Thesis: "spooky" as a genre should not be conflated with "horror," or even with "horror comedy."

Scream is a horror comedy; The Addams Family is spooky. Evil Dead 2 is a horror comedy; The Nightmare Before Christmas is spooky. Shaun of the Dead is a horror comedy; Beetlejuice is spooky.

Spooky is not necessarily about being silly or family-friendly, though it often is; fundamentally it is about celebrating rather than fearing the paranormal, about reimagining mythological monsters and demons as something approachable. Gore and violence aren't inherently disqualifying for spookiness, but suffering is. Stories with sympathetic human victims are horror; stories where victimization is absent, offstage, or treated extremely lightly (i.e., What We Do In The Shadows) are spooky.

Anyway, I like both, but I feel like it's really important to make the distinction, because they get lumped together a lot but they're such very different things. Horror is frightening; spooky can have a few jumps but is fundamentally a soothing genre, a genre about coming face to face with Death and saying "this guy's not so bad once you get to know him."