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Post by Sparrow on Aug 31, 2004 20:16:03 GMT -6
When Bilbo finally finds his friends, they have been captured by the great spiders. Bilbo enters the spiders' "lair" to discover that the creaking and hissing he hears is the spiders talking. Both their conversation and the description of the dwarves' predicament is pretty horrifying. Other passages have also been so. Isn't this story intended for children? Are scenes like this one too strong for young readers? What passages or descriptions do you find particularly horrifying?
Can you think of examples of horror in other literature intended for young children? In fairy tales? nursery rhymes? anything else?
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Post by MajahTR on Sept 8, 2004 7:10:20 GMT -6
it seems to me that most children's stories have/had a touch of horror in them (the only one that comes to mind right now is the original version of Little Red Riding Hood)
as an adult, i think those parts are included to either teach or reinforce the message that the story is trying to get across.
we cannot appreciate heroism without something bad for our hero to escape or rescue someone from, right? Maj ps we hateses icky spiders!
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Post by Greenleaf on Sept 8, 2004 9:22:07 GMT -6
I don't expect children nowadays would be scared by reading about some giant spiders, what with all the horrifying stuff they watch in TV, especially at the news. I don't know about the US but in my country there's not too much censorship as to what the TV channels show.
As a child, I don't remember being scared by anything I read, and I read a lot of books back then (I was really a bookworm, lol), mostly adventures. The only thing that really scared me was watching the first Alien movie at the age of eleven. After that I realised why it was rated PG-13! ( I was tall as a kid and was able to slip into the cinema without being stopped, lol.)
But I suppose in Tolkien's time, such images as creepy giant spiders might have been more scary to young children.
PS. Spiders have always been my favorite insects, besides ants. I only, really, hate cockroaches. Yuk!
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Post by MajahTR on Sept 8, 2004 12:52:19 GMT -6
and yes i agree with Greenleaf that the kids today are not as easy to scare...they are exposed to a lot more than i was...
i was horrified by the flying monkies tearing apart the Scarecrow and i couldn't sleep for days after seeing that movie...pretty tame now, eh? Maj
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Post by Stormrider on Sept 8, 2004 19:29:57 GMT -6
That first Alien movie got to me, too, Greenleaf! I couldn't even watch it! It was years later before I could sit down and watch it. That one was really creapy and so was Predator with the invisible creature stalking Arnold Schwartzenneger.
I was never scared of the flying monkies but I never liked the movies the Crawling Eye or the Bad Seed.
The Crawling Eye was a huge eyeball with octopus tentacles and it crawled all over the town. It almost got a little girl's dolly in the movie and she went back to save it--luckily she did! I couldn't sleep that night and shivered under my blankets all night long.
The Bad Seed was about a nasty little girl who inherited a bad trait from her father who was a bad person and who died in jail (I forgot what he did). This girl acted so sweet and lovely and had everyone fooled but you NEVER wanted to piss her off! She killed people who pissed her off and always got away with it. Finally in the end she got struck by lightening and died. I have never liked lightening since.
Also the movie about Marie Antoinette was scary--not the whole movie, just the idea of her and her husband being beheaded. Funny thing, my youngest daughter did a report on Marie Antoinette in high school and we rented the movie again and I watched it. Being beheaded still is a freaky thing to think about. Yuck!
Those were movies that scared me as a child and have stuck in my memory ever since.
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Post by jerseyshore on Sept 10, 2004 17:02:38 GMT -6
Strangely enough, the movie that I remember scaring me as a child involved insects. They weren't spiders, but ants. When I was about 8, I saw a movie called The Naked Jungle. It was about soldier ants that went across the land devouring everything in their path. One scene that has stayed with me over the years was of a man who was supposed to open a sluice gate to let water rush in and drown the approaching ants. He fell asleep and they continued right across him leaving little of him behind. I had nightmares about that for a long time!
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Post by Stormrider on Sept 3, 2012 13:58:14 GMT -6
Although Tolkien initially read his story to his own children, didn't he emphasize that it was not necessarily intended for children but for all ages? It seems EVERYONE loves a good scare (as long as they know it is fictional). If his children were scared, then others would be scared. If his children were not scared, then it wouldn't be frightening enough for anyone else.
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