[Weekly Update] Do Movies Still Traumatize Kids?

Welcome to spooky season October, when Montreal weather drops to 11 degree one day and rises to 27 degree the next day. Terrifying, I tell you.

Anyway, in this week's update, we'll talk about kids movies that traumatized children. But before that, as always, some housekeeping:

CHANNEL UPDATE

October Videos:
Both October videos are now ready to go. Our first video, one which I take jabs at bad film critics without naming names, will go live on the 10th. Our Halloween video, in which we review Kwaidan, will be published on the 24th. You can view the latter video now, posted on our Discord server. I do recommend giving Kwaidan a watch first, at least the first half of it.

Videos For the Remainder of 2025:
A quick reminder that November videos will not contain the proper Patreon credits, as they are being made this month, finalized before I head to China. November supporters will see their names in the beginning of both December videos. And if you support both months, your name will also appear in the ending of the video.
We have a review for The Legend (2022) and Godzilla Minus One (2023) lined up for November, before returning to Chinese cinema for a review of the best 2025 Chinese movies. Hopefully Dead to Rights will be released to streaming by then, and I can cover it by the end of the year.

Plans for 2026:
Our channel continues to dip in and out of the favor of the almighty algorithm, though performance is not significantly better or worse than last year. We are not sure if our channel will continue to be supported by sponsorships, which are majority of our income. In the event that we don't receive sponsorship supports, we'll once again experiment with longer videos, aiming for 30 to 40 minutes on topics that are much more in-depth.
One such topic I have in mind is, in fact, part 2 of our Journey through China. Since I'll be traveling to Shanghai soon, I'll be finding the origin of Chinese cinema inside the French concession, visiting locations that were important to early Chinese cinema, and explore scenes from Chinese and International productions. I'll be one long video focus only on Shanghai.

MEDIA TALK

Question: Do movies still traumatize kids these days?

That is not a jab. It's a genuine question, because I don't have kids of my own, and I don't really watch that many kids movies.

The thought came to me when watching Superman, when Superman pulls the nanites out from his mouth, and from The Fantastic Four, when Reed is being forcefully stretched to his limit. Both scenes contain a level a body horror that will stick with kids for a while. And it's pretty ballsy to do that, I think.

By the way, it's nice to finally see some movies that feel like kids movies but still entertaining for adults.

Anyway, while that is somewhat freaky for kids, it is of course nothing compared to children from the 80s and 90s experienced. Even ignoring straight up Children's horror films like Coraline, Gremlins, and Return to Oz, kids movie from that era are frequently freaky, and sometimes unassumingly mature.

Let's start with the mature bit. When I think of this, I think of The Brave Little Toaster, a movie about household appliance waiting for their human master to return to their vacation home. The film actually contains multiple deaths, including one appliance being dismantled. It is far from visually horrific, but the topic of death is no less frightening. The fact that this dark topic is wrapped in a cutesy exterior is probably not helping to some people.

Other movies that similarly discusses death includes My Girl, Bambi, Lion King, and Bridge to Terabithia.

But when we think of traumatizing moments fro kids movie, we usually think of special effect moments from movies. And this needs no introduction: It's the freaky eyes of Judge Doom in Roger Rabbit, the jumpscare from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and the face melting from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some of these examples are intentional, like the aforementioned Children's horror genre. Others, like The Dark Crystal, is just as perplexing to an adult as it was to a kid.

My question is, then, do these kind of moments and movies still exist, or are they now confined to the children's horror corner? A cursory search online yells no result on recent children's films that are deemed traumatizing. Although we all know how bad search engines are these days. It did, however, show me some new Children's horror films, like Nightbooks, a movie about a kid being forced to write horror stories after he was kidnapped by a witch. Just the premise alone oozes that old spooky charm, and I definitely want to check it out.

From what I understand, however, children's horror media these days mostly came from the Internet. With many horror games geared towards children, and SCP tickling that fear fantasy, the old "witch and monster" stories of Hollywood no longer has much appeal to curious kids.

But, once again, I have no kids. So that is just what I noticed as an outsider. So if you are a parent and are responsible for your child's media consumption, I'd love to learn more. Are there any freaky movies or TV shows that your child love? Do children still have an affinity for horror as we did back in the 90s?

I know this isn't much of an update. I suppose we can treat this as the beginning of a conversation. We still have a whole month ahead for horror related conversations. So, let's use this as a starting point, and talk more about spooky stuff.

I'll see you soon with a new video this Friday!