My Son Loves Scary Stuff Even as It Terrifies Him — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

I’ve never played Five Nights at Freddy’s because it is a video game and, as we have already established, I am way too busy slam-dunking basketballs and doing wicked skateboard tricks to waste my time with that juvenile nonsense.

But I was, if anything, excessively aware of the video game and the phenomenon it inspired all the same. That’s partially because Five Nights at Freddy’s is such a lucrative IP that you can make quite possibly a billion dollars with a low-budget feature film adaptation that’s not even good enough, let alone good.

But it’s also because my ferociously creative nine year old son Declan is a spooky kid. He lives for Halloween. So he is obsessed with scary stuff even though he finds it far too terrifying to actually experience himself.

He’s not alone in that respect. That’s the kooky paradox of horror as a genre; kids have an innate fondness for the sinister and the macabre even though it’s not appropriate for them.

Declan has never played Five Nights at Freddy’s but he likes the aesthetic. He likes the look. As someone who has spent ample time at Chuck E. Cheese, he can appreciate the subversion of transforming a family fun zone into a realm of poor evil.

Declan loves Chuck E. Cheese but he also loves Chucky, the iconic killer doll who has murdered so, so, so many people over the course of his thirty five years in the business. Thirty-five years! That’s a long time.

So while every single Child’s Play movie and its terrific television show is off limits for Declan until he’s a lot older he can enjoy the iconography to his heart’s content. Our adorable little dog Champion even has a Chucky costume that is possibly the single cutest thing in existence.

Declan has a matching Chucky costume, complete with a mask even though he has told us many, many times that he is afraid of things that are too scary and intense. There is a very distinct line he will not cross when it comes to scariness and adult content.

Declan loves stuff. Oh sweet blessed lord does he ever love stuff! He loves movies and music and books and music but he also enjoys material objects and the world of kid-friendly horror is conveniently full of stuff that parents can buy for their children. Declan has many dolls and figurines and Funko pops and stuffies and other detritus.

Declan is into way more than the Child’s Play franchise and Five Nights at Freddy’s. He’s also into It and Pennywise even though that stuff is too scary and intense, even for me.

My son is not alone in being obsessed with horror and its preeminent icons even though he is too young to actually experience it.

When I was a kid I was fascinated by Freddy Krueger and Tales From the Crypt. So were other children. That’s why the hard R-rated HBO hit spawned a pair of kiddie spin-offs in Tales From the Crypt-Keeper and Secrets of the Cryptkeeper's Haunted House as well as all manner of merch.

Kenner even made a line of action figures around Alien and put out a commercial with small children acting out the hyper-violent action of the film, complete with a talking xenomorph. I don’t recall the aliens in that film being particularly chatty but I’m misremembering it.

For now Declan is satisfied with kiddie horror like Tales from the Crypt-Keeper and Goosebumps and that’s okay. We’re taking it slow because we have a lot of time and nobody should have to grow up too quickly. I know that all too well.

So he continues loving the look and vibe and icons and iconography of the spooky stuff, particularly the costumes, even as he doesn’t yet have a stomach for actually watching horror films. When he puts on a costume of Pennywise or Chucky or Slappy from Goosebumps he gets to recreate the characters in his own image and decide for himself who they are and how they behave.

There’s something empowering in that. We’ve got plenty of time left before we traumatize him with The Shining, The Exorcist and other irresistible but wildly inappropriate fright fables and terror tales for adults but not for children.

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