Sleepover Movies
I grew up in the 1980s, and there were three movies that were key to any sleepover when I was a kid:
- The Last Unicorn
- Labyrinth
- The Neverending Story
You needed at least two of these for a sleepover to be a success. But if Blockbuster (or that one grocery aisle that had movies you could rent) didn’t have them, there were acceptable alternatives:
- The Secret of NIMH
- Any My Little Pony or Care Bears movie
- Clue
- Cloak and Dagger
- Back to the Future
(I realize Clue may be surprising, but rest assured we were too young to get most of the jokes. It was a great option on stormy nights, though!)
At a stretch, you could go for things a little farther afield:
- Flight of the Navigator
- Short Circuit
- The Cat from Outer Space
- A Herbie movie
- Really, just any old Disney film?
I liked Summer Magic and D.A.R.Y.L. and The Boy Who Could Fly but those were not common choices. We did sometimes watch things like Annie or a John Hughes movie. You might expect us to have watched Ghostbusters, but I’d seen it at the cinema and it had given me nightmares, so that was always a no-go. I was also not at all a fan of The Goonies, but was always 100% there for an Indiana Jones movie.
Once we were a little older, we chose things like Dead Poets Society or a Brendan Fraser flick. Since I’m not a horror person—creepy is fine, gory is not—those kinds of movies were never on the menu. I’m also no big fan of the horror-adjacent Tim Burton. (Sacrilege! I know.) So Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands never made it into the VCR when I was at a sleepover.
VCRs are, of course, no longer required, and I can count on one hand the number of sleepovers my three kids collectively have hosted or attended. Overnights don’t seem to be as much of a thing these days, probably because kids can be in virtual contact 24/7, so being in the same house or at the mall together is no longer the big draw it used to be.
Now, though, we do family movie nights, and we mix old favorites with the new stuff. It has been fun to introduce some of our childhood classics to our kids, and to revisit them often after decades of not having seen them. Some stand the test of time and some don’t, but it doesn’t [usually] diminish the nostalgic love we harbor for the oldies. Though I can’t seem to find D.A.R.Y.L. anywhere…