Infestation Origins Is The Mickey Mouse Horror Thing You Expected

It’s fast becoming a cliche that if a classic character that has long been under copyright protection is freed into the public domain, the first thing that happens is someone deliberately plays them against type in some kind of horror production. It may not be very original or creative, but it gets attention and that’s what counts.

Winnie The Pooh: Blood and Honey started this trend, a low-budget slasher that by all accounts isn’t very good and probably wouldn’t have been noticed if it hadn’t used the images of characters the director couldn’t use a year prior. He’s promising a sequel now with Tigger too, since the book that introduced that character becomes public domain in 2024.

But the bigger commotion is over the original Mickey Mouse hitting PD status today. There has to be more than one person out there making some kind of scary nightmare out of him. But what we’re discussing today got out there first: Infestation Origins, a first-person survival horror co-op that has you running and hiding from distorted, toothy Steamboat Willie-era Mickeys.

As loony as that sounds, it IS kind of effective to distort such an iconic image in this fashion; it has a Learning With Pibby quality to it, and it hasn’t been allowed with any legitimate commercial product before. (If you’re thinking of WB’s Banana Splits horror movie, that was made BY them, so it doesn’t count.)

Of course, is the game any GOOD? We have no idea. It can’t just coast on the shock value of a bloody fanged Mickey head (or can it?) Infestation Origins will be released on Steam in the near future.