As
Halloween beckons, summon up favourite child-friendly frighteners such as The Witches, Beetlejuice and Coraline
However much adults latch on to it as an excuse for partying and dressing up, Halloween remains, in its present-day incarnation, an occasion chiefly for the benefit of children: try trick-or-treating without one in tow and see how far you get. Yet film distributors don’t see it in quite the same way. This week’s suitably spooky cinema releases, from Last Night in Soho to Antlers to The Nowhere Inn, are all for adults and older teens. Warner Bros has taken advantage of the gap to at least rerelease the first Harry Potter film in cinemas, but otherwise, families seeking a bit of gentler fright-night viewing are better cosied up at home, where you can at least pause proceedings whenever things get a little too intense.
Because as much as many parents prefer their children’s viewing to be as edgeless and benign as possible, many of our most formative film memories tend to be of times we were scared stiff. When I was seven, and for some time after, my favourite film was Nicolas Roeg’s fiercely terrifying take on Roald Dahl’s The Witches (Amazon Prime), and it remains just about unbeatable as a primal horror film for kids. Hell, most adults have a hard time not yelping at the first, nightmare-inducing reveal of the rotted, creviced visage of Anjelica Huston’s fabulous supervillain the Grand High Witch.