Directed by: Walt Disney

Starring: Mickey Mouse (Walt Disney)

STORY

It is a dark and stormy night, and poor Mickey Mouse is caught outside in absolutely miserable weather.

Rain pours down. Lightning flashes across the sky. The wind has turned Mickey's umbrella into something considerably less useful than an umbrella. Desperate to escape the storm, Mickey spots an old house and decides that taking shelter inside is surely better than remaining outside.

Mickey is about to learn an important lesson:

Sometimes the storm is the safer choice.

From the moment he approaches the house, something isn't right. The building seems almost alive. The porch collapses, doors behave strangely, and once Mickey gets inside, the house makes it very clear that he isn't alone.

Bats burst from the walls. A giant spider descends toward him. Strange noises echo through the darkness. Ghostly figures appear and disappear.

Then Mickey encounters the master of this nightmare — a sinister hooded figure surrounded by an entire collection of skeletons.

Mickey would very much like to leave.

The ghosts have other plans.

Instead, Mickey is ordered to sit at a pipe organ and PLAY.

And suddenly this haunted-house nightmare becomes a supernatural musical revue.

Mickey pounds away at the organ while skeletons dance, stretch, twist, separate and reassemble themselves in ways that only animation could make possible. Bones become props. Bodies become instruments. The entire haunted house seems to join the performance.

But Mickey hasn't forgotten the most important thing:

GET OUT OF THE HOUSE.

The moment an opportunity presents itself, Mickey makes a run for it.

Unfortunately, every possible escape seems to contain another skeleton.

Doors betray him. Beds aren't safe. Windows aren't safe. Even places where no reasonable person would expect to encounter the undead somehow contain MORE SKELETONS.

Finally, Mickey escapes into the night and runs for his life.

Seven minutes earlier he needed shelter from the storm.

Now the rain doesn't seem nearly so bad.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS
MICKEY'S FIRST HAUNTED-HOUSE ADVENTURE

Long before Mickey encountered ghosts in later cartoons, The Haunted House plunged him into an early mixture of comedy and horror.

Released only about a year after Steamboat Willie, this is still a very early Mickey — mischievous, vulnerable and considerably more frantic than the polished corporate icon generations would later know.

Here, Mickey isn't controlling the situation.

He's trying to survive it.

MICKEY WAS STILL A BABY!

Think about this.

Steamboat Willie premiered in November 1928.

The Haunted House arrived in December 1929.

The Mickey Mouse phenomenon was barely one year old when audiences watched him run into this nightmare.

And Disney was producing Mickey cartoons at an extraordinary pace. D23 lists The Haunted House as the 14th theatrically released Mickey Mouse cartoon.

Fourteen Mickey cartoons — essentially within the character's first year.

WALT WAS MICKEY

There wasn't a celebrity voice actor playing Mickey Mouse.

It was Walt Disney himself.

Disney supplied Mickey's voice during this formative period, giving his own creation its vocal personality as synchronized sound became an increasingly important part of animated filmmaking.

So when 1929 audiences heard Mickey reacting to the horrors inside the house, they were hearing the voice of the man whose name would eventually become synonymous with the character.

UB IWERKS — THE ANIMATION POWERHOUSE

Behind Mickey's movements was one of the most important figures in early animation: Ub Iwerks.

Iwerks was the primary animator on The Haunted House and an essential creative force during Mickey's earliest years.

His ability to produce animation with remarkable speed helped make the extraordinary output of these early Disney cartoons possible.

The fluid, rubbery movement of Mickey and the skeletons belongs to an era when animated characters weren't constrained by reality.

Bodies could stretch.

Bones could separate.

Objects could transform.

Anything the animator could draw could happen.

CARL STALLING MAKES THE HOUSE SING

The music was composed by Carl Stalling, another enormously important name in animation history.

Stalling worked with Disney during this pioneering period before later becoming legendary for his decades of work scoring Warner Bros. cartoons.

In The Haunted House, music isn't simply playing underneath the action.

It IS part of the action.

Mickey's organ performance, the skeletons' movements and the sound effects work together, demonstrating how quickly filmmakers were discovering the comic possibilities of synchronized sound.

AINTOID: THOSE SKELETONS LOOK FAMILIAR...

They should.

Some animation in The Haunted House was reused from The Skeleton Dance, Disney's groundbreaking first Silly Symphony, which had been released earlier in 1929.

But rather than simply repeating the earlier cartoon, The Haunted House places skeleton animation inside a Mickey Mouse adventure and builds a story around Mickey being trapped among the supernatural performers.

Early animation studios frequently reused drawings and animation cycles when circumstances made it practical.

In this case, audiences got another opportunity to watch those wonderfully impossible dancing bones.

AINTOID: MICKEY MEETS HORROR

The Haunted House helped establish something Disney would return to repeatedly:

Mickey + scary things = comedy.

Later Mickey cartoons would again send him into darker territory, including The Gorilla Mystery and the wonderfully bizarre The Mad Doctor.

The formula works because Mickey reacts much the way the audience would.

When something terrifying appears...

HE RUNS.

AINTOID: EVEN THE CENSORS GOT INVOLVED

Apparently ghosts and skeletons weren't the only things causing trouble.

The cartoon encountered objections from some state censorship authorities over gags involving a chamber pot and an outhouse.

It's a wonderful reminder that censorship battles didn't begin with modern movies.

Even a seven-minute Mickey Mouse cartoon could manage to upset somebody.

A VERY DIFFERENT MICKEY

Modern audiences accustomed to today's Mickey may be surprised by the Mickey of 1929.

He's rougher around the edges.

The animation is stranger.

The comedy can be darker.

And early cartoons sometimes contain jokes, caricatures and cultural references that have aged very badly.

The Haunted House includes a brief gag referencing Al Jolson's blackface performance style and “Mammy” persona — imagery that reflected entertainment conventions of its era but is offensive and uncomfortable today.

It is part of the original historical film and also part of understanding how dramatically popular entertainment and cultural standards have changed since 1929.

AINTOID: MICKEY ENTERS THE PUBLIC DOMAIN — BUT THERE'S A CATCH

The Haunted House, as a work published in 1929, entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2025.

That makes this particular early Mickey cartoon part of an extraordinary new chapter in film history.

But public domain copyright status does not mean that every later version of Mickey Mouse — or every Disney trademark — is free for unrestricted use.

The copyright in this 1929 film and Disney's continuing trademark rights are separate legal issues.

For AIN, that distinction matters.

1929 AUDIENCES LOVED THEIR SKELETONS

Imagine seeing this in a theater in 1929.

Motion pictures had only recently undergone the enormous transformation to synchronized sound. Mickey Mouse himself was a new sensation. Audiences were discovering that cartoons could combine movement, music and sound effects with astonishing precision.

Then the lights went down.

A storm appeared.

Mickey walked into a haunted house.

And an army of skeletons started dancing.

Nearly a century later, the drawings are simple compared with modern animation.

But the imagination behind them isn't.

That is the magic of The Haunted House.

It's funny.

It's creepy.

It's historically fascinating.

And it's Mickey Mouse when Mickey Mouse was still brand new.