Mickey Mouse is a serial killer now... and that's a good thing

The 1928 incarnation of the character stars in the gory new slasher flick Screamboat. Welcome to public domain, Disney!

A new film version of a timeless Disney masterpiece is in theaters, and it’s garnering critical jeers and widespread grumbling that it has no reason to exist other than putting an unnecessary twist on a classic. I’m not talking about the live-action Snow White—I’m talking about the low-budget comedy horror flick Screamboat, out April 2nd.

Screamboat reimagines Disney’s flagship creation Mickey Mouse as a vicious serial killer. The iconic rodent is portrayed by the same actor who played the evil clown in the Terrifier series. What the hell is going on here? Disney, the company known for zealously guarding its lucrative intellectual properties, has just seen its flagship character enter the public domain.

On the left, the original 1928 version of Mickey Mouse . On the right, the twisted version of the character from the horror comedy adaptation Screamboat.

Screamboat joins the recent trend of low-budget horror flicks based on classic kid-lit properties. These films are generally pretty lousy, but we should not criticize them for what they are but celebrate them for what they represent—a fresh infusion of classic works into the public domain.

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In November of 1928, an upstart company called Disney Cartoons released the short animation Steamboat Willie. It was one of the first toons to feature synchronized sound, and it starred a singing, dancing mouse who gets into all sorts of shenanigans while piloting a riverboat. There had been a handful of silent Mickey Mouse cartoons, but this film’s technological innovation caused a sensation, and the mouse became the cornerstone of Disney’s IP Empire.

Steamboat Willie was made in the infancy of the sound era, and Mr. Disney clearly knew that the novelty of cartoon animals performing music and engaging in noisy slapstick would be enough to enthrall his audience at the time. But it’s still marvelously entertaining today. That original monochromatic iteration of Mickey Mouse was much more of a mischievous chaos agent than the character would become in the ensuing decades.

In this short, the mouse yanks open a cow’s mouth to play its teeth like a xylophone, and he tugs at piglets suckling at their mother sow’s teats to produce a series of musical squeals. (This scene was actually cut by the censors decades later—most people don’t realize that American movies made before 1934 were darker and earthier and more innuendo-laden than the stuff made over the next 25 years due to the strictures of the Hays Code.)

You really should watch this cinematic milestone if you haven’t. It’s easy to find now because it’s in the public domain.

Disney famously built its reputation on animated adaptations of public domain classics—The Three Little Pigs, Grimm’s Snow White, Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, Collodi’s Pinocchio, Charles Perrault’s Cinderella, Kipling’s Jungle Book, Villeneuve’s Beauty & the Beast, Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, etc. etc. etc. However, the company has always been viciously protective of its own copyrights. In 1998, a piece of legislation called the Copyright Term Extension Act, or CTEA, lengthened the terms of copyright to 95 years. It was dubbed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," because it ensured that Steamboat Willie would not enter the public domain until nearly a century after its creation.

After all the legislative extensions ran out, Steamboat Willie finally entered the public domain on January 1, 2024. The tongue-in-cheek horror adaptation Screamboat was announced the next day. The director of Screamboat says that it’s "the story of a late-night ferry ride in New York City where commuters and deckhands and all the usual passengers are attacked by a murderous and mischievous mouse who is mean, tiny, and loves getting up to no good."

Screamboat was not alone. Two other twisted horror takes on Steamboat Willie were announced the same day: the movie Mickey’s Mouse Trap and the survival horror game Infestation: Origins. And these Steamboat Willie rip-offs are part of a whole subgenre of low-budget horror films that steals juice from a classic IP. After a beloved children’s book series by A. A. Milne entered the public domain a few years ago, the grisly (grizzly?) film Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey was released. It featured Milne’s cute animals gone feral and eager to kill.

The last few years have also seen two different horror films based on E.C. Segar’s spinach-crazed Sailor Man, who is also no longer under copyright—Shiver Me Timbers and Popeye the Slayer Man. Meanwhile, Blood and Honey was followed by a Pooh sequel, as well as several spin-offs based on other classic IPs like Bambi and Peter Pan. The series will culminate with an Avengers-style crossover film called Poohniverse: Monsters Assemble.

The director of this unique franchise, dubbed the Twisted Childhood Universe, is Rhys Frake-Waterfield. He will release his next film Pinocchio: Unstrung later this year. The Chuckie-esque re-imagining of the classic will feature Robert Englund (aka Freddie Krueger) as the Talking Cricket. But even Frake-Waterfield, who seems to see macabre updates of childhood touchstones as his calling, has said that he wouldn’t dare mess with Mickey Mouse. “We didn’t want to go near that character,” he told Indiwire.

Behold Screamboat’s version of Steamboat Willie. He has the same round ears, the same four-fingered mitts, and the same captain’s hat. But this tiny murderous creature lops off a lot more limbs (and other appendages) than the original Disney version did.

Beyond the copyright issues, there are trademark issues. Disney has recently taken steps to make the iconic black-and-white Steamboat-era iteration of Mickey into a core element of its brand. A low-budget horror parody of the character will probably avoid legal issues, but a big-budget animated adaptation would probably still face some legal challenges.

These kid-lit horror films have another thing in common beyond source material that recently entered the public domain: they haven’t exactly been garnering critical raves. Screamboat is actually getting a slightly warmer reception than other entries in this bizarre subgenre, though reviewers frequently stress that this new film sails over the low bar set by its predecessors. The Guardian thinks it’s a “draining bout of horror opportunism,” but The Wrap writes, “If we absolutely must have low-budget spree killer movies starring classic cartoon icons, I hope they’re at least as good as Screamboat.”

But just because these films have a low cumulative Rotten Tomato score doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be excited about what could happen as more and more classic works enter the public domain. (Besides, critical aggregator sites are notoriously unhelpful in determining the enjoyability of horror films.)

“The public domain is the basis of our culture; it’s a condition for human flourishing throughout history,” says Harvard Law prof and copyright scholar Rebecca Tushnet. “And the only way to get a thriving culture is to have a whole bunch of stuff that isn't very good. The more people you have making things and the more perspectives they make it from, the more likely we are to get something that will stand the test of time.”

Tushnet points to the 1823 poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas" as an object lesson. It established the character Santa Claus as we currently understand him: a fat jolly dude in a sleigh pulled by eight reindeer who shimmies down chimneys on Christmas Eve to deliver presents while children sleep. (Seriously, all of those character details come from that one poem.)

“Santa Claus entered the public domain very quickly because copyright terms used to be much much shorter,” says Tushnet. “And now Santa is everywhere and everyone gets to do their own thing with him, including horror movies like Silent Night Bloody Night.” (That 1972 film was reviled in its time, but is now viewed as a holiday classic and a vital progenitor of the slasher genre.)

Look at the profusion of Shakespeare film adaptations: Olivier’s Richard III, Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet, Prospero’s Books, Chimes at Midnight, 10 Things I Hate About You, West Side Story, James Gunn’s gross-out black comedy Tromeo and Juliet. All but one of them are timeless classics. (Sorry, Sir Larry.)

Frankenstein, Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, the works of Lovecraft and Lewis Carroll, the Oz books—all are now in the public domain, and all continue to inspire adaptations, some good, some bad, some so bad they’re good. (Did you know that the 2014 film I, Frankenstein, which reimagines the titular monster as a badass action hero who wields two Filipino fighting batons, is known as Yo, Frankenstein in Spanish-speaking countries?)

Buñuel/Dali’s surrealist film Un Chien Andalou entered the public domain this year. So did the first Marx Brothers film and Hitchcock’s first sound film. So did Faulkner’s Sound and the Fury and Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms and Virginia Wolf’s A Room of One’s Own.

Next year, Mickey will be reunited with his beloved pet dog when the earliest iteration of Pluto breaks free of his copyright leash. I can hardly wait for Screamboat 2: Man’s Best Fiend.