Trailer Park: Mickey’s Mouse Trap

The day Disney’s Mickey Mouse hits the public domain, Jamie Bailey releases the trailer for his horror comedy thriller “Mickey’s Mouse Trap”.

It’s official: the mouse has been let loose from the house!

Joining another beloved childhood icon, the recently unshackled Winnie the Pooh, perhaps the most iconic representation of childhood innocence ever — and the face of Disney (they don’t call it the House of Mouse for nothing) — is now in the public domain. That means filmmakers have free reign to reinvent and reinterpret the character in any way they see fit. This also means that horror filmmakers are free to take the symbol of joy and wondrous imagination and corrupt it, bastardize it, and twist it into something sinister and nefarious.

We already saw what this could look like with the polarizing (critically skewered but profitable) Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey.

After nearly a century, Mickey Mouse is free from Disney’s copyright leash as of the first day in 2024. But just like with Pooh, there are some restrictions.

With Blood and Honey, fans bemoaned that only Pooh and Piglet made the leap from storybook heroes to icons of horror. What’s Pooh without Tigger? But, at the time of the film’s release, Tigger had not yet said TTFN to Disney’s domain.

Tigger first appeared in 1928 in The House at Pooh Corner. Disney retained rights to Winnie the Pooh characters created after 1926, including Tigger, until this year. But as of January 1, Tigger is free to join Mickey (and Minnie!) in morbid shenanigans. So, you can be pretty sure he’ll bounce into the upcoming sequel of Blood and Honey slated for this February.

As for Mickey, his copyright protection expired, but that only applies to the first versions of the iconic cartoon character, seen in Steamboat Willie, and a silent version of Plane Crazy. That version is a little more rough and tumble than the version of Mickey we know today (the more modern likeness is still protected by copyright law). But that actually makes him better suited for the horror treatment we knew was coming.

Director Jamie Bailey is first out of the gate with his new vision of the monstrous mouse, Mickey’s Mouse Trap.

Synopsis: It’s Alex’s 21st Birthday, but she’s stuck at the amusement arcade on a late shift. So, her friends decide to surprise her, but a masked killer dressed as Mickey Mouse decides to play a game of his own with them which she must survive.