I was emotionally scarred by Bambi at a young age, it probably goes without mentioning.
My stepbrother was forced to take 6 or 7yo me to a drive-in movie, so I got to see the rape scene in Billy Jack while he and his girlfriend made out in the back seat.
A year or two later my Dad took me to see Jaws, and the shot with Quint bleeding out of his mouth scared the crap out of me. Had NO IDEA that could even be a thing!
Saw that for the first time recently. Excellent film.
I was born in 1983 and lived and died by VHS.
My earliest movie memories:
Police Academy: This film features the first man I ever had a crush on, Eugene TackleBerry. I was probably six or seven years old and watched this movie on constant repeat. I don’t even want to know how it holds up, because I can guess. I was attracted to TackleBerry’s earnestness, and probably the uniform.
Ghostbusters: My second girlhood crush, Bill Murray (my crushes get even weirder from here, maxing out at Nicholas Cage.) I maintain to this day that Ghostbusters is one of the greatest films ever made, and it has held up every time.
Howard the Duck: I don’t know why or how this film found me but certain parts I cannot erase from my memory, including that red haired guy having a gross long alien tongue.
RoboCop: I’m not sure which one, but it featured a guy getting his stomach cut open and scarred me for life.
I have vague memories of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Teen Wolf, etc. Basically I was raised on 80s trash!
Cartoons: The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go to Heaven, and An American Tale. Revisited recently with my son. They aren’t very good.
Then, much later, Jurassic Park, which is really a feat of modern storytelling (or was.) I saw it recently with a writers eye and appreciated it all the more. Not a single wasted line or scene.
When I was twelve, my mother took me to see Eyes Wide Shut knowing absolutely nothing about the film. We sat in the front row, wordless, as the horror unfolded. Afterwards she said to me, “I’m so sorry."
I never really answered how seeing movies affected me. My parents weren’t really mindful about what kind of movies I watched when I was younger. Between the ages of 6 and 9 I saw Poltergeist, Platoon, First Blood, Sudden Impact, Police Academy, Witness, and a whole slew of other movies that really weren’t age appropriate one way or the other.
I wasn’t the least bit traumatized* by Bambi or the death of Artax in the Swamp of Sadness. I am largely inured to violence on screen to the point where I don’t always recognize how graphic a scene might be when compared to other viewers. I find the violent scenes that affect me the most are the ones that seem most realistic even if they’re not particularly graphic.
*On the other hand maybe I’m damaged beyond belief and just don’t realize it.
Born in 1952. The first movie I remember seeing was Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in its 1958 re-release. All I remember was the dwarfs singing “Hi Ho Hi Ho” and the evil Queen surrounded by lightning bolts. I have not seen it since.
The same year my mother took my brother and me to see “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” I was very impressed and remember the experience vividly. A somewhat less vivid memory was the day my Dad took me and my two older brothers to see “Journey to the Center of the Earth” in 1959. It’s pretty talky and long and I wasn’t as impressed at that time as I have later come to be regarding that movie.
There were some odd movies in between I remember seeing. One of them was a re-release of “Samson and Delilah,” which my parents wanted to see.
Adding to my previous post:
1960 was a breakthrough year. One Saturday afternoon at our neighborhood bijou I saw my first science-fiction movie, “Forbidden Planet.” I’ve been hooked ever since. And the same year I saw Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Man, that is one great train wreck!
And as if those weren’t enough, I was introduced to Hammer Horror with “Brides of Dracula” and “Revenge of Frankenstein,” both within a week of each other. Neither was new at the time but were making the rounds at kiddie matinees. I was very, very impressed.
All of these sparked an intense love of movies that I have to this day. Though many years have passed, I can still be swept away by the magic of a great motion picture.
I think you started at max, with Tackleberry…
My earliest movie that I have clear memories of was Gremlins. I had recurring episodic dreams about them for weeks after that. Born in ‘80, so presumably I was three or four at that point.
If the OP means first movie in a theater, I have vague memories of Alice in Wonderland, Fantasia and all the standard kiddie stuff. My first “real” movie, i.e. not for kids, was The Poseidon Adventure. I was six at the time and was mesmerized. I still love it to this day, corn and cheese be damned.
My first drive-in was The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing. Boring**!** But, it was exciting hiding in the way back of my friend’s parents’ station wagon with blankets over us. I couldn’t tell you one thing about the film.
If the OP means first movies as a child in general, I couldn’t say. I grew up in a very movie centric family and watched a lot of films, most age inappropriate.
Wikipedia says:
Critic Jeff Walls wrote:
Old Yeller, like The Wizard of Oz and Star Wars, has come to be more than just a movie; it has become a part of our culture.
I’m not a Star Wars child, but the first movies I saw were Old Yeller, Wizard of Oz, and, as I recall, some musical with a scene in an Orange Orchard or something, showing at the local drive-in.
The impact was, every time some other movie references Old Yeller or WoO, I understand the reference. And lasting memories of flying monkeys…
I didn’t get to see Psycho until I was an adult. That, of course, explained a lot of movie and TV references I had been missing.
Oh, yeah. I saw that same re-release age seven or eight. I remember many of the bits but the two that creeped me out was the Evil Queen in her dungeon passing by a skeleton in a cell reaching in vain for a pot of water (she kicks it and the bones go flying) and immediately after your lightning bolt scene where she’s precipitated into an abyss (classic Disney villain death) and two vultures nod at each other then take flight to slowly circle into the chasm after her.
I haven’t the foggiest idea what the first film I saw was, but I grew up in the 80s and 90s so VHS was a big thing, either renting or recording off the TV. One particularly traumatic memory I have (I suspect childhood trauma from scary films is a common occurence) is my parents renting the VHS copy of Ghostbusters from the local shop. At the age of perhaps 4 or 5, the scene where Rick Moranis’ character is chased by some rock demon or other (a gargoyle?) scared me to death. I think it was the fact that he was banging on the windows of some fancy restaurant and the diners were either ignoring him, or just oblivious, that was so horrifying. Of course, watching that scene as an adult I can clearly see it’s played for laughs. Amazing how a child’s perspective can be so different.
We’re almost the same age but I’m 99% sure that was the one for me.
There may have been others, but The Empire Strikes Back is the earliest movie I positively remember seeing in the theatre. The opening scene with the wampa attack made me want to leave immediately.
Ditto. Snow White is the first movie I recall seeing in an actual theater, when I would have been not-yet-four and the movie was re-released in 1983. I can’t say that it affected me strongly as I already knew the basic fairy tale. The Evil Queen adopting her witch-like disguise would have been freaky, I’m sure and the sequence with Snow White’s presumed death was sad, but I can’t say anything about the movie threw me off or traumatized me.
I remember a lot from my early childhood, and the only other movie theater experiences I remember from that time was of my father taking me to our local public library, which had a theater, for Saturday screenings of short films. These were typically old Disney shorts (between the age of arond 3 1/2 and 5 I remember seeing “Donald Duck, Fire Chief” and “Mickey’s Circus”) or random films like “Monkey Tricks”, or National Film Board of Canada features. They also sometimes showed European imports, such as the Dutch cartoon “David the Gnome”. All in all, warm, pleasant memories.
There was one cartoon short they showed, though, that stayed in my mind as one of those “weird trippy childhood memories - did I actually see that?”-type fims. It was a story about a young girl who liked to sing. She lived with her strict grandmother who kept pulling her ears, causing them to stretch to the size of an elephant’s. My last memory of this cartoon was of the girl running away from home, going to the woods to sing to the animals, and the grandmother missing her. Many years later - as in around four years ago, someone on a message board identified this for me. It was a Czech short children’s film called “Long-Eared Cecily”. The way the story ended was that the girl - Cecily - formed a band with some elephants who would accompany her singing with their trunks, and they started touring the world. She was reunited with her father and her grandmother when her band came to perform in their village. This cartoon would originally have been shown as a pre-bedtime cartoon on Czechoslovak TV. I now live in the Czech Republic and no one I spoke to remembers seeing it. Perhaps it didn’t have a long run.
My next memories of my parents taking me to the movies are of seeing The Smurfs and the Magic Flute - again, pretty easy fare - and then Disney’s The Rescuers, during its December 1983 re-release, preceeded by the short Mickey’s Christmas Carol. I recall the latter cartoon confusing me. As for the Rescuers, I had the storybook version, and I ended up preferring that one, as the actual movie was rather gritty in places.
I wouldn’t disagree; speaking just for myself, I don’t think there was much that traumatised me as a kid, though there were definitely things I saw from time to time that spooked or scared me. That said, we tend to use the term “traumatise” quite liberally nowadays, and quite frankly, I don’t know where to draw the line between being spooked a bit (as I was by some of the strange psychedelic shapeshifting that occurred in some old Sesame Street sketches) and being properly traumatized.
The first time I remember being seriously freaked out by a piece of children’s media was at the age of four, when my junior kindergarten teacher showed us a short cartoon film made by the Canadian production company Nelvana called The Devil and Daniel Mouse, based on the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster”. It was about a couple of mice who are struggling singers and then a shady character called “B. L. Zeebub” comes and offers Jan, the girl mouse, a chance to become a pop star, in exchange for signing a riculously contract that binds her to give him her soul after she becomes famous. The scene when Zeebub comes for Jan’s soul and she flees him over land and water, while he turns into a vulture, a predatory fish, etc. was hardcore scary, and I question my teacher’s judgment in showing that to four-year-olds.
Then when I was five, my parents took me to see Return to Oz. That movie was probably scary to pretty much everyone who saw it, and many parents probably didn’t realize what Disney had in store for them when they took their kids to see it. The movie definitely stirred my imagination for long after, and perhaps not in a very good way. This, however, was an outlier.
You may laugh when I tell you what was probably the most traumatizing child-oriented media for me, but it was any cartoon where a character dies and their soul flies off to heaven or becomes a ghost and it’s played for laughs (e.g. Tom in the Tom and Jerry short “Mouse Trouble” or the cat that the Inspector shoots and becomes 9 ghosts in the Inspector short “Notes to You”). I think this was because the whole idea of an afterlife was new to me at the time, I was confused as to what I should or should not believe about it, and I think I didn’t like characters’ deaths being played for laughs.
Interestingly, there is stuff I saw as a kid that was more frightening / unsettling to me as an adult, because I now understand the implications of what is shown better. Ghostbusters is a good example. I first watched it when I was 9 or 10. I don’t think I gave the climactic scene where they almost get pulled through the portal into the ghost dimension near the end much thought back then, but when I re-watched the movie in my 30s or early 40s, that scene was positively freaky when I saw how close they got to being trapped there. I would say the same about the movie The Rescuers that I mentioned above. The animation in it is fairly realistic, and when I watched scenes from it as an adult, it struck me how close Bernard and Bianca, the mice that are the main characters, came on more than one occasion to drowning in the bayou where they went to rescue Penny. Also, there’s a scene I didn’t register as a kid, but as an adult is extremely unsettling to me - Orville, the albatros who brings them to the bayou, gets sucked into the engine of the antagonist’s swamp mobile, and gets ejected out the back exhaust, which emits a flame, topically charred and coughing smoke, but alive. In real life’ he’d be reduced to a bunch of burned bits (and the movie is fairly realistically animated), and realizing that makes the scene very much in poor taste to re-watch.
Even as a kid I loved Ghostbusters, but the library lady scared the bejesus out of me. I could never watch that part.
Born in 1950. The first movie I remember seeing was Old Yeller so I would’ve been 7. I have two visual memories: the scene where Yeller was being stiched up with a mule’s hair (?), and the close up shot of Tommy Kirk crying as he was pulling the trigger. I have no recollection of having been emotionally affected by it. My three years older cousin and I were left alone at the theater (those were the days), and she told the family afterward about how traumatized I was by the shooting: Nearly everyone in the theater was crying, she glanced at me to see how I was faring, and I was sitting there staring at the screen stuffing popcorn into my piehole like a conveyor belt apparently oblivious to the onscreen heartbreak. What I remember most vividly is my mother retelling the story many times.
My hometown, and the “city” I went to college in each had one mediocre theater.
But when I graduated and moved to Madison, WI in the mid-70s, the UW campus made up for my lack of movie experiences. They had “more film societies than anywhere else except Berkeley”, so there were always wild or artsy films every weekend (Th-Sun nights… I got to see every ‘Berrrrgman’ film one semester).
But they also had The Majestic… an “arthouse” theater that played two features every night. (Imagine, if you will, crammed into a wooden seat for Lawrence of Arabia followed by Dr. Zhivago… a butt-burner indeed). But only two bucks!
Aha! I found a “Watch all 100 of these films” schedule!
Born in 1964; I think it was The Jungle Book. I got the record with all the songs, as well as figures of the characters from Jello box tops. I still remember most of the songs.
I’ve mentioned this before, but my dad took me to my first movie: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
At the beginning, Jimmy Durante dies after giving half the clue to where a treasure is buried. With his last gasp, his foot hits a pail. And the camera switches to a POV from the bottom of the hill, where the pail tips over… falls… tumbles… clangs… rolls… and cuts to the next scene.
I remember whispering ”Dad, Dad – how come no one said he kicked the bucket?”
“It’s funnier this way.”
“…Oh.” . . . ? ? ?
.
I’d like to think that lesson (/conundrum/zen koan) helped shape a lifetime of humor and writing (and Dad jokes?).
I’m so sorry…
The first movie I have a memory of seeing in a movie theater was a color movie featuring ships and war planes fighting it out. I am now pretty sure that it was Operation Petticoat (1959), which I must have seen on its initial release. I don’t recall anything from that initial viewing (although I’ve seen the movie since), so I don’t think it affected me. I saw Sink the Bismarck! (1960) in the same theater not long after, and that had a secondary profound effect, because I found a copy of The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck, the C.S. Forester book it was based on, and that started a lifetime love of Forester’s novels.
The first movie I can recall seeing on TV was The Son of Kong (1933), which was middling interesting until I saw that it had dinosaurs in it. I was already a dino lover from my books and visits to the American Museum of Natural History, but this was the first movie I recall seeing with dinosaurs in it. Shortly after, I saw King Kong on TV, and in the downtown movie theater I saw Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959) and The Lost World (1960), both of which nominally had dinosaur-like creatures, played by lizards and baby crocs dressed with with glued-on spines and fins. I loved it, nonetheless, although it caused a brief confusion in which I concluded that there were two kinds of dinosaurs – those depicted in museums, books, and good dimensional animation movies, and ones that looked like hyped-up lizards (as in *One Million BC *and King Dinosaur and others) that looked like cheap lizards.