October has come again. Leaves are blowing, mornings may be chillier depending on where you are, and store shelves are stacked with bulk bags of candy regardless of if that store is supposed to sell food at all. It’s time to mull some cider, grill some cheese, dig those plastic skeletons out of storage, start planning a costume, and get ahold of a big orange pumpkin. And, heck, while you’re sewing that monster suit or carving up that gourd, why not put on some classic Halloween TV to set the mood? There’s plenty to choose from, whether you prefer slashers, creature features, comfort flicks like It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and Casper the Friendly Ghost, or camp content like The Rocky Horror Picture Show (we all miss you, Tim Curry) and Beetlejuice.
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Amid all of these Halloween delights, however, we shouldn’t forget that shorter-form animations, especially those of the mid-20th-century, have given us some of the most influential, creative, and timeless spookiness ever to grace the screen. Here’s a list of seven of the creepiest, crawliest, and overall Halloweeniest classic cartoon shorts for your viewing terror. Muahahahaha.
7. Hell’s Bells (Ub Iwerks/Disney, 1929)
Starting out strong with a tale straight from Hell, we have this with this late-1920s animated horror by industry legend Ub Iwerks. While the vast majority of the cartoon’s runtime has little in terms of plot, it isn’t really meant to— this is a piece focused purely on conveying an aesthetic, and that aesthetic is creepy.
The camera pans across a weirdly-angled inferno, dotted with pits of dancing flames and lifeless except for the slithering creatures of various sorts that seem to swoop and squirm towards the screen until their bobble-eyed faces take up the entirety of the screen. All of this is only the leadup, and, led deeper within the twisting maze of craggy caverns, we’re treated to a surreal show as the Devil himself orders his minions to serve his strange whims. While it has nothing to do with the autumnal season, this one certainly brings the spooky.
6. Betty Boop’s Halloween Party (Fleischer Studios/Betty Boop, 1933)
Taking a more lighthearted moment to get into the Halloween spirit, we catch up with Fleischer Studios’ headliner Betty Boop as she prepares to host a Halloween party for her animal friends. This one is a truly cozy take on the season, as Betty decorates her home to vintage festive perfection before her friends arrive to bob for apples, sing, and play party games.
If you need proof of the truly immaculate Soft Halloween vibes, the first creature to receive an invite to Betty’s party is a scarecrow, who, having been shivering in his field at the first fall winds, readily welcomes the opportunity to spend the evening indoors, warm and around friends. All are welcome at Betty’s party, as long as you’re here to have fun— and when trouble does show up in the form of a guest far more interested in havoc and screams than fun and games, he is quickly removed from the premises with enthusiasm, whimsy and a bit of real, true Halloween magic.
5. Water, Water Every Hare (Looney Tunes, 1952)
Even in an article about classic cartoons, we’ve still got a monster movie— this one starring Bugs Bunny as a midnight rainstorm washes him, still sleeping, out of his rabbit burrow, down a winding river and straight to the castle gates of a scheming Mad Scientist (said castle has “Mad Scientist” displayed outside in neon signage, in case anyone wasn’t sure who lives there). The Scientist, a greenish little man in a lab coat, wants Bugs’ brain to power his giant robot, an idea that Bugs is understandably not too comfortable with.
Thankfully for the Mad Scientist, he has a monstrous henchman to help catch the rabbit— a creature known in Looney Tunes canon as “Gossamer” (yes, really) who can best be described as a hairy red Whatever in oversized athletic shoes. The resulting madcap chase through the Scientists’ castle takes Bugs and Gossamer through encounters with wildly winding staircases, mummies, conveniently placed suits of armor, a lab full of bubbling concoctions with fantastical effects, and of course the Mad Scientist himself. Which monster movie is this parodying? All of them, and it’s hilarious.
4. Trick or Treat (Disney short, 1952)
It does not get more Classic Halloween than this one. Future Ducktales stars Huey, Dewey and Louie make a stop on their trick-or-treating route to visit their uncle, Donald Duck, only to find that Donald is no treats and all (rather mean-spirited) tricks. Thankfully, the charmingly cliched Witch Hazel happens to be flying overhead on her broomstick just then and, seeing Donald tricking his nephews while keeping candy for himself, decides to take matters into her own hands and teach the selfish duck a lesson. Touching down beside the dejected ducklings, Witch Hazel offers to help— “help” which consists of Macbeth-esque potion-brewing antics, the conjuring of various ghosts and ghoulies, and doing things to Donald Duck that are probably in violation of some sort of international law (though, of course, it’s all really just cartoon-slapstick-as-usual).
Huey, Dewey and Louie get their treats while playing some tricks of their own, Donald learns a much-needed lesson on not being a candy hog who plays mean pranks on children, and Witch Hazel— who seems to be less of the benevolent, maternal witch archetype and more of a being who has intervened purely to enjoy the thrill of some magical vengeance — is a delight throughout.
3. Minnie the Moocher (Fleischer Studios/Betty Boop, 1932)
A walrus might be the last thing you’d expect to see in a cartoon on this list, let alone a dancing, singing walrus— but here we are. While it technically isn’t a Halloween-centric story, Fleischer Studios’ 1932 cartoon Minnie the Moocher has long been hailed as one of the best-ever works of spooky animation. One of the studios’ several productions in partnership with jazz musician Cab Calloway— a truly iconic singer-songwriter-actor-bandleader famous for his dramatic dance moves, comedic performance and drily-humorous lyrics— the cartoon not only features music by Calloway and his orchestra, but brings the man himself into the cartoon world using a technique called Rotoscoping, pioneered by the studio’s co-founder Max Fleischer, where live-action film footage is projected frame-by-frame onto glass to be traced over by an animator.
As for plot, Minnie the Moocher is fairly standard. A teenage Betty Boop, dissatisfied with her home life, decides to run away alongside her best friend Bimbo, only for the two to soon find themselves walking through a blustery autumnal scene of flittering shadows and looming trees. Attempting to take refuge in the roots of a tree stump for the night, the pair find themselves in an underground cavern, where a spectral walrus— Calloway’s cartoon-sona for the episode— regales them with the titular song accompanied by a chorus of ghoulish figures. This one is an absolute legend in the field of creepy cartoons, and will surely continue to be a mainstay of October cartoon viewings for decades more to come. Just don’t think too hard about why a walrus ghost was underneath a tree in the middle of America— the nonsense is the point.
2. Broomstick Bunny (Looney Tunes, 1956)
Following up Trick or Treat with director Chuck Jones’ very own take on a Witch named Hazel, we have another appearance of Bugs Bunny, this time in a cartoon that is clearly and outrageously in the Halloween spirit. Opening on this new version of Witch Hazel, we see that she is a green-skinned, lumpy-faced, lovably ridiculous witch with a passion for potions and the existential fear that she may one day become— gasp! — beautiful. We soon learn that it’s also Halloween, as, just when the witch is lamenting her lack of a final potion ingredient (you guessed it— rabbit), Bugs skips up to her door on his Trick-or-Treating route, in full mask and costume as an absolutely hideous young witch.
While Witch Hazel’s jealously of this visitor’s overwhelmingly ugly appearance quickly leaves Bugs in jeopardy as she schemes to eliminate her competition, things get much worse when he is revealed as a rabbit, and the ensuing chase scene through Witch Hazel’s whimsical and zany home gives a spooky-season flair to the standard Looney Tunes chase-and-hit-and-chase formula. Bugs triumphs in the end, of course, and while the humor of the rabbit’s ending quip may be lost on many younger viewers, the cartoon itself still holds strong as a Halloween classic.
1. The Skeleton Dance (Disney’s Silly Symphonies, 1929)
Finally, of course, there is absolutely no other choice to round out this Halloween watchlist than the undying, undead dance party that is Disney‘s The Skeleton Dance. A staple in any Cartoon TV programming or binge-watch surrounding the holiday since the midcentury, this animated short, originally aired in 1929. The animators executes the simple concept of a skeleton dance party with a creativity and attention to detail that is both charming and, at times, genuinely creepy (in particular, the skeletons’ chosen method of escape back to their graves at dawn may still send a few real shivers down viewers’ spines).
Being put to animation a few decades prior to the rise of mass-produced plastic Halloween skeletons, and even a good few years before the spooky skeleton would become a cartoon stock character in its own regard, these boney fellows still resemble real human bones enough to give audiences, especially modern ones, a good bit more reason to believe in the true fear factor of witnessing skeletons doing a funny little dance.
However, younger readers may already know that the true reason for this cartoon’s inclusion as number one on this list isn’t just its spooky factor or its staying power, but its viral adoption into modern Halloween culture— because, yes, a clip from The Skeleton Dance is the source of the music video for inescapable, iconic, may-as-well-be-the-theme-song-of-Halloween-itself electro-house song “Spooky Scary Skeletons” (remixed by The Living Tombstone in 2013 from a jaunty track on Andrew Gold’s 1996 Halloween album). Not content to remain among the classic cartoons of days past, these skeletons have found a new life— and some new tunes to dance to— as the face of the holiday almost a century after they first crawled from their graves.
Is your favorite classic Halloween cartoon not on this list? Let me know in the comments!
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