14 Best Horror Movies For Kids

This garish, utterly bizarre 1988 feature from the Chiodo Brothers (one of the the few examples of FX artists succeeding as directors, even if in this case they only did it once) is one of the most knowingly absurd horror movies from a decade in which horror was arguably at its most absurd. If nothing else, it's legendary for the tagline alone: "In Space, No One Can Eat Ice Cream."

The title says it all. Our antagonists are quite literally killer clowns from outer space, who land their strangely circus tent-like spaceship near a small American town, and set out to devour the residents by turning them into cotton candy. It's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds, and is loaded with wonderful insane gags like a balloon animal used as a sniffer dog, and a shadow puppet that becomes a carnivorous dinosaur.

Killer Klowns was one of the early PG-13 horror movies, and it perhaps goes a little further than some would go today: there's a little gore, a lot of beer-fueled humour and mild sex references, and the F-bomb is dropped once. But while it may not ostensibly child-oriented, it's so loud, bright and silly that it shouldn't be anything gutsier kids can't handle.