Airwaves that echo with fright all month long? The horror! The horror!

Traditionally there are 12 days of Christmas, and eight days of Hanukkah. Why, then, would we possibly need "31 Days of Halloween," which is this month's slogan and gimmick on cable's Syfy (formerly Sci Fi) channel? Many, if not most, other cable networks -- and broadcast networks, too -- will take ample or excessive notice of Halloween, principally by showing films and TV shows filled with ghastly, gory imagery and blood-gushing violence.

Don't worry; what follows won't be a lament for the good old days of atmospheric horror classics or the moodily suggestive dark dreams of cinematic artistes. It's actually the cheap, cheesy horror movies that tend to be the most fun anyway -- although today, with technically sophisticated special effects within reach of even the most minimalist filmmakers, cheesiness is relatively hard to find. Syfy's weekly made-for-TV monster pictures are sometimes hilarious steps in that direction.

My complaint about TV's saturation programming for Halloween is neither the barrel-bottom quality of the films nor their thundering banality. It's the truly wretched excess of the horror programming that is discouraging -- frightening for the wrong reasons, and giving occult, satanic and paranormal subjects worrisomely excessive expanses of airtime.

At Syfy, Tuesday's bill of fare includes the greatest low-budget horror film of all, George A. Romero's "Night of the Living Dead," but also such dubious delights as "Shave and a Headcut" and "Taxi Cab Carnage" (both are episodes of the "repackaged" cable series "Scare Tactics," incompetently hosted by Tracy Morgan) as well as the films "Joyride 2: Dead Ahead," "The Deaths of Ian Stone" and "House of the Dead 2." And so on and so on and blah blah blah.

Syfy, which NBC Universal owns, airs PG-13- and R-rated movies that have mostly been trimmed back to eliminate some of the violence, almost all of the sex and many a four-letter word. But even films that air during daylight hours, when children have easy access to the channel, can include explicit gore, the likes of which wouldn't have been shown even on late-night TV 10 or 20 years ago. Heads are lopped off, gruesome wounds inflicted, bodies splayed and splattered, and those inescapable "forces of evil" often depicted as victorious. Ever since Richard Donner's gigantic hit, "The Omen," in 1976 (stupidly remade in 2006), it's been fashionable for horror movies to have cynical, unhappy endings in which "bad guys" win and good ones are defeated.

Children now grow into adolescence with relatively little reassurance from pop culture that good eventually will triumph over evil, that bad people (or the monsters who represent them) don't win. The long-obligatory last scene or denouement in which all's been put right with the universe, or some little town, and the hero and heroine walk bravely into the sunset is no longer even vaguely obligatory. Now the cookie crumbles into the hot ash of hell; everybody's doomed and hope is kaput.

It has been established that large amounts of televised violence desensitize viewers, especially younger ones, to real violence, be it physical, verbal, political or whatever. Thus, kids today get not only a surplus of violence but also a steady, dour diet of pessimism and cynicism. Does this reflect the lowered expectations of post-Watergate generations or does it help breed it? Such chicken-and-egg questions may never be answered unequivocally, but how healthful can it be to expose young people to hours and hours of mayhem and horror in which dismembering and beheading may provoke laughter rather than revulsion?

Many artful, fascinating and challenging horror and sci-fi films have been made, of course. Even some of the teens-in-peril films of recent times can have redeeming virtues. "The Ruins," now making the rounds of pay-cable stations, is a sickeningly gory but ecologically resonant film about young adults trapped in a Central American country and menaced by vicious vines (okay, it sounds funny) that, perhaps in a spirit of ecological revenge, want to devour them, first by insinuating themselves into the humans' veins and arteries.

"The Mist," from a story by Stephen King, traps a cross section of humanity in a supermarket after a mysterious thick fog has settled over their town. From within the mist are dispatched truly horrible frights -- giant tentacles that rip off flesh with a single slap, enormous insects that splat against the supermarket's large windows and try to get inside, and a collection of animated spiders that rank among the scariest bugs in screen history. But in an actual attempt at social commentary, the mist also provokes monsters from within the stranded villagers, including a deranged fanatic who persuades some of her subjects to demand human sacrifice.

"Cloverfield," the 2008 horror film that took many knocks for its jumpy and bumpy hand-held camerawork, is more watchable on television than it was in theaters, and its primal scenario about a monster who for absolutely no explicable reason sets about destroying New York from the tip of Manhattan on up, is thrillingly brilliant. It translates old-fashioned horror into something that is much more intimate and somehow hideously plausible.

Even the best horror films can obviously be inappropriate for children, and at any hour on subscription channels like Cinemax, a horror film may be unreeling that would give a child nightmares of unwieldy intensity and realism. Hollywood will keep cranking out horror films for the target teenage audience that flocks to them on date nights, and for a very receptive global market. But everything ends up on television eventually, and there are so many of these films in the vast cinematic library now that they've become more than just bothersome.

The truly scary part is what they might do to the malleable mind of a sensitive child, and whether desensitization is becoming not just a worry but a genuine public health problem.

Maybe next year, Halloween could be shriveled back to just two or three or four nights -- 31 is a nice number of ice-cream flavors but an absurdly excessive amount of dreadful ordeals.