Shamelessly stolen from the User Questions section of the latest Cracked episode of Epic Pop Culture Discussion.
I have a couple of films that I wasn't emotionally prepared for as a kid, not really due to being incapable of processing them but simply because I was caught completely unawares that said films were going to be at all dramatic or depressing. Both the fault of my mother.
The first was The Butcher Boy. I was like 11 at the time I saw this and had already seen some intense films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Rambo and tons of other stuff with my uncle, but I knew what I was getting into when he let me watch those films with him. And they were also all generally war films very much detached and alien from my child's life in rural CT.
The Butcher Boy though was a film my dear mother left me to watch on my own when I was home sick from school with a low grade fever thinking it was a nice Irish film about a red head boy just like me. The film chronicles the insane period of a 12 year old boy's life in the 1960s after his mother commits suicide from severe depression and his alcoholic father is basically MIA. He gets into trouble for smearing shit all over the walls of his mean neighbor lady's house writing PIG with it and is sent to reform school where he's molested by a priest. He then has hallucinations of Virgin Mary played by Sinead O'Connor, returns home where his dad shortly thereafter drinks himself to death and he just leaves his body chillin in the parlor to be eaten by flies and maggots. He also talks to him. Almost immediately losses all grip on reality and takes the bolt gun from the butcher shop he worked at and kills his mean neighbor lady with it, smears her blood all over her walls like he did previously with his shit, decapitates her and tosses her head in pile of rotting cabbages to be found by even younger boys playing in the back alley.
So yeah that was not at all what I was expecting. My mom nearly died when she got home and I told her what it was all about.
The second film was yet again provided by my deranged mother, again from the local library. This film I cannot for the life of me remember it's title and it haunts me to this day, but it is again a film about young boys in the first half of the 1900s. All I remember from this film was a scene where the boys are tasked by a local Doctor, or some such, to go refill his coal furnace in the basement of his house and are told under no circumstances to go upstairs and disturb his ailing wife. But while they're in the basement the Doctor's wife comes down in her nightgown, propositions the boys for sex, they're all like ~10 and they bolt. They soon realize they forgot something in the basement and go back to collect it and when they get inside they find the Doctor's wife has hung herself right there. So that was great.
So what films or shows or even books did you unexpectedly get exposed to as a kid that you weren't at all prepared for?
I have a couple of films that I wasn't emotionally prepared for as a kid, not really due to being incapable of processing them but simply because I was caught completely unawares that said films were going to be at all dramatic or depressing. Both the fault of my mother.
The first was The Butcher Boy. I was like 11 at the time I saw this and had already seen some intense films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Rambo and tons of other stuff with my uncle, but I knew what I was getting into when he let me watch those films with him. And they were also all generally war films very much detached and alien from my child's life in rural CT.
The Butcher Boy though was a film my dear mother left me to watch on my own when I was home sick from school with a low grade fever thinking it was a nice Irish film about a red head boy just like me. The film chronicles the insane period of a 12 year old boy's life in the 1960s after his mother commits suicide from severe depression and his alcoholic father is basically MIA. He gets into trouble for smearing shit all over the walls of his mean neighbor lady's house writing PIG with it and is sent to reform school where he's molested by a priest. He then has hallucinations of Virgin Mary played by Sinead O'Connor, returns home where his dad shortly thereafter drinks himself to death and he just leaves his body chillin in the parlor to be eaten by flies and maggots. He also talks to him. Almost immediately losses all grip on reality and takes the bolt gun from the butcher shop he worked at and kills his mean neighbor lady with it, smears her blood all over her walls like he did previously with his shit, decapitates her and tosses her head in pile of rotting cabbages to be found by even younger boys playing in the back alley.
So yeah that was not at all what I was expecting. My mom nearly died when she got home and I told her what it was all about.
The second film was yet again provided by my deranged mother, again from the local library. This film I cannot for the life of me remember it's title and it haunts me to this day, but it is again a film about young boys in the first half of the 1900s. All I remember from this film was a scene where the boys are tasked by a local Doctor, or some such, to go refill his coal furnace in the basement of his house and are told under no circumstances to go upstairs and disturb his ailing wife. But while they're in the basement the Doctor's wife comes down in her nightgown, propositions the boys for sex, they're all like ~10 and they bolt. They soon realize they forgot something in the basement and go back to collect it and when they get inside they find the Doctor's wife has hung herself right there. So that was great.
So what films or shows or even books did you unexpectedly get exposed to as a kid that you weren't at all prepared for?
