It's that dark and mysterious time of year again. It's a time to carve pumpkins, dress in costumes, go door to door asking for candy and watch some frightening films. While many people watch modern horror/slasher films, I tend to watch the creepy kids media from my childhood, such as "The Nightmare Before Christmas," "Hocus Pocus," "ParaNorman" and "Courage the Cowardly Dog."
It's great looking back at how dark some of my childhood favorites were allowed to get. I don't watch a lot of modern kids media, but from what I've seen I can tell that many of these shows lack a certain "creepy" factor found in older kids media (with the exception of "Gravity Falls" and "Over the Garden Wall" of course). I see the trailers for films like "Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween" and get a little depressed seeing something like "Goosebumps," a series of genuinely creepy children's books, get turned into a "not so scary" comedy for really little kids.
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Almost a year ago I wrote about the slow disappearance of "children's horror" in modern media. Now I wish to talk about how those darker elements that parents try to keep children from seeing are essential in the messages these films and cartoons try to get across. These are the moments that stick in your head the most when you ingest these pieces of media.
"Goosebumps," both the books and the show, played to unique fears that only children could understand, such as untrustworthy adults, strict authority figures, sounds you here in the dark. Exposing children to these frightening concepts helps prepare them for similar scenarios they might have to deal with as adults. It's good that they shouldn't just trust any adult and/or authority figure based on the sole fact that they are an adult and/or authority figure.
The series "Courage the Cowardly Dog" used creepy scenarios to convey real world terrors that almost felt too real. The episode "The Mask" used a creepy cat in a mask, but it also conveyed things like emotional domestic abuse and how abusers can convince victims to stay with them (since this was a kids show this was all sub-textual of course). The episode "Freaky Fred" played on adults not believing children when they tell them that another adult they now is acting strange and possibly dangerous.
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I've touched a little on this before when discussing "ParaNorman" (spoilers), but that film uses things like witches, ghosts and zombies to effectively tell a story where human paranoia toward those who are different and the overreaction to that paranoia is the real evil. This film features the ghost of a child who was killed by her town because they thought she was an evil witch. That dark act hammers the message into kids' heads that even adults do unreasonable things out of fear and that our paranoia, when left unchecked, can convince us to do unforgivable things in its name.
These are the kinds of lessons I feel children aren't getting with these sanitized forms of Holloween entertainment. What makes horror so effective is when it conveys some terrifying aspect of the real world that we all have to look out for (abuse, kidnapping, strangers, killers, and the unknown). While horror is primarily suppose to frighten us, it has the potential to teach us, at a young age, about the dangers of adult life and how to avoid and/or prepare for them.
