Scary movies for kids for a family-friendly fright

Best for: Little Kids

James ‘Sulley’ Sullenberger and his buddy Mike are experts at scaring kids, but tots needn’t worry: as this Pixar classic reveals, they’re big softies at heart. In Monstropolis, the screams of human children are harvested for energy, even as monsters are taught that children themselves are highly toxic. So imagine the chaos that ensues when a fearless toddler named Boo gets loose in their world. It’s fun and clever in a way that’ll entertain adults as much as the wee ones, with the bare minimum amount of frights to qualify as ‘scary’. Rated G.

Best for: Big Kids

When Coraline moves into her new house—which just so happens to be old—it's quite a snooze fest. Her mom and dad are wrapped up, and she's left bored as a result. All of that changes when she finds a hidden door and an alternate universe behind it. How's that for an interesting abode? In this new realm, everything seems perfect, but nothing truly is. You won't be able to say no to a screening of this Neil Gaiman book-turned-movie when autumn swoops in. Rated PG. 

Best for: Little Kids

Washington Irving's grisly tale of Sleepy Hollow becomes more palatable for the kiddies in this cartoon, the second of two featurettes. Following The Wind in the Willows adaptation is the story of bumptious schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and his nemesis the Headless Horseman. It's a trite, chocolate-box picture of colonial days—until the Horseman shows up for one of those nightmare sequences with which Uncle Walt so relished terrifying his young audience. Rated G.

Best for: Little Kids and Big Kids

Halloween is naturally the perfect time for spooky antics, but a group of kiddos think one residence goes too far. After some sleuthing and a handful of unexplainable moments, a trio of buddies discover that the house next door is actually not a house—it's a monster. The scares are a little more grown-up in this animated adventure from Steven Spielberg's Amblin, making this a solid primer before your little ones graduate to Poltergeist. Rated PG. 

Best for: Little Kids and Big Kids

What makes a better Halloween movie than three evil witches? Head to the 1600s, where Sanderson sisters (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy) cast a spell that killed a little girl and turned her brother into an immortal black cat. Then, fast forward to the‘90s and meet Max Dennison, who just moved from Los Angeles to Salem, Massachusetts with his parents and his little sister. He’ll do anything to impress his cute neighbor, Allison, who just so happens to have access to the old Sanderson House. He even lights the Black Flame Candle, which as legend has it, will bring back the Sanderson sisters—and does! But hey, who believes in all that hocus pocus, anyway? Rated PG. 

Best for: Big Kids

‘Children’s movies’ were defined a bit loosely in the ’80s. Among the several puppet-intensive fantasy flicks of the era seemingly designed to traumatise its target demographic, this Jim Henson-directed feature is probably the most purely fun – but it’s still plenty freaky, sending a young Jennifer Connelly on an adventure through a fantastical realm full of dwarves, horned giants and fart bogs in order to rescue her baby brother from Jareth, the evil (and, played by David Bowie, uber-glam) Goblin King. Rated PG.

Best for: Big Kids

To say Jack Skellington is over Halloween is an understatement. The Pumpkin King has had his fair share of frightening hijinks, and he just can't seem to muster up the spooky spirit that one expects from his prestigious title. Instead, Jack finds himself drawn to Christmas, a holiday he hasn't encountered beforehand. He does a bit of research and soon decides to step on Santa's turf. Naturally, his holly jolly plan is nothing short of a disaster. In true Tim Burton form, this stop-motion classic delivers all you've come to expect from the artist: odd, yet totally lovable characters. Viewers will also delight in some toe-tapping tunes from Danny Elfman. Rated PG. 

Best for: Big Kids

Tim Burton’s career of conjuring gentle scares began in 1984 with a short film about a boy who puts bolts in his dead dog’s neck and brings him back to life a la Frankenstein’s monster. Thirty years later, Burton reanimated his own creation – pun slightly intended – as a stop-motion feature, allowing him to do stuff with the story he couldn’t the first time around, particularly with the thrilling creature-feature climax. Rated PG     

Best for: Tweens, Teens

Norman Babcock sees dead people, and he’s pretty fine with that, considering they treat him quite a bit better than the living ones do. But when an ancient curse causes the dead to rise, this horror-loving misfit is the only person who can save his hometown from a full-on zombie apocalypse. Animation house Laika’s second stop-motion feature (after the fab and freaky Coraline) is more madcap than macabre, but it’s a fun, funny supernatural caper that serves as an excellent gateway to bigger scares for the burgeoning lil’ horror fiend in your life. Rated PG. 

Best for: Tweens

In this meta-adaptation of the ’90s elementary-school book-fair staple, young Zach discovers that his new neighbour is none other than the reclusive author himself, RL Stine (Jack Black). When Zach begins hanging out with the writer’s young daughter, he makes a shocking discovery: the creatures in his books are real, and he keeps them locked away in his basement. And when one of them accidentally gets loose, it’s up to all of them to save their small town from destruction. Rated PG.

Best for: Big Kids 

The kookiest clan in town got the animated treatment in 2019. In this tale of spooky shenanigans, Gomez and his gang are waiting for a visit from relatives. However, things are turned upside down when a TV personality arrives instead and insists that the family's eerie hilltop home is standing in her way of taking down the entire neighborhood. This is the perfect entry point to Charles Addams' outcasts, best followed by a viewing of the 1991 live-action classic if the kids want more. Rated PG. 

Best for: All Ages

Dorothy’s journey over the rainbow has been enchanting children for generations, while also freaking them the heck out. Need we remind you about the flying monkeys? Of course not — they’ve been haunting your dreams for decades. And the puddlefication of the Wicked Witch probably hits different post-Wicked. (Let’s not even get into the urban myths surrounding the film.) While not as aggressively traumatising as Disney’s 1980s pseudo-sequel (see below), MGM probably still owes the audience billions in therapy bills. Rated PG. 

Best for: Tweens, teens

Of all the kids movies from the ‘80s that seemed purposely designed to scar the childhoods of their target demographic, none was creepier than this nominal sequel to The Wizard of Oz, if only for how grotesquely it distorts the beloved original. Set shortly after her original visit, Dorothy (a very young Fairuza Balk) returns to the titular land of Technicolor whimsy, only to find it reduced to a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated by creatures out of Jim Henson’s worst acid trips. You’ll wish there were flying monkeys in this just to lighten the mood. 

Best for: Big kids

A little boy named Lewis is shipped off to live with his magic-practicing uncle in a spooky old house that makes an unusual ‘tick-tock’ sound. Somehow the youngster manages to awaken the dead and unleashes mayhem on a once-quiet town. Starring Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, the whimsical film was directed by notorious gorehound Eli Roth, of all people, but don't go in expecting Hostel for kids: This is very much a ripping kid-lit yarn void of real menace. Rated PG. 

Best for: Tweens

Young’uns are likely to shriek at the ghouls, sandworms and Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis stretching their faces like Silly Putty, but for the appropriately-aged, Tim Burton’s cartoon-goth imagery and the manic energy of Michael Keaton’s performance as the ‘bio-exorcist’ of the title is the most delightful sort of nightmare fuel. The long-awaited sequel was a slight disappointment, but the gloopy-gloppy practical effects and presence of much of the original cast (plus Wednesday Addams herself, Jenna Ortega) make it worth a watch, too. Rated PG.

Best for: Tweens, teens

For a brief period in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Disney reinvented itself as a purveyor of grand guignol kids entertainment, marching out PG-rated horrors like The Watcher in the Woods and this adaptation of renowned kid-lit icon (checks notes) Ray Bradbury’s (?!!) tale of a dark carnival descending on a small town. Jonathan Pryce is the ringmaster in a kids-eye-view story that provides solid entry-level terror for the horror-curious set. Rated PG. 

Best for: Tweens

A witch convention is certainly not the first thing you expect to come across while staying at a hotel in England with your grandmother. Unfortunately, little Luke's curiosity gets the better of him, and he's caught spying on their evil gathering. It's up to Luke and his Grandmother to fight back against the witches, but it's just a hair more difficult now that Luke has been turned into a mouse. Rated PG.

Claymation masters Aardman’s cheeky entry into ‘horror’ pits the lovably hapless man and his dog against a threat pulled straight from the b-movies of yore: the dreaded were-rabbit. Beautifully animated and wholly silly, it’s not just a solid animated film for lite halloween fun: It’s one of the best animated films of all time. Rated PG.

Best for: Tweens, teens

Like Debbie Harry in the cult-classic Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Krysten Ritter presides over this horror anthology as a witch holding a child hostage and demanding scary stories. But this semi-anthology is less all-out terror and more funhouse scares, a film in the spirit of RL Stine’s Goosebumps (but definitely not Fear Street) that doles out scares without tipping too far into the abyss. Rated PG.

Best for: Big Kids, Tweens 

Victor is having a difficult time getting his vows straight‚ which is naturally problematic for his bride to be. While reciting his promises of love and devotion, Victor accidentally proposes to another bride...a dead one at that. Whoops! Try explaining that one, pal! In this charmingly eerie Tim Burton film, a groom with cold feet is pulled into the underworld by an enthusiastic deceased bride and learns quite a bit in the process. Equally endearing, heartbreaking and creepy, Corpse Bride is a must when Halloween rolls around. Rated PG.  

Best for: Tweens 

Need more evidence that children’s entertainment in the ’80s and ’90s was a conspiracy to drive an entire generation into therapy? Allow us to submit the Scary Stories book series: collections of spooky folk tales accompanied by illustrations so horrifying a death metal band would think twice about putting them on an album cover. Not only do director André Øvredal and writer-producer Guillermo del Toro adapt the most famously freaky of those stories, they maintain the look of Stephen Gammell’s unsettling (but totally friggin’ awesome) artwork and bring it to life. Hey, if we had to grow up traumatised, so do you, kid. Rated PG-13.

Best for: Tweens and Teens

Three spirit-obsessed scientists are canned from their jobs at NYU, but they don’t let that get ’em down; instead, they put their talents to good use. Using their passion for the occult as a driving force, they start a ghost-extermination company to help New Yorkers handle some very real ghost troubles. Their work doesn’t come without its skeptics, though...one even wrongly jails them for fraud! Ultimately the unlikely team helps to save the city from an ancient god. Be warned: It’s not quite rated for the current day, and Ghostbusters is really only appropriate for tweens and older. Rated PG.

Best for: Tweens and Teens

Dr. Henry Frankenstein will stop at nothing to create life by alternative means, even if it involves assembling body parts of the deceased to build a new person from scratch. He gets his wish, but things certainly don't go as planned, and the creature causes a lot of trouble when it escapes. For kids interested in Universal's classic days, this is essential viewing. NR.

Best for: Tweens and Teens

Let's get one thing straight: This movie still scares us. Between a supernatural child abduction, evil clown dolls, moving furniture and a crackling TV set, it's jam-packed with the heebie jeebies. Also, you can't unsee those skeletons in the pool. Basically, the moral of the story is to not build any houses on an ancient burial ground. Seriously... don't do that. But do watch this movie with your tweens and teens, because it's amazing. Just don't be deceived by the PG rating... the ‘80s were a very different time. Rated PG.

Best for: Teens

If you want your kids to be able to get into the bathtub without fear, it's probably best you skip out on Jaws until they're in their double digits. This monstrous Great White shark is terrorizing the waters surrounding Amity Island—just as summer begins. Naturally, the beach town is in a panic and afraid to go anywhere near the water. It's up to Chief Brody and co. to find this menacing creature. As the saying goes, “You're gonna need a bigger boat.” Rated PG.