When I was a kid, I was interested in horror, but there wasn't a whole lot of scary content aimed at my age group. Instead there were more books and short stories than anything- but because of the rise in internet hosted content, as well as the fact that TV was becoming less relevant and books weren’t holding my attention anymore, I looked to online content to get my scares. As a result, I came across media I regret having seen at that age. I’d say that around the ages of 9-12, with the emergence of puberty and preparations for entering into high school and therefore adulthood, a lot of people at that age want to be taken a lot more seriously and diverge from shows that feel like they talk down to kids. Especially if a morbid curiosity has grown in someone- in my experience, you would be expected to see how far you could push your limit for scarier content. It was easier to find certain content and dare people to watch it on a webspace that was a lot less regulated.
As such, I aim to create a teaser for a show that would sufficiently provide tweens with scares that don’t feel too fantastical or dumbed down, reigning back just enough to prevent traumatising a whole age group.
I believe the inclusion of one or multiple horror hosts could provide a safe ease into the content and remind the children watching that it was just a story upon the return to the hosts at the end of the program. I also believe including elements of humour or commentary from the host(s) would help ease tension, just as Dahl stressed in his comment in Tales of the Unexpected before presenting William and Mary:
"Nastiness and horror must be handled with great circumspection, because if left on their own, they will alwyas taste bitter in the end. But if humour is added to the mixture, then the tension is relieved by laughter, and the bitterness is vanished."
THE EVOLUTION OF HORROR IN MY CHILDHOOD
Outside of kids media, low-budget horror was starting to make a comeback in the 2000s, with an emphasis on gorey visuals and shocking content, kicked off by movies such as Saw. While I wouldn’t dare watch those kinds of movies at such a young age, via word of mouth and with access to sites like Wikipedia and IMDB, I could read plot synopses and scare myself with the mere thought of what I was reading. The largely unregulated internet at that time also birthed many shock sites and methods of scaring any clueless kid surfing the web. (Also, sometimes your brother decides he's going to show you the scary maze game when you’re only 3 years old)
From the ages of around 9-12 chain letters were also still pretty common, I could still open up my email and find some “curse” that had been sent directly to me and was definitely not a retelling of an urban legend from the 80s. It’s just like a lot of the media I watched as a much younger kid, just rehashes of older properties. But there's a reason we’re drawn to the horror genre time and time again, and I think it’s the idea that we love to scare ourselves. We love to contain the dangers of the world into an imaginary world that can’t really touch us. I think even though a child may have more trouble discerning what’s real or possible and what’s not, it feels much safer and entertaining to approach scary ideas from a storytelling angle.
