A message-board acquaintance of mine saw “two kids who had to be under five” at 28 Weeks Later the other day.

WHAT THE FUCK?

I don’t understand what the hurry is to expose your kids to this stuff–they’ve got literally their whole lives to watch zombies eat people!

I am the biggest horror fan you’ll ever meet, and yet I wasn’t one of these third graders who was watching Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th movies. (That was a popular-kid thing to do, oddly enough.) I was the kid who pretended to be asleep at sleepovers when the kids would watch Poltergeist II. I think I saw my first rated-R movie, The Lost Boys, when I was in eighth grade or so. I saw The Shining early on in high school at some point, and didn’t see my first real, gory, unabashed horror film, Nightbreed, until I was a sophomore. And that was fine!

I don’t know if these “parents” legitimately think their toddlers will enjoy watching horror movies, or if they think it’d be fun to freak them out, or if they haven’t given the kids any consideration and want to see the movies themselves and it’s cheaper to traumatize them than get a sitter. I just know it’s not the right thing to do to your kids.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 19th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.