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

Let's be honest, you could probably fill this entire top ten with Tim Burton films. Although a little off his game in recent years, the weirdo who never really quite fit in at Disney is the absolute master of "goth, but for kids" as a genre. I've decided not to allow more than one film by any one director on this list, though, which means narrowing Burton's oeuvre down to the one that best fits.

Poignant gothic fairytale Edward Scissorhands probably remains Burton's masterpiece, but the film that made his name, Beetlejuice, has more of the madcap family-friendly horror elements that we're looking for here.

Beetlejuice was adapted from a spec script by horror novelist Michael McDowell, who Burton had worked with on an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The original screenplay, however, was much more horrific and less full of the weird and cartoonish comedy that made the final film family appropriate. In McDowell's script, for example, the title character is a winged demon seeking to kill the family and rape their daughter.

Fortunately, in Burton's hands the film became a template for his approach in later work, enjoying the juxtaposition of the pastel coloured ideal of American suburbia and the twisted gothic, which would become a major part of Burton's aesthetic. The underworld here is a bureaucratic nightmare rather than a gory one.

Rather than a demonic rapist, Burton's "freelance bio-exorcist" Betelgeuse, a manic Michael Keaton, is less monster than creepy pest, throwing an element of chaos into an already strange little ghost story. Meanwhile, Winona Ryder's deadpan goth girl Lydia is the archetype of every girl in both Burton's films and his audience.