Editorials
The 5 Most Terrifying Kids Shows from Around the World
Imagination is a key component of a child’s development, and therefore a major focal point of children’s programming. You can count on shows and movies aimed toward kids to be colorful and creative, but they aren’t always heartwarming and happy. Sometimes they are downright terrifying. Growing up, you couldn’t have convinced me that The Garbage Pail Kids Movie wasn’t actually a horror movie in disguise; the live-action take on the characters was the stuff of nightmares.
Sometimes the grownups behind kids programming miss the mark entirely. For every warm, fuzzy character like the Muppets, there can be a character so creepy it’s enough to induce childhood trauma. These 5 kid shows from across the globe were so disturbing they’ll terrify even adults…
Terrahawks
The minds behind Thunderbirds brought this less serious puppet-filled sci-fi show about an organization whose mission is to defend the planet from alien invasion. For once it wasn’t the human protagonists that were terrifying, but the unnerving villains. The main villain, Zelda, was nightmare fuel on her own, but even she didn’t stand a chance compared to MOID. The Master of Infinite Disguise was an alien that looked like he might have been related to Skeletor. While that sounds cool, this puppet was anything but.
Peppermint Park
Leave it to YouTube to dredge up a buried direct-to-video children’s show from the late ‘80s. You know what they say, misery loves company. Now new generations can discover the terrifying part human part puppet characters that featured in this Sesame Street type educational series aimed at kids. Peppermint Park demonstrated why it’s a very tricky thing to feature human-like puppets. They’re creepy.
Tipi Tales
In case you thought all terrifying kids shows were a thing of decades past, I present you with this creepy Canadian kids show from 2003. Conceptually, it was a historical series about the First Nations families living in a cottage and focused on teaching family values and First Nations culture. The only problem is that the designs of these puppets were downright scary. Realistic features in cartoonish disproportion is not a good look if you want to not induce terror.
TV Fafao
This character first appeared on the Brazilian kids show Magic Balloon in the early ‘80s and was so popular that he became one of the biggest Brazilian icons of the decade, earning his own solo show and toy line. The character’s creator, Orival Pessini, drew inspiration from Steven Spielberg’s E.T., specifically how the character was fairly ugly but with a big heart. Clearly, he succeeded. Though, he also looks as though he might have inspired Good Guy doll fashion. Toward the end of the ‘80s an urban legend spread about Fafao’s plush toy, claiming that the doll had a knife hidden in its body. In a terrifying twist, a sharp, hard piece of plastic was confirmed to be inside as a placeholder spine. Not a knife, but still. Fafao is scary.
Donkey, Morso, and Mouru
This Finnish kids show ran from 1999-2001 and wouldn’t have made this list at all if not for one character: Morso. Based on a children’s book, the story tells of Donkey overcoming his fear of Morso with the help of his friend Mouru. It’s easy to see why Donkey was scared of Morso; the strung-out sheep puppet thing is bed-wettingly scary. It didn’t help that Morso had a tendency to pop up from behind fences or peer in windows like a creeper.
Some movies are just so beloved that you can experience them through cultural osmosis without ever sitting down to actually watch them. From loving parodies to meticulous recreations of iconic scenes, memorable filmmaking lives on even after the curtains close on the silver screen. And when it comes to horror, few films can compete with the massive impact that Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining had on popular culture as a whole.
Whether or not you think the flick is a good adaptation of Stephen King’s seminal novel, 1980’s The Shining slowly but surely grew into one of the most influential genre movies ever made, inspiring everything from surprisingly heartfelt sequels to classic episodes of The Simpsons. However, not all The Shining references are created equal, and today I’d like to shine a light on six unexpected homages to Kubrick’s iconic film.
In this list, we’ll be focusing on references and Easter eggs that either came out of the blue or came from creators that you wouldn’t expect to be fans of this classic ghost story. That being said, don’t forget to comment below with your own favorite references to the Torrance family and the Overlook Hotel if you think we missed a particularly memorable one.
With that out of the way, onto the list!
5. A Nightmare on FaceTime – South Park (2012)
Regardless of the brand’s iffy reputation among former employees, the death of Blockbuster Video was a serious blow to fans of physical media. Of course, some folks were more affected by this than others, and South Park’s Randy Marsh definitely took things a little too far in the twelfth episode of the show’s sixteenth season.
Titled A Nightmare on FaceTime, the main plot of this 2012 story is a surprisingly faithful recreation of The Shining where Randy purchases an empty Blockbuster store and begins to go mad once he realizes that his investment may not have been a very good idea due to the rise of streaming and the now-defunct RedBox storefronts.
4. The Overlook Hotel Level – Ready Player One (2018)
I was never really a fan of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, so I viewed Stephen Spielberg’s divisive adaptation of the novel as an improvement over the source material despite having its own narrative issues. In fact, I actually prefer how Spielberg changed the story by removing several references to his own work and replacing a lengthy Blade Runner detour with an over-the-top homage to The Shining.
A CGI-heavy recreation of the film’s most iconic moments that feels like a big-budget ghost train ride set within the Overlook Hotel, this intense sequence is more of a recreation of the freaky aesthetics of The Shining rather than its mind-bending narrative. However, it’s still fun to see Spielberg make a heartfelt tribute to a filmmaker that was once his close personal friend.
3. IKEA Singapore Halloween Ad (2014)
It makes sense that commercials don’t typically borrow from the horror genre, as it might be a bad idea to scare away potential customers, but some references are just too much fun to pass up.
That’s probably why the publicists behind this Ikea ad from Singapore were allowed to turn their commercial into a genuinely unsettling recreation of Danny’s tricycle scene from The Shining. After all, nobody cares if your store is haunted so long as it offers late-night shopping hours and a large selection of merchandise that you can become lost in forever and ever…
2. The End of ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’ – Community (2014)
Community is no stranger to recreating iconic movie moments within the show, and the series had previously tackled horror tropes in episodes like the fan-favorite Epidemiology. However, the most laugh-out-loud moment on this particular list comes from a brief gag towards the end of the season five episode ‘Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality’.
The majority of this episode has nothing to do with scary movies, but there’s a brief subplot involving supporting character Chang and a possible encounter with ghosts that leads him to question his own existence. This subplot culminates in the episode’s hilarious ending where the camera zooms in on a black-and-white photograph of Chang in period clothing at some kind of celebration, just like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining.
However, the picture’s subtitle eventually reveals that it’s merely a conveniently placed keepsake from the ‘Old Timey Photo Club’.
1. The Overlook Hedge Maze Sequence – Zootopia 2 (2025)
Disney movies are pretty far removed from both the gruesome horror of Stephen King and the heady filmmaking of Stanley Kubrick, so I don’t think anyone was expecting the climax of last year’s Zootopia sequel to take place in an animated version of the snowy hedge maze from The Shining.
In this unexpectedly intense sequence, friend-turned-villain Pawbert Lynxley (an unhinged lynx cat played by Andy Samberg) chases our protagonists through a creepy labyrinth in a loving recreation of Jack Nicholson’s icy demise outside the Overlook Hotel. The actual ending here might be a little more child-friendly than what’s being referenced, but it’s amazing that the filmmakers were able to push the horror elements as far as they did – especially since the scene doesn’t really have anything to do with the rest of the movie.
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