Jack-O (1995) and Kids Horror from my Childhood

When I was growing up, I was introduced to horror at a young age. Aren’t we all? My dad was never a horror guy, but my mom was interested in horror. Add to that a childhood curiosity in things that parents don’t want kids watching and you have a formula for getting into things that might usually be a tad bit on the spooky side.

I remember sleeping over at my cousin’s house and regularly watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show when we woke up in the morning. I don’t know why. It was just a routine we had whenever I slept over as a child. Wake up before the parents of the house and watch this horror musical. Another thing I remember is sneaking over to the neighbour’s house to watch some horror stuff with the neighbour kids. We would see things like Bride of Chucky or The St. Francisville Experiment while the parents were off doing other things that didn’t involve us kids.

All of that said, I had already been introduced to horror in other ways. I wasn’t discovering horror by sneaking off to watch it when there were no parents around. There was a lot of horror aimed at children during the 90s. It was a little lighter in tone (because it was aimed at children), but it still managed to tell spooky stories that could get children interested in the genre. There were books. There were movies. And there were a whole bunch of television shows.

The biggest of those 90s horror stories geared toward children was Goosebumps. The franchise began as a series of books written by R.L. Stine. Everyone had them. By everyone, I mean everyone interested in spooky stories in any way whatsoever. I had a bunch of them. I still do. Stay Out of the Basement, Night of the Living Dummy, The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena, Night of the Living Dummy II… All the good ones. I read them a lot as a kid, slowly amassing a collection of most, if not all, of them.

The love of Goosebumps continued as the series was adapted for television. It was one of those shows where I can still remember bits and pieces of it. I clearly remember the theme song. It’s running through my head on repeat right now. I remember the green slime through the opening credits. I remember Ryan Gosling showing up in one episode. The Goosebumps books and show became staples in the lives of many people around my age who grew to appreciate horror. We grew up with the franchise.

That popularity at the time, and the popularity that continued well after we became adults in the physical sense of the word (some of us, myself included, might not actually be adults in the mental sense), led to two Goosebumps movies being made in recent years. They paid homage to many of the classic tales while telling a story that was original to the movies. They continued a childhood horror tone that hasn’t really been around for some time. They brought my childhood of growing up in a horror-filled 1990s to the present day.

Another show from around that time, and one that had its own child actors who would become big stars, was Are You Afraid of the Dark?. Jay Baruchel showed up in a few episodes. Also featured, as regulars, were his Popular Mechanics for Kids co-stars Elisha Cuthbert and Vanessa Lengies. This one actually began the year I was born. Thanks to a revival in the late 1990s and repeats airing on YTV in Canada, I got to watch the show a whole bunch. I loved it. Goosebumps was the flashy horror show, where Are You Afraid of the Dark? was the spookier one.

Are You Afraid of the Dark? also got a recent reboot. I haven’t seen either season of the new revival series, so I can’t give any thoughts about it. I know it’s out there. I want to see it at some point. I also want to rewatch the old series because of my nostalgia. It’s a staple of my childhood life, and I can still remember seeing the finale to the 1990s revival when it aired as a television movie at the turn of the century. It was an event.

There were a few other shows I want to speed through before switching over to movies. Freaky Stories was a Canadian horror show for kids. It featured animated horror tales, usually based on urban legends and things of that sort. I don’t remember too much about the animated stories, themselves. I think one might have been about Area 51. What I remember most is the live-action bookends to the stories. There were two puppets that would introduce each of the stories. One was a maggot and one was a cockroach. They were in a diner. That’s what I remember. I watched that one a lot, too.

Then there was Tales from the Cryptkeeper, an animated version of Tales from the Crypt directed at children. The stories were the Tales from the Crypt style without the blood and gore. Because it was for children, you see. The voice actor for the Cryptkeeper returned to do the voice for the animated series, which made it easier to transition to the live-action show as you grew or matured. I don’t think I watched that one as much as the others, but I remember giving it a peep now and then.

Other kids shows on at the time that had some horror elements to them were Gargoyles, Eerie Indiana, animated adaptations of Beetlejuice and Ghostbusters, and Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, none of which I watched. I did watch some of Courage the Cowardly Dog, which was a crazy horror animated show. There was A Pup Names Scooby-Doo among all the Scooby-Doo reruns on TV. I did watch all of that. There was an Addams Family show at the end of the decade, and The Zack Files at the beginning of the next. I watched both of those. It was a big decade for a young me to get into horror-based stories through television.

Now onto movies. I was watching horror movies as a kid. I already said that. I saw Bride of Chucky when I was nine. I saw Scream when I was eight. I remember seeing the Tatum in the garage stuff when I was a kid. I saw The Blair Witch Project when I was ten. It’s not like adult horror was entirely foreign to me or anything. But there were some kids horror things out there as well. Or kids adjacent, might be a better term. The movies could get a little more extreme, at times.

One movie I remember getting me right in the horror feelings as a child was The Pagemaster. It was a hybrid between live action and animated. There was a live action bookend about a kid dealing with a life full of fear before seeking refuge from a thunderstorm in a library, then an animated main story as he was sucked into the world of books. He had to travel through a few different genres. He went through adventure. He went through fantasy. The final genre he went through was horror.

I watched The Pagemaster a lot as a kid. I can remember the paint running off the cathedral-like library ceiling. It was the child’s transition into the animated world, the location where most of the story would occur. I remember feeling spooked by that bit. Imagine going to the library to get out of the rain and being forced into living out some sort of animated trek through book genres. Imagine having to overcome your fear through the horror genre. You would have to directly face your fears in a world you didn’t know. It was a spooky tale.

Other movies like Jumanji, Casper, Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island, and The Nightmare Before Christmas incorporated horror elements as well. Then there were movies like Phantom Town, which I covered in 2020, which felt like Goosebumps episodes extended into feature length. There were two-part Goosebumps episodes released on home video, basically as feature length stories. And then there was Jurassic Park, a movie that kids wanted to see because there were dinosaurs. What they got was a family movie mixed with horror as the dinosaurs set out to hunt people. I still remember seeing the opening scene on VHS when I was five, being afraid of the unseen dinosaur in the box, and wanting to turn it off.

Sometimes a story that felt like it could be aimed at children had elements that were definitely not child-friendly. One such movie was 1995’s Jack-O. In 1915, a curse was placed on a family. They were hunted by a demonic pumpkin-headed demon. One of the family members stopped it. For eighty years, at least. In 1995, the demon rose and went after Sean Kelly (Ryan Latshaw), a descendent of the cursed family. It was up to Sean to defeat the demon before the demon got to his family.

Jack-O was very much a story that could have been told in an episode of Goosebumps or Tales from the Cryptkeeper. It had the classic elements of a kid-friendly story. There was the family curse. There was a demonic monster that wasn’t too spooky to look at. It was a scarecrow-looking guy with a jack-o-lantern head. There was a child in the lead role, protecting his family from the danger of the monster. With a few little tweaks, the story could have been a perfect fit for Goosebumps, with the flashy bits that would have set it apart from Are You Afraid of the Dark? episodes.

There were a couple things that weren’t quite kid-friendly, though. The first was the violence that was shown on screen. Most of the kids horror of the time didn’t feature a whole lot of blood. Jack-O featured an amount that wasn’t excessive, but was still more than kids horror would feature. The notable example was when one character was stabbed in the stomach, showing blood, and then began to cough up blood. His wife was soon electrocuted until she burned to a crisp. That was an amount of violence not typical for kids stuff.

The other thing was the humour of Jack-O. There was a satirical representation of a right-wing talk show host that showed up throughout the movie. He said things about how people should respect true Americans and true Americans only, people loyal to the flag. That sort of stuff, with slightly more nuance than I’m giving it here. There was also some sexual humour between Sean’s dad, David (Gary Doles), and his babysitter, Carolyn (Linnea Quigley). It probably wasn’t something that kids would pay too much attention to. It was in there, though, making the movie much more adult than you would think from the story.

Jack-O was a 1990s kids horror story trapped in the package of a 1990s adult-directed horror flick. It was a story that wouldn’t have felt out of place in a kid’s movie or television show that I watched when I was growing up. It was something that I could have watched when I was growing up, were it not for the violence and adult humour that was thrown on top of it. Though, I guess that wasn’t something that was out of bounds for me, so I probably could have watched it. Anyway, it was entertaining watching it now, when I’m 31 years old.

The 1990s were an interesting time to grow up. They helped to turn me into the horror fan I am today. Am I the biggest horror fan? No. Do I get thrills with the chills? Yeah I do. It was all thanks to watching things like The Pagemaster, Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Freaky Stories, and Courage the Cowardly Dog. They gave me the upbringing I needed to fully appreciate things like Halloween, Hereditary, and The Sacrament. It all started as a child, with that childhood horror of the 1990s.

Now that that’s done with, I can get to the notes:

• I mentioned Phantom Town (week 404) briefly in the post.
• John Carradine had a bit part in Jack-O. He also had roles in Monster in the Closet (week 55), The Ice Pirates (week 128), and Shock Waves (week 299).
• Cameron Mitchell showed up in Jack-O, after appearing in Terror in Beverly Hills (week 78) and The Swarm (week 253).
• Brinke Stevens was in Jack-O and The Summer of Massacre (week 26).
• Finally, Linnea Quigley made a quick Sunday “Bad” Movies turnaround. She was in Graduation Day (week 462) and Jack-O.
• Have you seen Jack-O? What did you think of it? Was there any kids horror that you grew up with? You can talk about it with me on Twitter or in the comments.
• Let me know if there are any movies that I should check out for future Sunday “Bad” Movies weeks. Get a hold of me on Twitter or drop the suggestion in the comments.
• Check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more Sunday “Bad” Movies fun.
• October is now over, which means we’re out of the horror month. I’ll be tackling a movie from another genre come next week. What movie is it? You’re probably asking that right now. Let me tell you. I’ll be checking out Material Girls, from 2006. If you want to see what I think of that, come back on Sunday for another post.