Guest-blogger, Jo Berry, is a film critic and mum of one who runs the website movies4kids.co.uk. Here, she talks about the powerful impact that fear has on children’s enjoyment of films, and how it’s not always the obvious baddie that gets the adrenaline pumping…
A few months ago, I had to go to a press screening of Kung Fu Panda 2. My six-year-old, D, happily came along to see the further adventures of Po the panda. Fast-forward to an hour and a half later: while exiting the cinema he loudly announced (in front of the film’s publicist, no less) that Kung Fu Panda 2 was, in fact, “the worst movie I have ever seen.”
Alas, D’s forceful reaction was not the first sign that he’s following in mummy’s film critic footsteps – it was due to the fact that, unbeknownst to me, he had spent the final half of the movie absolutely petrified by the bad guy (a rather nasty peacock voiced by Gary Oldman).
After I had asked him why he hadn’t just told me he wanted to leave the movie when he got scared (his answer – he wanted to stay and make sure Po was okay at the end), I started to think about kids and what scares them when they’re watching movies.
D, for example, has sat through the 12-certificate Transformers movies (I hasten to add I vetted them first), unfazed by the robots bashing each other to bits and the possible annihilation of the Earth, but had to be taken out of Tangled because he was frightened by the old lady who kidnaps Rapunzel.
And, having seen it at a screening, D now refuses to watch Madagascar 2 again at home – because the flashback of baby Alex the lion being snatched from his parents upsets him too much.
Children being taken from their parents is quite a common theme in kids’ movies (are filmmakers twisted, or what?). So when I asked some of my thirty- and forty-something friends what movie moment petrified them as tots, I wasn’t surprised that they all came back with the same example: the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Clearly we’ve all been scarred for life by that one.
Another common movie theme guaranteed to give us all the willies is kids losing a parent. Even Michael Winner, director of Death Wish, admitted that Disney’s Bambi was “the most frightening film for me as a child. The idea that they had shot Bambi’s mother would keep me awake at night.” And it’s not the only Disney movie to feature a dead parent – there’s The Lion King, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs and Finding Nemo, to name just three.
Of course, not every childhood fear makes sense. We can all understand why Cruella De Vil or the evil Queen from Snow White is creepy but I’m not sure what Freud would make of a friend of mine who was petrified by Sooty and Sweep as a kid.
And my scary movie moment? It’s not the death of Bambi’s mum, the Wicked Witch from The Wizard Of Oz, or even Maleficent the sorceress from Sleeping Beauty that kept me up at night as a child.
Nope, it was the sight of Olivia Newton John singing while teetering unconvincingly on roller skates in the 1980 musical Xanadu, which I witnessed with horror at the tender age of 10. Even now, the sound of ELO’s theme song (“A place, where nobody dared to go, a love that we came to know…”) has me diving behind the sofa, screaming “nooooooo!”…
–Jo Berry, www.movies4kids.co.uk
Movies4kids has a database of over 1,000 reviews of films aimed at kids, teens and families, and also reviews the latest cinema and DVD releases.
About Holly Seddon
Holly Seddon is a writer, editor and community consultant and helped launched the community for Adoption UK, which won charity website of the year just 9 months later. She also writes a music blog.