(Untitled)

[emmycantbemeeko]

Coraline was delightful and creepy, and I enjoyed it.

I am feeling bad though for all the little kids who are undoubtedly being taken to see it by mistaken or careless parents, who will be forever traumatized with regard to buttons, mice, and small doors.

Adults are sometimes very thoughtless in this way. A daycare worker made me watch The

Comments

[rainydaygirl]

Candyman was probably not the best movie for me to see as a little kid. I can still remember hiding behind pillows at certain parts of movie.

Thankfully I didn't see the Shining until I was older. It still creeped the hell out of me.

[emmycantbemeeko]

I think I was 13 or so when I first saw The Shining and I still check behind closed shower curtains when I go into a strange bathroom.

[mactavish]

The movie didn't come out until I was relatively old, but the book came out while I was going to a boarding school at a huge, old, falling-apart inn way up in the Sierra, where it snowed every winter. Scared the shit out of all of us who read it there.

[halloranelder]

I don't know.

Don't forget, some kids like being scared.

[cassielsander]

I would think that if kids never get scared then they'll never get over their vulnerability to being scared. But I have no real qualifications on the subject (other than having been one, and I wasn't paying much attention then).

[emmycantbemeeko]

Although admittedly I was an exceptionally neurotic and sensitive child, I was scared (really, really scared) hundreds of times over the course of my childhood, and each time seemed only to increase my capacity for being frightened in general. No scary thing ever served to desensitize me to itself, although occasionally I pretended to others that it had, as this seemed to be the general expectation, and especially as I got "too old" to be scared by whatever it was. I was also on more than one occasion forced to watch or participate in something frightening by presumably well-meaning adults who thought it would toughen me up, to no avail

[mandy_moon]

I'm glad you said so- another LJ friend wrote a long post about how horrible that movie was and how nobody should ever see it, etc., and I was a bit disheartened because I was so looking forward to it. Then again, that particular friend doesn't like anything so I probably should have taken her post with a bigger grain of salt.

I think adults are sometimes at a loss over what things might terrify a child, though. You never know- I liked The Dark Crystal and Poltergeist didn't scare me but I was utterly terrified by the guy in Sesame Street who painted numbers on people's heads. I was also scared of Charlie Chaplin.

[rainydaygirl]

Poltergeist scared me to death. I don't think the movie would have bothered me that much, but I looked JUST LIKE Carol Ann when I was five. I was terrified that I would end up trapped in the TV.

[mactavish]

Neil Gaiman has said that if a kid can handle Wizard of Oz (and flying monkeys) and Nightmare Before Christmas, it can probably handle Coraline. But when people ask him, "What will my kid think?" he always starts, "I don't know your kid." Some can handle this stuff, some crave it, some will freak out.

I think it's probably best saved for DVD for kids, though, just for the sake of being able to pause it and process, or turn it off and come back later, or walk away for good. People often won't take their kids out of a movie that scares them, if they've already paid good money for it.

[majellen]

I love how some parents think, "Oh, it's animated, so it must be made for children."

To those same parents, I tell them to go and do a google search for "hentai" when their children are in bed.

Usually changes their mind.

[mactavish]

I think daycare workers shouldn't be making kids watch anything, ever.

[emmycantbemeeko]

SO agreed.

My daycare was actually quite a nice one, but one particular aide who took over my class while the owner/teacher was on personal leave was a very bad apple, and watching probably inappropriately intense movies was a favorite pastime of hers.