Hacker News Reader

Comment by spanktheuser | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't the first horror film my children saw (they watched Jaws, Alien, and Stranger Things) but the most terrifying and traumatic experience they've seen was the shipwreck scene in the Black Stallion. If you want to frighten children, murder what they love while they watch: their parents and animals.

Coincidence both Bambi and the Black Stallion were written during or in the immediate aftermath of world wars?

View on HN

Parents being murdered is in plenty of kids movies. I don't think it has much to do with war I think it's more just you're writing a story with kids as the protagonists. How do you build a plot where they can overcome things if their parents are still in the picture.

Don't think its much deeper than that.

One thing I've really noticed is that a lot of people - children and adults both - have no qualms about depictions of violence and murder of people in media, but they get really squeamish when it's (cute) animals. I wonder what causes that, is it just a kind of desensitization? Or a built-in kind of justice that bad people dying is fine but innocent animals isn't?

This is a pretty well-observed phenomenon that the relative sadness of humans and cute animals dying in movies and real life is (presumably) reversed. Someone had even coined a term for it - “dog-dying-in-movie sad.” I’m at a loss to explain why, but it feels like Peak Internet Discussion so hopefully someone here will feel like expanding on it.