Pre-Screams for Pre-Teens

With Halloween falling on a Saturday night this year, slumber parties and post-trick-or-treating festivities are bound to fill living rooms across the country. Nothing goes better with a bag of Halloween candy than a scary movie—but which one? Pooh’s Heffalump Halloween [2] and the Halloween offerings from the Nick/Noggin crew are easy choices for younger kids, and teens will pick their own. But I’m hosting a pack of 8-year-olds who think they’re ready to be scared. I polled my DoubleX colleagues looking for starter-scary flicks and we came up with 10 movies that will give middle-graders just the right dose of Halloween.

1. Casper [3]: It’s got a just-right haunted house, a small dose of grief, and a Gothic mansion. And, according to staffer Torie Bosch, it’s “the most romantic movie ever.” (OK, she was a sixth-grader at the time.)

2. Labyrinth [4]: The David Bowie version of Alice in Wonderland [5] is goblin-filled and impressive, with delicious monster-puppet effects. Don’t tell your kids, but Nina Shen Rastogi claims there will be lessons about appreciating your siblings. [6]

3. Ghostbusters [6]: Worth it for the title song alone, funny and scary in equal parts. If the innuendo about the Keymaster and the Gatekeeper doesn’t go over their heads, then they already know anything this movie would teach them. [7]

4. Monster House [7]: All animated, but this is no cartoon for little kids, because the classic mean old man down the street lives in a kid-eating, predatory house that’s absolutely out to get the main characters. Rachael Larimore declared this one a little scary for her 5-year-old, but I sense her family will watch it again this year. [8]

5. Something Wicked This Way Comes [8]: Creepy and suspenseful, this one offers an introduction to why carnivals are scary (and a welcome rescuing parent). Classic junior horror, without the modern leavening laughs. [9]

6. Hocus Pocus [9]: Three Salem witches return to haunt a teenage dance at Halloween, providing goofy scares (and a decent amount of sexual innuendo). About as scary as a Scooby Doo movie. [10]

7. Beetlejuice [10]: Humor and horror in equal doses, but more gross than scary as the over-the-top Beetlejuice tries to help a horrified young married couple move on to the afterlife. [11]

8. Gremlins [11]: Funny and scary, with plenty of faux-gore in the gremlin-destruction process. Definitely a little on the twisted side, this one’s for the tougher kids in the group. [12]

9. The Nightmare Before Christmas [12]: Can the Pumpkin King of Halloween run Christmas? Well, no, not unless you wanted a severed head in your stocking—but this is a perfect, a touch creepy, occasionally shivery Halloween lead-in to the upcoming season, with music beloved by intern Lenora Babb.

10. The Addams Family [13]: Comic and creepy, this darker version of the classic sitcom may give black-hearted sisters ideas for new ways to torture their younger brothers.

Sometimes Parents Make Mistakes

And here are some movies we wish we hadn’t watched as kids. We collectively suggest keeping these out of the DVD player this year.

1. The Watcher in the Woods [14]: Forget funny and scary, this is just plain scary, with ghosts and eerie visions but without gore or innuendo—this one terrified the young Julia Turner at a slumber party and scarred small Samantha Henig, who claims her parents forced her to watch it “entirely alone.” [15]

2. The Witches [15]: Julia Felsenthal reports that this Roald Dahl adaptation with Angelica Huston is “terrifying,” with a convention of witches attempting to turn all of the children of England into mice. Consider yourself warned: It’s airing on the Cartoon Network this Halloween night. [16]

3. Parents [16]: This one features funeral home director parents who bring home the embalmed for dinner, literally. Another pick from the horrified Julia Felsenthal, who admits that watching it (at 6!) made her appreciate her own parents that much more. [17]

4. Horrors of the Black Museum [17]: I was deeply affected as a cable-TV-watching child by a scene in which a girl puts binoculars up to her eyes and needles shoot out when she focuses. I remain a horror-movie wimp—and still can’t touch a pair of binoculars without thinking about it.

5. [18]Cat People [18]: Melonyce McAfee has regretted watching this 1982 movie, about a race of “werecats” who turn into panthers when they have sex, since she was 8. [19]

6. Edward Scissorhands [19]: Between the scissorhands themselves and Edward’s haunting appearance, this movie gave a young Torie Bosch the shivers.

Finally, Ellen Tarlin suggests that kids might enjoy Shaun of the Dead [20], a zombie horror comedy chock-full of flying body parts and exploding heads. The rest of us felt it might wind up on a future version of a “movies we wish we hadn’t watched” list.

The winner for movie our parents most thought we’d enjoy that we instead found terrifying? The Wizard of Oz [21].

Thanks to my former colleagues at CommonSense Media [22] for refreshing my memory on the kid-friendly (or not) details of a few of the films.