If you know, you know – we have the Final Destination franchise to thank for a lifelong fear of logs, pool drains and tanning beds. Photo: Unsplash.
Hollywood has really cleaned up its act.
Kids these days are shielded by protective programmers and served feel-good films without the side of trauma we millennials traditionally received.
Case in point: When forced to watch my favourite movies from the 80s and 90s, my kids use the word inappropriate – without a hint of sarcasm!
Kids these days have never seen the red mutants of the Labrynth dance as they dismember themselves, gouge out their eyes and eat them. Or watched an innocent kitten named Milo float desperately down a rapid river. They’ve never met Drop Dead Fred – that lovable rogue with violent tendencies, a potty mouth and a penchant for casual upskirting. Red flags, anyone?
Yes, I despair for Gen Alpha – free from such formative movie moments.
In their honour, here’s a handful of horrors that left us with collective psychological scars.
1. The log scene – Final Destination 2
Nothing gave us a lifelong fear of innocuous objects quite like this fateful franchise.
The whole movie premise was deeply unsettling: if your number’s up, fate will find a way – turning everyday objects into instruments of your demise.
Millennials left movie theatres in a highly vigilant state and never really recovered.
Dripping taps and loose threads became the deadly weapons of a vengeful universe. Elevators, barbecues, bath tubs: All death traps! And tempting fate with a roller-coaster, acupuncture or laser eye surgery? Forget about it.
But nothing fed our anxiety quite like the cascade of carnage unleashed by one poorly-secured truckload of logs.
It fed our base-level fears, because – let’s face it – those things do look questionably secured.
Physics aside, my basic brain just sees a bunch of rolly-polly objects resting atop a vehicle moving with great momentum. And a couple of flimsy straps alluding to downward pressure.
Playing on our instinctual alarm, Final Destination took these wooden pylon projectiles and literally embedded them in our brains.
I defy anyone driving behind a log truck not to clench their butt cheeks together defensively.
2. Antie’s death – Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
For a more wholesome type of torture, movie-makers love to emotionally devastate us using animal suffering.
Free Willy spent the entire movie in captivity, Charlotte died in her web and the Lion King left us all with abandonment issues.
Millennial kids learnt not to get attached to animal side-kicks. But it was impossible not to love Antie.
This creatively named black ant was the little-big hero with a heart of gold, adding whimsy to a cautionary tale about four children with terrible fathers and desperately compensating mothers. Left largely to fend for themselves, the kids roam into their father’s deeply unsafe work-from-home style science lab, are accidentally shrunk and get lost in their own backyard.
After protecting these poor 80s children from a deadly scorpion, Antie dies from his wounds – using his last remaining strength to lovingly stroke his friend’s face with his adorable antennae thingos.
Antie taught us to love again. He’s also likely responsible for a huge uptick in ant farm sales in the early 90s – and an unquantifiable number of ant deaths.
3. Slow-death of the shoe – Who Framed Roger Rabbit
In the sage words of Michael Caine: Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Such was the disturbing villain mentality which led to the tortuous execution of an innocent cartoon shoe in this 1988 classic.
An existential allegory disguised as a family movie, the film offered surface-level delights via its kooky characters and slap-stick laughs, occasionally exposing its dark and foreboding underbelly and themes of prejudice, segregation and genocide. Like all good family movies.
But back to the shoe. Hellbent on wiping out Toon Town to make way for a lucrative real estate deal, Judge Doom uncovers the only known way to kill a toon – eroding them in a toxic chemical solution known as The Dip.
From its frantic squeaking as it’s carried towards death to its muffled cries as it’s slowly submerged, this was the most emotional shoe-related moment of our lives.
4. The whole of Watership Down
Honestly, what a bin fire.
This 1978 animation follows a group of anthropomorphised rabbits as they escape their own destruction.
On retrospect, it’s pretty clear that not enough information was provided on the jacket of this video tape, because a whole generation of parents returned from the video store with this “nice bunny movie” for the kids, which in fact dripped with dystopian themes of war, totalitarianism and survival. There was also a truly unhinged amount of bloodshed for an animated film about woodland creatures.
Set in Hampshire in southern England, the eerily formal British accents – and the stern middle-aged men voicing cute bunnies – definitely added an ominous, confusing edge for young viewers.
Ominous, gory, devastating. This movie was everything a kids’ cartoon/your worst nightmare should be. If you remember this one, you may be entitled to compensation.
5. Little Erica trapped in the painting – The Witches
I know what you’re thinking. Ah yes, the emblematic “reveal” moment a horde of witches peeled their faces off, uncovering a sea of horrific disfigurements, demonic bulging eyeballs and scabby wet skin covered in bulging welts and boils.
No, that was all fine. What really sent me spiralling was the story of Little Erica, kidnapped by witches and doomed to spend eternity trapped in a painting.
Hung in the family living room, Erica was doomed to eternal paralysis, watching on silently as life moved on without her. Talk about FOMO.
From her father’s unfolding realisation as he locks eyes with his missing child immortalised in paint, to her unreadable expression as she dead-pans back, I call this milestone: My First Existential Crisis.
What are your most triggering TV or movie moments?
