The thing about Knightmare was how it managed to combine scary/creepy and tension, which is almost unheard of in anything aimed at children, and pretty rare even for adult things, at least for anyone with a bit of genre savvyness. The tension came from the fact that you never knew what was going to happen next, and unlike almost all significant entertainment "deaths" there was almost no forshadowing. The same can't be said for most other childrens entertainment, which might be scary, but usually lacks the tension due to being predictable (usually either nobody dies, or nobody who matters dies, at least for "good guys") and generally the more "scary" adult stuff is, the more predictable, to the point where it's usually possible to predict from an early stage exactly who will live and die in a horror film, at least when it comes to characters you actually care about. Actually, usually they die, since many writers only bother to make you care about characters to get an emotional impact by killing them (which works for characters you like or dislike), and they feel that being attractive or being played by a popular actor is enough to make people like the stars anyway. Even unexpected deaths usually have obvious forshadowing, even if it's just seconds before, and mostly there is less ovious forshadowing much earlier which the genre savvy can pick up, or the death is so out of the blue that they there isn't any tension at all (a seemingly safe situation, then wham, dead).
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