The Real Ghostbusters cartoon was key to Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire director Gil Kenan knows his way around a family-friendly horror movie. Kenan’s first film was the cult-classic animated flick Monster House, a spoopy horror tale involving a haunted house that eats people, and the three young kids who venture into its depths. It’s up there with Henry Selick’s Neil Gaiman adaptation Coraline in terms of how scary it gets while still walking the line of what’s acceptable for a kids’ movie.

“I still get messages from people 15 years later about how it’s a core nightmare experience for them as a kid,” Kenan told Polygon ahead of Frozen Empire’s release. “I’ll be honest, that’s a point of pride for me. I love the idea that young audiences can have a visceral relationship [with something scary]. Because we loved it — we loved that feeling as kids.”

Kenan explains that his philosophy when approaching the scares in his Ghostbusters film came from that feeling of being “slightly terrified in the movie theater” when he was young, while ultimately knowing the heroes were going to be OK.

“Definitely there’s a push and pull,” he says. But careful editing around the movie’s spookier action sequences let him carve out a movie that he hopes will give young audiences a taste of horror, much like Monster House did back in 2005.

Monster House didn’t just give Kenan experience in molding a kid-friendly horror film; it also opened his eyes to the vast potential that animation offered.

“It’s the access to the impossible,” Kenan says. “Animation teaches you that you’re only bound by the boundaries of your imagination, that there are no restraints to storytelling. That’s what I learned as a kid drawing picture books and starting to animate them in my bedroom: The only thing that limited the story was the boundaries of the frame. Everything else is at your fingertips as a storyteller. That’s an intoxicating, potentially terrifying realization for filmmakers. But once you learn it, and you respect its awesome potential, you never go back. It’s a taste you can’t get out of your mouth.”

Ghostbusters as a franchise does have a legacy in animation, with the beloved cartoon The Real Ghostbusters airing for seven seasons back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. In fact, Kenan says The Real Ghostbusters was a crucial keystone in carving out the tone of Frozen Empire. He and producer/co-writer Jason Reitman sat down and marathoned the cartoon early in Frozen Empire’s development.

“It sort of unshackled us in terms of the weirdness and audacity of the writing of our villain story and its mythology,” Kenan says. “We didn’t have to be bound to any historical precedent, and we could get stranger and a bit wilder. I mean, that show got weird. And that’s fantastic. I remember loving that as a kid. I wanted to be able to put some of that same strangeness on screen here.”

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is in theaters now.