Defanged Horrors

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"It's not too scary, I think it's just scary enough."

—Roger Ebert on Harry Potter's suitability for kids

A good scare in a controlled environment can be a lot of fun. Horror movies and roller coasters make their money based on this truth. Well, kids like to be scared as well, and books and movies are produced to do just that.

Defanged Horror is a genre of horror created with kids in mind. However, it has to tread a fine line: being genuinely frightening to children without causing their parents any undue concern. So the standard scares of adult horror are not an option here.

Instead Defanged Horror will rely on turning the children's imaginations against them. The monster will be vaguely described. The consequences of venturing into a forbidden area will only be hinted at. Victims of the threat will simply disappear rather than having a Kid Hero stumble across their mutilated corpses.

This is by no means a put-down of the genre. Hardcore stuff like Se7en or Silent Hill is not really suitable for giving ten-year-olds a good Halloween scare. This is simply the media version of the campfire or sleepover ghost story.

On occasion, Defanged Horrors can be more scary than the explicit kind. This happens when what the average imagination can come up with is scarier than what the average Slasher Film will come up with. (Of course, sometimes you can scare kids without even trying.)

Strangely, it is often the adults that they are toning it down for, not the kids. As the above paragraph mentions, kids will probably find Defanged Horrors (done well) and normal horror movies equally scary. It's just the parents that'll complain if their children watch a movie with blood in it, meaning less money.

Not to be confused with The Taming of the Grue. See also Nothing Is Scarier, where the menace isn't visible but is all the scarier for that.

Examples of Defanged Horrors include:

Anime and Manga

• Pokémon uses this sometimes, such as in episodes featuring Ghost Pokemon.
• Mon Colle Knights has one episode where the Count Collection gets possessed by a vampire before seizing Professor Hiragi hostage. The Knights must fight their way through a castle filled with zombies, suits of armor, Frankenstein monsters, and more. Saban switched this episode around with a much earlier one, which is understandable (i.e. to tie in with Halloween, which isn't celebrated in Japan).
• Keroro Gunsou. A yukata-clad ghost lives in the Hinata family's basement, Fuyuki is a big fan of the occult, and episodes of the manga and anime center around spooky story contests among the main characters and their friends.
• Spirited Away takes place entirely in a world full of spirits who dislike humans. Both of Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs after eating some of the food there. And that's just the beginning of it all.

Disney

• Epic Mickey.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Henry Selick.
• The Tower of Terror film, based on theme park ride.
• The Watcher in the Woods film. No real gore, the fear is in what we don't see.
• The Haunted Mansion (feat. Eddie Murphy) had a plethora of potentially traumatizing elements (especially considering its rating being PG yet involving suicide and melting faces).
• The Haunted Mansion at Disney Theme Parks.

Literature

• Coraline, by Neil Gaiman, and the film adaptation also by Henry Selick.
  • According to Gaiman, at least, adults find it much scarier than children do, because children tend not to pick up on the implied Adult Fears.
• Goosebumps.
  • Taken quite literally with the story Vampire Breath: one of the elder vampires wore fanged dentures because he had no teeth.
• The humourously-titled Deadtime Stories
• The earlier Harry Potter books
• Oh, Deltora Quest... Let us count the ways:
  • The slow despair of living under a tyrant for seventeen years with no hope of salvation whatsoever, and the bitterness that comes with it.
    • The very real danger of choosing a side in a war of tyrant vs. La Résistance.
  • Body Horror galore - the Shadowland prisoners, Fardeep and his "pets", multiple counts of dismemberment at the hands of the Granuous, public branding and execution, not to mention the Ols' true form...
  • And, of course, the many psychological horrors - Discovering that everything you've ever been told about your world and your life has been a lie to keep you complacent. Being paralyzed and forced to wait for a horrific monster to eat you. Knowing your loved ones are being tortured for information on your whereabouts and being unable to help them, hiding enemy spies that could literally be anything from your best friend, to the squirrel that just ran past, to the chair you're sitting on. Living every waking moment in fear that someone else is going to die. Honestly, as the series goes on, it's difficult to remember that it was written for kids... particularly if you have a vivid imagination.
• The "De Griezelbus" series by the Dutch author Paul van loon are a perfect example of this. Almost every installment deals with a group of kids whom are forced to listen to the stories of the werewolf, and later vampire/undead writer P. Onnoval, with a climax at the end of each book. The stories are a combination of horror clichés like vampires, werewolves, etc. and a great deal of suspense, and most stories leave the end open, leaving you to wonder what happened.

Live Action TV

• The Goosebumps TV adaptation.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?
• Another literal example, but also a parody: the Monty Python's Flying Circus episode "You're No Fun Anymore" features various uses of the title phrase. One of these is a parody of Hammer Horror films, with Count Dracula (played by Graham Chapman) looming menacingly over a sleeping woman. He goes in for a bite...and his fangs fall out. The woman wakes up, looks at him, and says, "You're no fun anymore."
• Space (the Canadian equivalent of the Sci-fi channel) used to have short segments they'd play between shows to fill up their Canadian content requirements. One of the segments was a Blair Witch style 'recovered footage' short story, where we'd watch regular home movies that invariably took a turn for the strange. These where all done without explicitly showing anything evil, for instance the family who are driving along only to be knocked out and awaken in a vast, empty, rock-strewn wasteland. The second was far more scary, and was the tale of a crypt in the middle of a lost-graveyard containing something. We aren't shown what it is, as our camera man refuses to go down. But needless to say, whatever it is, it starts haunting him, and that book of Eldritch lore his friend recovered before 'disappearing' isn't helping matters.
• Doctor Who manages to put even adults under the bed shivering, often without a single drop of blood ever seen, and sometimes with a body count of zero.
  • The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances two-parter takes a fairly traditional zombie movie plot and alters it so there's no blood and no deaths. And it's possibly the creepiest bit of programming ever to be aired on television.
  • Blink gives it a run for the money; it's terrifying, considering there are almost no special effects and only two character deaths, both of which are peaceful, non-violent, and off-screen.
• The Haunting Hour the Series
• Wishbone's adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities made the guillotine a menacing specter using only cabbages.
• House of Anubis

Video Games

• Banjo-Kazooie features a witch who wants to steal Tooty's beauty as the main antagonist. Her lair, filled with things like cobwebs, cauldrons, and goblins, comprises the main section of the game. This trope is especially in play in Mad Monster Mansion.
• Snowboard Kids 2 features a course called Haunted House.
• Super Mario: The entire series has places with ghosts (especially spherical ones called Boos). Most of these are in haunted houses, but there are also places such as a haunted forest, a sewer system, and at least two sunken ships. Bowser is also known to reside in a gothic castle at the end of most games. Luigi's Mansion revolves around this trope from beginning to end.
  • According to Chuggaaconroy, this is the reason a hunter ghost was cut from Luigi's Mansion; he would have been the only {explicitly} homicidal ghost and was deemed too scary.
• In EarthBound, Giygas was nothing short of terrifying, and for good reason.
• Pokémon: Certain Pokedex entries in the series (especially about Ghost Pokemon) are this trope. For example, Gengar likes to imitate people's shadows under a full moon, and then laugh at their fright, Shuppet was a doll who seeks revenge on the child who disowned it, Dusclops traps anyone who looks into its eye into a void, and so on. Of course, none of this actually happens in-game.
• Sonic Heroes: The Hang Castle and Mystic Mansion zones.

Web original

• Bionicle web serials. Especially Tuyet's death

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender has lots of very well done instances of kiddy horror.
  • The poster boy for Defanged Horrors would certainly be Koh the Facestealer, a massive centipede demon that steals faces. The faceless monkey in front of his lair is a genuine scare, but it's his voice and his words, which are genuinely spine chilling.
  • The keeper of the library in the desert is just a very large owl, that's actually very polite and friendly. But it's clearly not a mere mortal creature and it's made very clear that one should not abuse its trust. And when it eventually gets angry, things turn really scary.
  • The Blood Red Moon during the season 1 finale.
  • Even though it's clearly on the side of the good guys, the Ocean Spirit single handedly (with Aang as a medium) destroying the entire Fire Nation Fleet and its troops, is really a terrible sight to behold. The fact that he's terribly pissed after the Moon Spirit is killed by Zhao helps a lot to drive the hammer home.
  • And let's not forget that this is a kids' show set in the middle of a century long war. There's no blood or corpses on screen the entire time, but it's explicitly mentioned many times how relatives died in battle or where executed by soldiers, and it's shown how soldiers abuse helpless farmers or how benders are put to forced labor in concentration camps. There's even a full scale genocide, and open discussions about assassinating the Big Bad. If there's a way to expose eight years old responsibly to these topics, Avatar probably comes closer to it than anything else.
  • The scene with Hama when she talks about bloodbending with such pride and pleasure also counts.
  • The fate of, uh, Zuko's face in "The Storm" is a good use of three different kinds of discretion shot to get the point across while still being (sort of) family-friendly. As the Discretion Shot summary states, things can be a lot more horrifying to the fertile imagination if you don't show it.
  • The creepy smile of Jo Dee.
• AAAHH!!! Real Monsters is a series about, well, monsters that scare humans. All of their "scare scenes" are very effective in showing how the monsters scare humans without scaring the audience in the process, mostly through giving said monsters individual personalities and motives (they're only doing it to complete school).
  • And stay alive.
• Teen Titans did this on occasion, such as when Raven pulled Dr. Light into some sort of dark vortex within her cloak, and when he came out he was curled up in the fetal position muttering, "S-so cold. Make it stop. Please make it stop."
  • The episode "Haunted" also ranks up there as one of the creepiest pieces of Western Animation targeted towards kids. They took Slade, a villain who's already creepy in his own right, and left the audience constantly unsure whether he was Back from the Dead and torturing Robin, or whether Robin had gone insane and was mutilating himself. The truth is somewhere in between.
• While not borderline scary (at least for the older folks), Danny entering the Ghost Zone for the first time in Danny Phantom was deliberately given an atmospheric, spooky, and naturally ghoulish feel to it; they were really emphasizing just how vastly different this world is compared to Earth. There's always something disturbing when numerous skeletons pop out of graves and tries to grab onto you.
  • On the other hand, Spectra and Dark Danny aren't "defanged" in the least.
• This trope is pretty much the whole point of Scooby Doo.
  • Especialy Zombie Island and Witch's Ghost.
• The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog, which often turned the Surreal Horror up a bit too much, and we all learned the hard way that you can't unsee this stuff...
• Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
• Some episodes of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic including Stare Master and Lesson Zero go into this territory.

Real Life

• In Japan, a popular children's game is Kimodameshi, where kids have to accomplish some minor task in a creepy yet safe environment. Adult guardians will be lurking about to make things interesting for the participating children. (Essentially a less malign version of the American haunted-house tradition; there are no maniacs with chainsaws in a kimodameshi, but there are mysterious lights and noises, and ghosts wearing white shirts spattered with red ink. Their imagination does the rest.)