What is the case? What is the bad outcome that happens to a 7 year old who watches a PG-13 movie? (Or more generally, a population of 7 year olds who watch PG-13 movies)
Like, what’s the bad “thing” that we should be able to see?
Yes, these can happen without the movie. Yes, some children will be fine with them. No, you won't always realize what the child is having a hard time processing.
The counsel for "parental guidance" is literal.
The next 2 years, I was terrified of any doors that would open to dark rooms.
[1] https://marvballrutodc.quora.com/When-the-Joker-shoots-Barba...
The PG-13 movies are optimized for an older audience, and that leaves children with fewer, lower quality options for entertainment.
This. There’s enough adult content in these films that even my 12-year-old nephew gets bored.
> The PG-13 movies are optimized for an older audience, and that leaves children with fewer, lower quality options for entertainment.
I think there’s still plenty decent kid-focused content, you might just need to go back some years for the more wholesome non-big budget stuff.
A quick, clean decapitation of a bad guy is hardly going to set a permanent mark. Nobody cared when Scar also died at the end of said movie.
Then there's Spec Ops: The Line. Yikes.
It wasn't until I watched it again when I was 17 or so and I realized how completely dark that actually was.
But yes, the rating shelters children from women's nipples, everyone's genitals, and naughty words.
That's what we do. It works great. I know our kids and what they can handle. Some PG-13 movies are fine for our 5-6 yr olds, some are not.
I know this is the internet and everyone just reads the headline, but comments like this are frustrating.
For example, i like movies with really convoluted/branching multi-timeline stories where you dont really have much of an idea of what's going on, and you have to uncover it as you go (e.g., Inception). It makes my head "hurt" in a good way, and i like it because of that. I know plenty of people who dislike those movies for the exact same reason I like it for. And i hear the same "why would anyone want to subject themselves to this" critique about those movies from them.
I couldn't make it through Saw either, and I am not into those types of movies at all. But i can totally see plenty of valid reasons for why a person would enjoy it. It is essentially a really twisted escape room story with death games. And all that violence and gore just ups the stakes of the death games, thus making it feel more grotesque and intense. They might like how uncomfortable that movie makes them feel, similarly to how I like intensely convoluted multitimeline mystery stories that make my head "hurt" in a good way.
They don't enjoy the torture parts of Saw, they enjoy how that movie overall makes them feel (terrified, contemplating certain moral dilemmas, etc.). Like, the point of Saw, from what I gathered, was that it put people who did terrible things to others into those death game circumstances. Which adds a whole other sub-theme of "but does it make it less terrible, if they were a horrible person?" type of a dilemma. And overall, the grotesque nature of the visuals in the movie just serves the purpose of highlighting how horrifying it all is, not to make people enjoy the torture and think "wow, this is kinda fun and lighthearted".
Mind you, I am saying that as someone who cannot really stomach horror movies in general. That doesn't mean that I cannot see plenty of valid reasons for why people might like those movies.
Horror may also have a larger-than-most-genres share of fans who are watching at a much lesser level of suspension-of-disbelief, remaining very aware most or all of the time that "it's just a movie" and appreciating the craft, daring, and skill of the filmmakers, as much as the experience of the film per se.
There's horror outside the comedy-esque thrill-zone, of course, and it tends to be really damn bleak and scarring, even without much gore (It Comes at Night, for instance). The gorey flicks are usually not among the "worst" the genre has to offer, IMO.