After keeping a low profile in the previous decade, the devil made a comeback in the

1940s, when soon-to-be war-weary audiences were both diverted and disturbed by satanic entertainment.

Thanks to the darkness lurking in the world during those years, we shouldn't be surprised

to find that were a number of genuinely ominous visions of evil captured on celluloid at

the time.

But who would have thought that one of the darkest and most fearsome appearances of the

Devil on film would be brought to us by Walt Disney.

In the animated 1940 film Fantasia, Satan arrives for the final segment of the movie set

to the orchestrated strains of Night on Bald Mountain, a faithful rendition of the composer's conception of the music,

in which he had envisioned as a poem that evoked the forces of darkness on the demon-haunted Bald Mountain.

The sequence incorporates a bit of German demonic lore into a Russian legend, since the devil awakens from the mountain on

wall purges knocked, which is April 30th.

The devil's spell conjures demons from hell and calls the dead to rise from their graves.

The creatures of darkness then dance wildly until dawn when the ringing of bells sends them back into the abyss. As the sun rises,

a very saccharine version of Ave Maria, is sung by a candlelight procession of the faithful. Now, let me

stress once again, this is a Disney cartoon. It's the same film that includes a light-hearted sequence with

Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer's Apprentice, so I'm going to bet that Night on Bald

Mountains sit more than one kid home from the theater with nightmares in 1940.

There is a cool side note to the story though, if you're a classic horror fan.

Disney animators tended to base their characters on human models,

attempted to capture their personality and the artwork by streamlining certain aspects of their emotions and movements, right down to the essence.

And who was the only possible model that Disney

...