Children's horror is a sub-genre of Horror that's exactly what it sounds like: horror aimed at children.
Horror stories aimed at children have been around for a long time (The Restaurant of Many Orders was published in 1924), but the genre experienced a boom in The '90s, thanks to the popularity of Goosebumps. While the Goosebumps books weren't the first horror stories for kids, they're certainly the most famous and influential. Several of the works listed below, and many, many more that aren’t, to cash in on Goosebumps' popularity, and you can still see its influence on many that weren’t.
Plots and villains are often inspired by ones from horror works aimed at adults, subtly or directly. Supernatural elements will often be metaphors for common kid problems and Aesops, like popularity, growing up, and bullying. Death of a Child will be avoided in favour of Fate Worse than Death, And I Must Scream, and other scary but nonfatal situations.
Tropes common to the genre:
- Adults Are Useless
- And I Must Scream
- Attack of the Killer Whatever
- Defanged Horrors
- Genre Anthology
- Fate Worse than Death: When you can't rely on death and gore for scares, you have to get creative.
- Horror Comedy
- Paranormal Mundane Item
- Short Story
Compare Teen Horror. If a work aimed at kids features ghouls and ghosties, but isn’t necessarily scary, see Spooky Kids Media.
Examples
- Bone Chillers
- The Demonata
- Disney Chills
- Galaxy of Fear
- Goosebumps
- Graveyard School
- Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids
- Horowitz Horror
- Fear Street
- The Midnight Library
- The Nightmare Room
- The Restaurant of Many Orders
- The Saga of Darren Shan
- Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
- Shivers (M. D. Spenser)
- Short and Shivery
- Spinetinglers
- Spooksville
- Strange Matter
- Tales for the Midnight Hour
- Weenies
Indexes: Genres, Horror
Notes:
- This is possibly redundant with Spooky Kids Media. That page's description says it's for stuff that’s spooky but not outright scary. However, a lot of the examples are written like it’s for kids’ horror media. I think we should clean up Spooky Kids Media to match its description and use this for the horror stuff.
- People might use this to make kids stuff they like seem darker than it really is, or to gush about how dark it is, like Nightmare Fuel and What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?. This has happened to Spooky Kids Media a little bit. I’m hoping that making the examples just the names of the works and not having any descriptions of them will help prevent it.
- I've haven't actually read or watched a lot of the works listed here, I just found them on the wiki. If any of them shouldn’t be on here, tell me — I accidentally added a show for adults at one point.
- I know Horowitz Horror is a red link. I’m planning on making a page for it at some point.
