7 Classic Movies on Disney+ That Are Scarier Than You Remember

A good movie is like a theme park ride. Consider Walt Disney’s classic Haunted Mansion or Pirates of the Caribbean: for all their thrills and chills, they’re as whimsical as they are macabre. For every happy haunt that materializes, there’s a rum-swigging swashbuckler whose remains among cursed treasure seekers serves as a reminder: “Dead men tell no tales.” Between an exciting action sequence — a shootout between dueling gentlemen ghosts, or a fort firing on a pirate’s galleon — there’s usually a scary sequence to make the rider shriek in frightful fun.

In that spirit, here’s a list of Disney+ movies that are spookier or downright scarier than you remember, from theme park attraction adaptations to dark, fantastical adventures in the lands of Prydain and Oz.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

The first in the five-movie Pirates saga to be based on the Disney Parks ride, Curse of the Black Pearl is best remembered for Johnny Depp’s Oscar-nominated turn as the seafaring, death-fearing, trope-defying Captain Jack Sparrow. But there’s also this memorable line, delivered when the kidnapped Elizabeth Swann (Kiera Knightley) is aboard the Black Pearl: “You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner. You’re in one!”

To reclaim his ship from his treacherous first mate Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), the mutinied Captain Jack joins forces with blacksmith and swordsman Will Turner (Orlando Bloom) in his quest to save governor’s daughter Elizabeth from Barbossa’s buccaneers. The ship’s pirate crew, cursed by Aztec gold, transform into (ahem) a skeleton crew as the moonlight reveals their affliction: “We are not among the living and so we cannot die,” the skeletal Barbossa tells Elizabeth between shots of the rotted pirates carrying out their undead duties, “but neither are we dead.”

The Haunted Mansion (2003)

Disney’s Haunted Mansion movie was the second big-budget film of 2003 to be based on a Disneyland attraction following Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Unlike that film, however, Mansion mostly eschews the darker parts of the dark ride for comedic, family-friendly fun.

When foolish mortals — workaholic real estate salesman Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) and his family — visit the supposedly for-sale Gracey Manor, grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize. It’s revealed that these not-so-happy haunts are lost souls trapped by a century-old curse, including lovelorn Master Edward Gracey (Nathaniel Parker), his butler Ramsley (Terence Stamp), ghost servants Ezra (Wallace Shawn) and Emma (Dina Waters), and the disembodied medium Madame Leota (Jennifer Tilly).

For all its humor and whimsy, Haunted Mansion delivers one fright-filled scene when Leota cryptically tasks Jim and his daughter Megan (Aree Davis) with entering the tomb beneath the great dead oak to find the key that will unlock the secrets of the mansion’s curse. They find the skeleton key in the black crypt with no name, and then flee the long-decaying and now reanimated corpses that emerge from their cobweb-covered tombs and the murky waters below. It has the feel of a more tame, PG version of a sequence that would fit into Pirates or 1999’s The Mummy.

The Black Hole (1979)

The poster for Disney’s 1979 sci-fi flick The Black Hole highlights the tagline: “A journey that begins where everything ends.” When the crew of the USS Palomino — Captain Dan Holland (Robert Forster), First Officer Lieutenant Charlie Pizer (Joseph Bottoms), journalist Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine), and Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) — find the long-lost USS Cygnus during an expedition into deep-space, they’re soon sucked into a plot by the insane genius Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) to fly into a black hole.

Aboard the Cygnus, the crew of the Palomino discover that Dr. Reinhardt’s army of Star Wars-inspired Sentry robots rounded up the ship’s human crew, had them lobotomized, and turned into zombie-like Humanoid robots that can only be freed by death. Reinhardt has his lethal robot, Maximilian, kill Dr. Alex Durant (Anthony Perkins) with a whirring blade as Dr. McCrae watches helplessly, and then Reinhardt’s journey ends where everything ends: inside the black hole. Reinhardt is seen drifting in a crimson cosmos before donning the shell of Maximilian, and is last seen perched atop wreckage and ruin in a dark, hellish landscape lit only by flames.

The Scream Team (2002)

Disney Channel Original Movies — or DCOMs — have scared up more than a few horror-lite features, like Under Wraps (1997), Halloweentown (1998), Don’t Look Under the Bed (1999), Phantom of the Megaplex (2000), and Mom’s Got a Date With a Vampire (2000).

In 2002’s The Scream Team, siblings Ian (Mark Rendall) and Claire Carlyle (Kat Dennings) learn that their recently deceased grandfather’s (Gary Reineke) spirit hasn’t crossed over to the afterlife because he was captured by Zachariah Kull (Kim Coates). A mirror that acts as an afterlife way station — the North American Zone Soul Retrieval Center — leads them to the “Soul Patrol”: friendly ghosts Jumper (Tommy Davidson), Coffin Ed (Eric Idle), and Mariah (Hocus Pocus‘ Kathy Najimy).

Part Ghostbusters and part Goosebumps with a dash of Casper the Friendly Ghost, The Scream Team has some eerie imagery: tormented ghostly faces appearing from beyond, grey-skinned decedents entering the afterlife, and Coates’ misunderstood (but vengeful) villain covered in flames and hurling fireballs as he unleashes hell on a town festival.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future), the half-live-action, half-animated Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a looney tuney noir about Toon-hating, hardboiled detective Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), who reluctantly takes a case that shakes Toontown: the murder of ACME gag factory mogul Marvin Acme (Stubby Kaye). When Maroon Cartoon star Roger Rabbit (Charles Fleischer) is framed for murder, Eddie and Roger get to the bottom of a plot by the black-clad Judge Doom (Christopher Lloyd).

It’s revealed that the seemingly human Judge Doom is a disguised, murderous Toon with bulging red eyes and a high-pitched squeal for a voice. But the true terror of Judge Doom is the scene where the villain dissolves a cute cartoon shoe in toon acid: Dip.

“I know that’s mean and cruel, and lots of people have said it gave them nightmares,” Lloyd recalled in 2020. “But the first Disney films I ever saw, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, etc., there was always a horrible moment, and I would have nightmares. So, it’s kind of payback.”

Return to Oz (1985)

Set six months after 1939’s The Wizard of Oz, Disney’s sort-of-sequel Return to Oz finds young Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) disturbed by her trip down the yellow brick road in the Land of Oz. Convinced Dorothy’s stories of a talking Tin Man, a walking Scarecrow, a cowardly Lion, and magical ruby slippers are delusions, her Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) subject Dorothy to electroshock therapy.

“I can’t sleep, and I talk about a place that I’ve been to, but nobody believes it exists,” she says, only to end up back in Oz after attempting to escape from the facility. Dorothy’s old friends have been turned to stone, so her new friends — talking hen Billina (Denise Bryer), the rotund robot Tik-Tok (Sean Barrett), and Jack Pumpkinhead (Brian Henson) — help her save Oz from tyrannical Nome King (Nicol Williamson) and the witch Mombi (Jean Marsh).

Disney’s dark take on the L. Frank Baum books has such horrors as Mombi’s hall of disembodied heads, stop-motion monsters conjured by the man-eating Nome King, an unsettling-looking Scarecrow resembling a possessed bobblehead figure, and Mombi’s hunched, horrific henchmen with wheels for limbs: the Wheelers. Shudder.

The Black Cauldron (1985)

Disney’s dark animated adaptation of author Lloyd Alexander’s high fantasy novels The Chronicles of Prydain is best remembered as a box office bomb that jeopardized Disney’s animation department. Predating the Disney Renaissance that would spawn such musical hits as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994), the PG-rated Black Cauldron sends assistant pig keeper Taran (Grant Bardsley), Princess Eilonwy (Susan Sheridan), and furry friend Gurgi (John Byner) on a quest in the mystical land of Prydain.

The evil Horned King (John Hurt) seeks to use the wizard Dallben’s (Freddie Jones) future-seeing pet pig Hen Wen to obtain the cursed Black Cauldron and grant him the power to resurrect an army of undead warriors, the Cauldron Born, to rule the world. Now a cult classic, The Black Cauldron unleashed some of the scariest sequences in any animated Disney feature since the demonic Chernabog descended upon Bald Mountain in 1940’s Fantasia and Ichabod Crane encountered the Headless Horseman in 1949’s Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad.