If you enjoy films of any description, Halloween is just about as bad as it gets. If you’re a coward, it can be hard to navigate your way through the onslaught of horror. And if you actually like horror, it’s even worse. Over the years, Halloween has become little more than a dumping ground for low-budget, low-imagination genre scraps that serve no purpose except to provide idiots with the unsatisfactory event-specific scares that tradition dictates they enjoy.

However, all is not lost. Not all Halloween films are bad, but the safest way to dodge the worst is to avoid horror altogether. There are plenty of non-horror, Halloween-set films that you can watch instead. Here are six of the best:

Mean Girls

Perhaps the greatest representation of Halloween in all of cinema history. Mean Girls cuts to the chase in no uncertain terms; Halloween primarily exists to allow teenagers to dress in skimpy outfits that would be deemed inappropriate at any other time of the year. If you get it wrong – if you end up dressing as something legitimately spooky – you’ll be branded a pariah and forced out of your social circle. Now, that is scary.

Donnie Darko

Another universal Halloween party experience, providing you’ve been diagnosed with schizophrenia and you’re haunted by terrifying hallucinations, and you shoot someone in the face and witness a supernatural vortex opening up in the sky, and then you’re killed in a plane crash and none of it really happened. Which, in fairness, you probably have.

The Karate Kid

Karate Kid is a movie so jam-packed with iconic moments that it’s easy to forget that Halloween is the catalyst for the entire plot. Were Daniel LaRusso not set upon by a gang of spooky trick-or-treat skeletons, Mr Miyagi would never have come to his rescue. If it weren’t for Halloween, LaRusso would have spent the rest of his life listless and unfulfilled, rather than becoming the violent brute of his destiny.

American Splendor

If you resent the entire notion of dressing up for Halloween at all – which, as an adult human being, you absolutely should – then American Splendor, a biopic of angry, disenfranchised comic artist Harvey Pekar, is the film for you. Witness the scene where young Harvey goes trick or treating without a costume, then rails against the artifice of the holiday and gives up in disgust. Harvey Pekar is all of us, and that should never be forgotten.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Is there a scene in We Need to Talk About Kevin where Tilda Swinton briefly drives past some trick or treaters? Yes. Does this make it a Halloween film? Yes. But does it also qualify as a horror movie, given that it’s about the unbearable psychological trauma of watching someone you’ve been taught to love unconditionally becoming a figurehead of absolute evil, and it ends on a note of abhorrent violence? No, it doesn’t. Are you sure? Listen, I make the rules around here.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

“But The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Christmas film, not a Halloween film”, you’re saying. No it isn’t, you fool. It’s set in a place called Halloween Town. The film poster is full of pumpkins. It was released on 29 October 1993. It is absolutely a Halloween film, and therefore I reject your thesis entirely.