To avoid hijacking this thread about recommended movies for young kids, I wanted to bring up a related question. A few of the movies I and others recommended were deemed too scary for the kid in question, many of which I saw at a young age and loved. We’ve always heard adults say things like “I had nightmares about the Flying Monkeys for weeks, and now The Wizard of Oz is my favorite movie!” “Darth Vader freaked me out, but now I’ve got a whole wing of my house filled with Star Wars toys.”
Scary characters and situations have long been a staple of the family film, especially when it creates an opportunity for the hero/heroine to triumph over evil and win the day (e.g. Harry Potter). One criticism of some modern kids’ films is that they have been so bleached of any potentially scary moments (replaced, apparently, by fart jokes) that they have become utterly bland and pointless. So, can some level of scariness be good for kids?
Now, obviously you aren’t going to force a kid to watch something they don’t want to watch, and tastes vary considerably, but at what point does a parent judge something “too scary” for their kid? How do you tell where that line is between “scary-as-part-of-the-dramatic-thrill-of-storytelling” and “too-scary?” How does a parent determine the age-appropriate level of scariness in a movie? One kid’s nightmare is another kid’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. Do parents evaluate supernatural-fantasy-scary on different level than real-world-violence scary (such as the local news)? Also, now that today’s kids are more likely to watch movies at home rather than in the captive environment of a movie theater, how does this change the point in which you decide to turn off the DVD and do something else?
Hate to resort to cliches, but it depends upon the kid. My little girl can’t stand anything violent happening to animals, but she loved Fantastic Four.
As a quick and dirty rule, for pre-school kids “too scary” depends more upon what is being shown than the actual plot.
Also, there are “interperative” things that you have to watch for. Sophie went through this two-week thing where she was scared of flies. It wasn’t any big thing until this locally-made commercial came on that had this big fake-looking fly buzzing around the screen.
My husband watched horror movies (such as The Omen, The Exorcist, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) with his older cousins starting when he was about four and loved them. To this day he denies the existence of a “scary” movie. He knew it was all make-believe going in and was fine. The only thing he’s ever been afraid of is heights.
I’m not suggesting those movies would be good for all kids, but everything depends on the individual kid.
“‘One more step, Mr Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out! Dead men don’t bite, you know,’”
Jim Hawkins to Israel Hands in “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)
I might not be the best person to answer this because my parents allowed me to watch Poltergeist when I was a wee lad of six. The movie scared me but I don’t recall having any nightmares about it. On the other hand I watched Silver Bullet when I was a bit older and that one gave me nightmares later that night. Who can say what will give a kid trouble and what won’t?
I think it is somewhat important for children’s programs with violent content to show the consequences of that violence. Television programs such as GI Joe and the A-Team typically didn’t show anyone harmed when fists were thrown and bullets were in the air. On the flip side, in Treasure Island we have descriptions of a bloody deck where Israel Hands killed a fellow pirate, the description of said corpse with a frozen smile on his face, and of course the death of Israel Hands when Jim Hawkins shoots him with two pistols.
In some ways I think you’ve just got to see how your child reacts to certain stimuli and then see if he can handle more. I laughed when my father told me the monkeys in The Wizard of Oz scared him as a child. My nieces have been scared at certain parts of Labyrinth and during the Harry Potter movies. All in all a little fear isn’t a bad thing.
Yeah, I’m afraid I also have to chime in with “it depends on the kid”. My son was/is a pretty sensitive viewer, but I admit I’ve been surprised a few times at what bothers him. He was HORRIFIED at the “Flesh Fair” scene in AI - tears streaming down a 9 year old’s face in a public movie theater horrified - but he’s been a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series, not the movie) since he was in kindergarten (with a little judicious editing by mom in the later seasons).
But you bring up an interesting point - yes, I think it matters a lot whether you’re seeing something in the theater or at home. There are some things (Blade, or the Matrix movies) that we would absolutely not let him see in the theater because they’re just too overwhelming. At home, on a tiny screen, with pause-for-commentary-by-mom/dad/kid and fast forward for the really bad bits, they’re not nearly so bad.
(He loves AI, by the way, and watches it on DVD all the time - but he still skips that chapter, even now that he’s 13.)
I do think that scary stories and books are important for a kid’s emotional and moral development (see Bettleheim for more on that topic), but I do think there’s a difference between seeing scary images on a screen and imagining them for the very young. I don’t know that I think seeing them is good before 5 or so. Then again, I agree with the APA’s recomendation that children under 2 see no “screen time” (television, movies, dvd’s, etc.) at all, but most parents don’t seem to agree. I think preschoolers should be limited to no more than an hour of viewing at a time, and no one under the age of 7 should be watching anything more intense than Barney alone - always with a parent who can talk to them about what they’re seeing or feeling. So that’s my 2 cents, probably more conservative than most.
I was exposed to horror starting around age 5 and the fact that my home is filled to the rafters with skulls, devils and monsters don’t have anything to do with it, lol!
I think I just really liked having the crap scared out of me as a kid. I thought it was fun.
I still remember being about 7 or 8 and watching our b&w tv at night with the lights off and it was the first time I had seen the Bride of Frankenstein. I was frozen watching the scene where the dude falls in the burnded ruins of the windmill and as he wade around trying to find a way out, we see the burnt monster come out of the shadows with reflections of light shimmering on the stone walls. This is tame by today’s standards, but I still can remember how scared I was at what was about to happen. And I still find light reflecting from water onto stone to be unsettling. While this didn’t do any damage , that I am aware of, I remember how I would bawl at seeing images of starving kids in those “for the price of a cup of coffee” commercials. My parents couldn’t console me at all. That was true horror to me even as a child.
So what does it mean? Hell if I know. Except everyone is different. My friend’s daughter is 8, she loves to dress up as zombie and pretends to eat your leg, but was hiding under her coat during most of Batman Begins.
It depends (yes, that’s a new sentiment here). I know an 8-yo girl who can’t take the slightest hint of suspense. She’s afraid to read the Laura Ingalls Wilder books after the first one because she knows the dog dies at some point. She’s a little on the sensitive side.
My kid (5) is tougher, but I am very careful with what my kids watch on the whole. We really liked Curious George recently (so refreshing! a children’s movie that is actually for children!). I firmly believe in the value of folk and fairy tales, and that the old versions are better, however. It’s OK with me when Cinderella’s sisters lose bits of their feet or Red Riding Hood gets eaten–but movies are different than books.
Chidlren are naturally violent in a lot of ways, and facing their feelings about violence and death is best, but I don’t think that scary movies is the way to do that. I’m more inclined to let them read books, tell stories, and have pretend guns than to let them watch horror movies.
Ghostbusters scared the bejeebers out of me at age 10. It was the librarian that did it, the rest was fine. I love the movie–but I still don’t like that bit.
