LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Bonus Conversation Edition

Welcome to a loverly punctuation mark at the end of the LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! series, in which I look at how to share horror with our offspring. Today's guest is Chloe N. Clark, an author and educator who has taught far more folks about horror than I have children. So let's talk scaring tiny people!

VK: Thanks for agreeing to chat about this!

CNC: Of course, I'm excited! Thank you for asking me!

VK: In your book recommendations for this series, you talked about how you got into horror at a very, very young age. I'm spending a lot of time thinking about how I roll this type of stuff out to my kids. But do you think, in the end, it matters? I mean, you seem to have turned out ok.

CNC: I honestly think it depends on a lot of factors: openness of the family in general and the kind of other media the child is consuming (as a child, I was also watching shows like Homicide: Life on the Street and talking about it with my parents, so there was certainly a level of my parents allowing me to be comfortable talking about adult matters); it also deeply depends on the child — I'm an immediate coward, I jump at jump scares like nobody's business but I also don't carry fears over. So as a child, I didn't get nightmares, for example. So I think a big thing is knowing that the child feels really safe in their surroundings. If they do, then I feel like horror is more manageable. There's also just the fact that a lot of children's entertainment is inherently scary — in Disney films and fairy tales, fucked up stuff happens, too.

VK: That's very true. I didn't realize how twisted even Snow White was until I re-watched it as I was getting into animation more generally as a late teenager. So much of that stuff just missed me as a small kid. Maybe it was because evil step-mothers and those fairy tale tropes felt so foreign. They didn't touch my life.

CNC: That's true, definitely — like they are based out of specifics that, in a way, are true to all genres of terror. There's a quote I love that I can't remember which Italian folklorist said, but is along the lines of "Don't believe fairy tales, they're true." Because at the time of their writings, they were the issues that people dealt with (where women died in childbirth way more frequently, etc), so there were stepmothers aplenty. Or where children did have to act as scullery maids (a la Cinderella)

VK: Right. For me, as someone who has always had very vivid dreams, as a kid the idea of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies was too much for me, and I steered clear of them for a very long time. It wasn't a burned-up guy with razor knives that did it, it was the idea of my dreams turning against me. When I talked specifically about Coraline and ParaNorman in this series, I discussed how it's given me an opportunity to talk with the kids about othering in very specific terms. It's easy for me, and my kids, to identify with Norman, or Coraline, as a kindred spirit with outsider interests. As those characters are othered and rejected by those around them, we've been able to have great talks about empathy, and how we don't want to make the mistakes of the crowd. Do you think that's a central part of the horror narrative overall?

CNC: Definitely, I can see that (fun side fact, Nightmare on Elm Street is how I realized I was a lucid dreamer as a child). And that's what horror does so well: it links into that idea of base primal fears (our own mind going against us, or the beach being dangerous, or whatever), but I almost think those are *good* lessons for kids to learn early. And yes, I think empathy is a key to horror. Obviously I think about othering and horror a lot — it's literally what I teach about. It is how we view monsters as others and how that shapes the narratives of fear told culturally. Horror is actively telling us to listen to those we might not listen to, and that's one of the biggest, most valuable lessons I think it can offer to us.

VK: This is one of the big reasons why I was looking forward to you participating in this series: Monster Theory! Can you talk in general terms about that?

CNC: So in general, Monster Theory is the critical lens of examining how monstrosity is used by different cultures in order to perceive of othering or social constructs, etc. I more specifically use it to talk about constructions of privilege and how horror is often a lens to examine that. This is something Get Out, for example, does exceptionally well. Making groups we fear into monsters has been a tactic since the beginning of storytelling. It's the most effective tactic for controlling a populace. And it's one, more and more, that we see horror narratives questioning in ways other genres are not.

VK: Right. Because there's an understandable, natural aversion to something that's different. But what separates humans from, say, my cats with new people in the house, is that we have an intellect and empathy and ways to synthesize those into an understanding of others. But routinely we see those impulses weaponized by leaders who want to divert someone's gaze away from where they should be looking. I feel like that's one of the most important lessons I can pass on to my kids, because it's a fundamental mechanic of the world. And you're right — I don't know other genres that consistently explore that theme.

CNC: Yeah, that exactly sums up why I teach horror in a rhetoric class. If there is one skill I want college students to have, it is to see the world with empathy and to understand the way fear is used to promote rhetorics of violence. Horror is the perfect genre to combat and explore that.

VK: Is the "what you thought was the monster isn't the real monster" (ie, Frankenstein, etc) a sub-genre in monster stories, or is it sort of the home key, do you think?

CNC: I think for the most part, it's the home key. I mean look at zombie movies — the whole premise is often, Oh shoot, wait! The humans are the ones we should be fearing after all!" The same goes for even things like Jaws — the shark is following its natural instinct, but it's the money-grabbing mayor who is actually the villain by not allowing the knowledge to spread/closing the beach. Like at their hearts, most horror stories operate on someone-did-something-awful-and-it's-created-a-monstrosity.

VK: That winds up getting perverted in the slasher genre, though, right? Because the "something awful" gets colored almost entirely by conformity/regressive morality. The promiscuous teens get chopped to bits, the virginal Final Girl lives on. I'm not showing the kids slasher movies. I mean, it's just something else that exists in the genre waters.

CNC: Definitely, Though I'd argue that in some ways those also have at least one, perhaps unintentionally, progressive bent — the premise is "listen to women." In almost all of them, the Final Girl susses out what's up and then absolutely no one takes her seriously. Which again becomes a people-in-power-not-doing-anything-to-help-stop-the-issue.

VK: Yeah — it's hard to imagine if Kevin McCarthy got pod-peopled in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Dana Wynter was the one who went to the next town over for help, that anyone would take her seriously.

CNC: Yes! That exactly! In the remake with Donald Sutherland, we even sort of see that a little bit with Veronica Cartwright versus Donald Sutherland's character.

VK: And it's so, so great.

CNC: It is one of my favorite films.

VK: We talked about the dangers of othering and how horror can provide a powerful (however bloody) window into that, so I guess we should talk about the other side of the same coin, which would be to keep a healthy skepticism of the uber-normal. I don't want to wander into the weeds of "Stranger Danger" or anything, but there's a consistent thread that connects The Stepford Wives and Body Snatchers, American Psycho, and even Get Out, I suppose, where the ultimate villain is someone who appears super normal on the surface.

CNC: Yeah, definitely. The veneer of normalcy needs to be interrogated in horror movies a lot of the time. Which I think is important — we idealize certain qualities, right? From "nuclear families" to "perfect marriages," etc, but we don't question enough what goes on beyond the surface of that. Horror helps us to push the idea of, "We can never know what secrets lurk beneath the surface." In horror, it's extreme, right? "Oh no! That successful businessman is a psychotic killer!" or, "Your neighbor is actually an alien!" But on a less extreme level, we do find that out all the time. The perfect husband is actually abusive, the business that seems so environmentally sound and respectable is actually using slave labor. Interrogation of ideals is a good skill to have.

VK: Yeah, and a perfect message for kids. Bruce Springsteen tells a story in his autobiography that he can't stand wind chimes to this day because when he was a kid, the husband in the next house was an abusive drunk, but the wife hung up these wind chimes to try to make the house appear peaceful and "normal" on the outside. You can see how that same lesson informs his entire career, and it's so easy (it's the norm, probably), for people to encourage their kids to be "like" somebody else. What's that really teaching them?

CNC: Yeah, it's teaching them this horrible lesson that if things aren't like everyone else then it's their fault. So many people don't report abuse because they don't want to be seen as being outside those cultural norms, too. Which is much more horrifying to me than a horror movie is.

VK: Agreed. Horror allows us a lens through which to process our own fears, and I'm thankful we've had so many generations of genre storytellers helping us all out.

CNC: Yes, that exactly! It also, I think, helps us to think about the ramifications of those fears. Like, we get the safety of asking "what would I do" before we ever have to actually face that question in real life. What would I do in a dangerous situation? Who would I be and who would I want to be?

VK: "Who would I want to be?" It's a perfect question, and one I think we should be encouraging our kids to ask (be they small, or in college).

CNC: Definitely. It's a lesson it's never too late to learn, but I wish we'd all learn earlier.

Posted by Vance K and Chloe N. Clark — in agreement about horror movies at nerds of a feather since at least 2016.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Books Under Bedsheets

Much of the genesis for this series came to me when my daughter asked if I would take her to see the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark movie. Those three original Alvin Schwartz books (with their oozing, teeth-filled illustrations by Stephen Gammell) were a staple of my childhood, and while Christopher Pike, R.L. Stine, and a couple other authors were working in the middle-grade horror space (although I'm not sure if Goosebumps itself was a thing yet), I wound up giving those a miss and leaping straight to Stephen King at a pretty young age.

I think the first Stephen King book I read was Christine, because I dug old cars. But relatively quickly, I found myself immersed in what was at the time the Dark Tower trilogy. There are things I read when I was 12 that still stick with me. "Go then, there are other worlds than these," is a line and moment that has never been far from me since. The Eyes of the Dragon was another pivotal King novel for me, because it was my introduction to fantasy. By the time I read it, I had friends that were big into Lord of the Rings, but that series and world had never interested me before. After reading Eyes of the Dragon, however, I quickly scooped up a copy of The Hobbit in the next convenient book sale.

I've spent most of my time in this series talking about movies because that's really my area of relative expertise, but reading scary stories was a huge part of my own, youthful indoctrination. So I reached out to the rest of the NoaF flock to see what their experiences with horror were as young readers, and if there were any noteworthy titles we could pass along.

Gateway Books

Like they were for me, the series of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books and the novels of Stephen King were the gateway to horror for many of our writers who got into the genre at a young age.

Dean made the interesting recommendation of Roald Dahl, who I wouldn't have thought of, but it's a very astute suggestion. I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to my kids many times, as well as The Fantastic Mr. Fox (big fans of the movie in my house), but it wasn't until I was reading them The Witches, when I caught myself thinking, "Wait...this is waaaay dark." Dean also recommended A Series of Unfortunate Events, which skews more creepy and sinister than outright horrific, but is certainly in the same neighborhood that we're discussing.

Adri writes, "Maybe the single biggest horror influence in my young life was Robin Jarvis, especially the Deptford Mice trilogy, which was about a group of anthropomorphic mice struggling against the influence of an all-powerful evil cat god. Horror highlights included the trip to the countryside with a series of murders descending into scenes of creepy ritual in the middle book, and one character whose final fate is to get banished outside of the main timestream so he experiences the world an instant behind all other living things. The worldbuilding was dense and bizarre, the story was totally cool with killing off characters (the first book literally opens with the father of the main family getting eaten by the god-cat), and I sincerely hope they still hold up today because in my memory they were amazing."

In addition to another vote for Scary Stories..., Chloe offers this: "As the former child who at age 4 watched Aliens so much she wrecked the VHS and whose 8-year-old sick day reading was The Stand, my suggestions for what children can handle is, um, skewed. But — Goosebumps, Coraline, a lot of Robert Westall's stories (more for 10+ ages), and Something Wicked This Way Comes." I was very pleased to see this one show up on her list. Something Wicked... is probably my favorite Bradbury novel, for what it's worth.





Rites of Passage

There is, to be sure, a certain solitary pleasure in horror. A musician friend of mine, who is one of the most amazing drummers I know of, she recently shared the unattributed quote, "Sometimes the fear won't go away, so you'll just have to do it afraid." And that stuck with me.

As much fun as it was to read Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark with friends and enact the jump-scares built into those books, most of our true fears are quiet, and private. And while there is magic in watching a scary movie among friends (here I recall my 15th birthday, spent as a sleepover with an all-night marathon of movies like Silence of the Lambs and Mario Bava's Black Sabbath) or even among strangers in a theater, so too is there a sense of growing up, of the passing of rites, in huddling under bedclothes with a flashlight and a scary book, and walking through the fire by oneself. The flames may resemble ghosts, or goblins, or dead friends or uncanny versions of relatives, rabid dogs or haunted cars, terrifying lands full of magic or mystery, or a carnival come to town. However they shake, and whatever shadows they cast, eventually we must each face the flames on our own.

This is, to me, the great gift of horror, and why I have thought so much about passing it on to my kids. No matter what movies I watch with them, there will be scarier ones out there. Just like no matter what challenges in life I attempt to prepare them for, there will yet be greater ones ahead, entirely unlooked-for. No matter how I try to cushion the blow that ultimately lets them know there is profound, inexplicable evil in this world, I know that blow will always fall. The best I can do is lay the groundwork for the next, more frightening movie, or the next, more frightening revelation, and hope that, however feebly, I have helped them to cultivate the tools necessary to confront it.

Now, then. Let’s frighten children.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012. Late-night, white-knuckled page-turner since...approximately...the man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Sleepers

Now that I've looked at some entries in the more mainstream family horror canon, I'd like to take a side-trip through the overgrown, ominous field alongside the road here to peek at some less-conventional but still easily accessible options for sharing frightening entertainment with kids.

By and large, I'm still thinking about this issue with young kids in mind. When I was growing up in the 80s, it was the era where even grocery stores had large VHS rental operations (and, with Redbox, we see all that is old is new again). Depending on the clerk at the counter, you could be 10 years old and rent any of the (as a friend of mine recently called it) unholy trinity of horror movies -- Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and any of their attendant sequels. So while I saw things like RoboCop or The Dead Zone at what was almost certainly too young an age, I don't think I'm any worse the wear for it. As a parent, you know your kids best and at a certain point, regardless of what the MPAA thinks, you're more than welcome to sit your tiny clone down on the couch and say, "Hey! Lemme show you something that scared the ever-loving shit out of me when I was your age!"

These are titles that kept popping up in my imagination as I thought about this series of posts, but that didn't conveniently fit in another post.

The Twilight Zone

Welcome to TGI McScratchy's, where it's constantly New Years Eve! Here we go again!

The Twilight Zone is on Netflix. Almost all of it. That means every day in your house can be New Year's Day, but even better, because you don't have to sit through the same three commercials on the SyFy Channel for however many hours you binge the show during their annual marathon. Something really fantastic happened in my house after I introduced the kids to Rod Serling's anthology masterpiece: the kids started asking me to tell them scary stories. But what they really wanted me to do was re-tell them the stories of the episodes. For a while there, I was really good at telling versions of And When the Sky was Opened, Mirror Image, Twenty-Two, and Little Girl Lost. The creepiness of so many of the episodes, from the uncanny to the paranoid to the unexplained, was a great way to introduce unsettling narratives into their media diet, and a lovely (for me) antidote to the Disney Channel. And the contained nature of each story makes them easily digested and easily understood. It was, and remains, a great thing to put on every now and again...if I can keep the kids from fighting about which episode to watch.

Animation

I spent a lot of time talking about animated features in the last installment of this series, but one of my favorite, favorite cartoons growing up was Disney's short The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I don't recall how I watched this so many times, separate from The Adventures of Mr. Toad — the two were originally presented back-to-back as a feature film — but I can only assume I taped the Ichabod Crane segment off the TV at some point and watched it repeatedly from that homemade VHS recording. I'm so pleased that this film is now part of my family's annual Halloween viewing programme. One of the neat things about it is that the whole thing is told in voice-over by Bing Crosby. There's very little diagetic sound in the segment, apart from the Headless Horseman's laughter and some sound effects.

The same decade that The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was produced, the Disney Animators Strike resulted in a whole bunch of animators heading out on their own to create their own studios. The most accomplished of these was almost unarguably UPA, which is now probably best remembered for Mr. Magoo. UPA was a titanic force for animation innovation and experimentation, and one of my favorite of their films is 1953's The Tell-Tale Heart, directed by Ted Parmelee. It's so creepy, and so wonderful.

And it's very difficult not to love a film that pulls all of the posts in this series together, which is Tim Burton's short film Vincent, about a little boy named Vincent who idolizes Poe, and which is narrated by Vincent Price. It's simply a joy.

 

The Best Ways to Ruin a Vacation

Here are a couple of good ways to ruin a vacation: 1) come to learn there's a man-eating shark in the water, or 2) decide that your new neighbors are serial killers. Either one of these scenarios will wreck a couple of weeks for you.

In the first case, I'm clearly talking about Jaws. This isn't a traditional horror movie, I guess, but it's the movie that gave us blockbusters, and it's been making people scared to go in the water since longer than I've been alive, so it's probably a slam-dunk crowd-pleaser for your home. The thing about Jaws, I think, that makes it such a great choice for young audiences is that even though there are frightening sequences, it's such a propulsive adventure tale that it's hard to not get caught up and just fall in love with the ride, even if parts of it scare you.

When it comes to Joe Dante's The 'burbs, it's a similar equation with different variables. It's tough to be too scared when you're laughing, and who's going to thumb their nose at a David S. Pumpkins/Princess Leia team up? In this comedy-horror that doesn't show up on nearly enough listicles these days, Tom Hanks' Ray decides to do a staycation during the same week his idiotic neighbor friends Art and ex-soldier Rumsfeld decide that the Klopek family, who just moved in to the cul-de-sac, are a bunch of murderous psychopaths. While there is plenty of gentle satire about suburban America and fan service to some lesser-known horror titles, the bottom line is this movie makes me laugh a lot, while sitting in a sandbox full of horror movie toys. If it's been a while since you've seen this one, give it another look, and see if it might be a good way to get your kids to laugh at some familiar horror tropes.

But Then, There's No Place Like Home

Finally, I have to mention one of my favorite-ever movies, and another title that I watched until the iron oxide started falling off the homemade VHS recording: The Wizard of Oz. They used to show this movie every Easter on network TV (Easter? Why? Network TV? I didn't have cable.) and one year I taped it, Maxwell House commercials and all, so I could watch it over and over and over and over again. The only other thing I'll say about this movie is that the flying monkeys have traumatized every generation of Americans for the last 80 years, so why shouldn't they traumatize your kids, too?


Recommendations

The Twilight Zone
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Tell-Tale Heart
Vincent
Jaws
The 'burbs
The Wizard of Oz
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather since 2012, Wizard of Oz devotee since...well, for much, much longer.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! The Mainstream

When I saw Coraline in the theater, I thought, “Nope nope nope. This is way too scary for kids.” I loved it, but the movie was legitimately unnerving. Buttons for eyes, sewn-up mouths, dead kids, a spider-lady. But then I heard an interview with Neil Gaiman where he was asked basically the same question — why did you write such a scary thing for kids? His response was wonderful (I mean...Neil Gaiman), and it was that things that are scary to adults are not the same things that are scary to children.

I think about this a lot, and try to take it into account when thinking about what to show my own kids. At the bottom of it all, the way I understand Gaiman’s meaning is that what’s *truly* frightening is the notion that the world ultimately doesn’t make any sense and isn’t governed by any rules that can be understood. As a kid, you’re always finding yourself in trouble or with aggrieved parents for reasons you don’t understand. The great hope is that one day the world will make more sense, and the feeling of careening between invisible, unfair obstacles will lessen.

It's a lovely fantasy. We don’t want to burst their bubble too soon. There is a pervasive mindset that runs throughout much of horror, which is that evil is omnipresent, its application is essentially random, and it is unstoppable. This is a universal feeling and one that older audiences are generally forced to reckon with beyond the confines of movies. One of the great gifts of horror stories to audience members is these tales allow the listener/watcher to confront their very real fears of an impersonal, uncaring, and brutal world in a safe environment. But for kids, the concerns are not yet of that nature. They are personal, dealing largely with one's place in the world. And these fears, too, are more-or-less universal.

The good news is that there are a ton of films that address these fears in a family-friendly way. And by and large, they’re the films you’re probably already familiar with.

Stranger Things

This is probably more of a no-brainer today than I give it credit for. I had some mixed feelings about showing my kid the breakout pop-horror title of our moment, but then I got the, "EVERYBODY at school has seen all three seasons and I'm getting SERIOUS spoilers" treatment, so now we're plowing through.

After Stranger Things, Season 1, I weighed in on this site about what I thought was a bizarre co-opting of...well, pretty much all the other titles I'm going to mention in this series. But here we are, two seasons later, and if kids today don't have time to read/watch every single thing me and the Duffer Brothers read and watched a million years ago, well, who can blame them? If Stranger Things is what steps into the breech, I can think of far worse things.

Tim Burton and LAIKA

At some point, everyone feels alone. Everyone feels like an outsider, or an imposter. Everyone feels un-understandable. This makes sense -- we each experience the world discretely from within our own literal shell. We are unique, separate beings, and each of us experiences the world in a singular way. It's scary. When you get right down to it, it's terrifying. It's only through shared experience and through story that we begin to recognize our own experiences in the experiences of others. Many of us are lucky in that we overlap in many ways with those around us, and begin to recognize these shared impressions almost before we are conscious of them. I guess this is what's called "fitting in." But some of us take a long, long time to encounter another or others who make us feel like we're not the first ones to fight these particular battles.

Artists are generally outsiders. Otherwise, we'd all be businesspeople. Growing up, we're often bullied or shunned. The weird kid. The oddball. The quiet one. Like Tim Burton, who famously idolized Vincent Price as a child and struggled to fit in, yet grew up to put a stamp of weirdness across the whole of popular culture that continues to invite other oddballs to feel ok about standing out. As a creator under the ubiquitous Disney umbrella, it's probably easy these days to shrug off Tim Burton. But I don't. This is, after all, the man who directed Ed Wood. He's more than earned his place on my Mount Rushmore.

The first two horror-adjacent films that my kids loved and re-watched again and again at a very young age were The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. But there's a funny thing about the movie that is billed as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas — Burton neither wrote nor directed it. Henry Selick directed and Caroline Thompson wrote the script. Now, Caroline Thompson's a helluva writer. She also wrote Edward Scissorhands, and The Addams Family, and The Corpse Bride, among many other titles in her 30-year-and-still-going career.

Henry Selick later moved to LAIKA and directed their first feature film, Coraline. You're sensing a pattern, I know. ParaNorman was the studio's second feature film, and is, to me, an indispensable family horror film. There is a lot of very dark thematic material in it, particularly when we learn about Agatha's backstory, but that character, like the rest of the film, is handled so empathetically and with so much care that I never hesitate to recommend the movie. Plus, the zombies are no scarier than Scooby-Doo villains, and are often played for laughs.

I mentioned how the film treats Agatha with empathy. This is a common thread in so many of these films. Norman himself is an outsider, someone who is misunderstood both at home and at school. Like Edward Scissorhands. Coraline is ignored, and feels invisible. And Jack Skellington is someone who seems cool and the guy everybody else wants to be like...but he feels out-of-place and like something's missing. For kids (and, let's be honest, most adults), these films model a way of existing in the world that resists being governed by the fear of not fitting in, encourages being open and welcoming to others who may be different, and highlights the fundamental human connections that bind us.

These are powerful messages, and they run counter to so, so many of the messages that kids receive on a daily basis.

If we can encourage our own little weirdos to be themselves and support each other, and we can do it with ghosts and spider-ladies, isn't it kind of incumbent on us to do so?

Recommendations

For kids, I recommend:
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Edward Scissorhands
Coraline
ParaNorman
Stranger Things

And though I haven't seen them, I have had good friends with kids recommend the more recent:
Goosebumps
The House with a Clock in its Walls

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of  Nerds of a Feather since 2012. Emmy-winning producer and director, and lifelong horror geek.

LET'S FRIGHTEN CHILDREN! Vincent Price & Scooby-Doo

You’re a parent. You love horror. But horror is scary. So how to share this love of horror with your young, innocent, in-love-with-the-world child?

Sure, you can Google “best horror movies for kids,” and get the usual results, which you kinda already knew anyway. But for myself, as a parent who has tackled this question four times over, I’d like to take a deeper dive into this idea. So today I’m introducing our “Let’s Frighten Children!” series, which I hope will at least prompt some discussion about how we grown-up nerds can indoctrinate our tiny replicas into the genre we love, without sending them, screaming, into therapy.

Over the years, I have documented on this site the way I came to love horror, which was through screenings of classic Universal monster movies on over-the-air TV back in the 1980s. But the world has moved on. No 21st-century kid is getting their creepy from UHF channels, so how do we, as loving, responsible parents who know the joys of floating skeletons and disembodied laughter, bring our little kids with us into the warm embrace of darkness?

Friends, I have ideas.

The Language of Horror

For me and my family, the first step to introducing horror was to introduce the language of scares without, really, the fear. It’s hard to be a little kid. You are tiny, and surrounded by giants. Nothing makes sense, and every outcome is uncertain. Mom’s leaving...Will she come back?! How long is an hour?! It’s unknowable. And worse, there might actually be a monster under the bed. Or in the closet — you just don’t know.


This is where Vincent Price and Scooby-Doo came in handy. It’s pretty unlikely any kid is going to be legitimately frightened by an episode of Scooby-Doo. And yet, there are ghosts, goblins, witches, vampires, werewolves, creepers, and more, all running about. I’m actually not a huge Scooby fan, but I found the Cartoon Network Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated series to be excellent. I watched a big chunk of it with my kids, who were five and seven at the time. They loved it, and still do. We re-watch episodes regularly. In a world where asking a kid who has grown up with an iPhone to watch Bela Lugosi’s Dracula seems like a bridge too far, this is a show that is fast-paced, conversant in horror tropes, dabbles in grotesque/frightening imagery, and is funny, smart, and good. It’s also a show that prominently features Vincent Van Ghoul, who is a not-at-all-disguised representation of Vincent Price.

I think the world of Vincent Price. And while you might shy away from some of his 1970s work when it comes to screenings for young kids (things got pretty bloody), he spent the majority of his career as a boogeyman in a system that shied away from realistic violence. The result is a trove of movies that are neck-deep in Gothic imagery, but that aren’t actually frightening. I showed my daughter the Roger Corman/Vincent Price The Pit and the Pendulum when she was five, and she was all in. Several years later now, I’m taking her to theatre performances about the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and she’s reading her first Stephen King novel.

Introducing horror tropes in a way that wasn’t actually threatening helped to get my kids familiar with mythologies, characteristics, and images that would come to have more meaning later on as they got a little older and began seeing more things. Bride of Frankenstein is, believe me, easier for a kid to understand after they’ve seen Edward Scissorhands (featuring, of course, Vincent Price).

Recommendations

If you have little kids and want to introduce them to horror iconography in a relatively subdued presentation, you’d do well to consider the various iterations of Scooby-Doo and the Roger Corman/Vincent Price Poe films of the 1960s.

Every kid is different, and what excites and engages my kid might not be perfect for yours. But one of the lovely things about starting with the sillier end of the horror spectrum is that a kid can experience the fun of a Halloween vibe without actually getting scared out of their wits. After all, not everybody is going to graduate to enjoying The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Exorcist or The Babadook, but everybody can enjoy a creepy, spooky aesthetic on their own terms.

For young kids, I recommend:
Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated
Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island
The Haunted Palace
Fall of the House of Usher
House of Wax
The House on Haunted Hill
Ghostbusters

Posted by Vance K — Emmy-winning director and producer, cult-film reviewer and co-editor of Nerds of a Feather since 2012.