For all the benefits of being a kid—no bills to pay; lots of free time to sing about dinosaurs; a brain that can’t properly understand politics—there are drawbacks, too. This seems especially true for kids who grew up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, an era when movie and TV practical effects seemed to be made entirely to fuck child brains up with unexpected nightmare imagery.
BranitFX And Lucamax Pictures have cut together a highlight reel of the most memorable examples of these kind of scenes, which is good for anyone either hoping to confront formative fears or to make a list of how to inflict them on their own kids.
There’s the melting Nazis from Raiders Of The Lost Ark and NeverEnding Story’s quicksand horse death along with Bilbo Baggins’ demon face from The Lord Of The Rings and Large Marge turning into a bug-eyed monster in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. The nightmare factory himself, E.T., obviously shows up, too. The video chooses to highlight the scenes where E.T. looks like a slab of dried-out pork, but it could just as easily have pulled from parts where the little freak pops out of a cornfield or hides in a closet, camouflaged by dolls. (It’s not surprising that Steven Spielberg once gave Eli Roth the advice that “kids want to be scared” when Roth was working on The House With A Clock In Its Walls.)
We’d probably add The Labyrinth’s baby abduction sequence or Gremlins’ horrible chattering murder-fiends popping like living boils from a wailing Mogwai’s furry back. But hey, if you want to make sure your kid’s nightmares are a bit more colorful, this supercut is a great place to start.
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