The 10 Best PG-13 Horror Movies

Horror movie fans are a unique breed. We will turn on Shudder and watch anything that happens to hit the screen. We’ll sit through a critically-panned, utterly reviled slog if it even has potential to include one good scare. We’ll watch Exorcist sequels.

But Halloween is for everyone, not just the weirdos. That means we need to make space for those who don’t have strong feelings about the best Texas Chainsaw prequel and are just getting started in the genre. That’s where PG-13 horror comes in. Fortunately, some of the greatest horror movies ever made are rated PG-13, 10 of which we’ll list here.

Now, to be clear, we’re just talking about movies that were actually rated PG-13 when they released, not retroactively given that rating. Which means that all of these movies came out after Red Dawn in 1984, the first PG-13 rated film. But even with that caveat in place, we’ve got plenty of great films for those looking to get a little deeper into horror.

The Gate (1987)

Just because they don’t go as hard as an R-rated movie, PG-13 horror films aren’t necessarily kid’s stuff. However, The Gate is a kid-centered horror movie, and an excellent one at that. Director Tibor Takács and screenwriter Michael Nankin came up with an irresistible premise, about a group of older kids and teens (one played by a young Stephen Dorff) who discover a doorway to Hell in the backyard.

As demons escape from the pit, the kids must mount a defense against the diabolical invaders. Not only does that involve some pretty remarkable special effects, including a great stop-motion animation sequence, but it also lets the kids be the heroes for once.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

In these days of Spirit Halloween saturation, scary clowns barely merit a raised eyebrow, let alone a scream. The combination of smiling faces and bloody teeth isn’t the same juxtaposition it was when Pennywise was new. Yet, the monsters of Killer Klowns from Outer Space still unsettle, in part because of the incredible designs by the Chiodo brothers—including director Stephen, who co-wrote the script with brother Charles, and producer Edward—and because the Klowns lean more to the sillier side.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space follows a basic alien invasion plot, complete with teenagers whose necking gets interrupted by the arrival of an extraterrestrial threat. In this case, the aliens are clowns who arrive in a big top-shaped space ship and capture their victims in cotton candy. The clowns do their worst, knocking off heads and devouring people with shadow puppets. But its the cheerful tone that proves most unnerving.

Tremors (1990)

Like Killer Klowns from Outer Space, the creature feature Tremors boasts some unbeatable creature effects. The gigantic sandworts who menace the desert town of Perfection Valley, Nevada—dubbed “Graboids”—look incredible to this day, and director Ron Underwood takes his time revealing them in full.

But the real appeal of Tremors is actually Perfection itself, or rather, the people in it. As down-on-their-luck handymen Val (Kevin Bacon) and Earl (Fred Ward) try to leave town for good, the arrival of the killer worms forces them back to take care of the neighbors. And we believe they would do it, too, as screenwriters S. S. Wilson and Brent Maddock create instantly memorable characters, all brought to life by character actors like Victor Wong and Michael Gross. We care about the citizens so much that we cheer for every minor victory they win over the graboids, and we mourn every loss they experience.

The Mummy (1999)

Even before waves of nostalgia elevated it to masterpiece status, 1999’s The Mummy was recognized as more of an Indiana Jones-style adventure than a horror movie. And with good reason, as Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell has all the swagger of vintage Harrison Ford, especially when paired with brassy librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz). Writer/director Stephen Sommers even sprinkles in plenty of comedy moments, most courtesy of Kevin J. O’Connor as slimy opportunist Beni.

But make no mistake, The Mummy is a horror movie and has many spine-chilling moments. Even if we discount gigantic set pieces in which the titular monster manifests in a sandstorm or sends scarabs to attack our heroes, the slow process by which Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) reforms, stealing body parts from the living, makes for some terrifying visuals.

The Sixth Sense (1999)

The Sixth Sense has come to suffer a similar fate as The Mummy, with its horror bonafides obscured by its strong dramatic core. M. Night Shyamalan is at his prestige best here, telling a genuinely compelling story of not just a boy who sees dead people, but also of psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis), whose regret won’t let him move on. Haley Joel Osment gives an all-timer kid performance as that boy, Cole Sear, especially in scenes with Toni Collette as his harried mother.

But don’t forget that Cole does see dead people, and those dead people are very scary. Shymalan perfectly paces the initial ghost scenes, signaling their arrival with dropping temperatures and lingering shadows. He even manages to work in a few extra scares toward the end, when Cole and Malcolm learn to live (so to speak) with their conditions.

The Ring (2002)

As much as we love the movies on this list, most of them do earn the qualifier “for a PG-13 movie.” They’re all good and they’re all scary… but scary for a PG-13 movie. That’s absolutely not the case with The Ring, Gore Verbinski’s adaptation of the Japanese manga and film Ringu. Yes, Verbinski’s version, written by Ehren Kruger, devotes a great deal of time to reporter Rachael (Naomi Watts) sleuthing around to find the secret to the video tape purported to be involved with the death of her niece. And the family dynamics between Ruth and her son Aidan (David Dorfman), as well as her friend Noah (Martin Henderson), gets plenty of attention.

But when The Ring gets scary, it gets really, really scary. The haunted video itself still manages to raise the hair on your neck, as does every photograph of a person with a distorted face. But the standouts remain a hard cut to the twisted faces of two teen victims and the centerpiece sequence, in which Samara (Daveigh Chase) finally crawls out of the television and into our nightmares.

Cloverfield (2008)

The found footage craze of the 2000s produced several PG-13 movies of varying quality. Cloverfield earns a spot on this list for both its ambition and its formal creativity. Unlike most found footage movies, which take the form of documentaries recording supernatural events (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as we’ll soon see), Cloverfield uses the intimate format to tell a kaiju story, and succeeds in giving us something we’ve never seen before.

Directed by Matt Reeves and written by Drew Goddard, Cloverfield follows a group of young adults as they make their way through New York City under attack by what they eventually learn is a giant monster. One of those New Yorkers, Rob (Michael Stahl-David) goes through the crisis while dealing with his complicated feelings about Beth (Odette Yustman), feelings that we come to learn through interruptions in the tape. The interruption conceit allows Reeves to show us plenty of the monster mayhem we want to see, while still helping us care about the humans involved.

Drag Me to Hell (2009)

Anyone who was at an impressionable age when they saw Doc Ock’s tentacles attack in Spider-Man 2 can tell you that Sam Raimi knows how to be scary in a PG-13 movie. But Drag Me to Hell somehow takes it even further than expected, providing all the slapstick terror and buckets of viscera that you’d find in an Evil Dead film, and keeping it all within the rating limits.

Working off of a script he co-wrote with his bother, Ivan, Raimi presents Drag Me to Hell as an EC Comics-style cautionary tale. When loan officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) allows the house of an elderly mystic (Lorna Raver) to go into foreclosure, she gets repaid with a curse. Long before titular Hell-dragging occurs, Christine must get splattered with all manner of mud, goo, and fluid, all of which Raimi films with his usual Looney Tunes level of excitement.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

Earlier, we (lightly) disparaged found footage’s over-reliance on a documentary format, in which someone wants to record a supernatural event to disprove it, only to find that something does indeed lurk in the dark. We wouldn’t mind so much if all found footage movies executed that idea as well as The Last Exorcism, directed by Daniel Stamm and written by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland.

The Last Exorcist does indeed follow someone who has followed a film crew to recording his debunking. In this case, it’s former faith healer Marcus (Patrick Fabian of Better Call Saul fame), who wants to expose his practice after losing his beliefs. But as he and his crew visit the home of a young victim named Nell (Ashley Bell), he finds that he was right all along. Expertly shot and performed, The Last Exorcism knows exactly when to show the viewers something terrifying, and when it’s even worse to have the person holding the camera turn away in shock. 

Happy Death Day (2017)

Of course, PG-13 horror movies aim more directly at teenage audiences than their R-rated counterparts. Unfortunately, not all of them take seriously the concerns of teen and college-aged viewers. Thankfully, Happy Death Day bucks that trend by giving us a compelling young lead in Tree Gelbman, played delightfully by Jessica Rothe. Even better, Happy Death Day explores Tree’s development through a twisty and fun slasher plot.

Happy Death Day comes from beloved horror director Christopher Landon and disgraced comic book scribe Scott Lobdell. It follows Tree as she finds herself caught in a Groundhog Day-style time loop on her birthday, the same day she’s killed by a slasher in a baby mask. Each morning after getting brutally killed, Tree must wake up and relive her day, trying to figure out who killed her, but learning along the way how to deal with the mistakes of the past.