Since it's well known that the extreme extensions of copyright protection in the U.S. have been largely pegged to Disney's efforts to keep Mickey firmly in their grasp (There were lots of other corporations lobbying along with Disney, of course, but Mickey was kind of their poster child), Mickey seems to have become sort of a holy grail for people who live to make sick parodies of stuff. There must be crazy amounts of stuff like this on its way. We'll just have to brace ourselves and hope it doesn't take too long for them all to get it out of their systems.

I've found that if you aren't looking for these kinds of things, you don't encounter them very often.

When Winnie the Pooh became PD, they made a terrible horror film too. It doesn't affect anything in my life and the original Milne characters and art are all still there to enjoy.

Well, I don't know. I've done image searches online for some subjects before, and was annoyed to find great gobs of tasteless parodies instead of what I actually wanted. If the parody makers really crank it up, searching for legit early Mickey Mouse may get awkward for a awhile. Probably not a problem if you're looking specifically for "Steamboat Willie," but if you're doing a broader search for early Mickey Mouse images there's liable to be a lot of junk showing up in the feed in the near future.

Even when Mickey Mouse was under copyright it was not illegal to create "sick parodies" of the character... parody is protected by legal precedent. The lapse into public domain allows broader use of the character in profit-seeking ventures like the above slasher film, but there's already a lot of stuff out there. It will be interesting to see if the slasher film gets released under that title. I would think an argument could be made that calling a film "Mickey's Mouse Trap" infringes on Disney's trademark on the phrase "Mickey Mouse."

Yeah, the name is problematic, I think, more than anything else.

About the Mouse's comic strip.

Well said.

I’ve never understood modern-ish “horror“ movies (I used to like some of the classic psychological haunted house type stuff).

But for them what likes such (teens in scary situations) horror stuff, here’s a 15 minute one:
The Next Girl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDss3ushtUg