Snow White, for one:
And Bambi losing his mother:
The original endings were often not so pleasant.
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
- G.K. Chesterton.
Ha. Yeah. No.
Hell, Hunger Games features children killing each other, and a teenager getting eaten by dogs. I remember when I picked up that book thinking YA was some sanitized kid’s thing, and based on the premise I assumed it would maybe allude to or threaten to kill children, but no, it’s a straight - up axe-to-the-face murder spree.
No, I shut my eyes during the scary parts. In the 40s, the juvenile and young readers section was not focused on fear and terror, like it is now, and children did not control the boxoffice.
I love Hansel and Gretel because it is, at heart, a story about two children who decide that the adults around them are shit, so if they’re gonna survive, they’d better look out for one another and take care of those they love. The children are constantly working to save one another from the deadly forces around them.
Set the wicked stepmother and the cowardly father and the cannibal witch aside, and it’s a deeply humanistic story, my favorite of the Grimms.
Even less PC, Injun Joe.
Spoiler
Tom and Becky were lost in the cave for a couple days and nearly died. After they were rescued, unconscious, when Tom comes to two weeks later, Becky’s father, Judge Thatcher, tells him the cave’s entrance had been closed by an iron door.
Thanks for reviving my memory, I remember that even more horrible detail now. As for the name, in my German kid’s version, the it was “Indianerjoe”, literally “Indian Joe”. Never knew the original name.
ETA: I’m sorry to have unspoilered your hint in the quote, I don’t know what happened, I didn’t change anything…
ETA2: I went back to your post and fixed it. It’s strange, your [detail] tags didn’t carry over in the quote.
I can’t recall why, but as a kid I really wanted to see Papillion, and my dad took me and my brother (9 and 7) one Saturday afternoon. My folks were normally pretty protective of what we were allowed to watch, but, perhaps because my Mom was preoccupied with a new baby, we convinced Dad to take us.
We didn’t make it past the early scene in the ship where during a knife fight (as I remember) a guy got his face slashed.
My brother and I were also traumatized by a “Chiller Theatre” showing of “The She Demons” one evening (parents must not have been around) which included hideously deformed women victims of the evil Nazi doctor. I can still picture that image and we realized we should turn it off.
I’ve never seen the movie, but I read the books (there was a sequel) at an very early age (10 or 11) and though not traumatized, I was at least very impressed and shocked by the brutality and inhumanity told.
The 1954 movie The Naked Jungle, which was about army ants attacking a Brazilian cocoa plantation. There was a scene where the ants are cutting leaves and using them as rafts to cross an irrigation ditch. A man who is supposed to open the flood gate has fallen asleep. He wakes up to find that his arm is being devoured by the ants. I had nightmares for a long time on that one.
I love that scene!
As an adult, the Deliverance rape scene gave me the horrors. I’ve never given that movie a second viewing.
I can’t even watch that movie because I know about that scene.
You see, nothing has changed since Red Riding Hood. So what they’re frightened of today are exactly the same things they were frightened of yesterday.
—A. Hitchcock
The witch in the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty scared the day lights out of me, to the point that I had to be talked at for two years to see the recent Malificent movie.
Not to mention the gory beheading, or the guy nailed by the flip up spike trap…
As a child I would not go to any movie where a dog dies. As an adult I won’t go to any movie where an aircraft carrier sinks.
On the non-trauma side, I remember being taken to see the Ten Commandments with my first grade sunday school and falling in love with Yul Brynner. (He had a magnificent body)
Yul Brynner
Imgine a 6 year old trying to find words to express “he’s hunka hunka burnin’ love”
(nitpick on the Richard Gere - close, because he was also an unpleasant character, but it was Tom Berenger)
Yeah, the film’s final images of Keaton’s dieing, gasping face flickering in the intermittent strobe light is one that can still crop up in my mind these days like it was 40-odd years ago. Absolutely terrifying.
From “The Mind” book (or was it the “Drugs” one?), there was a section on a middle-aged woman experiencing debilitating depression, with a picture of her sitting down with her face in her hand, an image that opened this 4 or 5 y.o. up to a world where big people can be in a really dark place too, and always considered it a forbidding, dreadful predicament as something to avoid.
Recently posted elsewhere about the movie The Light at the Edge of the World and its sadistic violence that didn’t go over too well for this seven-year-old. Its nastiness resonated with me in a negative way for quite some time. If I had seen Clockwork Orange at that same time, I’m sure I would have regarded that film the same as I did LatEotW, however, the former didn’t arrive to my neck of the woods until I was 15, by which time, of course, I was thirsting for any depraved shit that came my way.
Conversely, if my 15 y.o. self had seen Silent Running, I would have been laughing - actually no - just wanting to kill Bruce Dern. But no - I had to be seven when I saw it, and seeing, at the end, I think it was Huey, the robot, watering the plants, by itself, plodding along, for the rest of its lonely existence, no one else, just itself and the plants, as it gradually drifts into space…(as Joan Baez rubs it in with her singing) …resulted in it sticking with me for a bit too much longer than it should have.
For me, it was a trailer of similar ilk - It’s Alive.
Yeah, that stuck with me like homesick diarrhea slithering up my leg.
I’d figure, for your vieiwng pleasure, Mr. Atoz, provide the quite bucolic final seven seconds of your flick…
This resurrected thread gives me the chance to post about nine-year-old me having nightmares about evil little creatures living in my walls thanks to Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark. Poor Kim Darby …
Lots of people seem to think the killer doll after Karen Black in Trilogy Of Terror was equally scary, but no, those little whispering dudes making Darby one of their own nearly scarred me for life.
A couple of other very memorable TV movies of the era for me (while maybe not traumatizing) were Killdozer and Ants! (much better than the original nondescript title, It Happened At Lakewood Manor). Oh, the sight of Suzanne Somers getting devoured by ants in her bed …
TV movies of the 1970s were really something.