‘Adorable’: Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie (2012). ![]() For slightly older children, meanwhile, Beetlejuice (Amazon) is optimal Halloween viewing, innocently juvenile in its humour and grossness, but a perfect gateway to more adult notions of the grotesque. His other stop-motion film, Corpse Bride (Chili), looks the part, but its tale of goth-zombie whimsy is maybe too sleepy for many kids. Still on Disney+, his adorable animation Frankenweenie abounds in horror-adjacent B-movie imagery but is more sweet than scary. It’s branded as Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas on Disney+, which is rather unfair on Selick’s vision, though Burton, of course, remains the biggest brand name in family-friendly spookery. His modern gothic fairytale Coraline (Apple TV) is ideal Halloween viewing for small fry, with its ghostly expressionist aesthetic and plucky heroine in genuine, eerie peril, while his darkly funny The Nightmare Before Christmas (Disney+), with its versatile face-off between the worlds of Halloween and Christmas, is just coming into season. Henry Selick remains the master of this niche. Elsewhere, cartoons can make unreal, uncanny images awfully vivid. Sometimes, animation can alleviate the brute impact of horror to an extent: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (Disney+) is an endearingly odd mashup of Washington Irving and The Wind in the Willows, but it’s about the most wholesomely toddler-friendly spin on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow imaginable. I was a shade too old when Hocus Pocus (Disney+) came out to share in the cultish nostalgia it inspires today on belatedly watching it, I found it a bit naff, though Bette Midler is hootingly good value. Witchery, indeed, is fruitful terrain for childhood Halloween viewing. Robert Zemeckis’s pallid, CGI-gloopy remake last year ( Now Cinema, if you must) didn’t put anything like the same trust in its audience. ![]() Roeg, rather like Dahl, doesn’t condescend to children, playing on their nerves in the same visceral way he did their elders’ in previous films. ‘Primal horror’: Anjelica Huston in The Witches. Hell, most adults have a hard time not yelping at the first, nightmare-inducing reveal of the rotted, creviced visage of Anjelica Huston’s fabulous supervillain the Grand High Witch. ![]() When I was seven, and for some time after, my favourite film was Nicolas Roeg’s fiercely terrifying take on Roald Dahl’s The Witches (Amazon Prime), and it remains just about unbeatable as a primal horror film for kids. ![]() Warner Bros has taken advantage of the gap to at least rerelease the first Harry Potter film in cinemas, but otherwise, families seeking a bit of gentler fright-night viewing are better cosied up at home, where you can at least pause proceedings whenever things get a little too intense.īecause as much as many parents prefer their children’s viewing to be as edgeless and benign as possible, many of our most formative film memories tend to be of times we were scared stiff. This week’s suitably spooky cinema releases, from Last Night in Soho to Antlers to The Nowhere Inn, are all for adults and older teens. Yet film distributors don’t see it in quite the same way. However much adults latch on to it as an excuse for partying and dressing up, Halloween remains, in its present-day incarnation, an occasion chiefly for the benefit of children: try trick-or-treating without one in tow and see how far you get.
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