.
The film Phantom of the Opera is curiously poorly made, having come down through at least five different versions and a phalanx of directors, including Chaney who likely directed his own scenes. It's flat and unimaginative until Chaney comes onscreen, in one of film's most hauntingly perfect performances. Despite its flaws and because of an imaginative ad campaign that censored all views of Chaney's makeup, the movie defined the concept of "critic proof": you couldn't stop people from seeing it. This scene, which still gets modern audiences into a lather, caused shrieks of fright in 1925; audiences ducked to hide behind their seats - then dared each other to go see it again.
Phantom of the Opera, however, did not establish a new wave of horror, nor did it ride an existing one. Audiences clucked their tongues about the horribleness of the whole production and women requested more romance. Following Phantom, Chaney teamed with ex-carnival geek Tod Browning to make a series of lurid crime and revenge films, including The Unholy Three (1925), The Unknown (1927), and West of Zanzibar (1929), all of which featured Chaney as bizarrely disguised or deformed criminals. These have since been accepted into the horror canon, but they're as uneasy a fit as Browning's later, notorious Freaks (1932) is.
The Browning-Chaney film that has the strongest horror credentials is London After Midnight (1927), no doubt because it is a lost film. The stills that survive tend to make it look like a spooky haunted house romp, but always overlooked is the fact that the film is a farce where Chaney dons a spooky-funny vampire costume as part of a plot to expose a murder. He is a detective working for the city. Spooky scenes aside, the film is a straightforward whodunit that nobody in 1927 seems to have particularly liked: "If it were found again, I think people would be rather disappointed" Ray Bradbury once opined. In this way London After Midnight sticks rather close to the mainline of the American Horror Tradition outlined below. It may deserve a place in the pantheon, but even this widely longed-for film has a big asterisk next to its name.
Chaney himself refused to stay pigeonholed and alternated these lurid thrillers with straightforward character roles, usually played without elaborate makeups such as his drill sergeant in Tell It To The Marines (1927). Following a sound remake of The Unholy Three in 1930, Chaney died of lung cancer, having not lived to see the horror boom of the 1930s brought on by his friend Tod Browning's 1931 film Dracula. Still, if homegrown American horror starts anywhere, it starts with Chaney's Phantom of the Opera.
The American Horror Tradition
The most identifiable American horror tradition of the 1920s is the "old dark house" thriller, which began with a cycle of mystery thrillers on Broadway led by The Bat. In 1926, Roland West brought his version of The Bat to cinemas, billing it under the cumbersome description "A Comedy-Mystery-Drama!". Today, we'd just say it's a good old fashioned horror comedy, with the titular Bat as an ingenious criminal on the run, pursuing a stash of diamonds hidden in a big, rambling Mansion by his latest victim, as the various comic characters are variously killed or just barely escape with their lives and finally succeed in unmasking the fiend.
If that description excites you, imagine the impact this fast paced, clever thriller must have had with a fresh audience. The film begins with a delightful title card and never slows down from there:
The Bat was then remade by Roland West in 1930 as the basically identical The Bat Whispers, which is such a scrupulous remake that it uses the same staging, identical sets, and what appear to be many of the same props. Bob Kane always cited The Bat Whispers as an influence on Batman, but he interestingly seems to conflate the two films into one in his memory, which is understandable given how alike the two films are and how close their release was. The 1926 Bat has an intimidating bat head with a flapping jaw and bag full of tools:
The Bat Signal makes an appearance in the 1926 film in a sequence left out of the sound remake (it turns out to be a fly on the headlight of a car):
But The Bat Whispers has the speed of the superhero films it begot, although it's best described as a Super-Villain film. Once he actually appears in the film, The Bat has fantastic pulp dialogue like: "I've got the greatest brain that ever existed!" and "You think you've got me, eh? Let me tell you this: there never was a jail built strong enough to hold The Bat! After I've paid my respects to your cheap lock-up, I shall return! At night! The Bat always flies at night! And always in a straight line!"
And you know what? He looks exactly like Fantomas.
The Bat and The Bat Whispers represent European proto-horror crime thrillers finally coming home to roost on American soil. Although The Bat is a figure of fun and fantasy, he's something hard-headed Americans could identify: instead of an actual revenant ghoul with an army of rats, he's just a crazy guy in a mask. The mysterious and spooky events of the film could be explained away as the machinations of The Bat vs. The Police, with innocent bystanders caught in the middle. And so, as studios rushed all over themselves to come up with their own version of The Bat, they would be compelled to copy its setting, tone, stylization and its very human villain. The "Old Dark House" thriller was born.
These films are one step closer to something identifiable as a horror flick. Mixing Old School thrills with American aggressiveness, the horror cinema began to be born. And it was born in Universal City, Hollywood.
In the 20s, Universal catered to down-market exhibitors with cheap westerns, melodramas, serials, and whatever vice they could slip in. They had produced Chaney's Phantom and Hunchback, making them the sole Hollywood studio strongly associated with shockers. But studio patriarch Carl Laemmle had a streak of class in him too, and had "discovered" and heavily promoted (and then heavily sensationalized) super Auteur-director Erich Von Stroheim. Universal had brought German director Ernst Lubitsch to Hollywood, and now they set their sights on a clever director and production designer named Paul Leni. Leni had made a highly entertaining omnibus film called "Waxworks" starring future emigre director William Dieterle which climaxed with an eerie fantasy as Dieterle is stalked by Jack the Ripper. The striking five-minute sequence almost certainly got Leni his next job: as director of the 1927 Cat and the Canary.
Cat and the Canary single-handed invents the comedy-horror film, as Leni combines dark, unnerving European visuals in the Pommer style with American slapstick in a kooky but deadly serious plot of relatives vying for the inheritance of Cyrus West in his dilapidated and possibly haunted mansion. This film became the cornerstone of the Universal "house style": a heavy atmosphere of dread, visually dense (but cost conscious!) setting, capable comedic and dramatic actors, a visually arresting ghoul, and overseen by an imaginative - and preferably European - director. The film was among the most widely seen of its era, and remains so today.
Cat and the Canary is, like Caligari, one of those movies that seems to be a wellspring for a thousand others. Take the example of Benjamin Christensen, a bright young film director from Denmark and a former opera singer. Christensen's 1914 Feuilladian spy caper The Mysterious X was one of the hits of its movie season, where it played around the world. He followed it up with the superb Night of Vengeance, then spent four years making Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages, an uncompromising pseudo-documentary which mixes up history lessons with freaky dramatic "imagined recreations" of the practices of witches and their historical persecution. Haxan served as one basis for Disney's superb "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence as seen above, and some of Christensen's visual ideas may have impressed his contemporary Paul Leni:
Benjamin Christensen - Haxan - 1922
Paul Leni - The Last Warning - 1929
But by 1929, it was Christensen who was tagging along behind Leni, making a cycle of Cat and the Canary-derived comedy thrillers, only one of which survives: the weirdly hallucinatory Seven Footprints to Satan.
Paul Leni
Leni went on to direct A Chinese Parrot, a lost Charlie Chain mystery, and The Man Who Laughs, a sort of Hunchback redux based on a Victor Hugo story centering on a historical romance starring a man whose lips were cut off as a boy, giving his face a permanent smile (this idea inspired Bob Kane's Joker character). Originally intended for Chaney, Lon backed out and incorporated the shark's-face smile makeup effect he had developed for the film into his Vampire disguise in London After Midnight. Leni backtracked towards comedy for his final film, the remarkable (and remarkably difficult to see) The Last Warning in 1929.
Universal wouldn't give up their dream of a Paul Leni / Lon Chaney pairing, and intended to team the two on Dracula for 1931. Leni suddenly died of blood poisoning in 1929, leaving behind a small legacy of four available features, two of which totally and forever rewrote how to do stylish screen horror - Leni codified the basic language of the horror film.
When Chaney died almost a year later, Universal decided if they could not have him, they would have his greatest director. It's difficult to imagine now how differently things would have turned out with the dream team of Leni and Chaney on Dracula. We certainly would have a much more accomplished and entertaining film, but we would also be robbed of the iconic Bela Lugosi and his still-riveting persona. Tod Browning did directing duties and moves the camera about with almost apathetic precision, and the film is quite without the blood and thunder he later brought to his major masterpiece Freaks (1932). But the film was a smash hit and, most shockingly for 1931 audiences, Dracula turned out to be a real vampire!
Today this seems like a minor accomplishment, but audiences at the time were shocked, and even more shocked by Frankenstein from later the same year, played deadly straight. Frankenstein was directed by Englishman James Whale, who had screened a number of Universal's early thrillers in preparation for his assignment of Frankenstein and spent the rest of his life eagerly talking up both Cat and the Canary and The Last Warning. Whale went on to appropriate Leni's seamless blend of laughs and thrills for his triumvirate of comedy thrillers The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
James Whale
But 1931 is the landmark year. Dracula and Frankenstein, with their straightforward mystery thrillers without disguises or final twists, is the point where the proto-horror of the American and German schools finally seamlessly combine into Horror Movies. The despair on the screen matched the mood of America, and now Universal's home-grown genre was pulling ahead and the other major Hollywod studios were playing catch-up.
Universal spent the rest of the 30s horror cycle continuing the Leni formula of heavy atmosphere and light comedy helmed by European emigres like Whale, or Frenchman Robert Florey, German Karl Fruend, or Austrian Edgar G. Ulmer. Warner Brothers had Czech Michael Curtiz directing their own horror comedies like Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum and RKO sent out the nasty little The Most Dangerous Game. Even MGM jumped on the horror bandwagon, setting Tod Browning to work on the silly Mark of the Vampire as Karl Fruend made the disturbing Mad Love with Peter Lorre.
But the party ended soon: Ulmer's Black Cat went so far, with its climatic scene of Boris Karloff being skinned alive while Bela Lugosi laughs manically, that some overseas companies began to ban all horror films outright. As overseas money slowed to a trickle, in July 1934 the Hays Office began to actually enforce its Motion Picture Production Code. Whale's Bride of Frankenstein is basically a coda to the whole crazy cycle of the first wave of American screen horror that began with Phantom of the Opera and saw America begin as an emergent world power and end in the pit of the Great Depression. Whale originally filmed his sequel with something like two-dozen onscreen deaths and a phalanx of sneaky debauchery, homosexuality, and blasphemy. The final film is considerably toned down. When Karloff pulls the self-destruct lever at the end of Bride of Frankenstein, the resulting explosion kills off the style for good until the start of World War II.
If it seems like I've spent a long time muddling about in obscurity and flipped past the entire Golden Age of Hollywood Horror in two paragraphs, it's because not only are these classic era shockers much better known, but they are in no particular danger of disappearing; fans of both horror films and the Haunted Mansion - you know, people probably reading this sentence - probably have ready access to the bulk of films mentioned above and dozens more. But it's also because, for better or worse, the horror film stops evolving after 1931. Once you've charted the progression from World War I to Erich Pommer, and from Pommer to Paul Leni, and from Paul Leni to James Whale, there isn't much further to go.
After the Golden Age
Screen horror enjoyed a brief vogue in the late 30s and early 40s, and this is when Universal began their second cycle of increasingly juvenile monster rallies, starting with Son of Frankenstein (1939) and ending with House of Dracula (1945). At the same time, RKO handed a paltry sum to a paranoid production executive named Val Lewton to go off and make a movie designed to ride the coat-tails of Universal's superlative Wolf Man: Cat People. Get it? They may have a Wolf Man but we have Cat People! It can't miss!
Lewton took a dumb title and made a beautiful psychological horror thriller out of it, then then did it again with more RKO market-tested titles like I Walked With a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Along the way he started a new tradition of horror, and promoted several of his underlings to full director: Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and Mark Robson. We'll hear from them later.
But these films were not universally respected and were designed to return on investment; the era from 1936 to 1957 was dominated by film noir, epic romances, romantic comedies and historical dramas. The nearest mainstream Hollywood would get to horror in this period were the numerous "women's thrillers" like Rebecca (1940), Spellbound (1945) or Secret Beyond the Door... (1948), which played with concepts like insanity and ghosts in much more structured, predictable ways.
The biggest horror films of the era proved to be a cycle of Universal light horror-comedies probably best typified by Abbot And Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which also includes the Bob Hope comedy films The Ghost Breakers (1940) and The Cat and the Canary (1939). Compared to the Leni Cat and the Canary or even the talkie remake The Cat Creeps, this newest version was tame stuff, centered around Hope's one liners and almost totally devoid of suspense. Even Universal's big color remake of Phantom of the Opera with Claude Rains is remarkably docile, being two-thirds a musical.
Horror and thrillers did return in the 50s... in the form of scientific horrors, minting a new film genre: science fiction in its modern sense. The first film had appeared in 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still, significantly directed by Robert Wise. Once again Universal led the charge with It Came From Outer Space in 1953 and Creature From the Black Lagoon in 1954, and by the time Ishiro Honda's anti-war parable Godzilla landed on American shores in 1956, the rest of the era would sit under the atomic cloud of giant lizards, bugs, arachnids, women, and anything else that could credibly destroy a city.
The Haunted Mansion and Its Era
What this means is that when WED Enterprises sat down to start working on the idea for the haunted house at Disneyland, the pop culture well was pretty dry. The great era of horror cinema had been over a generation before... there was no particularly strong "local" Gothic tradition to turn to to start with. Well... almost. Because now that we've entered the era of Disneyland and Davy Crockett, it's time to introduce the Monster Kids.
In 1957, Universal sold a huge chunk of their now hopelessly devalued horror back catalogue to television, where a new generation of post-war kids thrilled to the same stars their parents had. In a rush to piggyback on this success, Forest Ackerman and James Warren conceived and quickly published a one-off magazine called Famous Monsters of Filmland, which along with EC Comics became the paper scourge of the schoolbus set. Famous Monsters grew into a massive genre publication, encouraging serious interest in the subject and creating the next generation of horror and science fiction buffs like John Landis, George Romero and John Carpenter who would set the tone for much of where the genre is today.
Spurred by the renewal of interest on the Universal horrors and the sudden monster cult in America, a cheap little production outfit called Hammer Film Productions in England embarked on their legendary cycle of gothic horrors, amping up and blood and sex appeal as much as the British Board of Film Censors could tolerate. William Castle, a savvy businessman who knew how to extract as much money from his films as possible - using force if necessary - made and promoted Macabre (1958) with a schlock advertising campaign that became the stuff of playground legend. By the time monster movie maker Roger Corman launched his own faux-Hammer Poe cycle in 1959, the little spark that flared horror's rebirth was already a blazing inferno... and it was spreading across Europe, Asia, and South America.
The Haunted Mansion is absolutely part of this cultural cycle, but most fascinatingly, it seems to have been conceived in splendid isolation from it. We know that Yale Gracey and Rolly Crump looked at some of William Castle's shock flicks - echoes of both House on Haunted Hill (a kind of Cat and the Canary update) and 13 Ghosts show up in some early Haunted Mansion concepts, but just as strong is the influence of in-house spook stories like The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949).
It's been well known forever that the Haunted Mansion team looked at Robert Wise's 1963 The Haunting for ideas, although it wasn't until late last year that Disney researcher Melody Dale turned up the "smoking gun" in the form of this 1965 memo:
But never discussed is the fact that The Haunting was pretty much the only place WED Enterprises had to go. The Hammer flicks were considered the height of poor taste at the time; Disney artisans would be disinclined to go rooting through Castle thrillers like Homicidal or Horror of Dracula, no matter how influential these films would be. There's The Innocents from 1961, but that was a British film that sank without a trace at the box office and was only subsequently rediscovered. From there you pretty much have to go all the way back to 1944 and The Uninvited for a serious depiction of a supernatural event in a Hollywood picture. The Haunting was more or less the only "fresh" thing the Mansion team had to work on.
And as such the nature of the influence of The Haunting has been both exaggerated and under reported somehow all at once. We do know that the Haunted Mansion team were actually paid to go watch The Haunting, but just as often cited is Jean Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete from 1946. We do know that Rolly Crump saw the film - probably in a revival at a Los Angeles art theater - and went around talking it up, but it's pretty easy to exclude La Belle from the docket of serious contenders for "Haunted Mansion source texts".
Always discussed here is the Cocteau film's "living architecture" as being a possible source for the Mansion's eerie leering skulls, statues, and faces.
There's a definite family resemblance, although it's just as possible that the Haunted Mansion team got the idea from The Haunting. Wise uses just as many pieces of decor, especially statues and faces which pop into the edge of the frame at unnerving moments to announce the presence of the uncanny, to infuse Hill House with an atmosphere of dread:
Wise even fades these "faces" into fades between scenes lacking them, adding a subliminal undercurrent of unease - it's very easy to miss these, and I'm convinced Wise got the idea from Val Lewton, who used the effect in Bedlam (1945) to show off engravings by William Hogarth. Here's one from The Haunting which precedes the famous "something at the door" scene:
Wise didn't invent the idea, although his cinematic treatment of it is very effective. The core concept comes from the novel, The Haunting of Hill House, and Wise uses spooky statues at the edges of his frame to always remind us that the characters are being watched by an inhuman entity.
But the idea isn't original to the novel, either. In fact, you can see it in the Universal Horrors, in the Paul Leni comedy thrillers, in Haxan, and it's obviously much older than that. The basic threat of a haunted house is less the return of the dead and more the invasion of your personal, private space by the uncanny - this is why it's a good shorthand to depict the house itself as an omniscient force, because you can't run home to escape the evil, because it's in your home already. The Haunting is just a very classy update of the technique.
Let us return to Cocteau. The main, undeniable piece of evidence in favor of La Bete are the skeleton arm torches in the crypt at the end of the ride:
That one is just obvious. There's no way that can't be a Cocteau reference. And it is. But I'm still not convinced that it means that Mansion designer Claude Coats went and looked at La Belle et La Bete as research of the Haunted Mansion. I think it just proves that Coats was looking through Rolly Crump's art to pick up some extra ideas.
To explicate this, a long-winded example. The "demon face" wallpaper in the Haunted Mansion has lots of rumors flying around behind what it resembles and who's responsible for it. Almost everyone agrees it seems to be descended from this scene in The Haunting:
....and from there goes on to say that Marc Davis designed it, or Rolly Crump designed it, and so on and so forth - the story changes depending on the agenda of who tells the tale. But the face in The Haunting and the demon faces covering the walls of the Haunted Mansion just aren't that similar at all; for one thing Wise's camera finds an eyes and mouth in the negative space of a textured wall, and the Mansion faces are just plain old part of the wallpaper pattern. The piece of art which inspired it isn't shown much, which is a shame because seeing it makes the connection obvious. It's Crump's idea for a man eating plant.
Now, the Man Eating Plant is sometimes misidentified as the greenish blob at the bottom of this famous photo:
That's actually a Mandrake. You can tell because it looks like a baby, as do the ones in Harry Potter. The reason why Mandrakes sometimes look like babies is a nasty bit of folklore I'll let you discover on your own. This is Crump's Man Eating Plant:
But more than that, this version of the chain of influence is the only one that makes any sense to me because it's the only version that explains how those faces ended up on that wall. It's because they're scary plants, and plants are what you usually see on wallpaper. Now it snaps into focus as a very creative twist on the idea seen in The Haunting. My guess is that Coats hit on Rolly's drawing and from there designed out the famous wallpaper. As Long-Forgotten has pointed out, all of the other (stock) wallpapers in the attraction seem to be chosen for their resemblance to this pattern.
It's also worth pointing out that this idea, too, is far older than The Haunting, so there's no reason to suspect that Coats felt he had to be faithful to the Wise film in this case. I was once riding with a Mansion novice, and when we got to this part of the ride she exclaimed: "Oh, cool, The Yellow Wallpaper!"
To bring this back to my initial point: I have no doubt that the Cocteau film influenced Rolly Crump, and that some of these ideas quite naturally bled over into the ride, but I do think it's safe to say that whatever direct influence La Belle et la Bete had on the finished Haunted Mansion was oblique and refracted at best.
In fact, The Haunting touches on a number of moments that will be familiar to Mansion fans. In the first scene (a flashback) we get a body hanging in a tall, vertically-oriented space:
Another moment that seems to have inspired Marc Davis occurs elsewhere in this opening montage. I think it's the inspiration for the famous (and now removed) April-December changing portrait.
April-December, at least compared to the other paintings in that scene, was a little ambiguous - much less of a "boo" type of scare compared to, say, a seductive lady turning into a panther. I think Davis got his idea from this uncanny series of optical dissolves in The Haunting, which bridges a 60 year span in the narrative:
Laid out like that, it even looks like a Mansion-style changing portrait. For all we know, it inspired them to put the gag in the show. But even beyond the four considerable specific links outlined above, I think a whole vast stretch of the ride is a citation of The Haunting. Not all of the links made it to opening day, and then when Coats reworked the ride for the Florida house he added some patches over the missing pieces probably to satisfy his own artistic discipline, which tended to cloud the debt a bit further. But, there's no denying that as envisioned and constructed, we ascend a huge staircase to the second floor of the Haunted Mansion flanked by creepy statues...
...discover an old conservatory filled with plants and a menacing object at its center...
...see a door handle turn on its own....
...observe faces in the wallpaper...
....and see a door bulging out, defying the laws of reality.
To put it another way, the second floor of the Haunted Mansion, where both the artistry of the ride and its fright factor are at their height, seems to be a comprehensive catalogue of frightening images from the Wise film. What sets the Mansion apart is essentially the synthesis of these images and the way they are conveyed: the film can take its sweet time building up these ideas, but the Haunted Mansion is like a Gatling gun; it has to fire off these concepts one after another in quick, vivid flashes. It's like watching a horror film in fast-forward.
Okay, so, I've proven something almost everybody knows by now and I've spent longer than anyone else in the history of the Internet doing it. What else have we got?
Well, there's that final part of the corridor of doors where there's the out of control clock and the creepy shadow hand. What about that?
Well, we can start at one common point: the menacing shadows of Nosferatu. I've already said that Albin Grau was the likely source for the treatment of this shadow play thanks to his occult leanings and production design for the film. This is true, but then again director Friedrich Wilheim Murnau wasn't exactly any slouch with shadows and threatening hands in his films. For one thing there's this scary dream sequence in the film he made immediately before Nosferatu, the non-supernatural mystery Schloss Vogelod (1921):
Or the massive hand of Mephistopheles in Faust (1926):
And.... well, let's stop there, because outside Murnau there's probably thousands of evil hands and shadow hands - and menacing shadows - in Weimar cinema alone. Thanks to Erich Pommer, bizarre distorted imagery and strong visual ideas were what German audiences came to expect in the 1920s, and German filmmakers were really really good at delivering them. And since all of these films came out of the same culture and were minted at the same cultural moment, of course they're going to cycle through the same stock ideas and images. And although the Marc Davis quote I used at the start of this article does tend to lend legitimacy to the idea that the shadow-hand in the Mansion could be descended from the Nosferatu hand, Davis could've just been name-dropping two of the three most famous German silents. In a section I omitted, he actually did then go on to talk about Metropolis, so that's three for three. I don't think Nosferatu merits really serious consideration any more than any number of famous, creepy old movies.
Let's see if we can find something closer to home but in the same style. Murnau and nearly every other famous German director of his era was mentored under Max Reinhardt, and Paul Leni designed sets for Reinhardt. When Universal imported Leni to make The Cat and the Canary, he brought the entire Weimar bag of tricks with him, including creepy hands, a roving camera and expressive images:
The following scene at the bookcase, which probably seems a little silly today, was the absolute height of horripilation for 1927 audiences, with screams and giggles interspersed:
The scene was so influential, in fact, that every remake of the Cat and the Canary has felt compelled to mimic it. We know Ken Anderson remembered it well:
Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere.
But if there were so many Cat and the Canary remakes (1930, 1939, 1946, 1961, and even 1979), how do we know that the original version was the influence? One well-worn Internet rumor claims that Walt Disney was thinking of his Haunted House at Disneyland as being similar the the 1939 Bob Hope version, which matches up well with the dates for the earliest ideas for Disneyland, although it doesn't demonstrate if he directed Ken Anderson to look at it. Nor does it prove that the final Haunted Mansion team had it in mind at all. In fact, a number of things convince me that Coats, Davis, and Anderson were more likely to have been remembering the Leni film.
For one there's the film itself, which is chock-a-block with proto-Mansion imagery. The setting and visual style of the house may have inspired the Florida version:
There's a long hallway with windows down one side and a storm raging outside:
The style of the interior of the house is the same; heavy wood paneling, gothic furniture, there's even a chair in the main room that's a dead ringer for the Ballroom chairs WED had custom sculpted. There's a spooky portrait that seems to be alive:
The fiend ("The Cat" of the title) is a ludicrous pop-eyed ghoul that Mansion fans will find immediately recognizable:
Who wear a floppy brimmed hat and has a posture that reminds me of a piece of Marc Davis art...
....yeah, that one's a stretch, but look, Davis even bothered to include the "spooky maid" character (hilariously named "Mammy Pleasant" in the film) in his concept art, and she made it into the final show:
It seems to have been on their minds. In fact, since there is so much in Cat and the Canary that seems to anticipate The Haunted Mansion, I think it makes more sense to regard the particular idea of the "shadow hand" as having been descended not from Nosferatu or German films of its era, but from the Leni film, by way of Ken Anderson.
Since Anderson's "Hairy the Arm" character is an unambiguous lift from Canary, and there is otherwise very little in the known Haunted Mansion production art to suggest definitively where the idea otherwise came from, I think the shadow of the hand is an echo of Ken Anderson's Mansion. It's the ghost of Hairy the Arm. The presentation of the idea is even similar to that in the Leni film: a menacing hand comes out of nowhere, seemingly to grab you. It's very possible that a shadow projection was the only way the Mansion creators could conceive of to actually put you in the middle of this situation without the use of an actor or prop. The hand seems to attack you.
But noticing these similarities to Cat and the Canary unlocks an even wider context outside of the film. Both Claude Coats and Marc Davis were born in 1913. This would've put both men at about age fourteen when Cat and the Canary was new. That's pretty much right in the zone where you start to experience most of the stuff that's going to leave a big mark on you; at age fourteen I was riding The Haunted Mansion too many times.
Furthermore, Davis especially had shown pre-existing tendencies to raid the films of his youth to serve as inspiration for Disneyland attractions. He seems to have been a big Lon Chaney fan:
It's easy to imagine a young Marc Davis going to one film after another in the late twenties to enjoy Lon's eccentric and graceful performances. Chaney's dancelike, balletic mime in films like Phantom of the Opera and Unholy Three anticipates the swift, on-pointe movements of Davis characters like Tinkerbell. One of the things that makes the Disney animated films of the golden era so great is that the men who animated them spent the formative years of their lives watching silent film and so had an intrinsic understanding of how expressive non-verbal communication could be.
We don't have to limit the discussion to just Davis. Could Yale Gracey have remembered this shot in The Bat where a menacing shadow seems to close a door...
...when he drew this effect sketch for the Haunted Mansion?
The E-Ticket Issue Number 34
Yale would've been sixteen when The Bat was new, and it's one of the most memorable moments in the whole movie.
In fact, I think given the circumstances it's completely logical that Davis and Coats could've thought back to The Cat and the Canary while working on the Haunted Mansion. While the films of their own era could provide guidance on content, there were no contemporary horror comedies outside of William Castle's schlocky kids fare. If you had to try to create something which there are few contemporary models for, wouldn't you have thought back to a movie you'd seen years ago that seemed to do exactly what you wanted to achieve? The Cat and the Canary was one of the blockbusters of its era, the most archetypal example of the early comedic thrillers. It set the standard for the genre. And, most importantly, it was both genuinely scary and genuinely funny - a perfect blueprint for what the Haunted Mansion team was after. Leni's film had laughs, but the laughs never undercut the atmosphere of unease. This may also explain why many of Davis' cartoonier ideas didn't end up in the final ride, because they could find a way to fit them into the sardonic atmosphere of the Leni films.
Persistence of Vision Number 9
That's the thing that's missing from La Belle et La Bete and The Haunting as serious contenders as Haunted Mansion predecessors: a useful model for how to combine comedy and chills so one doesn't negate the other.
The Butler Did It
Looking specifically to Leni's thrillers and the Old Dark House genre in particular may help to explain some other aspects of Mansionana that may otherwise appear to be strange. For example, I've looked through a number of Haunted Mansion Cast Member operating guides from various early eras - Disneyland 1975, Walt Disney World 1980 and 1986 - and nowhere in any of them can I find any reference to the "performance" many Haunted Mansion Cast Members continue to give as they perform their duties. Only in a 1990 guide does a section on what to do and what not to do appear. That's about the time you start seeing it showing up in promotional videos or the Disneyland 35th Anniversary television special, where Charles Fleischer makes a hammy cameo as a creepy butler. It had probably been going on for years by that point, but simply based on the available evidence, the tradition appears to have developed all by itself.
Why? Because of Old Dark House horror comedies, that's why. Even if the college kids working the Manson have never seen or heard of these movies, they almost certainly are familiar with the "creepy servant" stereotype in the Whodunit thriller, and the Haunted Mansion is a space where a number of horror genre concerns are acted out in a controlled way. The Florida house even makes this more explicit by adding into the mix a howling wolf in the distance, secret panels (that the Stretch Rooms are hidden behind), portraits with follow-you eyes, and a featured role for the servant as they open a big heavy door and welcome guests inside.
It's an indelible moment on the East Coast version of the ride because it starts to throw all sorts of dusty old switches in your mind - all those times you saw that in a horror movie - now, it's happening to you.
Today the Haunted Mansion has begot a phalanx of imitations, both flattering and not. It's become a film comedy that largely failed to attract interest, despite the fact that the attraction continues to draw long lines and evoke reactions of startled disbelief, surprise, and suspense. Not many media productions of any kind last as long as it has: four decades and counting - while still attracting widespread demand. How many children today have even seen, say, The Rescuers? Yet The Rescuers is a more contemporary piece of entertainment than The Haunted Mansion.
The fact that more modern entertainments date themselves or run themselves ragged over the years - will anyone be watching Avatar in forty years? - is a testament to something else in the Mansion's construction. That something is that it largely allied itself with images, themes, and ideas which have been around far longer than it has. I think this is partially because of the comparative drought of serious supernatural pop culture at the time of its creation. Had the Mansion opened in, say, 1979 it would've had more to draw on - it also may have dated more rapidly. Looking at the history and development of horror cinema is one way to see this. You can also see it by studying larger patterns of, say, prose fiction, or narrative stagecraft, or magic tricks, or visual art. It's a comprehensive package.
In fact, one of the dangers of having "Mansion on the Brain" is that you start seeing it everywhere, which is one reason I've tried to be super scrupulous and careful while putting this piece together to justify my conclusions. But then, that may be the greatest compliment of all, in the end. Haunted Mansions suddenly seem proliferate in popular culture. The ride is like the keystone of the arch or the center of the web where the entire form of the pattern is held together in a single, neat knot.
