This week’s new release Clown in a Cornfield comes to theaters occupying an unusual position in the horror landscape. The movie is based on a YA novel aimed at teenagers, and, well, it shows: It’s about Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), a teenager who moves to small town with her grieving father (Aaron Abrams), falls in with a new crowd, and promptly gets terrorized by a creepy clown mascot figure. It would be perfect for a group of 14-year-olds having a night on the town (or at the mall), except for the fact that it’s rated R, entirely on the basis of blood and gore.

That sounds like a contradiction between the movie’s beginner-slasher storytelling and its gory bloodletting, and it sort of is. But really, the best thing about Clown in a Cornfield, which has some of the youth-inflected insouciance of a Kevin Williamson slasher like Scream or I Know What You Did Last Summer without being especially scary or funny, is precisely that tension. In this particular case, the gap between grown-up horror and teenage angst is part of the movie’s (somewhat heavy-handed) thematic design: Quinn and her new friends, who make scary online prank videos involving the local clown mascot Frendo, are continually at odds with the traditionalism of their small-town elders, creating generational friction. The movie is ultimately sympathetic to the younger characters, though it doesn’t hold them above some light mockery (there’s a funny moment, included in the trailer, where none of them have any idea how to use a rotary phone). Adults may recognize the significance while still finding the movie tedious; despite a couple of clever story turns, the characters never really come to life and there are scarcely any jump scares, nevermind genuine shivers. But then, shouldn’t a movie where teenagers are threatened with murder appeal to younger audiences first, anyway, even if it’s supposedly not “appropriate” for them to see it sans parents?

That seems to be the animating interest in Netflix’s Fear Street movies, which are so far (in terms of horror, suspense, characterization, and even knowing what was happening in the years where they take place) significantly worse than Clown. But as YA horror, they may function as better, because the MPAA rating means even less on a streaming service that no known teenager has ever experienced difficulty accessing. Another I-love-the-eighties installment, Fear Street: Prom Queen, drops on the service in a few weeks.

Still: There must be better movies for younger teenagers (or older tweens) curious about the horror lifestyle who aren’t necessarily quite ready for something as intense as Hereditary. Yes, teenagers are people too, and they don’t need every movie they watch to be served directly to their demographic, following other teen characters. But they’re also social creatures, and YA-inflected horror about fellow teenagers might be an easier sell for a group activity than something truly disturbing. So here are six solidly R-rated, teen-centric horror movies that thread the needle between adolescence and adult terror more skillfully than Clown in a Cornfield, ranked by increasing inappropriateness for younger viewers.

1. An extremely late-’90s riff on Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Faculty is a relatively soft R, in that a lot of its squishiness has to do with wriggling alien creatures that possess an increasing number of teachers and students at a high school in Ohio. (There’s also some light nudity and barely-coded drug use.) As far as all-star horror team-ups go, the Robert Rodrigez/Quentin Tarantino From Dusk Till Dawn is a stronger shot of those filmmakers sensibilities than Rodriguez doing a for-hire job off a second-tier Kevin Williamson (Scream) screenplay. But teenagers are the focus for this one, and the youthful energy makes it extremely watchable. Plus, Josh Hartnett appears in only his second movie role, after the similarly Williamson-affiliated but vastly worse Halloween: H20; he’s quite charismatic as a handsome, enterprising quasi-burnout.

   where to stream the faculty

2. Somewhat lost during its COVID-era theatrical release, director Christopher Landon, whose Happy Death Day movies are great PG-13 Starter Slashers, went more R-rated with this high-concept mash-up, originally titled Freaky Friday the 13th. Yes, instead of a mom and daughter switching bodies, it’s a teenage girl (Kathryn Newton) and a hulking serial killer (Vince Vaughn). Landon doesn’t soft-pedal the required gnarliness of the gore, but he also uses plenty of his trademark empathy – if not necessarily for the deranged killer, at least for his human body; Vaughn “plays” a teenage girl with surprisingly non-caricatured sensitivity.

   where to stream freaky

3. With the series returning to theaters just a week after Clown in a Cornfield with a long-awaited sixth installment, young horror fans might want to dip back into the dawn of the millennium and check out the first (and still best) installment, where onetime heartthrob (and forever horror king) Devon Sawa has a premonition allowing him to avoid a deadly plane explosion – only to have the unseen forces stalk him and other survivors, nudging them into more gruesome accidents to “correct” their defiance of death’s grand design. Sawa’s performance is key to the first movie’s enduring effectiveness; watching his Alex, a teenager on his way to Paris with his whole life ahead of him, descend into twitchy (and justified) paranoia provides crucial emotional context for the mischievous fun of the series’ Rube Goldberg-style death traps. Some of the sequels are a lot of fun, but they often feel more like parodies or hollow imitations of 2000-era teenagers, rather than characters who resembles the real thing.

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4. This collaboration between hard-edged director Karyn Kusama and quippy screenwriter Diablo Cody was a critically derided box office flop in 2009; the years have been kind, and now it’s nothing but reclamations and appreciation pieces as far as the eye can see. This could easily lead to Jennifer’s Body becoming overhyped, but it remains a particularly astute study of formative (and complicated) female friendships. Though Jennifer (Megan Fox) is possessed by demonic powers following a botched sacrificial ritual, the movie is savvy about the ambiguity of her relationship with meeker Needy (Amanda Seyfried) – specifically, whether demons actually tear them apart or if that just exacerbates the situation. The recent, Cody-penned PG-13 horror movie Lisa Frankenstein makes a great companion piece to this one, but Jennifer’s Body goes a little further into darkness in a way that plenty of teenage girls will probably find familiar.

   where to stream jennifer’s body

5. where to stream it follows

   David Robert Mitchell’s eerie, artsy horror movie about a ghostly, shapeshifting, slow-stalking killer that attaches to victims until they “pass” it to someone else via sex isn’t exactly one for the tweens; it’s a little more elliptical in style and disturbing in content, with allusions to STDs and doomy fears of young death. But it’s a perfect coming-of-age endpoint for younger horror fans, a variation on teen horror that takes place in that liminal space between childhood and adulthood.