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

While their classic animations have often contained villains scary enough to traumatise younger children, Disney does not seem like the first place that you'd go to find a live action horror picture for older kids (at least not one that's genuinely scary, unlike the camp of, say, Hocus Pocus).

But then, a novel from Fahrenheit 451 writer Ray Bradbury and the directorial talents of The Innocents' Jack Clayton are not an immediately obvious fit for the Mouse House in the early 80s either.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, adapted by Bradbury from his own novel, tells the story of Mr Dark, a well-cast Jonathan Pryce, the disturbing soul-stealing proprietor of the Pandemonium Carnival and the two boys that try and stop him.

It was a hugely troubled production for Disney. Despite being picked up by the studio precisely because they wanted something with a maturer tone than their usual fare, they clashed repeatedly with Bradbury and Clayton over the darkness of the film and even the unsettling music. Then Bradbury clashed with Clayton over rewrites with neither having much say in the final reshot, recut and rescored movie.

In the end, Something Wicked made back significantly less than half its budget for Disney. All of which is here to say that the final film is something of a curio. There's a real sense that a darker, more lyrical film may have once existed here, but what we're left with is still atmospherically menacing even when paired slightly awkwardly with the kids' adventure tone of some of its more "Disney-esque" aspects.