You should not direct kids here. Itch is not a safe place for kids. And not talking about horror or even nsfw games.
There is malware on the page, because projects are not curated by staff, and it can take over a week to recognise or remove such projects. Unsuspecting kids might download such "games" and get the family computer infected. Playing web games on Itch is safe though.
There is also many minors that use Itch to trash talk and have drama in comment sections.
If you look for "popular" "indie" games, browse Steam.
If you look for actual indie and hobby games, well, horror is popular on Itch, because of all the streamers playing horror games. So the first few pages on Itch will be ridden with horror games naturally.
So the best advice really is, to use a postive tag - if you use the popular sorting.
You could also just visit the front page itch.io
There is https://itch.io/games/new-and-popular/featured and https://itch.io/games/newest/fresh . Those lists are curated and should have a balanced mix of indie games.
There is also the recommendation section. And if your browse interesting tags, you might see a link to public collections that have this game. So those collections might be interesting to you.
But yes, you can filter away "horror" games with a bookmark. But this will not catch psychological-horror or gore or creepy or .... or unlesss the developer has also tagged horror.