While Halloween is the perfect holiday for horror films, we shouldn’t give short shrift to the more family oriented fare that comes out at this time of year.  Nowadays, Halloween is arguably a kids’ festival, so it’s no surprise that Hollywood would want to cater to those who love and celebrate the holiday but are too young or, like me, too wimpy to watch The Exorcist.

Perhaps it’s fair to say, then, that there are two major genres of Halloween film: the scary and the family friendly.  (There’s also the funny or the romantic goth-y, but those subgenres are much less popular, and, moreover, the films that fall under those categories usually also fit into the aforementioned dichotomy.)  Real horror films can shock or disgust, but the very best of them terrify us by confronting us with things we are scared of in real life: dead bodies, foreigners, nature, pregnancy, clowns.  Family friendly Halloween movies, like all other family friendly films, have happy endings and seek to comfort us.  The only difference is that these films, being Halloween-based, tend to be a bit quirkier than usual.

You’d think that It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown would fit in the second category, not the first.  I disagree.  It may be the scariest Halloween movie there is.