October is a month when everyone watches horror movies, sometimes whether they like it or not, but usually by ecstatic choice. Marathons abound, in homes and in theaters, of motion pictures featuring death and monsters and blood and we all gather to shriek and spill popcorn. It’s a healthy way to purge our own demons, and to experience the catharsis that only approaching the darkness and dipping a single toe inside can provide.
But although most horror movies seem to be “Rated R,” they’re not always for adults. Sometimes the best scary, spooky or just plain monster-filled movies are made with kids in mind. And whether you’re still a kid, have kids or your own, or are in that weird in-between place where you simply remember being a kid, a lot of these movies remain our most entertaining Halloween staples.
Related: The Best Movie Ever | Robert Zemeckis
As we wait to find out if young audiences embrace Goosebumps (that is to say, as much as we did), we decided to ask our panel of critics for their picks for The Best Horror Movie for Kids Ever. Apparently there are only two reigning champions in this creepy little subgenre, and we’ll let Crave’s William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold and Collider’s Brian Formo present their choices below.
Let us know your favorites, and come back next week for another highly debatable installment of Crave’s The Best Movie Ever!
The Best Horror Movies for Kids List
William Bibbiani: The Monster Squad (1987)
Tristar Pictures
Horror movies for kids have to walk a fine line between scary, obviously, and funny. Go too far in one direction and the film will be too much for your target demographic to handle, go too far in the other and you don’t so much have a scary movie as a film that just happens to have Dracula in it (coughHotelTransylvaniacough).
Several movies strike this balance well, but not many. ParaNorman is a modern classic for creepy kids (as I myself once was), and we’ll always have Gremlins and Beetlejuice as well. But the film that veers most excellently between terror and silliness is now and probably always will be Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad, which pits a group of dorky kids who swear a lot against all the classic Universal monsters in a fight to the death.
Explosions! Neck snappings! Transmogrifications! The Monster Squad has it all and with jokes aplenty. It’s a funny film, a scary film (for kids anyway), but more than anything else it’s made with a respect for children and horror fans alike. The reason children have to save the world from monsters is because only children believe in monsters, and as such, Dekker’s film celebrates childhood itself. Loving scary movies isn’t just a hobby, it’s a way of life that carries its own rewards. The Monster Squad entertains kids and makes them feel good about being kids in the first place, and for that reason it will always be at the top of my Halloween slumber party list.
Witney Seibold’s Pick: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Buena Vista Pictures
When I was but 8, I watched the PG-rated 1982 Tobe Hooper horror flick Poltergeist on home video. This was the result of a pilgrimage to my local video store to rent my very first horror movie; I was always drawn to scary movies, but didn’t have the courage to actually watch them. The evening was, most assuredly, a terrifying experience, and Poltergeist – what with its killer clowns, living trees, and self-inflicted-face-removal – gave me nightmares for weeks, if not months. This film was ostensibly for kids (the suburban setting, Spielbergian tone, and child protagonists were a dead giveaway), but I think many kids my age view Poltergeist as a shared crucible of childhood trauma. This was not, history has now proven, a kids’ horror movie.
But that doesn’t mean kids hate being scared. Oh sure, as kids we tend to have a low tolerance for violence and gore and monsters (as is healthy), but, if you were like me, you carried a strong attraction to them. I believe that kids like to be scared, especially more than they let on. It’s a kid’s first exploration of death. Reading scary stories about blood and monsters – even if they are a little out of one’s age range – is a person’s first flirtation with the darker side of life: death, pain, fear, nightmares. It’s a way to poke at taboos in a safe way. Provided the stories aren’t too extreme.
As such, the best kids’ horror movies deal with real fears, real peril, real death, and real monsters… just presented in a slightly-less-than-horrifically-brutal fashion to make them slightly more palatable. And while there are more sophisticated films that deal with anguish, there is no avoiding Henry Selick’s now-classic The Nightmare Before Christmas when it comes to riding the perfect line between the light and the dark.
It’s a twisted cartoon world where monsters live. They talk about drinking blood and terrorizing the living; this is a movie where three psychopathic children eagerly try to feed Santa Claus to The Boogieman. They live for fear. And, given the way they look, they mean it. All the creatures are lanky, ragged, haphazard beings that look capable of harm; no friendly monsters are these. The world is unique and imaginative and gorgeous… and kinda of scary. The film is, however, tempered by a wonderful sense of gallows humor, and the creatures are eventually revealed to have very relatable human impulses; Jack Skellington feels that Christmas can fulfill the emptiness inside him, when it was actually love he longed for.
Brian Formo’s Pick: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
Buena Vista Pictures
As a kid I avoided horror, even horror movies meant for kids. I had nightmares when a purple-skinned and horned Howie Mandel peed in a family’s orange juice in Little Monsters. I couldn’t handle the dragon decapitations in Willow. Hell, I even hid under the theater seat the first time I saw Big Bird. Having said all that, if I have a kid (if my girlfriend is reading this, hi, please read that as “when we have a kid”) I can’t wait to show them A Nightmare Before Christmas.
Part of the problem with the kids-approved horror and fantasy films that I saw as a kid was that I didn’t have an adult to tell me, “it’s all going to be okay, that’s the worst that it gets.” And with Henry Selick/Tim Burton’s stop-animation film, I won’t only be able to be reassuring after the appearance of the boogeyman, but I’ll sing along to all his songs.
In the spirit of his Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, and Pee-wee characters, Jack Skellington is another quintessential Burton outsider. He’s fantastic at his job but he knows there’s more to his existence than clocking in and clocking out. His job is scaring children when it’s Halloween time and then going back to Halloween town where all the inhabitants are preparing for the next big scare (and for the kid’s sake let’s be clear, these are all safe scares, that’s a job well done). When he discovers that there’s this other holiday about giving joy, he decides that he can do that and kidnaps Santa Claus.
Okay, we all know the story but what’s absolutely great about Nightmare Before Christmas is how dually ghoulish and delightfully joyous it is. Like a perfect pair of inside out socks, it works for TWO holidays. There are great Halloween gags filling every inch of the frame—with stitchings spilling out fabric guts and creepy crawlers everywhere—and there’s a Seussian lesson of Christmas being a feeling of togetherness rather than gifts that occurs in the second half. But like I said about my maybe future child, the parents are likely to join in—with their double-sided holiday Skellington socks on their feet.
Let us know what you believe are the best horror movies for kids in the comment section below!
