How appropriate is Thimbleweed Park for an 8 year old?

You´re not alone! Yes, that could be one of the greatest twist endings ever, if that image wasn´t so iconic. Just to think for how many people I´ve ruined that ending now again… :grimacing:

However, this might be worse…

I think I somehow managed to avoid knowing about it before I watched it. I love bitter last-minute twists like that. * shudder *

Hm. Now do I want to click on that…

You know you will eventually…

Anyway, this should maybe be branched out to the scifi movie thread, how do we do that again?

I’ll get the thread back on track:

This is interesting because a 8 year old boy from my neighbours isn’t afraid of such things. :slight_smile: He likes Halloween though. So I guess it depends on the kid if TWP is appropriate for him/her/it.

Halloween the movie or Halloween the Halloween?

I also can´t imagine how the abduction scene could have given me nightmares at age 10…or even age 6. But then again I was always a little different…

The night before All Hallows’ Day.

Today everything is more “soft”.
My Daughter is three and it´s sometimes crazy to see what parents (have to) do nowadays.
Back then, things were different. It was more like, “Here´s your child, feed it sometimes”.
My Daughter is scared even on cartoons for three year olds, as soon as some animal wants to eat another or a bad wolf comes.
I once wanted to watch the Gruffalo with her, before I watched it myself. That was a big mistake…


I think we watched three minutes until she was really scared and didn´t want to watch any further.

I got a Commodore Plus 4 at the age of 8 and a C64 a bit later because the Plus 4 broke. I can´t remember how long it lasted.
Of course we all had tons of copied games that we all shared. We got everything that was possible. There was no PEGI.
I can remember games like Commando Lybia and stuff like this and it didn´t scare me.


(seems like nobody cared about or watched what I was playing…)
And there was this game where you could drown in a pool or get imprisoned together with a skellton. There was a Tentacle and a weird son that always wanted to capture you. And you even could cause a nuclear meltdown. - I loved it. :grin:

Today even fairy tales are changed. Cinderellas stepsisters don´t cut their feet to fit into the shoe and the frog king is hit by a pillow instead of thrown against a wall. So maybe it´s because everything get´s “softend”.
But it still depends on the child and his/her understanding of the “world”.

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You’ve raised interesting points.
Disney has a big fault in this. Most of the edulcorated versions of tales come from Disney movies.
Fairytales, until Disney, have always been cruel. There’s a beautiful Kafka quote I had cited somewhere else in this blog… something like “all fairy tales come from the deep of blood and anxiety and are intended to make mankind think about the truth”

Specially 1990ies Disney and on.
I recently watched Disney’s Pinocchio with my children and it is quite cruel!! There is even smoking, alcohol and gambling in there! :scream:

How did we ever live through watching Watership Down all the way through, just how?! :frowning:

I think like with stuff as Custers Revenge, context is important. Things like that disturb me more these days for their backround and intent that was actually is shown would have upset me as a kid.

My mother-in-law used to tell my wife’s little cousin the story of Little Red Riding Hood avoiding the part where the wolf eats both grandma and baby because “she might get scared”.

I mean, what?

It feels like I’m rising my daughters to be sociopaths. Kids must learn that bad things happen.

I remember when the cricket shouted Pinocchio saying: “Look! He’s smoking! playing pool!”.
And I was wondering, why it’s so bad to play pool? I used to play it, with my friends, for fun!
Never understood why playing pool was associated to gambling.

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That’s because you haven’t read the original book by collodi. That’s much more crude.
Look for it, it’s interesting.
All tales are like that. Ogres eating children, hunters who eviscerates wolves to retrieve girls, stepmothers who ask for their stepdaughter’s heart in a box.
And that was intended to be pedagogical.
I’m not saying that old fashioned ways to raise children are better, but the world is cruel. And Maybe it’s better to find a language to explain evil to children, than pretending to protect them hiding it.

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Pinocchio is the first book I’ve ever read. My mother says I loved it so much I read it again right after finishing it. And I was four years old - I don’t remember being emotionally scarred by it :smiley: but I was scared as f**k for a small pixel ghost in the gameover screen of a C64 game. Children are strange.

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I think there’s something about seeing it visually that’s more viscerally affecting than just reading the words. The same 10-year-old reads a lot of books with scary events, but they don’t affect him the same way.

Somewhere I have a Grimm’s Fairy Tales… the old tales, with all the brutality. I wonder how old I was when I read them.

I don’t know. Seeing can be reassuring.
If you don’t see, your imagination can go even beyond. My mental images of Bluebeard’s tale are carved in my mind more deeply than any scary movie scene I’ve seen as a child.

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I was actually surprised to learn that this story has been turned into film like a ton of times. But I bet none of those are true to the gruesomeness of the story (and it probably also wouldn´t work as good if you know the twist already) so the best way to make this twist would be maybe to make a bluebeard film but not call it that and have it the twist that it is a bluebeard film.

The first time I read the story, btw, was in The Shining (the novel).

Nah, nah, the feet weren’t cut. Only a heel and a toe.
Just think of Andersen’s fairytales. Bad ending for the little mermaid. The girl with red shoes. Or the girl with the matches. Brutal fairytales that teach something.

At least German speakers might also remember Struwwelpeter:

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OH MY!!
It’s PIERINO PORCOSPINO !!!
It was on my fairy tales book when I was a little boy!
It scared me !!!

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