How of the sights and sounds of a child’s world contribute to fear?

Hi, I am currently carrying out a research project. I am studying this question, relating back to horror films such as IT (2017), Annabelle: Creation, and The Ring. Focusing on child fears such as clowns, dolls and even the use of nursery rhymes. does any one have any other ideas or opinions on this?

The use of something normally comforting and playful and associated with children as an element of terror is very powerful because it goes to the heart of what we think of as 'safe'. It builds the fear that if THAT can be corrupted then what hope do we have! Nothing is safe! Plus theres the element of evil things getting to our children which is ostensibly a more terrifying notion then evil things getting to us. Thats why movies like Poltergeist or Mama were so effective because they were essentially about innocent children being dragged into direct contact with supernatural forces. And that we MUST protect them! Of course, the twist in the movie Mama was that the supernatural force felt the same way.

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Farewell and adieu to you fair Spanish ladies...

Great thread. I believe visual input from movies to be the single largest source of nightmares for children, and ran this experiment to test the theory:

Me/child of the 80s watched anything i wanted retarding horror films as a youth. Result, plaguing nightmares all of developmental life.

When my daughter was born in the nineties, she was raised with a firm rule no horror tv, no crime scene tv, and any relative that plays them in my absence will meet with t Rex, and likely to lose a limb. Dad didn't play.

Result

The worst bad dream my child had in twenty years was a big spider. Not one ghost, ghoul, a big dinner plate spider.

Maybe she peeked around the corner during arachnophobia heh.

Eh. I have been watching scary movies and horror movies since I was a kid and I never had nightmares or turned into some wilting violet or psychopath. Heck, watching Jaws actually encouraged me to want to become a marine biologist, it didnt make me fear the ocean. And its not just horror movies that can scare (or scar) kids these days. Just about anything on TV could be an issue. One season of Toddlers and Tiaras in my opinion could have a FAR worse effect on a growing child then Halloween or Friday the 13th for example. Not to mention the news. So Id be careful with the helicopter parent approach of NEVER anything scary EVER. Its good to take into account what real life is like before making every attempt to shield our children from it.

That being said, I do regret showing my step daughter Baise Moi when she was in high school.

Clowns are just plain scary, because they look inhuman, but are still recognizable as people. Thus children are inherently predesignated to be scared of them....Movies have nothing to do with it.

mine was the possession/devil movies like exorcist. not that my rents were proud to show me that, I just got up in the middle of the night and watched it quietly in the living room with no permission, jaws and the like, cujo, didn't scare me.


Im sure its all a varied mix of outcomes ranging person to person, but its also prudent parenting. In no way is keeping ones daughter away from slasher and demon flicks snowflaking, its decent parenting.


It doesn't add to developmental psychology to be shown that stuff, not that the occasional parent doesn't mind inadvertently testing their own children's ptsd limit with free range tv approval.


100% you can stop nightmares of demons by not watching demons, fact. Id do it all the same again.


we prevented nightmares for two decades solely by practicing the old computer coder's limerick


crap in, crap out. veggie tales in, dreams of oranges and peaches and fruits come out.

This. My dad wouldnt let us see Jaws because we had a beach house. I read the book instead and was never afraid of sharks until I was an adult (after seeing some live footage of an attack). The only thing I was afraid of was spiders because where I live they're very dangerous and we are all scared of them because it was drummed in by our parents not to touch them so we somehow got it into our heads all spiders were dangerous. The exorcist scared my sisters who are all much older than me but I put that down to the malicious nuns at their school, not the movies.

Good point, CR. I was never scared of clowns until those idiots started scaring people at night. One day someone will pull out a baseball bat and go for them for being such idiot traffic hazards. Clowns like IT down scare me though, and I read that as a kid (promptly forgot it, much like the movies)

Oh I did have a nightmare once about a skeleton from the skeleton army in Jason and the argonauts which I saw as a very young kid but someone in my family was terminally ill at the time so I put it down to the real life situation, not the movie.

want to see a scary scary book they torture kids with heh? see this


search out amazon:


the tailypo ghost story


check that gem out. I think that scarred the back half of my medulla oblongata, its pure evil heh


substitute teacher read it to us in 84, 4th grade. I cannot begin to enumerate the number of hours sleep lost it would register as a medically significant event, not unlike firing a weapon close to my ear without me getting ready. only cuz I was a meager kid already jacked from watching the exorcist, that book holds record for the most scarring set of print I ever laid eyes on.


marketed right for kiddos

I've only recently seen The Conjuring and that idea of evil corrupting not just people but objects was very compelling.

The mention of nursery rhymes made me recall listening to Doctor Who audio dramas and the fact that the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons was used to sinister effect in both Night Thoughts (2006), which features a disturbing toy, Happy the Rabbit; and The Haunting of Thomas Brewster (2008).

I'd also have to cite The Babadook for its amazing use of a children's book and the character within – if it reminds me of anything it's probably the creatures from Slavonic folklore.

Wow, what a great subject! Iwould go for thr curtain of suspense.

I thought so too .

Early on in The Company of Wolves there's the sequence with Rosaleen's sister being chased by wolves. Toys from her bedroom are suddenly within the nightmare, but man-sized. There was a similar set up in Labyrinth wasn't there? Maybe objects from Sarah's room came into the story but I can't recall.

I try, but sometimes my gf isn't in the mood.

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5-time MoFo Award winner.

This is interesting. I won’t judge the parenting technique, though I believe children will ultimately get their hands on what they want, especially if it’s a forbidden fruit.

I had an unrestricted access to film and books. I guess I harbour a kind of self-sabotaging abnormality within myself, at least when it comes to seeking out the morbid. I never had nightmares per se, though since the age of about 16, I have been sleeping less and less and haven’t really slept “well”.

The childhood fear I remember was pretty basic - death - but to me that manifested in old age. I had lots of contact with elderly relatives and find that only backfired, as my empathy strings were being pulled at to no avail. I don’t think that fear came from horror films; until I watched Relic and The Taking of Deborah Logan, which are, obviously, very recent, I hadn’t really seen age demonised per se. But I can see that maybe that does stem from horror films/books in some subconscious way.

In the midst of all this, both horror and explicit erotic films (and literature, which I also got my hands on really early) only served to comfort me, if anything.