Mickey Mouse horror film rides viral buzz | CityNews Calgary

Here’s Mickey!

A Canadian horror director is driving a wave of viral buzz for turning Disney’s most well-known character right into a ugly slasher flick.

The trailer for “Mickey’s Mouse Trap” was launched on Jan. 1, the identical day the earliest iteration of the beloved animated rodent entered the general public area, and it’s been making headlines.

“We kind of shook the world,” says Toronto-based filmmaker Jamie Bailey, 46, who has been fielding interview requests from the likes of ABC News and Rolling Stone over the previous couple of days. “It’s been a wild ride. One of the craziest weeks of my life.”

“Mickey’s Mouse Trap,” directed by Bailey and written by Simon Phillips, who additionally performs the titular mouse, sees a bunch of pals throw a party at a Dave & Buster’s-esque venue, when “someone becomes possessed by Mickey Mouse and goes crazy and starts killing people.”

The movie was shot in eight days at Funhaven, an amusement centre in Ottawa, “on a super low, micro-budget,” says Bailey. He refuses to reveal simply how a lot cash was spent.

Bailey was born and raised in Cape Breton, N.S, earlier than transferring to Toronto in 2007 to pursue a profession as a filmmaker. He started gravitating in direction of the horror style as a result of the movies don’t all the time require main stars and will be made on a budget.

“The great thing about the Mickey Mouse thing is we’re kind of injecting the two things — the genre of horror and taking a big name, which is Mickey Mouse — but we don’t have to pay for it, which is the magic sauce right now,” he says. 

The movie was strategically shot in September so Bailey may drop the trailer as quickly because the copyright expired for “Steamboat Willie,” the 1928 Disney animated quick that debuted the characters of Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

“I’m shocked that we were the first people that actually jumped on it,” he says. “I’m shocked because anyone could have done this that makes movies.”

While Bailey’s movie was certainly the primary, an as-yet-untitled Mickey Mouse slasher was introduced on Jan. 2 by director Steven LaMorte, who beforehand helmed a horror parody of “The Grinch” referred to as “The Mean One.” On Instagram, LaMorte described the movie as: “A late-night boat ride turns into a desperate fight for survival in New York City when a mischievous mouse becomes a monstrous reality.”

Bailey’s crew needed to tiptoe round authorized limitations — solely the “Steamboat Willie” model of Mickey Mouse is public area, not the modern-day Mickey with the gloves and outsized sneakers. The killer within the movie dons a Mickey Mouse masks that appears precisely as the unique iteration of the character was drawn, with pupil-less, small, black ovals as eyes.

At one level, Bailey had the killer doing Mickey’s iconic, high-pitched giggle, however he needed to take away it as a result of solely later variations of the mouse did the chortle.

“The lawyer said, ‘Take that out, you can’t do that.’ It’s little things like that that can get us in trouble,” he says.

Bailey was impressed by “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” a horror movie by British director Rhys Frake-Waterfield launched in 2023 after the unique model of the beloved fictional bear entered the general public area.

“They never got sued,” he says. “They’re making a sequel now.”

He factors out that the copyright for the unique model of Peter Pan — based mostly on J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play concerning the character’s adventures in Neverland — expired on Jan. 1 and Frake-Waterfield additionally has a horror movie within the works based mostly on him.

“I think this is going to be a trend,” he says. “It’s going to be the beginning of something. Maybe in five years we’re going to be heavily oversaturated with it.”

His movie will not be with out its haters. Bailey admits the trailer has been getting skewered on-line for its campiness, however he believes the backlash is simply par for the course.

“I find especially with ‘Blood and Honey’ and these low-budget horror movies that there’s a certain market for people who love to hate it,” he says. “Like, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen someone say, ‘This looks terrible. I can’t wait to see it.’”

And as for when folks can see “Mickey’s Mouse Trap,” Bailey says he’s aiming for a March launch, though he’s at the moment in talks with distributors. He says he’s been supplied every part from theatrical releases to alternatives on streaming platforms.

“We have everyone knocking on our doors right now,” he says.