You guessed it, Rage is at class again so I have chosen to write about a not so typical horror film, Sleeping Beauty. The difference between this post and my previous post on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is that I believe Sleeping Beauty can legitimately be classified as a horror movie, or at least a very scary movie, especially for kids. I base that statement entirely on one character: Maleficent. I propose that there is no more frightening villain in all of Disney animated moviedom. She has a cold, calculating voice that she calmly uses to send chills down the spine. If she makes a threat, no matter how extravagant, you better believe she is going to follow through with it, big time. And the icing on the cake? She can turn into a dragon! Not a lame cartoony dragon that you could make fun of (a la Jafar turning into a snake in Aladdin), a terrifying dragon that could haunt your dreams if you were ten years old (or even thirty, I don’t think that dragon ever gets entirely non-frightening). What other villains could compete? We’ve already discussed Jafar (who comes off the fool at the end of the movie, tricked into becoming a genie? What a chump), Scar (coward), Hades (hilarious, but not scary)? The only villains who come close to Maleficent are her fellow villainesses Ursula from The Little Mermaid and the Queen from Snow White. Why is it that the earlier Disney movies produced the most terrifying villains? And why were these villains all women? I am not going to get into that, because I don’t know. But while I’m here I might as well spit out a few ideas. Maybe because girls are way more scary than guys. Maybe because girls are much smarter than guys when it comes to devious planning. Maybe back in the day children weren’t coddled like they are today, and they were allowed to be properly terrified by children’s movies. Do you think parents could scare their kids into eating their vegetables by threatening that the computer from Wall-E is gonna come get them? Not a chance! Have them watch Sleeping Beauty, and they’d be doing the dishes, washing the car, and mowing the lawn just to avoid a visit from Maleficent. In my humble opinion, based on the comedy provided by the fairy god mothers, the lovely music, the romance, and especially the terrifying villainess, I give this movie 7.4 out of 10 stars.
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