Monday, January 16, 2006

"A Serious Form of Child Abuse"

When we went to see King Kong over Christmas Break, I was disturbed to see parents watching the film with young kids: 3, 4, 5 years old and up. King Kong may be about a big furry animal, but it is certainly not a kids' film! I think it betrays a serious lack of wisdom and discretion--and probably the presence of selfishness--for a parent to bring a kid into a movie like that.

But it gets worse. At the end of Thomas Hibbs' review of the new horror film, Hostel, directed by Quentin Tarantino and replete with graphic violience, sadism, sex, and torture, Hibbs writes:

Yet, the most depressing and horrifying thing about these sorts of films is, alas, not the explicit gore. It is the fact that at nearly every screening of a gruesome horror film I attend (from Massachusetts to Texas), I see parents in the audience with young children. That strikes me as a serious form of child abuse and a more convincing sign of the impending apocalypse than anything depicted on the screen.