Over on Tumblr, A Fragile Sort of Anarchy has advice for horror-loving twelve year olds...

[froodle]

I remember you saying a thing about liking horror movies pretty recently? (If that wasn't you, I'm sorry!) I'm looking for something to show my 12 year old sister that will scare both of us, and not scar her. We just watched Sinister the other day (I made her close her eyes during the scarring parts because I'd seen it already), I was wondering if you had any ideas of movies we could watch together? P.S. All the cryptid stuff on your blog is the best.

A lot of what’s going to be okay for kids is in the Monster Squad/Goosebumps/Little Monsters/Eerie, Indiana/Are You Afraid of the Dark? category. Like, campy almost-horror, probably super dated, intended for kids in the first place stuff that, while fun and great, isn’t really scaring anyone unless you’re particularly jumpy. I think the campy stuff is worth watching if you’re someone who enjoys the genre as a whole and aren’t always looking to take a philosophy class while you watch someone get disemboweled, though.

What will freak somebody out is a hard thing to gauge, because most of the fun of watching a good horror movie is laughing about how dumb it is all the way through and then being 100% convinced that there’s a murderer in your house once the sun goes down. I don’t think any horror movie on this planet has scared me just for what it was at face value. For me, it’s always been, “Am I still vaguely, irrationally scared to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night because of a dude in FX makeup I saw three days ago? Wow. That movie was cool.”