Popverse's top stories of the day

• Dan Da Dan is weird, profoundly inappropriate, and the perfect anime this season
• Star Wars' new series Skeleton Crew drops a new trailer that feels less Star Wars than usual
• "We're the ones being chased all the time:" What We Do in the Shadows's Harvey Guillén on the intersection of Latino culture and Gothic storytelling

Let’s be real: everyone loves Kate Siegel. Star of Oculus, Hush, The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass, The Fall of the House of Usher, and many other modern horror classics, and now horror director herself with Shudder’s new V/H/S/Beyond anthology, Siegel is one of the most recognizable — and most fun — figures in horror these days, so it’s no surprise that we’re all fans. But… how did she end up here? As she revealed during Shudder’s New York Comic Con 2024 panel, her entry into the horror genre was pretty unexpected.

Asked what her gateway into horror was, Siegel surprised the late night crowd by saying, “I’m going to say that it was an episode of the Care Bears, and you’re going to think that it couldn’t possibly be. But there was an episode, it was a Halloween special, I believe, where the bears had to escape a haunted house.”

We actually looked into this, and we might have an answer to what this episode was… but we’ll let Siegel finish her story first.

“This is how I remember it. I can’t tell you if this is real or not. I know they were all running out of something onto a dock, and I don’t know if this is crossover in my mind or the Stephen King I was reading [at the time], but seeing the thing that I thought was so safe and so tender in danger, it tickled something in me that I couldn’t explain. I’d watch it over and over again, trying to reconcile this idea that the Care Bears were scared, and I just loved it. I think that kind of balance is something I look for in everything I do since then, and in all the movies that I love too. That tenderness and legitimate danger.”

So, here’s the thing. Siegel was born in 1982, so she’s almost certainly referring to the original Care Bears animated series, which ran from 1985 through 1988 (and then in syndicated re-runs afterwards). In that series, there isn’t a Halloween special, nor is there a haunted house episode per se... but there is an episode called ‘Mystery of the Phantom,’ which ran September 29, 1988, in which the various Care Bears have to get over their fears to help save a theater that’s seeming haunted. That has to be it, right…?

Maybe we should watch to be sure… because that episode is available for free via the official Care Bears YouTube channel. Ladies and gentlemen, the thing that made one of the leading ladies in horror realize that she loved horror:

Happy Halloween, everyone.

In the immortal words of Danny Elfman, "Life's no fun without a good scare." We couldn't agree more, which is why we think you should check out horror aficionado Greg Silber's list of the best horror movies of all time. Or, if you've already seen those classics, check out our list of the most underrated horror movies from the past couple years. And if you've already seen all of those, Let us tell you what to look forward to (or dread) in Popverse's list of upcoming horror movies.