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I remember when I first met. Scary stories to tell in the dark. It was second grade, and another kid had smuggled a copy of Alvin Schwartz’s Horror Collection into the playground during recess. We huddled around, repulsed by the terrifying depictions but compelled, unaware that what we read next would script our nightmares for the next 30 years.
Scary storieswhich was first released in 1981 but is still ubiquitous in sleepovers and back-of-the-bus scare sessions during the ’90s, is popular among millennials for instilling sheer terror.
The one that haunts me to this day is “The Dead Hand,” about a young boy with a demonic obsession who wanders the swamp at night, only to be attacked with a broken arm. He shakes the boy’s hand and walks away. Nothing but a bloody stump. The story, with its illustration of a screaming, toothy corpse’s head rising from a swamp, kept me awake for at least a week. I still remember curled up in my bed with bugged eyes, absolutely certain that a limp hand was about to float through my bedroom door.
As Halloween approached this year, I began to wonder what? Scary stories was still popular, or if my children had their own equivalent – a horror story so powerful it could leave a mark on the subconscious of a generation. So I reached out to booksellers, librarians, and my older child’s favorite horror author to find out what’s scaring kids these days and what role, if any, horror stories play in their lives.
I thought that General Alpha’s children, obsessed with obsessive doomsday fantasy scabbeddy toilets, were probably too stupid to be scared. In fact, experts told me the opposite – today’s popular titles, e.g Michael Dahl’s Truly Scary Stories or Five Nights at Freddy’s. series – a bit tamer than what I read as a kid.
“We had serious, terrifying scares that kept you up at night,” Jane Darnell, director of library science for the Philadelphia school district and a lifelong horror reader, told me. “The psychological fear was a little bit deeper.”
There’s something to be said for a light touch in children’s horror. As far as I understand now. Scary stories Part of my education as a writer and horror fan, I actually don’t want my kids to lie awake at night, terrified of being attacked by a broken limb.
But the contrast between my children’s horror scenarios and my own got me thinking about what kids really get out of scary stories, and the importance of such stories in a legitimately scary world.
The taming of horror stories
I didn’t know it at the time, but I had come of age during the terrible baby boom. Scary storiesAccording to Mental Floss, which eventually grew to three volumes, started the trend, with authors Christopher Pike and RL Stine soon following suit. The latter wrote the popular Goosebumps series, which, along with the mid-90s TV series, still looms large in the imagination of many millennials.
While some were silly or weird, many were legitimately terrifying. The one that sticks in my mind. Welcome to Camp NightmareIn which a boy arrives at a sleepaway camp only to be threatened and gassed by strange counselors and eventually pressured into hunting down his fellow campers with a tranquilizer gun.
Although immensely popular, the Goosebumps books became victims of their own success, with a saturated market and declining sales. By the 2000s, horror had overtaken fantasy, particularly the Harry Potter series.
But like a zombie, the genre has risen from the grave in recent years, even as sales of books for elementary and middle schools overall have struggled. Anna Hirsch, co-owner of Wild Rumps Bookstore, a children’s bookstore in Minneapolis, told me that scary books are selling well, enough to keep the store’s dedicated “scary shed” stocked year-round. Popular titles include Tales from the Cabin 23An anthology series with each episode written by a different bestselling author, and Satanic, Hirsch said that its monster-of-the-week vibe makes it the most obvious contemporary successor to Goosebumps. They’re aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, but younger readers enjoy the Creepy Tales picture books, about everyday objects and foods (underwear, carrots) that come to life as Jasper. , stalks an unsuspecting rabbit.
According to Harsh is also popular. Gustavo the Shy Ghosta 2020 bestseller (and a favorite in my house) about a sweet ghost struggling to connect with her fellow paranormal creature. Gustavo And its sequels are more heartwarming than scary, but they take place in a world where werewolves, Calavera-style skeletons and invisible girls with floating goggles are commonplace.
As for the classics of my youth, Wild Rumps still stocks some Goosebumps titles, but those are mostly graphic novel adaptations that were released in the 2010s. Some of Goosebumps’ original plots feel dated today — readers of Gen Alpha might wonder why some of the terrified protagonists just “don’t use their cell phones and call their mom,” Hirsch said. Hirsch said today’s horror stories are more likely to involve heroes who attack monsters and ghosts doing research online, or who find themselves in a fantasy world where such technology doesn’t exist.
Scary stories are also less scary than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, said library science director Darnell, who added that horror just “feels watered down.” Darnell said adults are more concerned than ever about age-appropriate subject matter, and if children’s authors today delve too deeply into psychological horror, school organizations and psychologists stand by. will be
Max Brillier, author (under the pen name Jacques Chabert) of the Erie Elementary books and several other horror series, said today’s young readers are also “in many ways more conservative” than children of decades past. While the kids of the 90s were terrified. Scary stories Covers, today’s young people can be more closed. In fact, the 2011 re-release of the books featured much less disturbing art (although fan backlash eventually led to the restoration of the original images).
What do scary stories do for children?
There’s nothing wrong with being a little concerned about children’s mental health and ability to sleep at night. After all, there’s always been a fine line between entertaining horror and painful memory. After Brallier saw Jaws As a child, he recalls, “the ocean and the lake and the swimming pool were ruined for me for 15 years.” And as a writer, he said, “you really don’t want to spoil anybody.”
Some adult attempts to scare children just feel sad in retrospect. I had a neighbor growing up who would answer the door on Halloween wearing a very scary werewolf mask with glowing red eyes. I don’t remember it with any fondness, and I think it’s okay that such costumes for adults are less common today during trick-or-treating.
Meanwhile, Kit’s Kathryn Geiser-Morton recalls a complicated parenting stunt from her youth, complete with a graveyard, a chainsaw and a disembodied voice coming from under fallen leaves. “It was an exhilarating moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of security,” writes Jeser Morton, who worries that children today are “losing the sense of a thin veil between worlds that words It’s hard to articulate but clearly bound up in memories.”
Meanwhile, for Darnell, horror stories are about learning to live in this world with all its horrors. “When I read a horror story, I look at how the main character strategizes,” she said.
Fear “makes you use the resources around you to solve the problem,” Durnell said. “I think it’s a skill that kids need.”
I don’t want my kids to be psychologically scarred by the books they read – after all, the realities of a warming planet and widespread democratic retreat are scary enough. What I want them to get from horror stories is a sense of a universe full of mystery, the unknown lurking behind us all the time, its cool breath on the back of our necks.
Or maybe that’s what I get from horror stories. Today’s young readers will have their own relationships with fear and their own ways of finding out what they want to feel.
Even in this post-Goosebumps era, Hirsch says she still encounters readers who like to be scared. “It’ll be this kid who comes in just like, in the cutest outfit, and in great style, and is like, ‘What’s your scary book?'” she said. “Some people are just kind of into them.”
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Next Tuesday, as you may know, is Election Day in America. Have you ever taken children with you to vote in your life? If so, what did they think of the experience? Also, if you are a first-time youth voter this year, please write in and let me know how it felt! You can contact anna.north@vox.com