Five Scary Movies You Can Watch With Your Kids

Scary movies are communal at the core, often best experienced with others for the optimal effect (yelling and screaming at the screen, laughing, hugging at terrifying moments). Many adults who embraced horror at a young age did so because of watching that one special flick with mom or dad, older sibling, younger sibling, or all of the above; in my case, my love of horror was DIRECTLY influenced by my parents, whether it be watching A Nightmare on Elm Street with my mother and a group of friends and family or seeing the immortal Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein with my dad one amazing Sunday morning.

For that reason, we offer FIVE movies that might be a blast to watch with your own little boils and ghouls ANY time of year. And who knows? You might even make a special memory. Now, some of these movies will be TOO scary for very little ones, so please take that into consideration before blasting your four year old with Dracula. Ratings included for a BIT of clarity, but watching something TOO scary with a little one can have the opposite affect for a youngster.

THE MONSTER SQUAD: I rented this VHS 35 times or more one summer.

5. The Monster Squad (1987, PG-13) – Fred Dekker’s comedic clash of the classic monsters is a perfect bridge from the more mild, “Scooby-Doo” type prepubescent material to a bit more sophistication – but only a bit. The fun stuff stays. The Monster Squad is entertaining from start to finish, featuring appropriate updates of the Universal Monsters, a great cast of kids, memorable lines, and Michael Sembello’s relentlessly catchy ode to eighties synth cheese “Rock Until You Drop”. You’ll be slapping your head for weeks trying to get that little ditty out of your mind.

4. The Gate (1987, PG-13) – The Gate is the other great family horror film from 1987, but with somewhat less comedy and a more heightened sense of spooky. A group of kids accidentally unleash demons from a hole in the backyard, and now they gotta save the world. Stephen Dorff made his theatrical debut with this little gem, remembered by many children of the nineties as the first time they liked a scary movie.

3. The Witches (1990, PG) – Child literature visionary Roald Dahl (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) penned The Witches, an atmospheric, creepy look at a group of witches who want to rid the world of children. The catch is that the one person who knows about the plan is a young orphan boy that the witches have turned into a mouse. It’s somewhat dark and very entertaining, with a memorable turn by Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch.

2. Dark Night of the Scarecrow (1981, Made for TV) – Widely considered by many horror fans to be one of the best TV movies ever made since its release just before Halloween of ‘81, Dark Night of the Scarecrow is both a scary visual treat and an engrossing story full of pathos. A mentally ill man named Bubba is erroneously hunted down by a group of angry townspeople after a tragedy involving a little girl. In the most effective climactic scenes, a scarecrow stalks Bubba’s attackers one by one, the apparent victims of a paranormal vigilante. It is a thoughtful and creepy movie for younger and older viewers alike. “Bubba didn’t do it!”

1. Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983, PG) – Classic stories from the TV series are revisited by four big-time directors with somewhat mixed results, but the overall package of Twilight Zone: The Movie is entertaining and eerie, with arguably the most memorable moment occurring during the John Landis directed prologue. “You wanna see something REALLY scary?”

HAPPY VIEWINGS!