The Haunted House (1929 film)

Plot

During a stormy night, Mickey Mouse seeks refuge in a creepy house. He knocks on the porch door, gets no reply, and when he pulls the knob, the whole porch falls apart. Peeking through the open front door, he goes inside, and the door locks automatically. Scared, Mickey is surprised by bats flying out of holes in the wall. A big spider drops from the ceiling, making him hide in a chamber pot. After climbing out, he hears howling and clattering, so he runs into a hallway just as a chandelier's lights go out. He yells three times in the darkness, strikes a match, and looks around. The shadow of a hooded figure appears next to his own shadow. Terrified, Mickey screams, panics, and runs away in fear, but the figure chases him, making growling sounds. The hooded figure traps Mickey in a room, lifts its hood, and is revealed to be a skeleton ghost. This skeleton and several others force Mickey to play the organ while they dance, with one using a radiator like an accordion. When Mickey finishes, he tries to sneak off and escape, but the skeletons spot him. As he runs and grabs a doorknob, it turns into a skeleton hand that grips and shakes him. He dashes up a staircase, bumps into two more skeletons in a bed, then jumps out a window into a barrel full of skeletons, which raise their hands threateningly. He rushes to an outhouse and desperately tries to open the door to hide, but a skeleton sitting on the toilet frightens him. That skeleton slams the outhouse door shut as a terrified Mickey flees.

Reception

The 1929 short The Haunted House appears on the 2004 Walt Disney Treasures DVD set Mickey Mouse in Black and White: Volume Two, placed in the "From the Vault" bonus section. That section opens with film historian Leonard Maltin discussing the roots of racial stereotypes in Disney cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s. The Haunted House is included because Mickey performs a "Mammy!" impression, a nod to Al Jolson's blackface rendition of "My Mammy." The 1931 short The Moose Hunt also appears in this section due to a similar gag involving Pluto.

Critics have offered contrasting views on the cartoon's quality. On the Disney Film Project, Ryan Kirkpatrick praises it as a step forward in sophistication, noting that it breaks the usual formula of dropping Mickey into a setting with immediate music. Instead, it opens with an establishing shot of the house, which resembles a menacing face on the horizon, followed by Mickey struggling through a storm to reach it. The music, rain animation, and wind moving objects in the foreground all build a sense of foreboding.

Gijs Grob, in his book Mickey's Movies: The Theatrical Films of Mickey Mouse, disagrees. He argues that Mickey's role is limited, serving only as a vessel for the audience's fear. Mickey repeatedly looks into the camera for sympathy, pulling viewers into the haunted house with him. While the early scenes evoke genuine horror, Grob contends that the short ultimately falls back on the tedious song-and-dance routines typical of early Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphony cartoons, preventing it from standing out.

Contemporary reviews were more enthusiastic. Motion Picture News, on January 4, 1930, called it a subject with plenty of weird material, capped by a burlesque of Al Jolson's Mammy line that was a "darb" and would bring down any house. Film Daily, on January 5, 1930, described it as a "creeper" idea injected into a Mickey Mouse comic, featuring the usual storm, lightning, ghosts, and dancing skeletons, along with a flash simulation of Al Jolson via a black-and-white character silhouette and a simultaneous cry of "Mammy" that was a knockout.