2000s childhood nostalgia aesthetic movie#

Also! There’s a talking black cat! What more could you want? Halloweentown Quartet: Halloweentown (1998), Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge (2001), Halloweentown High (2004), Return to Halloweentown (2006) But Max’s evolution from Too-Cool-For-School to someone fiercely protective of his little sister is also sweet. Seeing their wacky interactions with modern day (well, 1990s) life is hilarious. Bette Milder, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker absolutely commit to the bit as three out-of-time witches bent on feasting on children in order to preserve their immortality. He reluctantly agrees to bring his little sister trick-or-treating, and then, in order to impress a popular pretty girl, he accidentally summons the Sanderson Sisters, three child-eating witches. Apparently 1993 was the year in the spoopy canon! Hocus Pocus follows Max, an edgy teenager, freshly moved to Salem, Massachusetts from California, who thinks he’s too cool for Halloween.

2000s childhood nostalgia aesthetic movie#

… and this is the other movie you probably think of when you think of a spoopy movie. There’s silly debate about whether it’s a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie, but considering by the end, Pumpkin King Jack Skellington realizes that he does love Halloween and wants to embrace it fully, I firmly believe it’s a perfect Halloween movie. Directed by Henry Selick - who would go on to direct James and the Giant Peach, Coraline (on this list), and Wendell & Wild (an honorary member of this list) - Nightmare Before Christmas was a beacon to budding counter-culture youths everywhere, misfits drawn to the dark aesthetic and who perhaps identified with wallflower outcast Sally or restless Jack Skellington. And with its infectious music, enduring characters, and distinct visual style, it’s very easy to see why.

The stop-motion flick has been a hallmark of Halloween ever since the movie came out 30 years ago. When you think of spoopy movies - movies that embrace dark Halloween aesthetics without ever being too scary for children - you probably think of The Nightmare Before Christmas. This list is far from comprehensive, but in the spooky spirit of Halloween, here are 13 quintessential spoopy movies that define this particular subgenre.

And many of them end with said kids finding a community of their own, be it through other weirdos, supernatural beings, or realizing their own worth. Many of them also follow misfits - specifically outcast kids who struggle to find a place where they belong. They’re a cartoonishly giant skeleton instead of a rotting corpse, one with a smile and a quippy joke instead of an insatiable hunger for flesh.īeyond celebrating the off-kilter Halloween aesthetic and presenting scary stories that kids can also enjoy, spoopy movies serve another vital purpose. Spoopy movies embrace macabre aesthetics, without being too graphic, and tell scary stories, without being too traumatizing. The term captures the nostalgia-tinged Halloween of childhood, filled with trick-or-treating, buckets of candy, and movies that tickled that holiday itch (but were not traumatically scary).

Eventually, the term became associated with Halloween, specifically the part of Halloween that indulges the fun and spooky, without ever being too scary. Instead of the word “spooky,” skeleton bones spelled out “spoopy.” The goof blew up, with other users sharing their own spotted misspelled Halloween phrases. Spoopy originated from a (now-defunct) Tumblr post from 2011, which aggregated an even older Flickr photo of a misspelled Halloween sign. But as much as we like being scared, there’s another staple of the Halloween movie canon to consider: the Spoopy Movie. With Halloween just around the corner, many are on the hunt for the perfect horror movie to usher in the spooky season.