MovieChat Forums > General Discussion > Movies you saw at a too-young age (and i...

Movies you saw at a too-young age (and its effects on you)


I saw a lot of movies that I probably shouldn't have in the eighties as a little kid, mostly because my father was a huge movie enthusiast. As a parent myself, I think about waiting longer to introduce the same movies to my kids, even though I believe it had no long term effect on me (how someone can truly make that conclusion about themselves may be questionable, but I believe so).

But there are cases where it causes problems. We know a kid at school who is 6 and is into Hellraiser, Pennywise / It, Freddie / Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason / Halloween, etc, and he has a few tendencies to get violent when he doesn't get what he wants. He has made threats to other kids about cutting their throat, putting plastic bags over their heads, strangling them and so on.

The only thing I can recall from watching scary movies as a little kid is freaking out about flashing lights in the sky during thunderstorms because of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and being afraid to go into a dark room because of Alien. I was also afraid to watch An American Werewolf in London again until my 30s because I saw it just as a little kid and remember it vividly - the stalking scenes in the field at night, the transformation, the subway scene.

Those things wore off soon enough but I'm curious to know what other things affected others at a young age?

reply

Not movies but I used to be obsessed with Mortal Kombat video games when I was young (in particular Mortal Kombat 2). I was around 7 years old when I started playing them. So, around 1995. I've watched the Mortal Kombat movies too (looking back at it now, those movies were AWFUL!!!, lol).

Parents didn't care. Yet, I didn't turn out violent like some idiot politicians would say.

reply

Movies and videogames won't do shit because we know they're fake. But real clips like war, terrorism, etc. on the Internet may shake up your psyche. I watched a clip about the beheading they done somewhere in the Middle East. Just looking at how the victims behave while being slaughtered traumatise me because it's not a movie, it's real world. I couldn't sleep well for weeks!

reply

MK was a decent movie.

reply

Lol. No it wasn't.

reply

I rate it.

reply

i was playing gta as a kiddo but i dont think uit was a bad thing i have great memories of it

reply

I didn't care much for the movie either but it had a sick techno track by The Immortals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAwWPadFsOA

Produced by the legendary Oliver Adams.

reply

I saw my first Godzilla movie when I was about five, and i started whining because I thought that thousands of people were dying when the monster crushed apartment buildings with his mighty feet. By grace school, I had learned to love monster movies, and snuck out of bed on Saturday nights to watch "Creature Features" whenever possible.

Which is how I came to see "Night of the Living Dead" when I was still under age ten. That one scared the living shit out of me and I had zombie nightmares for decades*, although i don't think they started right after I saw the film. I don't think that i had any lingering trauma from watching zombie movies or anything, I just think that my deep subconscious used the zombie story format to express some emotional issue. And it would be "NotLD" that my subconscious used as a template, I've never much liked zombie movies and haven't seen that many.


- - -
* I actually put a stop to the zombie nightmares with my one lucid dream ever.

reply

One of my kids saw Night of the Living Dead at a very young age and still comments about how scared it made her. And I think she was older than you when you saw it.

reply

I saw Frankenstein, (1931), when I was about 6 and it scared me to death.

reply

Robocop, it's rated R. But all kids watch Robocop at the time.

reply

I was shocked that at a boys 10th birthday party, the parents put it on. R movie!

reply

In hindsight, it's actually all right. It's just a robot pew pew movie.

reply

I saw Robocop as soon as it hit video stores and the next day at school we were all running around being ED-209s and RoboCop at play time.

reply

Jaws when I was 8 or 9.

First time exposed to such violence on screen. (Cable was much more tame in the 1970's)

Freaked me out for a long time. Scared of the dark, burglars, weird things that didn't have to do with water.

reply

Me too. I was terrified of oceans after Jaws. I still swam in them, but the back of my head I kept thinking I'm gonna get chomped.

I'll toss in Poltergeist. I saw that in the theater when I was like 10. Jesus the doll, the tree, the guy pealing his #@#$ing face off, the bodies in the pool...

reply

The 🤡 yes..I was a bit older but still, Speilberg really has some talents.

reply

Oh yeah, Jaws. I saw this as a kid a decade after it was made and for at least another decade I always kept the shark thing in the back of my mind when swimming in the ocean. Every week there seems to be a new shark attack on a surfer here in Australia lately.

reply

Than there was this 1970's TV intro to a chiller/thriller movie (I think this inspired Michael Jackson). A WPIX intro to the scary movie.

Freaked me out big time as a 7 year old.

https://youtu.be/Ux3laLkueZk

reply

The Omen when my babysitter decided to let me watch it with her when I was about 9 or 10 years old.

I think the music scared me the most.

reply

I was likely traumatized when my brother took me to see "The Crawling Hand" when I was about 6. It was about a dismembered hand of a murderer strangling people in their sleep. I literally spent years protecting my throat while I slept by pulling the covers over me and placing my hands in front of my throat as a self-defense while I slept.

reply

“ I literally spent years protecting my throat while I slept “

Wow! That’s crazy. I had a similar thing going on for a while too. I saw a movie, but I don’t remember the name, where a lady gets stabbed through the back of her seat during a movie. For a long time as a kid I remember not leaning back in seats in movie theaters.

Edit: the movie was: He Knows Your Alone (1980).

reply

That reminds me of a cockroach-infested movie theater I used to attend. I was afraid to leaning back, touching the armrests or having my feet on the sticky floor. They usually kept the lights turned down, but once they turned the lights on and there were roaches crawling on the seats all around me. Yikes! I stopped going until they fixed their infestation problem.

I've been to theaters with huge rats, too. I'd keep my feet off the floors.

reply