My nine year old wants to watch It. This sweet, sensitive girl who is so afraid of even the idea of blood that I haven’t had the heart to break it to her about menstruation yet, wants to watch a movie about a child eating spider clown.
Her confidence about her ability to handle it feels a little forced, but she seems to really want to test herself. She said that some kids in her 3rd grade class had seen it, so I explained that the questionable parenting choices of others have no impact on my decisions.
It’s cute and new- that level of self-delusion. At first I was surprised at her interest in this sort of thing, then I remembered how much I wanted to see Halloween when I was her age. My older siblings were watching it and of course, my mother said no. So I would sneak downstairs and peek my head around the wall to catch glimpses of the TV.
I just managed to see Michael Myers’ face before being shooed away. I didn’t know that he’d been wearing a mask and my mind used that ‘face’ I saw along with the soundtrack and all of the screaming I heard to fill in the blanks of the story.
Because of this, for years I thought Halloween was a monster movie about pale lady with a weirdly menacing frozen face that killed teenagers by ripping their faces off to wear as her own.
That white lady’s murder face kept me up at night for a while.
Yet, that summer when my dad took me to my uncle’s house and I saw that my older cousins had A Nightmare on Elm St on VHS I decided I needed to watch it. I was still apparently trying to convince people of my bravery and anyway, it was in the middle of the afternoon and I reasoned that you can’t get that scared in broad daylight.
My father, wisely, said no. But I begged and told him that it was fine and that I watched this sort of thing all the time… I should point out here that I did not live with my father, nor did I see him regularly. But still my father, again- wisely, did not believe me. However, he did make me a deal. He said that he was going to show me one scene from the movie and if it didn’t scare me, then I could watch it.
The scene he showed me was the most terrifying thing I’d ever seen in my young life, but rather than admit that, I said probably something like, “Pffft- is that it? I’ve seen scarier episodes of Thundercats.”
Now, I don’t know that dad believed me. Maybe he thought this was a teachable moment and was letting me make my own mistakes. Maybe he didn’t want to welch on a deal. Maybe he knew what my mother’s night was going to be like having to deal with a terror-stricken child and was feeling petty. Who knows?
And so I watched it. I watched the whole thing though I was so scared I was nauseous. I got through it by telling myself that surely at the end, the bad guy would be defeated and sleeping would be safe again. But this wasn’t Thundercats and there was no hopeful, happy ending.
For days after this, I was absolutely convinced I would be horribly murdered if I had a dream. I ended up sleeping in my little brother’s room for like two weeks after making him promise to wake me up if it looked like I was having a nightmare, after all if I got ripped apart by a dream demon, who did he think would be next?
I sometimes describe my mother in this era of her existence as “long-suffering.”
So I showed Violet a snippet of It– (see bottom of post). I watched her eyes get wide and her hands fly to her cover her mouth, and when it was over, this child turned to me with an audible gulp and said, “So? It was just a little scary.”
And because I learn from my even 30 year old mistakes, the deal I made her was that there was no way I was letting her watch this movie, but I would find her her horror training wheel movies and we’d watch them together. She agreed and was maybe a smidge relieved.
Maybe if she gets more comfortable with gore, I can finally tell her about periods and spare her having a Carrie-esque shower scene in the future.
