This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
I remember the first time I encountered Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It was second grade, and another kid had smuggled a copy of the Alvin Schwartz horror collection out to the playground during recess. We gathered around, repulsed yet compelled by the ghoulish illustrations, unaware that what we read next would form the script of our nightmares for the next 30 years.
Scary Stories, first released in 1981 but still ubiquitous at sleepovers and back-of-the-bus scare sessions throughout the ’90s, is famous among millennials for inducing utter terror.
The one that haunts me to this day is “The Dead Hand,” about a devil-may-care young lad who goes walking in a swamp at night, only to be attacked by a disembodied arm that yanks the boy’s own hand off, leaving nothing but a bloody stump. The story, with its accompanying illustration of a howling, gap-toothed corpse head rising from a bog, kept me awake for at least a week. I still remember huddling in my bed with eyes peeled, absolutely certain that an oozing hand was about to float through my bedroom door.
As Halloween approached this year, I started wondering if Scary Stories was still popular, or if my children would have their own equivalent — a horror tale so powerful it could leave a mark on a generation’s subconscious. So I reached out to booksellers, librarians, and my older kid’s favorite horror author to find out what’s scaring kids these days and what role, if any, spooky stories play in their lives.
I thought the children of Gen Alpha, obsessed with the frenetic doomsday fantasy Skibidi Toilet, might be too jaded to be scared. In fact, experts told me the opposite — that popular titles today, like Michael Dahl’s Really Scary Stories or the Five Nights at Freddy’s series — are a little tamer than the ones I read as a kid.
“We had serious, gripping fear that kept you up at night,” Jean Darnell, the director of library science for the Philadelphia School District and a lifelong horror reader, told me. “The psychological fear was a little bit more in-depth.”
There’s something to be said for a lighter touch in children’s horror. As much as I now consider Scary Stories part of my education as a writer and horror fan, I don’t actually want my kids to lie awake night after night, terrified of being attacked by a disembodied limb.
But the differences between my kids’ horror landscape and my own have me thinking about what kids really get out of scary stories, and the value of such tales in a legitimately scary world.
The taming of scary stories
I didn’t know it at the time, but I came of age during a children’s horror boom. Scary Stories, which eventually grew to three volumes, kicked off the trend, with authors Christopher Pike and R.L. Stine soon following suit, according to Mental Floss. The latter wrote the iconic Goosebumps series, which, with its accompanying mid-’90s TV series, still looms large in the imagination of many millennials.
While some were silly or bizarre, many were legitimately terrifying. The one that sticks in my mind is Welcome to Camp Nightmare, in which a boy arrives at sleepaway camp only to be menaced and gaslit by weird counselors and ultimately pressured to hunt his fellow campers with a tranquilizer gun.
Though wildly popular, the Goosebumps books became a victim of their own success, with a saturated market and declining sales. By the 2000s, horror had taken a back seat to fantasy, most notably the Harry Potter series.
But like a zombie, the genre has risen from the grave in recent years, even as book sales for elementary- and middle-schoolers struggle overall. Anna Hersh, co-owner of Wild Rumpus Bookstore, a children’s bookshop in Minneapolis, told me that horror books are selling well, enough to keep the store’s dedicated “Spooky Shed” stocked year-round. Popular titles include Tales From Cabin 23, an anthology series with each installment written by a different bestselling author, and Monsterious, whose monster-of-the-week vibe makes it the most obvious contemporary successor to Goosebumps, Hersh said. These are aimed at 8- to 12-year-olds, but younger readers enjoy the Creepy Tales picture books, about everyday objects and foodstuffs (underwear, carrots) that come alive and stalk Jasper, an unsuspecting rabbit.
Also popular, according to Hersh, is Gustavo the Shy Ghost, a 2020 bestseller (and a favorite in my house) about a sweet ghost who struggles to connect with his fellow paranormal beings. Gustavo and its sequels are more heartwarming than scary, but they take place in a world in which werewolves, calavera-style skeletons, and invisible girls with floating eyeglasses are simply the norm.
As for the classics of my youth, Wild Rumpus still stocks some Goosebumps titles, but they’re mostly graphic novel adaptations released in the 2010s. Some of the original Goosebumps plots feel dated today — Gen Alpha readers might wonder why some of the terrified protagonists didn’t just “use their cellphone and call their mom,” Hersh said. Today’s spooky stories are more likely to include heroes doing online research into the monsters and ghouls plaguing them, or they take place in fantasy worlds where such technology doesn’t exist, Hersh said.
Scary stories are also just less scary than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, said Darnell, the library science director, who added that the horror simply “feels watered down.” Grown-ups are more concerned about age-appropriate subject matter than they once were, and school organizations and psychologists would be up in arms if kids’ authors today delved too deep into psychological horror, Darnell said.
Young readers today are also “sort of more conservative in many ways” than kids in decades past, said Max Brallier, author (under the pen name Jack Chabert) of the Eerie Elementary books and several other spooky series. While ’90s kids were drawn in by the frightening Scary Stories covers, today’s young people might be more put off. In fact, a 2011 re-release of the books featured much less disturbing art (although fan backlash eventually led to a restoration of the original images).
What spooky tales do for kids
There’s nothing wrong with a little concern over children’s mental health and ability to sleep at night. After all, there’s always been a fine line between a fun scare and a traumatic memory. After Brallier saw Jaws as a child, he recalls, “The ocean and the lake and the swimming pool were ruined for me for, like, 15 years.” And as an author, he said, “You don’t want to really screw someone up.”
Some adult efforts to scare children do just feel sadistic in retrospect. I had a neighbor growing up who used to answer the door on Halloween wearing a very scary werewolf mask with glowing red eyes. I do not remember this with any fondness, and I think it’s fine that such costumes for adults seem less common during trick-or-treating today.
At the same time, Kathryn Jezer-Morton of the Cut recalls a complex parental stunt from her youth, complete with a cemetery, a chainsaw, and a disembodied voice coming from beneath fallen leaves. “It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety,” Jezer-Morton writes, and she worries that kids today are missing “the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories.”
For Darnell, meanwhile, scary stories are about learning to live in this world, with all its horrors. “When I’m reading a scary story, I’m looking at how that main character strategizes,” she said.
Fear “forces you to problem-solve with the resources around you,” Darnell said. “I think that’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 backsliding are scary enough. What I want them to get from scary stories is a sense of a universe charged with mystery, the unknown always sneaking up behind us, its cold breath raising goosebumps on the backs of our necks.
Or maybe that’s just what I got from scary stories. Today’s young readers will have their own relationships to horror and their own ways of seeking out what they want to feel.
Even in this post-Goosebumps era, Hersh says she still encounters readers who love to be scared. “It’ll be this kid who comes in who’s just like, in the cutest little outfit, and so well-mannered, and is like, ‘What is your scariest book?’” she said. “Some people just kind of have it in them.”
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Next Tuesday, as you, um, may be aware, is Election Day in the US. Have you ever taken the kids in your life to vote with you? If so, what did they think of the experience? Also, if you’re a young person voting for the first time this year, please write in and tell me how it felt! You can get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.
