Editorials
How ‘Cuphead’ Resurrected the Unsettling Style of Early Cartoons
Before the “House of Mouse” forever associated cartoons as a genre predominantly for kids, animation wasn’t quite so family-friendly. The video game Cuphead resurrected the surreal and terrifying style of Fleischer Animation and Disney Studios early cartoons. Best of all, Cuphead doesn’t market itself as unsettling, the game is rated E after all – its biggest offenses (according to the back of the box) being gambling and tobacco use. Instead of inserting frightening aspects into the game, the developers (Studio MDHR) heightened what was already present in a lot of early cartoons. Gamers who look between the hand-drawn lines of animation will uncover a nightmare of body-horror, black comedy, and terror.
Old cartoons, even more than silent films, feel like they’re from a different planet. Modern viewers usually note several unsettling qualities of retro cartoons. One of the most obvious ones is a bounciness featured in those early films. The “bouncing” was due to the popular animation style of the time nicknamed: rubber hose animation. It was a technique where character’s bodies lacked sharp edges or joints and instead had bendy long black tubes for appendages. Combining this with simple repetitive animation (bouncing) was intended to make the film’s more alive and better animated. What was cost-cutting in theory, turned out terrifying in practice. Other upsetting aspects of those films went beyond the limitations of animation of the time though. These unsettling storytelling choices were very much intentional.
Early animated films often feature a strange set of intense moralistic values (which Cuphead also plays up). The perfect example is “Swing You Sinners” (a 30’s Fleischer Studios cartoon ). In “Swing You Sinners,” a happy-go-lucky dog named Bimbo steals a chicken and is hounded by the forces of hell until a giant skeleton eats him. Being dragged to hell for chicken theft might be a tad excessive of a punishment, regardless, this Puritan “all or nothing” value system was present in many cartoons of the time. There aren’t any concrete theories as to why these cartoons had such harsh morals, though the fact that cartoons at the time weren’t exclusively produced for children certainly had something to do with it. Still, one could argue that the idea behind these intense parables stemmed from an attempt to teach kids about right and wrong (in the scariest possible way apparently). The idea is similar to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which, on the surface, were about princes and princesses but also sneakily featured incest, murder, and torture. Together, the morals and quirky stylistic choices of the era create a bouncing nightmare of cheeriness – which is exactly what Cuphead is.
The biggest antiquated animation motif Cuphead’s creators borrow is of course the ever-present smiles on the game’s mascots. Both Mug Man and Cuphead are fitted with a set of vacant coin-eyes and toothy-grins, previously featured on mascots like Felix the Cat or Bimbo the Dog. The smiles are doubly unsettling since players spend the majority of the game murdering other cartoon characters. Cuphead extends this frightening aesthetic choice into other aspects of the game’s world. Minor opponents are all equipped with resting states, a default animation cycle to return to when they’re not engaged. The resting states for most minions is them simply grinning ear-to-ear along with a Judge Doom-like set of unblinking eyeballs. The result is as if the cast of stuffed animatronics from Splash Mountain gained sentience and went “Westworld” on unsuspecting guests.
Cuphead also adopts the perverse morals of the cartoons it takes inspiration from. The game’s story is presented as a fairytale that follows our heroes as they’re turned into indentured soul collector’s by the Devil as punishment for gambling their own souls away. Again, this is a throwback to early cartoon works like Disney’s Pinocchio, which featured the deceptive Pleasure Island (a local not too dissimilar to the Devil’s Casino in Cuphead). Like poor Pinocchio, our child-like protagonists are sucked in by adult vices and punished for it; although they’re thankfully spared this fate. Then there are the bosses.
One of Cuphead’s biggest achievements is creating horror from its boss fights through the natural extension of rubber-band animation: body horror. Each boss in Cuphead has multiple phases, with each phase distorting and mutilating the bosses original form. Enemies rip off their heads, morph into strange shapes, and much worse. By the end of fights, bosses barely resemble their kid-friendly first appearance. As the bosses slowly stretch and warp, they transform into the full realization of Cuphead‘s thesis: there’s a fine line between creepy and cute.
Cuphead’s guise of being a “kid-friendly” cartoon game was a massive success. The E-rated title was one of the best rated games of 2017 and is still incredibly popular two years after launch. Surprisingly, the game did end-up especially resonating with younger fans, inspiring a line of toys, blankets, and an air-freshener (yes that’s true). Studio MDHR did their job so well that most players don’t pick-up on the latent horror themes in the game’s story and presentation. Much like when audiences were heading to watch Bimbo or Mickey’s latest exploits, few realized that this wide-grinned cartoon had its roots in horror. But, the further gamer’s progress, the more they understand that something deeply twisted is lurking under the surface of each cell of animation.
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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