In his introduction to Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence’s book Scarred for Life, writer Johnny Mains says ‘the seventies were a very twisted time’.  In addition to public information films that terrified infant-school children, the decade saw an explosion of horror within pre-teen popular culture. From Dracula-ice lollies and horror crisps, through board games and card games, children’s books, model and make-up kits, records, comics and magazines, the decade saw the emergence of an industry peddling horror to enthusiastic British children. Even the Weebles’ house was haunted. However this was before home video and those children had little or no access to watching horror films. Age restrictions in cinemas were enforced, and horror movies were shown late at night on TV in houses where there was often only a single set controlled by adults. It would thus be wrong to assume that the majority of UK children enjoying a Dracula lolly had seen a Dracula film, or that those picking leg bones out of the shark’s mouth in Ideal’s 1975 Game of Jaws had seen Robert Shaw chomped on the big screen. This paper will examine the range of products through which children could encounter monsters in the 1970s and offer some preliminary hypotheses and approaches around the way in which such encounters impacted upon and shaped a generation’s engagement with the idea of the monstrous.  

Cartoons were not always perceived to be the terrain of children’s programming. In the early days of cinema, cartoons were influenced by vaudeville performances and newspaper comic strips, while being used as forms of political satire and propaganda. In the studio era, they would be screened alongside newsreels, documentaries, and B-movies, with most studios possessing their own animation wing. The tropes of horror often appeared in animation whether in the form of surreal experimentation or comic parody.  It was in part the success of Disney Studios that fuelled the association with children and this association became more pronounced with the rise of the Saturday Morning Cartoon slot on American and Canadian TV channels from the 1960s-1990s.  The aim of this paper will be to examine how the Saturday Morning Cartoon negotiated debates about screen violence while also introducing kids to the visual and aural language of horror. The paper will illustrate how shows such as Scooby Doo, Where Are You? and Beetlejuice engaged kids with classic gothic monsters, abject body horror, and surreal imagination, reimagined through the form and format of animation. Looking at a range of examples, the paper will illustrate how the language of animation, and the medium’s focus on materiality and metamorphosis, creates a secure space to experience horror without sacrificing the genre’s transgressive potential.  

Hasbro’s My Little Pony range is a long running children’s franchise, incorporating television, cinema, comics and digital games, but primarily pony-themed toys and accessories. Reflecting children’s culture’s traditional affinity with romantic fantasy, folk tales and fairy stories, media associated with the MLP range frequently draws upon Gothic imagery, themes and narrative structures. Early animated specials contain stories of imprisonment, enslavement and monstrous transformation, where Gothic-coded antagonists intrude upon the bucolic idyl of Ponyland. In staging confrontations between a bright pastel pony world, and a dark contaminating villainy, these cartoons employ Gothic tropes to promote the brand’s signature aesthetic, personified in an iconic rainbow weapon wielded by the show’s human protagonist. While such Gothic elements feature inconsistently in subsequent MLP generations, the 2010 reboot ‘Friendship is Magic’ often employs Gothic characters, tropes and iconography. Villains include a vengeful princess exiled to the moon, a changeling queen infiltrating a royal marriage, and corrupted versions of familiar characters turned villainous by malignant forces. Such aspects, while often aligned with specific toy range releases, reflect the multi-generational appeal of the Gothic, and the increasingly broad demographic addressed by this long running franchise.