My friend Katherine shows movies when she bartends, and last Friday’s theme was “A Very Scary Christmas.” This was the lineup: Gremlins (1984), Black Christmas (1974), Jack Frost (1997), and Silent Night Deadly Night (1984). I hadn’t thought about Jack Frost in years—the late-1990s kids movie where the dad played by Michael Keaton dies in a car in the first scene. It’s around Christmas, and he’s reincarnated as a snowman. He talks to his son and helps him deal with the loss of father. That last part might be wrong, I haven’t seen it in 25 years, if ever—I might’ve left the room when Keaton ran off the road. But I remember that fucking evil snowman from the TV spots. It was horrifying, a tragic and perverse fantasy thrust into the imagination of children across the world.
And then when I went to look all of this up, I realized Jack Frost came out in 1998, and that Katherine was playing the direct-to-video comedy slasher by the same name from 1997.
In any case, we both remembered Keaton’s Jack Frost, a movie that should never be shown to children. Katherine and I have an off-and-on debate about violence and sex in movies and when it’s appropriate for children to watch certain things. As a mother, she’d abide by the MPAA and forbid her children from seeing PG-13 and R-rated movies until they’re of age, no matter the film. She thinks it’s insane that I saw Kill Bill: Volume 1 on opening weekend when I was 10, but I was excited for that movie, I was ready for that movie, and I could certainly handle it. God, I loved it!
But not Jack Frost, or Mousehunt, which I saw with my mom and brother at the Clearview Cinemas Chelsea in 1997. Movie Guide, the family guide to movies and entertainment, has this to say about the film: “MOUSEHUNT is not for children. It is a dreary, dark comedy starring Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as two brothers who inherit their father's decrepit string factory. At their father's funeral, a coffin handle breaks, and their father goes catapulting into the sewer.” That’s the scene I’ll remember forever: the funeral and the disaster with the coffin. I was not prepared for this.
Mousehunt, like Jack Frost, is rated PG. These are pernicious, menacing films that terrorize their only audience; more than “torture porn” or Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, what makes movies like Jack Frost, Mousehunt, and Bambi so traumatizing is the way they combine the fantastical and the tragically real. Even children know that deer don’t talk, but they identify with Bambi. They follow Bambi and Bambi’s gigantic white eyes. Bambi is a fantasy interrupted by cold reality: a hunter, sudden death, grief with no end. I was lucky: I didn’t see Bambi until middle school, and while it was still horribly sad, I don’t think about it much.
You can deal with death in G and PG-rated films: The Lion King is perhaps the best example, and in my life, Bicentennial Man taught me about time, aging, and the limits of our lives. But that was December 1999, and while it rocked me, I don’t regret seeing Bicentennial Man at all. I was ready for that movie at seven-years-old.
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is the first R-rated movie any kid should see: aside from the opening shot, completely unrealistic violence in the same style as those drawings that all children make: detached limbs and stumps spraying blood, X’s on eyes. All of the sexual violence that The Bride goes through is met with swift revenge: killing Buck and his customer is a beautiful thing when you know they’ve been raping her in a coma for years. But I have zero reservations about the violence in Kill Bill, because it’s the kind of stuff you see in cartoons, and ultimately, The Bride triumphs just like Simba in The Lion King.
Bridge to Terabithia, My Girl, Pokémon: The First Movie… these are all more damaging to young children than something like Five Fingers of Death or Friday the 13th.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith