The funny thing is, kids can find some fairly random stuff scary.

I was completely wigged out by the scene in Willy Wonka where the girl swells up and turns into a blueberry. It was terrifying.

They showed my 2nd grade class "The Witches", and there's this terrifying scene where the witches feed this boy the cursed chocolate and he turns into a rat with this terrifying head shaking thing. Oh man, that thought terrifies me to this day. But I've always been a scaredy-cat, so I probably won't show my kids anything rougher than "Care Bears" (which is still pretty freakin' scary!). Not because I worry about them, just because *I* don't want to have to watch anything too scary!

Haha, yeah--I can see how Willy Wonka and his Chocolate Factory can be scary--it was kind of surreal for me (turning into a blueberry), so you can understand the terrifying effect it has on kids, jeez.

TPS, there's this scene in the Care Bears where two or three of em have to make a trip to some kind of a haunted place--scarrry--I still remember that.

hadjiboy, sounds like Poltergeist.

My son is 11 and remains very easily spooked by movies/TV shows. I'd love to take him to see Coraline (a book we both enjoyed) but he declined the invitation, saying it would be too scary. The most recent movie we watched together was Tale of Despereaux. He found it much too dark and spent most of the movie with his sweatshirt pulled over his head.

The bloodthirstiness of many of his classmates sort of freaks me out though. I first became acquainted with it while volunteering in his first grade class room a few years ago. I asked what everyone was dressing up as for Halloween and the boys rattled off names like Jason, Freddie and Chuckie. I asked how they knew those characters and they had all already seen those movies. At seven. Ugh.

Night of the Living Dead. I saw it at a matinee when I was 11. It was scary and cool but when we came home to a barbecue all I could do as I ate my rare steak was to look at my family and friends and think "is this what YOU would taste like..." I still think that when I eat a steak.

Miko, I think the boat ride is up there with that scene too. There's no earthly way of knowing... which direction we are going...

TPS! My friends and I were JUST talking about that exact movie/scene last night! The Witches really is terrifying.

E.T. freaked me out when I was a kid. I refuse to watch it again to this day.

I'm glad it's not just me!!!

At seven--gasp--I think I didn't know who Chucky was until I turned thirteen, and Freddie and Jason, much after that, however, I'm still not sure if I know Jason.

Yeah, Poltergeist was the name of that damn film. Damn Steven for scaring me half to death...

The part in Willy Wonka & the CC that freaked me out were the coat hooks, which were these dead-white disembodied hands sticking out of walls. The hands would come alive and grab onto coats and hats.

Oh geez, Poltergeist. When I was about four it was playing on TV and I insisted on watching it with my older brothers, despite their warnings of "it's too scary!" I think they wanted me to watch it, using that tactic. I ended up so scared I insisted on sleeping on the floor between their beds that night, rather than alone in my room. That's the only movie I remember actually scaring me, though I think the part of E.T. where he's sick freaked me out a little.

I learned a few years ago that starting at the age of 3 months, my ex parked our son before a TV after I left for work and left him there to watch whatever video she plugged in that day. We had an auto-rewind VCR so he was confronted by the same movie 3, 4 or 5 times a day -- plus I travelled a lot.

My ex figures our son saw the first 4 Friday the 13th and the first 3 Elm Street movies a few dozen times each before he was 1 year old. We also had Halloween, Evil Dead, Dawn of the Dead and other horror classics of the late 70s and 80s.

Today, he is bored silly by most action movies, in fact, most movies in general, and he refuses to watch anything on TV. His explanation, "I've seen it all before. There's nothing new."

If you encounter him in Warcraft, be nice or you will be stripped naked or dead within minutes. THAT is what he does now in his free time. Something of which he has plenty. He finished all the homeschool courses a couple years ago, but he won't be old enough to take the GED for a couple months yet.

Still, I wonder if we raised a clockwork orange.

"Today, he is bored silly by most action movies, in fact, most movies in general, and he refuses to watch anything on TV. His explanation, "I've seen it all before. There's nothing new."

If you encounter him in Warcraft, be nice or you will be stripped naked or dead within minutes."

Ardiril, I could see him as an Alex but I can also see him as someone so jaded that he is disinterested in artifice and compassionate but unwilling to suffer fools.

But I would tell him "I've seen it all before. There's nothing new." is right but you still got to roll with the tide, if only for your own calm mind.

Kids can get wigged out by the oddest things. I was freaked out by a woman swimming in a calm lake in a movie, because I thought jaws would eat her (I don't think that it was the movie jaws at all which is the strangest part). I never liked Mumin for the accents made it hard for me to understand (finnish swedish accent). Storpotäten in "vilse i pannkakan" scared me and more of that dudes work got me seriously angstfilled, one where two "earheads" in black suits would have bizarre conversations against a steel background and very strange music. aaaarghh! also watership down had me full on sobbing every day for a week.

It wasn't a film, but it was some sort of weird TV show that I was watching in a friend's basement during New Years after we had spent several hours drinking champagne and painting each others nails with zero ventilation. It was a show all about how in the year 2000 that the world was going to end.
And it had things like machines and animals conspiring together to kill the humans and I remember a few things vividly, like a cat clawing at a child's face and a waffle iron pressing itself against the mom's face and a shredder eating the father's tie and....

*shudders*

Still scares the shit out of me now. I don't really do well around those apocalyptic things.

Hm. One time I was in the theater when some mom decided that Batman Begins was a good movie to take her 6 yo kid (she probably only heard of Batman by the Adam West series or something).

The kid was quite annoying at the beginning. "Is that Batman? When is Batman showing up? Is that Batman?", annoying enough for me to move seats... but my friend stays there and said the kid was really quiet after the first scarecrow scene.

I would not show my young children Jacob's Ladder or Angel Heart.

Hellraiser. I can't really remember what it was about, but I do remember it scared the shit outta me.

I think the Purple Smurf episode of The Smurfs scared me more than anything when I was a kid.