Editorials
5 ’90s Horror Cartoons That Should Really Be Brought Back
A major staple of childhood is cartoons, and growing up in the 90s meant a vast selection of quality cartoons available. It was a decade where anything and everything received an animated series, from boy bands to popular toy lines. There were numerous cartoons for any and every interest and fandom, but especially for the budding horror fan. Popular HBO horror anthology series Tales from the Crypt reeled in a younger demographic with Tales from the Cryptkeeper. Disney went gothic with beloved series Gargoyles. Toy lines My Pet Monster and Mighty Max cleverly crafted cartoons that amounted to 30-minute long commercials. But for all the well known and loved cartoons, there’s a lot more equally great horror cartoons that have since been forgotten. These 5 horror-themed cartoons were gone too soon and are worth reviving:
Toxic Crusaders
Following the environmental trend made popular by the likes of Captain Planet and the Planeteers, this kid cartoon came from one of the most unlikely sources: Troma’s Toxic Avenger films. Obviously, the R-rated content Troma is known for, was scrubbed for a more age appropriate cartoon, though that didn’t stop them from sneaking in some adult jokes. This version of Toxie was a big-hearted law-abiding citizen of Tromaville, who battled other mutants and their polluting ways. This cartoon only ran for 13 episodes, but it was popular enough to produce a line of merchandise that included action figures, trading cards, a board game, and more. I still have fond memories of my Toxic Crusaders coloring book.
Monster Force
Long before Universal sought to recreate Marvel’s cinematic universe with their own Dark Universe, there was Monster Force. The 13-episode series was created by Universal Cartoon Studios and Lacewood Productions, and saw a group of teens and college students facing off against Universal Monsters in the year 2020. Led by Dr. Reed Crawley, the group used high tech weapons to fight on behalf of humanity, but their own grudges against the monsters as well. Dracula, the Creature of the Black Lagoon, the Mummy, and more actually side with the good guys in their quest. It didn’t catch on with viewers though and ended too soon.
Attack of the Killer Tomatoes
Based on the movies Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and Return of the Killer Tomatoes, this Fox cartoon owes its creation to an episode of Muppet Babies cartoon, where poor Baby Fozzie imagined an attack of the silly tomatoes seeking revenge on comedians. The popularity of the episode prompted the sequel Return of the Killer Tomatoes, which in turn lead to the animated series. Airing for two seasons, it picks up years after the Great Tomato War and follows little boy Chad as he befriends the failed experiments of Dr. Putrid T. Gangreen as they team up to thwart Gangreen’s nefarious plans.
Freaky Stories
A Canadian anthology cartoon that was a lot like Twilight Zone but for kids. Each episode featured urban legends with different narrators and animation style, but they all began and ended with the line, “This is a true story, and it happened to a friend of a friend of mine.” The show was hosted by animatronic puppets of a cockroach and his maggot sidekick, who bookended each episode with their conversations in a diner where the storytelling takes place. The series ran for 3 seasons.
Gravedale High
Also known as Rick Moranis in Gravedale High, this 13-episode cartoon features, you guessed it, Rick Moranis. The series centered on the adventures of a human teacher in a school for monsters. As the only human in school (and voiced by Rick Moranis), he teaches a group of teen monsters that are versions of the classic Universal monsters. The teens are unruly, disruptive, and uninterested, and only the unassuming human Max Schneider would take the job. Being a kid cartoon, it was a light take on the monsters, and had an after-school special type slant with real world problems wrapped in a monster package. Mattel might have created a cartoon to sell their Monster High dolls over a decade later, but Gravedale High was the original.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
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