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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?

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An Aussie film called "Man of Flowers" it is a crap art film but has a fair bit of nudity in it. I was probably about 10. I saw heaps of films that I shouldn't have seen, back in the 70's and 80's a lot of action films tended to have nudity in them as well.

So violence and sex. That was my childhood!

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Hammer House of Horror and Tales of the Unexpected used to scare the shit out of me when I watched them as a kid, I'd watch them every week though!

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“I'd watch them every week though! “

Isn’t that crazy how being scared as a kid was so much fun? 😀

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Yeah, I used to love watching horror films as a child but very rarely watch them these days.

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I grew up with a mom and pop movie rental store within bike riding distance from my house. So I was one of those kids who spent hours browsing the isles of horror and action vhs titles, then renting things my friends and I were way too young to watch. I remember Faces of Death being a big deal when we watched it like it was a forbidden thing or something.

Nothing messed me up like I Spit on Your Grave. I remember we watched it at a friends house late at night and the long rape scene was Very shocking. We thought about turning it off there, but then the castration scene was finally enough. We turned it off and jumped on my bike and rode home feeling sick.

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Nightmare on Elm Street when I was a kid. I have insomnia to this day and still get flashes of Freddy Krueger’s face when I’m trying to fall asleep.

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My mother gave the baby sitter money to take us to the movies. She decided to take us to see Saturday Night Fever (Rated R version) because that's what she wanted to see. I was seven, my sister was five. For weeks afterwards we kept asking questions about the age inappropriate stuff we had seen. Also my mom got a new baby sitter.

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Threads 1984 - no matter how old you are, it’s still too soon to see this

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The Graduate. I'll never look at my friend's mom in the same way ever again.

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👍

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Strangely enough, the two things I remember being disturbed by came from a most unlikely source: G-rated Disney films.

One was the "Night on Bald Mountain" segment from Fantasia, which I saw at age four. That giant demon coming out of the mountain scared the ____ out of me! The other was the forest fire scene in Bambi. I vaguely remember that part. My parents later told me that I was pretty traumatized when I first saw it.

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