The Importance of Family-Friendly Horror
PG-horror is a great gateway to the genre for us scaredy-cats.
Casper the Friendly Ghost. Spirit Halloween. Stranger Things. The last few days have seen these different family-horror IPs trending on social media. Casper? He’s getting a dark, moody makeover in a series on Peacock. Spirit Halloween is putting some skin in the movie-making game. And Stranger Things just dropped a trailer that was heavy with horror vibes. In short, it’s good to be a horror fan right now. Especially a young horror fan.
Family-friendly horror is a subgenre that waned at the turn of the millennium, and stayed at a low output for most of the following decade. Prior, in the ’90s, kids were spoiled with a gamut of scary books, movies, and shows that were tailored specifically for them. Even the ’80s had quite a great spread of horror aimed at adolescents with classics like Gremlins and Monster Squad. Horror has been adored and absorbed by children for as long as horror has been around. Hell, the original Grimms’ Fairy Tales (before they were “George-Lucas-ed” by puritans) are steeped in horror.
Now, it seems, gateway horror is creeping back into the mainstream. As ’80s nostalgia has slowly transitioned into ’90s nostalgia, the peak of family friendly horror is becoming ripe for reboots. We’ve already seen…
