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Classic Animation Meets Modern Horror – How OWC Helped Build the Nightmare of Screamboat

Screamboat is a terrifying new horror movie based on—a Mickey Mouse cartoon?

Wayne Grayson • Apr 03, 2025

Have you ever watched the very first appearance of Mickey Mouse? "Steamboat Willie" premiered in 1928 and was a trailblazing cartoon: the first with synchronized sound. Of course it also represented the debut of one of the most famous and prominent characters in all of human history.

But have you ever sat down and really watched it? It's very much a product of its time. The sound is scratchy and the music largely provided by a tinny pipe organ. The animation is rough in places, the pace is slightly off, and the way the cartoon was filmed causes light to dance erratically across the screen as Disney and crew were still very much in the nascent days of developing their medium.

But that's not the most striking thing about "Steamboat Willie." The first time I watched it as an adult I was absolutely struck by how violent this proto-Mickey Mouse is. Take a look for yourself.

Mickey does all of the following things to unsuspecting animals in this short:

  • Uses a pitchfork to shove hay down the gullet of a cow.
  • Stretches open the mouth of a goat and asks his pal Minnie to bend the goat's tail into a crank so they can then use the goat as a phonograph. (Music and the short's gags synchronized to the beat are the big flexes and main focus.)
  • Picks up a cat by the tail and swings it over his head seemingly because he likes the sound the cat makes as he does it.
  • Shortly after the cat incident, he picks up a duck and begins to choke more musical quacks out of it.
  • Stretches open the mouth of a bull and plays its teeth as a xylophone. (Side note: This might actually be the cow from earlier?)
  • Knocks a parrot into the ocean with half of a giant potato.

Mickey was quite the, uh, scamp, in his youth. Given the above offenses, it should come to no surprise that once the short entered the public domain, as it did last year some enterprising team of horror movie makers would bring this nightmare to life. And that's exactly what Steven LaMorte and his team have done.

LaMorte at work during the production of Screamboat.

LaMorte is the Director/Co-Writer/Co-Producer behind the new horror film Screamboat. LaMorte says the indie film is a horror comedy adaptation of the original "Steamboat Willie." The movie centers around a "a late-night boat ride" that "turns into a desperate fight for survival in New York City when a mischievous mouse becomes a monstrous reality."

"We've got practical effects, we've got big kills, we've got jokes, we've got pop culture references that everybody's going to know," LaMorte says. "It really does have something for everybody.

Take a look at this video where you even get to see a sneak peek at the film's monster, the eponymous hero "Screamboat Willie"—played by none other than Art the Clown himself from the Terrifier movies, David Howard Thornton.

OWC Atlas Ultra CFexpress Type B cards were used to capture the bloody thrills of Screamboat.

To make Screamboat happen, LaMorte and company used OWC solutions at every stage of the production process. The team used Atlas Ultra CFexpress Type B Memory Cards while filming on RED cameras. To get data off the cards, the team used the blazing fast Atlas CFexpress Card Reader.

The team also used OWC Envoy Pro FX drives to shuttle dailies and raw media from set to their archive setup. And in post-production, the team used both ThunderBay Flex 8 and the ThunderBlade X8 to power editing and visual effects.

The OWC ThunderBay Flex 8 on the set of Screamboat.

"It's the best compliment that you can pay a piece of technology, that you forget it's there. And that's OWC," LaMorte says.

Be sure to check out Screamboat, which is now playing.

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