10 Family Friendly Horror Films To Scare Kids (And Their Parents) This Halloween

2. The Witches

Very few writers have ever understood how to make something magical yet terrifying for children quite so much as Roald Dahl. Dahl, of course, did write dark and sinister stories for adults, but it's his children's books that endure the most, in part because he didn't stint at all on giving them just the same darkness.

Dahl's 1983 novel The Witches drew on the writer's Norwegian heritage and the folklore of Norway to tell a story in which witches are demonic beings in human-ish form (bar the wigs and gloves that they have to wear to disguise their true identities) determined to curse or kill all children. Fortunately, the boy hero's Norwegian grandmother knows the secrets of witches, helping him to defeat them, despite being turned into a mouse in the process.

The 1990 film came courtesy of Don't Look Now director Nicolas Roeg (a man with plenty more experience of constructing an unsettling atmosphere than kid-friendly fun) and effects from the Jim Henson creature shop.

The Witches movie was the last screen adaptation of Dahl's work in his lifetime and, true to form, he hated it (largely because the boy gets turned back from a mouse at the end). What does he know, though? The Witches is the film that best captures the dark and sinister side of Dahl's work with Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch perfectly traumatising for all kids in the audience.

Like a lot of films on this list, The Witches underperformed at the box office on release, perhaps being seen as too scary to attract a mainstream family audience. Time has been kind to it, though, and its reputation has grown through cult status so that audiences now recognise it as perhaps the best screen version of any of Dahl's works.