Now that we’ve hit mid-September, we need an ongoing horror movie thread. I would love to hear about any horror movie recommendations, but if anyone specifically has recommendations for horror movies that I could watch with my almost 11-year-old son, that would be great (rated R movies are fine as long as the themes wouldn’t be way over his head or as long as they’re not too disturbing).
I'll come back to this thread in the future, as I'm deeply fascinated with why human beings love things like horror films and rollercoasters--it's partly about ancient genetic responses regarding controlling fears, but it's also wrapped in various streams of human culture.
To your specific question, the variance on how kids handle these things is huge and beyond prediction. When I was about six I snuck in the back door of a theater and saw the film
Tales from the Crypt (1972), and actually had trouble sleeping for weeks after that. Some kids your son's age could possibly do fine with a given film while others, maybe even reporting they were fine with it, might have some real lasting problems. It's interesting that there has been a push against violence in media for kids in recent decades, but go back to 1815 and Grimm's Fairly tales, and tiny kids were continually told stories of intense, violent horror. Worse still: Bible stories! You need to just know your son well, as I am sure you do, and I'd advise seeing the films first by yourself.
To talk my recommendations, personally, the excessive gore of many contemporary horror films does not scare me. Likewise, I am not scared by supernatural stuff, especially related to things like exorcism. Instead, it's the really good horror films where someone is losing their mind, or thinks they might be, that can really scare me. It's not a panic, but feeling really profoundly uncomfortable and disturbed. So the horror films that get to me are usually more subtle things like
Session 9 (now much acknowledged as a masterpiece of this kind of horror) and
Pontypool, and other films where the character is worried they have lost contact with reality, or they are in danger of doing so.
Other horror films can get to me too (I always choose to watch them in a dark house late at night, to give them the best chance to work their magic). I really find very few horror films that are any good--that's the main problem. Also recommend the film
The Babadook -- it really had me laughing at myself later on at how scared I got a few times. It's a modern classic at this point.
Of recent films, I liked
The Heretic, from last year, and wrote about it and some others in the movies thread.
