Stephen King Called This 82-Year-Old Disney Classic a Horror Film

Most horror-obsessed fans can tell you about the first time a movie truly scared them. For some, it was sneaking into a dark theater and watching an R-rated horror story that they weren’t technically old enough to watch yet. Others may have stayed up late, waiting for everyone in the family to fall asleep, only to turn on the TV when no one was watching to watch something they were specifically told not to watch. And then there are those of us who find ourselves terrified while watching a movie no one ever expected to be scary.

As a child, Stephen King experienced this latter phenomenon firsthand. It was not The Body Snatcher, The Phantom of the Operaor even The Wolf Man that terrified King's imagination and set him on the path to becoming one of the world's most prolific horror creators. Instead, a classic children's film enchanted, captivated, and horrified his young mind.

Which Disney movie scared Stephen King to death?

Love (and horror) comes to the forest people

Anyone who has ever read Stephen King's seminal work On writing knows that a series of macabre events during King's childhood set him on the path to becoming a master of the horror genre, whether it was a terrifying encounter with a nest of spiders or witnessing a friend get hit by a moving train. While both of these experiences were instrumental in developing his dark inclinations, Another equally pivotal experience occurred when King sat in a darkened theater watching the Disney film Baby.

In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2014, Stephen King recalled this childhood classic as the moment he recognized horror stories as intriguing to him. When asked what drew him to horror in general, he replied:

“It's built in. That's all. The first movie I ever saw was a horror movie. It was
Baby
. When that little deer got caught in a forest fire, I was terrified, but I was also elated. I can't explain it.”

After hearing Stephen King explain his unusual tastes, you're probably as confused as everyone else. Let's dig in and find out why. Baby It became a watershed experience in the life of one of literature's most macabre artists.

What is Bambi based on?

Nature and nature can be cruel

Unlike many Disney films, Baby It wasn't based on a fairy tale. It was an adaptation of Bambi: A Life in the Woodsa 1922 novel by Austro-Hungarian author Felix SaltenThe Disney adaptation would later become so famous that it would make the film's original material more or less unknown, a factor that is crucial to our story because the original Baby the book is much darker than the Disney movie.

The English language version of Baby was translated in 1928 by the would-be Soviet spy, Whittaker Chambers. The book was enormously popular, receiving rave reviews and selling out. Meanwhile, the original version of the novel was banned in Nazi Germany and considered a parable about the treatment of Jews in Europe. Once Disney got his hands on the source material, he edited it to make it more “child-friendly.”

For starters, Disney removed all scenes of animal violence, a key part of Salten's book. In the span of just two innocuous pages in Salten's version of Babya fox tears apart a gentle pheasant, a ferret mortally wounds a squirrel, and a flock of crows attacks the young son of a friendly hare, leaving the animal to die in agony. Even Bambi himself nearly kills a rival who begs for mercy.

These weren't extraneous scenes that Salten created to stir up excitement. In his opinion, they were the point. Salten wanted to educate “naive” readers about what nature was really like. So when Disney got their hands on the source material to make a child-friendly animated film, much of it Baby the darker elements were immediately discarded. Many, but not all.

Which scene from Bambi scared Stephen King the most?

A spark ignited his imagination

Here's a quick recap for those who haven't seen the Disney movie Baby since they were in single digits. The titular deer is born to an unnamed mother and a father with majestic antlers. He soon befriends a very energetic rabbit named Thumper, a good-natured skunk named Flower, and a doe named Faline. After their mother dies, Bambi and Faline fall in love, but they can't end up together until they survive a series of trials involving a rival deer, a pack of hunting dogs, and, finally, a forest fire.

Released during World War II, Baby wasn't quite the box office success you might expect. With the war in full swing, movie theater attendance across America was declining. Over time, however, Baby became a much bigger hit. In the four decades following its release, Baby earned over $47 million, more than ten times the total haul he Casablanca earned during that time. As such, it soon found its way in front of a young Stephen King, who sat in his local movie theater, fascinated by what he was watching unfold on the screen. One scene, in particular, however, turned that amazement into horror.

For many of us, the scariest and most tragic part of Baby It will always be the shocking death of the mother about halfway through the film, a moment that has become one of the most famous murders in all of cinema. But not Stephen King. For him, it was a late sequence. Baby where the titular character finds himself lost in the woods. To make matters worse, a human bonfire set the forest ablaze and all the animals scattered in fear. Sitting in his seat watching this scene unfold as a child, Stephen King was terrified. That moment triggered so much fear in his mind that he still remembers it today as his first experience with terror. But it wouldn't be the last time. Baby to scare someone to death.

Has Bambi ever been made into a horror film?

Be warned, the reckoning is coming

Stephen King called Baby the first horror film I ever saw. Film critic Pauline Kael said she had never met a child who was as scared by an adult horror film as they were by BabyWith this in mind, it is surprising to learn that Baby will it be reinterpreted as a low-budget, gratuitous horror film?

There is a rather unusual trend in today's pop culture to turn otherwise innocuous fairy tale stories into Winnie the Pooh and now Baby in bloody shock festivals. Two entries have already been made in Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey. Now, Bambi: The Reckoning will be released in 2025.

Bambi: The Reckoning asks: What if, instead of going on a coming-of-age journey after his mother's death, Bambi became a ferocious mutant deer thirsty for human blood and went on a killing spree? If this doesn't sound like a premise lifted straight from the pages of a Stephen King novel, then you probably haven't heard (or read) Cujo.

While it's (quite) unlikely to reach the same heights as Disney's beloved classic, this revisionist look at Baby consolidates what Stephen King (and other children traumatized by the death of Bambi's mother) have always known. After all, Baby It's a horror story.