Just don’t take the kids to see Bambi Meets Godzilla.
Or Bambi’s Revenge.
When I was a kid, my parents let me watch whatever I wanted, with basically no oversight, Alien, Retirn of the Living Dead, all the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street films. The gorier the better. None of them bothered me.
But I had to fast forward past the library ghost in Ghostbusters, every time we rented it.
I watched that on an endless loop from a very young age (still think it’s one of the best movies ever) and yes, that librarian scared the Bejeezus out of me.
I was also allowed to watch anything, and I don’t think that was a great call. I was a sensitive kid. I am a sensitive adult - still can’t watch anything with torture. My parents also would watch TV with the volume up real loud when I was trying to fall asleep and I could always hear horrible things happening on screen, but since I couldn’t see it, my imagination just filled in the worst possible explanation for those sounds.
Large Marge scared me as a young adult, and she scares me now.
Nothing in Ghostbusters scared me as a kid, though I have to admit, when I watched it again in the late 90s I was a bit surprised just how scary some parts were. The zombie cab driver? Seems a little intense for a movie they let all us kids watch.
You remember a Lily Thomlin movie called The Incredible Shrinking Woman? There’s a scene where she shrinks so small she disappears from sight in front of her family. As she’s doing so, she tells her family goodbye and sings her kids their favorite song, “I Wish I was A Little Bar of Soap.” I had to fight back tears every time I saw that movie when I was 5 or 6.
Sort of like this?
From my middle school years (up to age 13), I remember not only Where the Red Fern Grows but also The Grapes of Wrath, Lord of the Flies, The Jungle, etc. All of which involve gruesome deaths.
Not to mention deaths and murders in the classics, Heracles killing his own family, Achilles dragging Hector’s corpse around, the dual suicides of teenage lovers Romeo and Juliet, the murder of Dr. Robinson in Tom Sawyer, etc.
We also read about euthanasia in The Giver, killing for sport in The Most Dangerous Game and The Hunger Games, racist murders in To Kill a Mockingbird and Holes.
Heffalumps and Woozels!
Oh, and the Terminator. (Robert Patrick, not Arnold Schwarzenegger.) I remember begging my parents to let me sleep in their bed after that movie. But that was plainly not age-appropriate for me.
I mean, I’m a grown adult and that one scene in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) was… shocking. The scene where Scarlet Witch murders the Illuminati. I don’t understand why that movie was rated PG-13 instead of R.
~Max
P.S. I’ve always disliked dogs, and do not remember crying while reading Where the Red Fern Grows.
I remember being seriously scared by the (allegedly) children’s song “Abiyoyo” about a giant who eats people. (Which in my distant childhood memory was on a folksong album by Burl Ives, rather than the more familiar Pete Seeger version, could I be misremembering?)
I also remember a children’s song about Abiyoyo. I couldn’t tell you which version we listened to, it was a CD with bright colors on it. In the 2000s. I was just mentioning it to my brother last weekend.
~Max
My baby sister was scared to death of the Meow Mix ads where the cat sings, “Meow, meow, meow, meow, your cat asks for it by name”
Creeped her right out.
So there’s no accounting for where your fear lies.
(BTW, she has cats now, but I bet I could sing that in her ear and put fear in her heart. Hey, I may send her a message with that on 
Halloween)