October is horror month. This is treated in such a matter-of-fact way that even I, and I do not actually like horror for the most part, feel obligated to spend my entire month writing about prominent people in the genre. And that’s fine; there’s nothing wrong with that. If I were a horror fan, it would be nice to have a month wherein people took my preferred genre seriously and considered it worthy of attention. The number of think pieces every October must be truly staggering.
What we don’t talk about, though, is the realm of not-actually-horror Halloween movies. And I don’t mean thrillers, either. I mean the stuff made for kids that either looks at the holiday itself from another angle or the stuff featuring traditional spooky material but in a way that isn’t really scary. I don’t think it’s that we’re trying not to scare kids, either; for one, there are certainly scary things marketed at kids. (The Garfield Halloween special is weirdly chilling, for example!) But we also acknowledge, I think, that there’s other takes on such things. Somehow, though, they mostly come out of kids’ specials or movies or what have you.
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown is a classic example. As Anthony Pizzo put it, “It captures the idea that Halloween is just like every other day, except you’re hanging out in hot and uncomfortable costumes.” And are cruelly mistreated by everyone you know, or are horribly disappointed by the failure of your beliefs, or any of the other disappointments that crowd into that half-hour. I have long pondered what would make all the adults who live in those houses give any kid a rock in their trick-or-treat bag and if they all know that everyone’s doing it to Charlie Brown. It’s awkward to think about.
From another angle, you get The Halloween Tree, based on the book by Ray Bradbury and using the trappings of Halloween to teach history. Or Nightmare Before Christmas, forever caught in debate about which holiday it belongs to, full of grim-seeming characters who hasten to assure you that “we’re not mean.” I haven’t seen them, but I’m sure the Hotel Transylvania movies fit in this tradition—here are the scary characters, and here they are just being themselves. Coco, too—Dia de los Muertos is a different holiday, to be sure, though it shares roots with Halloween, but it and Corpse Bride are chipper movies about the dead and the afterlife.
Similarly, I consider no Halloween movie marathon complete without Blackbeard’s Ghost, which features the ghost of a pirate—and make no mistake, the historical Blackbeard was not exactly a do-gooder—who helps a small college track team win a meet and keeps a bunch of old ladies from being evicted so a casino can be built on their land. Hocus Pocus probably fits in there, and there’s a Donald Duck cartoon where a witch helps Huey, Dewey, and Louie get candy from Donald. And my goodness but the Treehouse of Horror just keeps going on, doesn’t it?
Sometimes, we get movies like Coraline and Paranorman, that actually are a bit scary but end on a heartwarming note. (And I mean, they both came out when I was an adult but my friend freaked out when the Other Mother went to try to sew buttons on Coraline’s eyes because that needle was coming at you, man, and why did we see this in 3D?) If I remember correctly, Monster House fits into this as well. Children’s movies are much more about the dawn, the “Ave Maria” after “Night on Bald Mountain,” if you will.
And honestly, I’ve always liked that better, even though I was more frightened as a child by “Ave Maria.” I remain as an adult the sort of person who would rather watch Blackbeard’s Ghost than Halloween, and while I’m pretty sure I saw all of the first Friday the Thirteenth, I’ve still never seen Nightmare on Elm Street and don’t even remember why I was watching Friday the Thirteenth. I do own a few more grown-up Halloween movies, but even there our household tends more toward the Ghostbusters end of the spectrum. Mostly, though, our Halloween stuff tends toward the PG.
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