You want grim fairytales, nothing can beat Hans Christian Andersen. Even as a kid I found them soul-sucking.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the one I watch as an adult and marvel at it being marketed to children.
It’s even stranger when you consider that Roald Dahl wrote deeply mysogynistic erotica on the side.
I think I made it through the first story where the guy inadvertently beds a leper.
I suspect it’s because the orcs are always orcs, but the skeletons transform from regular pirates.
But were they originally considered “for children”?
Is she scared of spiders in general?
She is.
Yes, although even then (1812) others disagreed. From Wikipedia:
The first volumes were much criticized because, although they were called “Children’s Tales”, they were not regarded as suitable for children, both for the scholarly information included and the subject matter.[3] Many changes through the editions – such as turning the wicked mother of the first edition in Snow White and Hansel and Gretel (shown in original Grimm stories as Hänsel and Grethel) to a stepmother, were probably made with an eye to such suitability. Jack Zipes believes that the Grimms made the change in later editions because they “held motherhood sacred”.[4]
They removed sexual references—such as Rapunzel’s innocently asking why her dress was getting tight around her belly, and thus naively revealing to the witch Dame Gothel her pregnancy and the prince’s visits—but, in many respects, violence, particularly when punishing villains, become more prevalent.[5]
There’s another thread about Dr Who. That is children’s entertainment and is screened here in the UK in the early evening. Daleks are old hat now, but those statues…
Well, I’m gonna talk about Coraline anyway. I first watched that with my daughter when she was eight or nine, because Coraline is such a strong character: brave, but also demonstrating her fear at the same time. My daughter was a little scared during the first watch, but also loved it.
I don’t think we watched it 50 times, but I’m pretty sure we watched it more than 30 times before my daughter moved on to other movies (like, say, Hanna).
My daughter is 19 now, and only recently got all her friends to watch Coraline yet again.
So, to the bigger question: my daughter and I bonded for many years watching other horror movies. She found vampire movies terrifying and wouldn’t watch them, but poltergeist/evil spirit movies didn’t frighten her so much, and we watched tons of those. I don’t have a good explanation about why one thing was too scary for her and not another, unless it has something to do with body horror, but my point is, kids’ mileage varies.
I told my 4 year old son that we all skeletons inside us and he was NOT ready for that information.
My parents let me watch a lot of straight-up horror when I was a kid. My dad took me to Alien in the theater when I was four. John Carpenter’s The Thing was a staple of my video rentals. My best friends and I would rent Friday the 13th movies and keep track of how many kills there were, and which film in the franchise had the highest body count. Didn’t phase me.
What did freak me out? The jump scare in Ghostbusters in the library. Jason Vorhees hacking open skulls like they’re casaba melons, no problem. Library ghost? Eyes closed, head under a blanket until the scene was over.
But, they do, at least in part because the studios actively market PG-rated films (both animated and live-action) to kids.
Many recent Disney and Pixar films have been rated PG (e.g., Moana, Encanto, Finding Dory, Frozen, etc.), as are a lot of the animated “family” films by other studios (e.g., the Despicable Me and Minions movies, the Shrek movies, etc.)
In live-action, the Star Wars movies and the Harry Potter movies, for two examples, are also heavily marketed towards kids, and many of those are PG-13.
The fact that studios market PG movies to children is just the result of filmmakers knowing more about what is appropriate for kids than the MPAA does.
As shown in this thread, some kids just don’t get scared by stuff others would be terrified of. I know that my 10-year-old niece is in a defiant stage right now where if we tell her something will make her scared or sad she says “NO IT WON’T” and then proceeds to laugh through the scary or sad bits, just to spite her parents.
I was a big weenie as a kid and our mom never let us see anything rated past our age, and never anything scary. Half of it was her shielding us and half of it was me saying “good, I didn’t want to see it anyway.”
I’m never surprised when kids don’t find stuff scary (cuz as an adult I still find stuff scary that other people laugh at) but I did think that some of the recent animated movies - Soul, Turning Red and Inside Out would be enjoyed by children. Not because they’re scary but because they are deep, and require some thinking. Maybe not Turning Red so much but the other two are “high brow” I felt.
But, I’m not a kid so wtf do I know??
The actual quote - and it’s completely apropos to the point - is:
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
When The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms premiered in Great Britain, it had an "X: Certificate, meaning “Adults Only” (The “X” rating wasn’t restricted to sexual material). I think I saw it on TV whewn I was five.
King Kong in 1933 reportedly had women fainting in the aisles. I find that a bit hard to believe, too, but the special effects were top of the line for the day. Eight years earlier, Willis O’Brien’s effects for The Lost World confounded reporters. I saw Kong before I was five.
The only movie I recall to have caused me any distress was the 1951 version of The Thing, which literally gave me nightmares. I got over it.
My wife is a huge horror movie fan, and our five-year-old will watch plenty of them with her (filtered for excessive violence/gore and sexual content). She emphasizes that it’s all movie make-believe, much like her father did when she was little. As such, my son is hardly afraid of anything on-screen.
He does jump at jump scares. There’s a good one in the Muppets Haunted Mansion special. After we finished it, he asked to rewind back to that scene and had me play it over and over. I think it’s a thrill.
He does have some trepidation about monsters and ghosts in real life, along with darkness. I’m working on that.
Oh, the banshee! I’ve heard a lot of folks talk about how that scared them.