Disney's Darkest Hour
I've been thinking about Disney a lot recently. I'm not entirely sure why, but I did discover a video on YouTube based around Disney's darkest and scariest moments. The video mentions how dark The Little Mermaid is, and I quite distinctly remember myself thinking hang on - the movie of the Little Mermaid was all fluff and cuddles compared to the original book, how can they possibly call it dark?
So I began thinking about when Disney goes bad. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was pretty twisted in various places, and let's not forget that Disney also own Touchstone, Miramax and a bunch of other movie studios, so it's not like they just do kids stuff. But to get at the absolute crowning achievement of messed up Disney darkness, you need to look beyond movies and head to the happiest place on Earth, Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Or more specifically, Walt Disney World in the late 1990s.
In the Tomorrowland section of the Magic Kingdom is Stitch's Great Escape. But before it was opened in 2004, it was a different attraction, going by the name of the Extra-Terror-Restrial Alien Encounter. A warning notice outside this attraction alerted punters to its intense nature, but being part of happy fluffy Disney World, nobody cared about that. It must be suitable for kids, right?
The attraction took the form of a show, but one you experienced mainly through non-visual means, as the bulk of the show was in total darkness. I'm really glad I got to visit this thing in the short time it was open, and certainly before I went deaf in one ear, as a lot of the show used clever stereo sound to fool you into thinking sounds are coming from somewhere else. The 'story' of the show involved you being strapped into a chair and given a demonstration of an intergalactic teleportation system that went horribly wrong, allowing a hideous, winged extraterrestrial being to escape into the room with you. You got to see the creature for a split second under strobe light before it "escaped" and pretty much everything else happened in almost total darkness. It breathed hot breath and drooled down your neck, made noises as it flew around your head, and shook your shoulder restraint violently. Several times throughout the show a staff member was apparently slaughtered, causing "blood" to spray across the audience, before the alien finally reappeared in the teleporter and got blown up right in your face. It all sounds pretty gruesome and gratuitous, but when you consider the entire thing was achieved through nothing other than a water jet, some air vents, a couple of speakers and a motorised seat restraint it's amazing how intense the entire experience was... there was a genuine marriage of art and technology which explored the path previously trodden by so many fine horror directors who know that there is nothing scarier than the human imagination; you're far more likely to be scared by something you can't see. It was the sort of attraction that they could happily move to Universal Studios and run it for years, but somehow it ended up in the Magic Kingdom, where it scared the crap out of children for a while before being replaced with something far tamer.
What's even more worrying is that the version eventually made was very toned down, compared to some of the original concepts. The original idea was to have a ride based on the movie Alien, which was seen as a big no-no by the Disney board of the time, as the Alien movies were all rated R. They even brought in George Lucas to write a screen play which involved the alien actually being a captor of the company, who are using the audience as 'guinea pigs' in some hideous experiment.
It's impossible to convey the experience of this thing through text, or even video as you don't get to fully appreciate the special effects and sound and touch cues that the whole thing uses to scare the hell out of you, but there are one or two videos on YouTube that try - including at least one filmed with a night vision camera that gives away most of the secrets of how it all worked. But if you're ever looking for a good example of Disney being a little less kiddy-friendly and frankly shit-your-pants terrifying, then look no further than the Extra-Terror-Restrial Alien Encounter.