Fond Remembrances of Cinematic Child Abuse

[colinr0380]

I agree on the taping thing. I still remember pressing a microphone to the TV speakers, synching up the video and trying to play and pause the tape at the right point to capture the music. I've actually still got some of the tapes. They are quite fun to listen to as every bump, drop out or choice of music usually has a story behind it!

And I still have a tape of a comedy skit/defamation of a literary classic recorded with two school friends who I think were very upset by having been forced to read Arthur Miller's The Crucible as part of their English Literature set texts for some reason and were in need of some means to let off steam. I can't bring myself to listen to it but remember having been a sort of the foil to their antics since I hadn't studied the play myself at that time. It certainly wasn't any intellectually rigorous critique of the text though - mostly I just remember reading the play in a variety of funny voices and there being a lot of Winona Ryder jokes since the film was coming out at around that time.

[Jonathan S]

the only film that ever truly distressed me (so much so that I had to take the next day off school) was MGM's supposedly wholesome family film The Yearling - which I still consider the most emotionally sadistic film I've ever seen. So much for ratings systems

I often ponder just what the deal is with these supposedly kid-friendly films such as YEARLING and OLD YELLER that are about some child & his/her pet & end with the animal being kiilled off. It's just plain sick, imho.

Then all death is sick I suppose.

I can see an argument for it being a way to expose a child to the inevitable concept of death itself. I don't know if I agree with that, but I would throw that out there to ponder.

For me, as a child, the problem with The Yearling was not so much the death of the animal but that the boy in the film is

SpoilerShow

practically forced by his own family to kill his (healthy) pet himself and that the film celebrates this as a rite of passage. It's rather like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy the only way to get back to Kansas is to shoot Toto - and that film climaxing with her doing it! The Yearling certainly intensified the guilt I felt at having (terminally ill) family pets "put to sleep" - even though in those cases it was for their own good.

The Yearling may well be a valid drama for its particular setting, but I think its message must be very confusing and unnecessarily harsh for most children. In the UK at least, there is too much emphasis, in my opinion, on shielding children from "adult" material which is often so far removed from their own reality and concerns that it would be unlikely to have any impact on them for good or ill.

[HarryLong]

Then all death is sick I suppose.

Do you doubt it?

I can see an argument for it being a way to expose a child to the inevitable concept of death itself. I don't know if I agree with that, but I would throw that out there to ponder.

Maybe if the pet died a natural death of old age, but the deer in THE YEARLING has to be shot - as I recall just because it's too old to be hanging around the house or something - and Old Yeller has to be shot cause he's gotten rabies.
I understand you suggestion about not shielding kids from the facts of life, including death, but i can't think of any kid (including me) who wasn't traimatized by these films. And I certainly was introduced to the concept of death at around age 5 when my Great Grandmother, who lived with us, died in her sleep in the attic bedroom.

[fiddlesticks]

the deer in THE YEARLING has to be shot - as I recall just because it's too old to be hanging around the house or something

The deer has to be shot

SpoilerShow

because it's a friggin' deer! Nothing the family does is effective in keeping the deer from eating their crop and dooming them all to starvation.

I've always found it hard to take this film seriously, because I grew up in farm country. Deer are lovely to look at, and many people think they're fun to hunt, but deer and farms or gardens go together about as well as Armond White and film criticism. That this family would allow the boy to keep a deer as a pet requires a suspension of disbelief that is impossible for a farm-country boy to muster.

[inri222]

As a youngster growing up in the 70's in Manhattan my parents had cable tv. I used to get up in the middle of the night and watch stuff that I should not have been watching. I would see stuff on public access like Ugly George, Midnight Blue, Robin Byrd etc. What really fucked me up was one night in 1974 when my 4 year old ass saw The Exorcist. I could not sleep for weeks.

[flyonthewall2983]

How many here thought "Head Cleaner" was a horror movie?

[richard_t]

I had a teacher who used to lend me all kinds of 'questionable' pirate VHS tapes back in the early 80's when I was about 12 years old for some reason.

As well as more mainstream stuff like 'Evil Dead', because of him I got to see Italian trash like 'Contamination' or the charming 'Don't Go In The House' for example.

To be honest I'm not quiet sure what he was thinking of and the strange thing is that my parents let me watch them too. Different times I guess, I can't imagine for second that a teacher giving out copied DVDs of modern day nasties to a kid of that age would last very long in their job.