The 10 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Children's Books

Some kids’ entertainment is outright frightening, books and movies like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Coraline; the former is about a psychotic candy seller who seemingly kills kids who disobey his rules; the latter follows a little girl trying to survive a dream world where her parents have buttons sewed into their eye sockets. The intention of such titles is to unsettle, even if the scares are geared toward the pre-teen set and are concealed by happy-go-lucky storytelling. But you know what’s even more disturbing than children’s books designed to upset? Ones written by authors who don’t even realize what they’re doing subconsciously.

When the almighty Dr. Seuss first wrote The Lorax in 1971, he did so with the goal of providing younger readers with a lighthearted romp about a jolly orange creature, with a save-the-planet, ecological subtext. But what Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel was really doing was turning kids’ future walks in parks and rounds of playing outside into potential horror shows—don’t stand too close to a tree, unless you want a freaky little troll with a bushy moustache to recycle your soul.

Are we looking too hard at The Lorax? We’ll let the youngsters who gain all-new psychological imbalances thanks to the movie version of Dr. Seuss’ classic book (in theaters this Friday, featuring the voices of Taylor Swift, Zac Efron, Ed Helms, and Danny DeVito) give that answer. In the meantime, let’s delve even deeper into not-yet-adult nightmares with The 10 Most Unintentionally Terrifying Children’s Books, old favorites that are even more unexpectedly chilling than The Lorax.

Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone)

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It’s one thing for a kid to play with dolls and stuffed animals and project life into them using their imaginations; that way, the toys don’t actually move or adopt any human tendencies.

In author/photographer Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll, and the series of similar books it spawned, coming-of-age stories are depicted through pictures of the doll you see above, the one that looks like a cross between The Twilight Zone’s Talking Tina and those mannequins from the Zone episode “The After Hours.” One flip through The Living Doll’s suggestively creepy pages and an innocent adolescent is open to many disturbing thoughts, such as, “Is Tickle Me Elmo smiling at me with a frozen grin?” As well as, “Why is my G.I. Joe action figure pointing its gun at me?”

The Giving Tree isn’t “terrifying” in the spooky, heebie-jeebies sense—it’s more disturbing for what it implies about grown-up relationships. Shel Silverstein’s enduring kid’s book follows the story of a little boy who does nothing but take, take, and take some more from a thoughtful, helpful, and selfless tree that gets nothing in return. That’s exactly the kind of message we all want our present or future offspring to comprehend and employ in their own lives, isn’t it?

You know who should really fear The Giving Tree? Fathers of young adult women. Call it the “Silverstein Tree” test: Ask your daughter’s new boyfriend what books he read as a kid, and if he mentions this morally corrupt hardcover product, tell him to exit stage right.

Truthfully, Steve Jenkins’ informative Never Smile At A Monkey should be required reading for any kids on the verge of a class trip to the local zoo. A handy guide to dealing with wild animals and other non-human creatures, Jenkins’ picture book is a one-stop-shop for parents hoping to keep their seeds away from the hospital and rabies-fighting needles.

Yet every page in Never Smile At Monkey, including that ominous cover image, instills the fear of God into its readers. The chances of anyone encountering dangerous jellyfish, cone shells, or platypuses in everyday urban or suburban life are slim to none, but what happens when Jenkins’ words of doom make one think twice about playing with the neighbor’s dog, petting a friend’s domesticated turtle, or glancing at their grandmother’s mean-spirited cat? Next stop: paralyzing anxiety.

If some ballsy filmmaker ever decides to make a modern-day feature film take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, the finished movie could rival Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream in terms of its depressing nature.

Literary buffs will have you believe that The Little Match Girl is a story of hope, but fuck all that—it’s as hopeless as children’s fiction gets, and, for that, it’s the stuff of any young girl’s nightmares. The protagonist is a homeless female, an under-aged beggar freezing her ass off on the streets because she doesn’t want her father to hit her for not selling any matches. Desperate for some warmth, she curls up in a little nook and daydreams about her dead grandmother and a Christmas tree that she’ll never see in real life.

Feeling hopeful yet? You will now: The Little Match Girl ends with the poor kid freezing to death in the nook, her lifeless body left for streetwalkers to discover. What young lady wouldn’t want to seize the day after reading that?

There’s no other way to say it: The Cat, he of Dr. Seuess’ Cat In The Hat fame, is an emotional terrorist. How else would you describe a freaky looking, overgrown feline that shows up unannounced—along with his two no-good accomplices, Thing One and Thing Two—and makes the lives of a young brother/sister combo a living hell. Put yourself in the shoes of Sally and her younger narrating brother, who are forced to contend against what’s basically an evil monster in a huge top hat.

By the end of Doc Seuss’ story, the Cat makes amends by helping the kids clean up the house before their mothers returns home, but we know better: Kitties, by nature, aren’t to be trusted. If the Cat could easily get into their house, who’s to say that he won’t pull the old urban feline legend and kill the tykes by sucking their breath out while they’re sleeping? As Thing One chants, “One breath, two breaths, three breaths, four…”

Fans of the disturbing, incredibly bleak horror movie classic Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer should find plenty to like in author Peter McCarty’s cleverly manipulative T Is For Terrible. By design, the dinosaur-heavy introspection is meant to show how individuals viewed as bad, such as a menacing Tyrannosaurus Rex, are just like us good folks once you look inside their minds and see what makes them tick. A noble message, no doubt.

Unless the person/thing of interest happens to be a cold-blooded, vicious killer like our friend the T. Rex here. Essentially an allegory meant to sympathize with a serial killer, T Is For Terrible even abandons the typically happy ending of most children’s books and leaves readers with a particularly downbeat image: the unreformed dinosaur getting ready to pounce upon a pack of smaller creatures. “T,” as it turns out, is actually for “terrifying.”

Where should we begin with this one? How about the plot itself: In Maurice Sendak’s In The Night Kitchen young Mickey is lying in bed, minding his business, when he suddenly floats, and his clothes all come off, and his naked body is dropped into a pot full of batter for some “morning cake.” Once out of the mixing device (and, yes, still nude), the kid hops onto the top of a huge, penis-shaped milk bottle and takes pleasure in the creamy liquid that’s oozing within it.

Forget the fact that In The Night Kitchen concerns a little boy whose nightmare centers around being cooked alive; Sendak’s uncomfortably perverted tale is packed with plenty of none-too-subtle sexual innuendos, which Sendak might not have even intended for (we’ll give the author of Where The Wild Things Are the benefit of the doubt). Here’s one kitchen we’d never want to enter after hours. At least not without a can of mace.

David Shannon, bless his soul, conceived his series of David books to help parents teach their little ones about right and wrong—basically, rugrats, don’t ever do anything that the demented Dave does in any of the editions. But take another look at the titular problem child, who's two red horns away from looking like an official demon from the fifth circle of hell.

Shannon keeps David’s antics understandably light, given that his target audience ranges from ages four and up; in this first book, No, David!, the hell-spawn picks his nose, breaks a vase with a baseball bat, and tracks mud all over his bedroom floor. The literary sequels continued the saga with David Goes To School, David Gets In Trouble, and David Smells. We’ve already put in our orders for David Changes His Name To Damien And Brings On The Apocalypse; supposedly, that’s going to be Shannon’s best work yet.

At its core, Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever is a sweet, commendable book for any little kid, with its message that a youngster’s mother will always love them, unconditionally, no matter how bad life gets. It’s a necessary, reassuring message that anyone, whether young or old, could only be so fortunate to experience in real life.

But then Love You Forever takes a hard left turn into creeps-ville. The central character is a grown man, living on his own, and coming across as a normal, well-adjusted guy. Until his mother sneaks into his bedroom window at night, cradles the fully grown dude, and rocks him to sleep.

What’s so terrifying about that, you ask? It’s precisely what Mrs. Bates would’ve done to her son, Norman, and both author Robert Bloch’s and director Alfred Hitchcock’s versions of Psycho have shown us where Bates’ kind of mother/son closeness leads.

The well-meaning librarians inside middle schools will tell you that Jumanji is a fun adventure book, or, if they’re leaning a bit more toward reality, it’s a high-stakes fantasy. We know the truth, though: Chris Van Allsburg’s classic, kid-friendly tale is one pure, unrelenting, never-look-at-Operation the same way dose of horror.

Imagine playing a friendly board game with some grade school pals, then leaving the set in your living room while you and the chums grab some frosty Cokes. You walk back into the den and see snakes slithering across the carpet, and a hungry, foaming lion eyeing your best friend down like he’s lunch.

That’s the gist of Jumanji, a story about what could happen if recreational time-killers somehow come to life. As in, Candy Land generating homicidal tendencies into a bag of gummy bears turned life-sized red, green, and yellow killing machines. Or a little kid waking up to discover that his or her stomach has been cut open and scalpels are poking around in their innards, all because they played a round of the aforementioned Operation before sleepy time. Screw you, Milton Bradley.