Common sense tells us that the fastest way to break a young person’s brain is to show them horror movies and scenes of abject violence. But this is also a bit misleading: screen-based trauma doesn’t exclusively stem from an early diet of Freddy Krueger and Hostel. You could plonk your children in front of the most innocuous, PG-rated fluff and still give them long-lasting nightmares.
How else to explain the plight of The Independent’s Culture and Lifestyle desks, who’ve curated a list of the films that traumatised them as youngsters. Is there a Jeepers Creepers in the list? A Saw? No! Instead there are numerous entries from the Disney canon and a cosy childhood romance film that inexplicably ends with one of the young lovers being stung to death by bees.
Here are 15 films that, for mostly confusing reasons, penetrated and permanently altered our fragile psyches.
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
“You know Dinah, we really shouldn’t be doing this!” Alice says while shoving her entire body down a hole in a tree, which reveals itself to be a long pipe into hell. Disney’s original Alice in Wonderland is horrible enough to maim even the most psychologically sound of adults. It’s a hallucinogenic little fable that warns innocent kids not to follow their curiosity. Nothing in this film is even momentarily pleasant. Characters? Between a rabbit with an anxiety disorder and a cat with schizophrenia, they’re all demented. The SFX? Grim and nightmarish. The script? Cryptic and sinister. Only a real freak like Walt Disney would have the impulse to turn a Lewis Carroll story into a kids’ movie. Hannah Ewens
Babe: Pig in the City (1998)
When my mum took me to see Babe: Pig in the City when I was seven, she had no idea that George Miller had snuck nightmare fuel past studio bosses. I was wary immediately: gone was the warm glow of the original film, that I’d worn out on video already. In its place was a grim tale of animal poverty featuring an evil clown played by Mickey Rooney. I may have lasted the course but my popcorn didn’t. It was flung in the air as I shielded my eyes from a visual that is to this day seared into my brain: a dog, dangling from a bridge by his leash, struggling to breathe as his head is trapped underwater. Jacob Stolworthy
The Black Cauldron (1985)
One of Disney’s more obscure animated films, The Black Cauldron was also the first to receive a PG rating. Watching it today, an 18 seems more appropriate. Loosely based on author Lloyd Alexander’s Welsh mythology-inspired series The Chronicles of Prydain, it follows “assistant pig-keeper” Taran, who dreams of becoming a famous warrior, as he tries to keep his oracular pig Hen Wen from the clutches of the evil Horned King. The film is bonkers enough, made more so by a litany of oddball characters, a dark colour palette and a sinister soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein. In its worst scene, the adorable character Gurgi sacrifices himself to save Taran by jumping into the cauldron. It gave me and my younger brother nightmares for weeks, and haunts me to this day. Roisin O’Connor
Cabaret (1972) and the overall Liza Minnelli oeuvre
I’m aware that there’s something morally horrible about being lightly traumatised by an entire person – rather than a single movie or cartoon character – but good God, did Liza Minnelli bother me as a child. The spidery eyelashes. That breathless, somewhat uncanny voice of hers. The way she seemed to glide across rooms as if her legs weren’t quite real. Liza Minnelli was my Babadook, my Slender Man, my creature at the end of the bed. My parents had a Cabaret poster on our living room wall that I actively avoided looking at whenever I was in there alone, and to this day – and to the continued outrage of numerous people in my life – I have not actually seen Cabaret, so deep is my visceral aversion to it. (Joel Grey’s emcee can get in the bin, too, while we’re here.) Adam White
Chicken Run (2000)
The constant threat of death looms over Mrs Tweedy’s concentration camp-cum-egg farm in Aardman’s Chicken Run. The sombre mood is reflected in the film’s muted grey colours – like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers but with more poultry. As a child, it always sent me spiralling into a deep melancholy that only a few episodes of The Wild Thornberrys could remedy. Tom Murray
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)
There are few things more terrifying to a young girl than The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Robert Helpmann peering around every nook and cranny of the fictional kingdom of Vulgaria – prosthetic nose first – will forever haunt my brain. Not to mention his sinister skipping and eerie cries of “ice cream”. It took me a long time to trust a Mr Whippy after that. Lydia Spencer-Elliott
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
I’ve always felt the world was on the verge of ending. Yes, the climate crisis, war, and the general deterioration of society, but also because of The Day After Tomorrow, which left an indelible impression on my 13-year-old mind. Extreme weather events including snowstorms and tornadoes usher in a new ice age, changing the world forever. I have a general outlook of nihilistic optimism (“Why not do x,” I say, “the world is going to end anyway?”), which may have started with that film. Maira Butt
Free Willy (1993)
Sure, Free Willy has a happy ending. Free Willy tells the uplifting tale of orphan Jesse (Jason James Richter) who befriends the titular Ocra and releases him into the wild from the clutches of an evil theme park owner. It has a very happy ending. But that triumphant storyline was lost on me as a child – I was completely rattled watching Willy’s mistreatment throughout the film, which seemed to be repeated on Film4 every weekend. All I could think about were those bleak scenes of the killer whale trapped in a gigantic tank and/or fishing net, soundtracked by Basil Poledouris’s melancholy string quartet score. I found the whole thing distressing. I didn’t care if Willy was free or not: my brain couldn’t let go of those dark, dark images. Ellie Muir
The Last Unicorn (1982)
This cult animated classic from 1982 features an all-star cast of voices, including Mia Farrow and Jeff Bridges. It also features a plot so trippy and terrifying that me and my sister remain traumatised 30 years later. The story follows the last unicorn (Farrow) on a quest to find her brethren – but along the way she encounters a horrific freakshow carnival, a flaming, raged-filled entity known only as the Red Bull, and the bitterness of human mortality, thwarted love and bone-crushing grief. In short: it’s a lot to unpack for an eight-year-old. Helen Coffey
The Lion King (1994)
In the first half of The Lion King, evil uncle Scar warns us to “be prepared”, because he’s cooking up a truly awful plan. It’s safe to say that three-year-old me, watching the musical for the first time on VHS, was not remotely prepared for the emotional trauma I was about to undergo a few minutes later, when Scar chucks his brother, the luxuriantly maned king Mufasa, off a rock to be trampled to death by wildebeests. The words “long live the King”, which Scar hisses into Mufasa’s ear before committing lion fratricide, can still activate my fight-or-flight mode (Charles’ Coronation weekend was a difficult time).
Worst of all, though, is young cub Simba’s response to his dad’s death, desperately lifting up Mufasa’s paw only for it to flop to the ground, heavy and lifeless; his little cartoon face is horribly expressive. I’m pretty sure watching The Lion King was the first time I learned about death. Up to this point, my toddler cultural diet had pretty much consisted of wall-to-wall Rosie and Jim: great for learning about how canals work, less enlightening on, say, the pain of mourning a parent. And the other traumatising part? Those revolting squishy grubs that Timon and Pumbaa procure from under rocks to eat as snacks. I’m a vegetarian now. Katie Rosseinsky
Mrs Doubtfire (1993)
The last (and final) time I attempted to watch Mrs Doubtfire, the tears were simply too much. I couldn’t breathe. Sure, in that moment it might’ve been down to my hormones. But that film has traumatised me since I was child. Why? Because I come from a broken home and while I can’t relate to a father going above and beyond to try and get closer to his children (mine moved to America when I was four), it’s something I’ve never been able to separate from my own experience. Maybe because I wish I had a father who’d done the same. It doesn’t help that I’m also a huge fan of Robin Williams, who coincidentally lived in the same area of northern California as my dad before his untimely death by suicide in 2014. Now, on the rare occasions when I visit my dad, we drive over the Golden Gate Bridge before going through a tunnel with a painted rainbow over the top. Since 2014, it has officially been known as the Robin Williams tunnel. Olivia Petter
My Girl (1991)
As Kevin McCallister, the cherubic, eyebrow-wiggling face of the 1990 smash Home Alone, the young Macaulay Culkin was the toast of fledgling millennial pranksters. Evidently, as a six-year-old, I didn’t quite realise that he was acting; to me he truly was Kevin, this wisecracking, parent-defying scamp who could outwit Joe bloody Pesci, a man who had previously scared the hell out of me in Moonwalker (no, I hadn’t seen Goodfellas back then). Imagine my horror, then, when Culkin – our adorable little Kevin – reappeared as Anna Chlumsky’s heartthrob in My Girl (1991), only to be stung to death by a swarm of bees. Having dragged my parents to see it at the Whiteleys in Bayswater, I left my seat reduced to hot, gulping sobs, my heart indelibly shattered, my head forever reminded that there is nothing as futile as “happily ever after”. Plus, I’ve never been able to listen to The Temptations. Patrick Smith
The NeverEnding Story (1984)
There were a few things about Wolfgang Petersen’s The NeverEnding Story that unnerved me as a child. There was Falkur, a dragon who somehow had both pearly scales and ivory fur. There was also the fact that it was my first taste of existentialism as I watched Atreryu try to save the magical realm of Fantasia from a vague disease called The Nothing – which is what happens when “people lose their hopes and forget their dreams”. But most harrowing of all was the slow, slow death of Artax, the film’s gallant white horse, who sinks beneath muddy darkness in the Swamp of Sadness while his little boy companion watches on in horror, grasping on to a rein that eventually connects to nothing. The scene instilled in me both a love of horses and an irrational lifelong fear of quicksand. Annabel Nugent
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
As a relatively sheltered boy of 10 or 11 years old, was I too young to watch One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? Probably, but in the scheme of kids being shown age-inappropriate fare, we’re hardly talking about Bone Tomahawk here. Nonetheless, the multi-Oscar-winning film left a deep imprint on me – specifically the scene at the end, whereupon the nervous Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif) is found in a pool of blood, having taken his own life. I suppose some of the credit, traumatising-a-child-ingly speaking, must go to Dourif, a truly phenomenal and underappreciated character actor whose wiry and brilliant debut performance here made the scene all the more devastating. I still find the scene gruesome and disturbing when watching it as an adult; for a child, the sad, bloody tragedy of it is downright bewildering. I’d have been better off watching Chucky. Louis Chilton
Watership Down (1978)
It’s often said that pets are a good way for children to learn about death. But in the absence of actual, furry, cuddly pets, it turns out animated rabbits will teach these lessons almost as well. I didn’t have pets as a kid, but we did have a telly and one day, Watership Down – overflowing with beautiful, heart-wrenching scenes of bunny carnage – appeared upon it. It would be melodramatic to say I was never the same again but, to this day, I can’t hear Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes” without my bottom lip wobbling slightly. Phil Harrison
