TheRichest: 15 Kids TV Shows That Gave Us PTSD

[froodle]

Kids TV shows, like books for children, should be positive, upbeat, and happy, right? They should leave their young viewers with a smile on their faces and maybe impart a little education along the way. What they shouldn’t do is cause nightmares and emotional trauma. We should all be able to agree on that.

That’s what makes it surprising – not to say disturbing – that it was pretty easy to come up with a list of children’s shows that undoubtedly left a trail of PTSD-afflicted kids in their wake. Sometimes, it seems like the creative team of a show somehow deluded themselves into thinking that certain characters were cute, when they were actually horrifying. We’re not sure how it happens, but we’ve got the evidence. There are TV shows for kids that are meant to be scary, but sometimes, the creators go over the top in their quest for thrills and chills. A good ghost story shouldn’t haunt your dreams decades later.

Here’s our list of 15 kids TV shows that, over the decades, have left generations of scarred children who grew up into the adults who gave us the messed up world we have today. Coincidence? Maybe not.

10: Eerie, Indiana

Director Joe Dante had already made Gremlins and The Howling when he took on Eerie, Indiana, a live action kid’s show about Marshall Teller, a teen who moves from New Jersey to the appropriately named Eerie, Indiana. Eerie is a small town with the ominous population of 16,661 and a problem with ghosts, mysterious deaths, and other supernatural weirdness. The show’s genius was to have the very ordinariness of a small town serve as the backdrop for all the bizarro stuff like kids who sleep in plastic containers and ghosts in the library. From glasses that turned people into zombies to battling the menacing ghost of an old bank robber, the series was inventive and well written — and most of all, scary AF. It lasted only one season, but has haunted our dreams ever since.