The 10 Grandparent-Approved Scary Movies That Kids Love Every Single Time

People are very excited about sharing their favorite horror movies for kids and are thrilled to give recommendations when someone asks for the best horror movies for kids in an online film forum. Here are their best recommendations.

Most respondents agree that Coralline is the best horror movie for kids. The stop-motion animated film directed by Henry Selick, who also directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, is gorgeous and brings a wonderfully creepy, but not overly violent, story to the screen.

Based on the book of the same name by Neil Gaiman, the film follows the titular Coraline (Dakota Fanning) as she discovers a magical world parallel to our own that at first seems perfect and much better. But she soon learns that this world contains serious danger.

Produced by the same studio that developed Coraline, ParaNorman is another beautifully crafted stop-motion animated horror movie targeted to tweens and younger children.

The film follows Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an eleven-year-old boy who can speak with the dead as he is saddled with the responsibility of performing a ritual to keep the town safe from a centuries-old curse. But, unfortunately, things don’t go smoothly, and zombies attack before Norman can stop them.

Many of the same users who recommend Coraline and ParaNorman, also recommend Monster House, forming a late 2000s/early 2010s trilogy of animated films with many fans.

Unlike those films, Monster House isn’t stop-motion animated but computer animated. It uses the same technology as The Polar Express, allowing the filmmakers to capture human performances and place them in the fantastically realized animated world.

Here that animated world features a house that is also literally a monster, as the film follows a group of young friends who investigate and then become trapped inside the titular Monster House.

Several films in the thread aren’t precisely horror movies but adventure films that feature some downright horrifying scenes.

Jumanji, which follows a group of kids who are supernaturally pulled into a jungle-set survival game, offers more than a fair share of scenes that have stuck with people who saw it as a kid but not scarred them so horribly they wouldn’t show it to their kids as a fun and safe way to have some scares.

Several horror fans mention Beetlejuice as a great entry point for kids into the genre. While the movie certainly has some, let’s say, “suggestive” jokes, it’s a very accessible movie that delivers horror and humor in equal measure.

The story centers on a couple who die while driving home and don’t realize it until living people move into their home. This leads them to summon a “bio-exorcist” to exorcize the living from their home, leading to several hilarious sequences of supernatural hijinks.

While Scooby-Doo as a franchise certainly falls more on the comedy side of horror-comedy, some stories of the beloved great Dane and his mystery-solving gang come with real scares.

Multiple people say Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island isn’t just the scariest movie in the franchise but also one of the best and a great way to introduce kids to horror movies without scaring them too much.

Not all horror movies are dark and spooky; some are brightly lit, colorful, and all the more terrifying. Of course, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory isn’t generally considered a horror movie.

But when you consider that the plot essentially follows the same narrative as a slasher, with characters being removed from the story one by one, it’s hard to say it isn’t. Add to that the horrifying ways in which children are removed from the tour they’ve been invited to and the iconic tunnel sequence, and you’ve got a children’s horror classic on your hands.

The Dark Crystal is another fantasy film that’s very nearly a horror movie, especially for a child. The movie was somewhat controversial upon its release in 1982 precisely because of its dark tone and genuinely frightening monstrous creatures, but it’s become a cult classic over the years.

And for a good reason, the movie is one of Jim Henson’s best and shows off fantastically designed and incredibly articulate puppets while also delivering an exciting and often scary fantasy adventure story about two young creatures who must save the world by restoring a magical crystal.

Many parents call out Nicolas Roeg’s The Witches as one of the most effectively scary horror movies for kids; one even says it still scares them now. Based on Roald Dahl’s book of the same name, the film centers on a group of, you guessed it, witches who can disguise themselves as humans and the young boy and his grandmother who must stop their plan to turn all children into mice.

This thread inspired this post.

1939’s The Wizard of Oz certainly has some claim to being a horror movie for kids, especially the scenes with the flying monkeys, but 1985’s legacy sequel Return to Oz is outright horror fantasy.

The film begins with a young Dorothy (Fairuza Balk) sent to receive electroshock therapy because she keeps talking about Oz, but wouldn’t you know it, an accident during the procedure sends her back to that magical land.

There she discovers that the evil Nome King has taken control of Oz and must be overthrown. She makes new friends and sets out to save Oz. Along the way, she and her companions encounter several frightening characters, including a princess with a collection of different heads she can choose to wear on a rotating basis.