I was a bit of a scaredy-pants as a kid, and this was especially true when it came to Disney movies. I remember the first time I watched Sleeping Beauty, and I remember how terrified I was when Maleficent turned into a giant dragon at the end. Now, I’m not sure if I actually cried or not (I probably cried), but I do know that it made me much more wary next time I put anything other than Barney or The Flintstones (cartoons, not the blasphemy that is the live action movie) in our VHS player.
Now that we’re all more-or-less grown up, people tend to laugh at me when I say how scared Disney used to make me. They scoff at my childhood fear and gasp in amazement when I say I haven’t seen whatever their favorite childhood movie was.
Part of me agrees with them. Sometimes I do feel like I missed out on a huge part of my childhood. I didn’t watch Toy Story or The Little Mermaid until I was probably twelve. To this day I haven’t seen Dumbo, Atlantis, Pinocchio, the Hunchback of Notre Dame… the list goes on and on. My generation seems to share all these childhood icons, these movies that defined their elementary school lives, and, because I was afraid, I missed out on so much of that.
But then I watch some of those movies today. I watched Princess and the Frog when I was probably 14 years old — fairly soon after it came out. And I’m not going to lie. I was kind of scared. When Dr. Facilier summoned those demons or ghosts or whatever near the end… yeeks. It wasn’t fun.
And I know it’s not Disney, but I just watched Anastasia for the first time the other day. And I wasn’t really that scared by it at 19, but I can only imagine how terrified four-year-old Paige would have been. It’s based on the true story of a family who was killed in cold blood by a firing squad (not shown in the film itself, but still). The villain is quite literally a rotting corpse. His hand sometimes detaches, exposing bone. His head at one point falls into his empty chest cavity and rests in the heartless void between his ribs. And at the end he turns into a skeleton and then dissolves into goo (spoilers, I know, but this movie came out in 1997 — there’s a time limit on spoilers).
These things are — or at least probably should be — terrifying to any normal toddler, though maybe that’s just the scaredy-pants in me talking. Yes, maybe you were able to “handle” these things as a little kid, but I wasn’t. And I’m sure there are a lot of kids out there who weren’t able to handle these very frightening images.
I’m not asking movie companies to stop showing these old films or tone down the movies they’re currently making (though if they could at least aim for this side of horrifying, that’d be nice). I just want people to admit that these movies are scary, and to stop rolling their eyes every time I say that I was a bit freaked out by a Disney movie.
Image credits: animatedviews.com, foxsanastasia.wikia.com, artquiltmaker.com, lostinreviews.com