The Rescuers

The Rescuers

The key to what made The Rescuers so unnerving was the subtle blending of a sinister, melancholy atmosphere with a crazy red-haired bitch teetering on the brink of child abuse. The storyline itself is far into the dark side of kids’ movie themes, with the main protagonist, Penny, an orphan from New York, now abducted and imprisoned on an abandoned river steamer, sending a message in a bottle in a desperate bid to be saved from her captors – said evil woman and her two pet alligators. The message is picked up by two mice who are members of the Rescue Aid Society (look, it’s a cartoon, OK?), and they embark upon a mission to save her. One of the most frightening scenes is the one in which Penny is dropped into a dark, rapidly flooding cave in order to rescue a diamond from a dead pirate’s skull. Alongside the movie’s content is the score — surely Disney’s creepiest — which instilled terror in us when we were little.