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

Of late Amblin have been only too happy to spend their time mining their 80s back catalogue for nostalgia kicks (leading inexorably to what amounts to a feature length Amblin made Amblin tribute film with Ready Player One).

Back in 2006, though, this 80s nostalgia was still fairly fresh when Amblin first dipped their toes in a tribute to their own kids' horror golden age. Monster House was a collaboration between Amblin and Robert Zemeckis' ImageMovers and remains the best of the latter's obsession with making performance captured 3D animation a thing.

Like the classic 80s films that inspired it (including the aforementioned and similarly titled Monster Squad), Monster House features a gang of pre-teen kids battling supernatural forces entirely unbeknown to their parents. In this case, a boy lives across the street from a possessed house that eats people and needs the help of his chunky best friend and a hyper-competent girl scout to take it out.

Monster House seems laser targeted to be the kind of cult hit that would appeal to indie parents as well as their kids with an adult voice and performance capture cast that includes Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Zemeckis' Jessica Rabbit, Kathleen Turner, as the monstrous house itself. Meanwhile, writers Dan Harmon and Rob Schrab, who would follow the film up with the decidedly more adult Sarah Silverman Program, snuck in as many slightly risque lines as they could.

The creators are obviously very fond of the 80s material (director Gil Kenan would go onto remake Poltergeist, while Harmon's Rick And Morty is a long running riff on Zemeckis' most famous film) and that really comes across in a film that has far more of the anarchic oddness of that period than the relatively safe mid-budget animations of its own.