I’d venture a guess that pretty much every kid growing up in America had a house in their neighborhood they thought was haunted. For me, it was a house that backed up to my elementary school’s playground. It was this weird yellowish color and looked like nobody had bothered even trying to take care of it, so it stood out next to all the other two-story homes on the block. The other kids on the playground and I would stare up at its dark windows and creep ourselves out imagining who or what might be looking back down at us.

For every kid who knew or knows of a house like that, there’s Monster House, a new horror/comedy/family CGI-animated film from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis.

This was the first time in a while I could recall seeing the Amblin logo in front of a movie, even though I know it was tacked onto War of the Worlds, The Terminal, and others, so maybe it was just the fact that this was the first movie in a while that felt like an Amblin movie that made me take notice of it. For those who don’t know, Amblin is Steven Spielberg’s production company — founded long before DreamWorks — that brought us movies in the ‘80s like Gremlins, E.T., Harry and the Hendersons and The Goonies. In my mind, Monster House could easily fit right into that pack.

Monster House is a fun kid-centric adventure story that seems to hearken back to the style and feel of those ‘80s films, just with a whole lot more bells and whistles. Those bells and whistles come courtesy of Zemeckis’ animation style pioneered with The Polar Express. The actors’ performances are recorded digitally via 3D image capturing and then the filmmakers can play around with camera placement, lighting, etc. all after the actors have long gone home. However, unlike in The Polar Express, Monster House uses this technology to tell a fun and engrossing story.

When the crotchety, Gollum-like old man living across the street dies, pre-teen D.J. and his best friend Chowder believe that his soul has taken possession of his dilapidated old house and is trying to get back at all the neighborhood kids that won’t keep off his lawn. Together, they’ll join forces with a — gasp -- girl to try to protect their unsuspecting neighbors from the man-eating domicile on Halloween night.

Unlike Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Monster House isn’t a horror spoof that takes scary movie conventions and spins them around into something silly; it’s an honest-to-goodness scary movie aimed at kids who aren’t quite ready for slasher flicks yet. The first half of the film offers up some sincerely creepy and startling moments, and the fact that they’re often punctuated by some light comic relief won’t help calm the youngsters whose parents may have mistakenly dragged them to the theater, thinking they’d be seeing something lighter and more akin to, say, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.