There are many different factors to consider when you choose movies that you feel comfortable having your family watch. Some movies that are entertaining for toddlers are boring beyond belief for adults. Often times it is hard to find a balance between extremes. Such difficulty in choosing family friendly Halloween movies is especially true. You want to find something scary but not overly so, and you need a movie that is entertaining not only for the children, but for the adults as well.
To help you in making your decision about what family friendly movies will be most appropriate for your family, below you will find some comparisons between various Halloween movies. Hopefully this comparison will provide you with the information that you will need to go out and rent or purchase the movie that you and your family will enjoy this coming Halloween.
The movies Casper the Friendly Ghost and Monsters, Inc. are both excellent family friendly Halloween movie choices that you may not initially think of as Halloween movies. Both of these movies have something for everyone to enjoy. Some jokes made are made strictly for the adults and the scary portions of both of these movies are easily handled by children. Although Casper is live action and Monsters is animated, both movies bring an equally imaginative twist to what the monsters, ghosts, and other scary creatures do on ordinary days.
Clifford’s Big Halloween and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown are two movies that are better suited for the younger crowd of viewers. Toddlers are the target audience for this Clifford movie that is really more silly than scary. However, if your kids are not Big Red Dog fans, you could probably do a better job of entertaining them with the Charlie Brown movie option. For more than forty years, this Charlie Brown Halloween special has entertained audiences of children and adults alike. If you have an appreciation for movies, dialogue, and animation like they just don’t make any more, you will appreciate this time-tested classic.
For fans of the Nickelodeon genre, try Rugrats Halloween and SpongeBob Squarepants; Halloween; they are sure to please. These cartoons are aimed mainly at the pre-teen audience and contain humor that is specific to children. As far as story lines and characters go, both could use some help. Both of these movies are spin-offs of their more popular television cartoon series and could therefore do more to appeal to the adult generation. Kids seem to like these types of Halloween-oriented movies, but adults are likely to become bored quickly.
The above mentioned movies have a lot going for them if you are a child but parents are likely to want to watch something with a bit more substance to it.
Perhaps you are interested in the classic Halloween flicks. Well, you cannot get any more classic than Alfred Hitchcock. Psycho (1960) and The Birds (1963) are both excellent options for family thrillers that are more scary than your cartoons, but still clean enough to be considered family friendly. In contrast, more recent movies such as Beetlejuice and Hocus Pocus, combine humor with fright. These more modern movies are not however, appropriate for all ages. As times have changed so too have movie standards and sensitive audiences may be offended with some of the language and content of these later two movies.
As you compare Halloween movie options and make your decision concerning which ones will be right for your family, keep the fact that you want to watch a Halloween movie at the forefront of your mind. If you do not think that a particular movie emulates the spirit of Halloween then this movie night won’t be any different than every other movie night.
