8 Surprisingly Scary Animated Films That Scarred The Kids

3. Disney's Snow White

She may not quite be the most fearsome of all Disney villainesses - that accolade goes to Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent - but Snow White's Evil Queen is easily one of the scariest characters from the entire Disney canon in a story that plays upon childhood fears of abandonment and parental evil. She is the archetypal wicked step-mother, the unwelcome bird in the nest driving a wedge between father and daughter, and even more poignantly, jealous of that relationship and of the little girl's cherished status. In Snow White, that manifests itself as a murderous envy, fuelled further by underlying rage and a supernatural edge to the character that made her extremely memorable.

The Evil Queen also had icey presence, as vain and horrible as she is beautiful, and features in several scenes that will still be chilling to even the most hardened of modern children, as she plots her step-daughter's demise and transforms herself into an evil old hag to carry out the task herself. But it is the Evil Queen's death that is arguably the most jarring of the film, lightening striking her as she attempts to crush Snow White with a boulder, and sending her falling from a cliff to a grim and fully deserved death - with Disney also offering just the hint of something more grisly with buzzards collecting to make a feast of her.

Fairy Tales are always a little bit scary, and in the Evil Queen, Disney managed to capture the haunting essence of the underlying source perfectly.