I spent the weekend at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, an event I attend each year. For the past few years, the festival has programmed a selection of incredibly wretched and deviant cartoons at the bar prior to their big animation dance party/orgy for all the normally reclusive animators to enjoy. This year it was Cultoons as presented by Steve Stanchfield. Mostly little-seen industrial and commercial films, there were a number of shorts that disturbed me more than most horror movies.

Monkey Doodle, a 1931 classic concerning a chimpanzee, a dog with pants that keep falling off for no reason, a ridiculously realistic tiger and bare breasts was the second most bizarre thing I have ever seen.

The first was Experimental Animation, in which a mangy stop-motion monkey sings about selling peanuts. Everytime he left the screen and popped back on, in nightmare inducing close-ups, the entire audience would scream in soul scarring terror. Imagine an amalgamation of every shadowy stuffed animal you have owned coming back from the landfill to haunt you and you still can’t come close to visualizing how horrible this thing was.

The most explicitly horror-centric short of the night was Monster Do Have Their Place, a theatrical public service announcement created by theatre chains to combat the imminent rise of cable television. It put forward the idea that movies, specifically horror movies as represented by drawings of various monsters, including Christopher Lee as Dracula, should be seen in the comfort of the theatres and not on your tiny set at home. How times have changed.

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