Scary stories for children as first horror readings and the frightful trip of Huey, Dewey and Louie

In the Duckscares series, Donald Duck’s famous nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie travel to several European countries, where they face numerous supernatural dangers. In Brazil, the comics were published in 2021 as a compilation containing four stories, each being split in two parts. The object of research is ‘The Nightmare Formula’ story. It dialogs with elements from fairy tales connected to characters and conventions commonly found in fear narratives, as expected, and aims at observing the strategies used by both verbal and non-verbal texts with the intention of causing fear to the reader. This publication is an example of how terror can also please younger readers when it is created with this public in mind; it is also a first point of contact with the genre that can potentially increase the number of adult readers interested in it. This research is based on the theoretical works of Carlos Reis, Paulo Ramos, Stephen King and Thierry Groensteen.