A friend posted a Facebook question recently asking for the scariest movie we remember watching as a kid. Nearly instantly, I recalled the horrific, blood curdling, heart racing, bone chilling scene in which a ferocious whale chased a young boy frantically rowing a makeshift raft through tidal waves of terror in … Pinocchio. 

Pinocchio. Compared to the horrible horror movies kids watch today, Pinocchio’s terror temperature is akin to watching the struggle of male penguins sitting on an egg. 

To the same question, my wife recalled the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz,  and I agreed those monkeys kept me awake the night I first saw it, too. Then, since my mind was attuned to the subject, I recalled the ape figure on the airplane wing in Twilight Zone. 

In that episode, a man returning home from a stint in the mental hospital looked out his airplane window to see what appeared to be an ape trying to tear metal sheets off the wing. That episode, “Nightmare at 20,000 feet” is listed on at least one website as The Twilight Zone’s scariest episode in its five-year run.  

William Shatner played the mental patient, well before his Star Trek fame. And the climactic moment, after he failed to convince anyone else that what he saw was real, came when he steeled himself to take one more look, to verify others’ doubts. He took a deep breath, pulled back the curtain quickly, and there was the beast, his face pressed firmly to the glass. 

I lived upstairs in an old farmhouse at the time. Each night after I kissed mom goodnight I’d climb the stairs to my room. In the dim light of a single bulb I’d pull down my shades over my south and west facing windows. The night I saw that episode, it took every ounce of courage in me to walk to my windows and pull down the shades. 

Pinocchio is a kid’s movie. Wizard of Oz is for the whole family. I had no idea it was already 20 years old when I first saw it, being produced in 1939. When those monkeys took to the air to find Dorothy and when the hour glass was draining its last grains of sand, my heart was racing, my pulse pounding. 

Pinocchio, Oz, and even The Twilight Zone were basically benign. I cannot imagine how young people watch the horror shows being produced today. Nor can I fathom how parents let them. I’m not a fan of the genre, I admit. I see nothing entertaining, redemptive, encouraging, instructive or beneficial to exposing children to things that will make them unable to sleep at night. 

We made that mistake with what I thought was a suspenseful movie – not classified as “horror” – when my daughter was young. We took everyone to see Jurassic Park, the box office smash of 1993 . Erin was not quite 12, plenty old enough to separate fiction from reality, we thought. Yet, she slept at the foot of our bed for a week afterwards, afraid because the velociraptors HAD figured out how to open a doorknob!

Horror movies may be your thing. I just don’t get it. There’s enough scary things going on every day in real life to keep me awake at night. I mean, just think…what if Donald Trump were to get a second term?