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

Following the success of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Spielberg was developing a much darker follow-up, Night Skies, a film concerning significantly more malevolent extraterrestrials tormenting humans.

The movie never got made and aspects of it were split into the two projects that Spielberg would make instead in 1982. The alien elements went into E.T., while the ordinary people tormented by a malevolent force would form the basis of its much more disturbing cousin Poltergeist, a film in which an average suburban family's pesky poltergeist problem turns out to involve a portal to a hell dimension in their children's bedroom closet.

Given his commitment to the former movie, Spielberg was contractually obliged not to be credited as director of the latter (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre's Tobe Hooper took that job), but his fingerprints are all over the finished project.

Although best known for family-friendly films, sentimentality and serious drama, Spielberg's skill as a master of horror is often overlooked, but it's been a key part of his toolkit from the stripped down thrills of his debut Duel to humanising the epic scale of War Of The Worlds.

Here Spielberg expertly mixed his ability to see the world through a child's eye with his mastery of tension and good sense of an iconic image to give us seminal moments like a young girl transfixed by communicating through TV static.

Poltergeist pushes right up to the line of what level of disturbing content is acceptable in a PG movie (and probably beyond, to be honest, without Spielberg's personal clout it's unlikely the movie would have scored that certificate), which makes it not just a good scary movie but also a perfect "my first horror film" for getting slightly older kids into the genre for real.