Skitter Skitter: Is That Kids' Movie Too Scary for Kids?

By Martha Brockenbrough
MSN Cinemama

The first time I watched one of my favorite kids' movies, "My Neighbor Totoro," I kept waiting for it: that scary moment ... the upsetting image ... the hideous injury -- in short, for something awful to happen. For the duration of the movie, I sat on the edge of my seat, bracing myself.

The moment never came.

While there is a brief scare that the little sister has drowned in a lake, "Totoro" is a gentle and lovely tale about two sisters who meet a friendly monster. They ride a psychedelic cat bus to go visit their hospitalized mother, who appears to be recovering nicely. That's it, more or less. It's utterly charming, and a movie I recommend time and time again to families.

I thought about this recently when my husband mentioned his first viewing of "Curious George."

"I kept waiting for something scary or bad to happen," he said. "It never did."

What kind of media environment are we living in when we expect moments of terror in children's movies? Yikes.

Media violence gets lots of attention, as it should. Since 1950, there have been more than 1,000 studies showing that kids who see a lot of violence on TV are more likely to act and think aggressively.

Think this isn't your kid? Think again. The average child has seen more than 200,000 violent acts on-screen by the age of 18 -- 40,000 of which are murders. Even if your little Buckminster is below average, and perhaps has watched just a quarter of the television and movies of his peers, 10,000 murders is still a lot to take in.

But I think the potential of movies to scare kids is underrated, and maybe even dangerously so. Though there aren't anywhere near as many studies on this, one from 1999 showed that 90 percent of college students reported being really scared by something they watched during childhood or adolescence. Of those, 26 percent were still experiencing the effects.

These effects aren't trivial. They range from months' worth of insomnia to "steadfast and continuing avoidance of the situations portrayed in the programs and movies."

Let this sink in a moment. Because of something they saw as children, about one quarter of college students still suffer the effects.

It's astounding. If consuming a food or beverage one time could cause such long-term negative effects, we'd want it banned.

And here's the thing. We all know kids scare easily. Every parent has been woken up at some point by a child who's had a nightmare. The monster-under-the-bed/in-the-closet story remains an archetype of kids' literature. Even clowns, that birthday-party staple, have been found in a British study to be frequently scary for kids.

It's a wonder to think that no one has yet conceived a study on the terror capacity of Santa, who not only dresses in big boots and a blood-red suit, but also somehow knows when you've been sleeping, when you're awake, and whether you've been bad or good. Stalker! In all seriousness, though, do you know any kid who doesn't have at least one screaming Santa picture?

The truth is that most adults are incredibly insensitive to what's scary to children. We sometimes even find their fear cute. This could be because we don't want to think about our kids' suffering. We just want to solve the problem.

Or, it could also be that we've got our coping strategies down. We know what we're seeing on-screen isn't real, and isn't likely to happen in real life. Even when we reassure them verbally, kids don't necessarily have that skill, and have to rely on covering their eyes or getting a hug from a grown-up.

Even with these strategies, though, our bodies appear to experience the same reactions that they'd endure in real-life traumatic situations, this study and others have reported. No matter how many times you tell yourself, "It's only a movie," your body isn't buying it. Neither is your child's. It's one thing to feed yourself the cinematic equivalent of an unhealthy meal. It's another thing to do it to your child's growing body.

Put another way, if you wouldn't want them to experience something traumatic in real life, then don't let them experience it on the screen, lest you invite some of that same psychological damage in through the side door.

Hollywood doesn't make this easy for us. Obviously, kids are going to be freaked out by "Saw IV" or "Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street." Only a really dim parent would take a young child to one of those.

But even quality movies meant for all viewers, such as "Finding Nemo," are marred by scary images that added absolutely nothing to an otherwise great film. I'm thinking here of the scene where the scuba-diving dentist rears his giant head on-screen for the first time. I'm sure this made for a dynamic storyboard. But whoever came up with the idea should be forced to watch this G-rated movie with a 4-year-old. Many a parent I know spent the rest of the movie in the multiplex bathroom, consoling a screaming child.

This scene was most likely accidental judgment lapse. Other movies, however, have been made scary on purpose. A recent offender is "The Water Horse," an adaptation of the book by Dick King-Smith.

The book, meant for beginning readers, is about an 8-year-old girl who finds a mysterious egg by the shore and hatches it in the bathtub. The story has no villain, no suspense, no moments of great drama. It's a cozy tale by a former farmer, the author of the book that inspired "Babe."

For some reason, though, the movie changes the focus to the brother, makes him deathly afraid of the water, then has the egg hatch in a dark toolshed, where the monster skitters around just like the freshly hatched creature in "Alien." It's full of tense and creepy sound effects, and visuals straight from the Horror Movie 101 production manual.

Even parents who'd checked the rating and read the book beforehand couldn't anticipate these over-the-top effects. While it's true that the movie is rated PG (for some action/peril, mild language and brief smoking), there's nothing in the source material or rating that suggests the kiddies will be subjected to horror effects, a psycho-looking hunter, and an extended torpedo campaign.

I talked with Margit Crane, a child development specialist and founder of Rock the World Coaching, to get some real parental guidance about what level of stimulation at the movies is healthy for kids.

She had a great point. When kids are watching a movie that's too much for them, they cry, squirm, talk and walk around. This ruins the movie for others, but it's a clue to something else. "It means your kid is uncomfortable with the situation," she said.

Children's nervous systems aren't yet fully developed. The giant images and booming audio systems that make movies exciting for adults can be way too much for kids.

"It's an adrenal [system] assault akin to [the] potential impact of feeding your child a supersized fast food meal with a beer chaser," she said.

Crane wrote a blog entry after seeing youngsters at "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" this past summer.

"While parents may think that their kids can handle the situation 'because they see this stuff all the time,' if they would take some time to think about it they might notice an increase in nightmares or anxiety or a feeling of mania or exhaustion after seeing the movie ... if your children come out of a movie theater jumping around or dragging their feet it means ... the movie overwhelmed them. Overwhelming kids is not a good thing!!!"

It's almost as though Hollywood thinks these elements are necessary to get people into the theater. But the scary effects of "The Water Horse" seem to have backfired. Nearly a month after its opening, it failed to break the $40 million mark at the U.S. box office. It'll never become a classic, despite a fine cast. The scare-free and utterly mediocre "Alvin and the Chipmunks," meanwhile, has made almost $200 million in the United States alone.

Maybe what that really tells us is that the world is a scary enough place for kids. We want stories that make them laugh. We want stories that make them think. We want stories that show them what's possible -- in the best sense -- when people (and the occasional fuzzy animal) behave with courage and integrity.

But scariness? There's time for that later. Especially during a presidential election year.

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Martha Brockenbrough is author of "It Could Happen to You: Diary of a Pregnancy and Beyond." She's also founder of SPOGG, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. She writes a fun-with-kids column for Cranium.com, as well as an educational humor column for Encarta. Check out her Web site.

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