If you remember this movie, you understand the horrors. If not, let me just say this: the movie involves a haunted mansion, a creepy art teacher, kidnapped children forced to make paintbrushes, and a scene that involves pubic hair that won't stop growing. I have vivid memories of the film from my childhood, including a scene where a bald boy's wig is torn off mid-soccer game, much to the amusement of his fellow players, who mercilessly tease him. Wikipedia quickly reminded me of the rest, and now I won't sleep for years.

The Peanut Butter Solution [Wikipedia]

Return To Oz: Years before Fairuza Balk showed up in The Craft, screaming "These are my gifts!" on the beach as deranged witch, Nancy, she starred as Dorothy Gale in this 1985 sequel to The Wizard of Oz, wherein Dorothy returns to the magical land over the rainbow and all hell breaks loose. I have to be honest with you guys: I don't remember much about this movie. The things I do, remember, however, come to me in nightmares every 6-8 months; the yellow brick road, destroyed; the creepiness of Jack Pumpkinhead, and the Tin Man and Cowardly Lion, turned to stone. Imagine, if you will, being 5 years old and thinking you were going back to a happy Oz, post-Wicked Witch, only to find the entire Emerald City effed up beyond repair! It was horribly traumatizing. For years I chose to believe that the movie wasn't real, and that I had made it up somehow. In college, I learned that many of my peers had done the same thing. We were all forced to admit that yes, Return to Oz was real, and yes, it scared the crap out of us.


The Neverending Story: I had nightmares for YEARS because of G'mork, the werewolf in the film, whose mission was to kill the brave Atreyu. I'm not going to lie to you guys; I'm still scared of G'mork. I can't even handle this picture. Look at him! THIS IS A WEREWOLF, CHILDREN! Don't be fooled by the lovable Professor Lupin or the shirtless Jacob Black; they all have a G'mork within!


The Snowman: When I was compiling this list, I asked my boyfriend if he had anything to add. Without hesitation, he said, "The Snowman." The Snowman is an animated short (based on the book by Raymond Briggs) that my elementary school teachers would show us every year, and my boyfriend is right: it scared the bejeezus out of me when I was younger. I attribute this mostly to the haunting soundtrack, sung by choirboys, that accompanied a young man and his snowman friend as they flew to the land of snowmen and then back home—where (spoiler alert) the snowman MELTS AWAY in the end. And he doesn't melt away in the "Well, kids! See ya next year!" Frosty kind of way, he melts away in the "here is an introduction to sadness and death" way that completely traumatized me as a child. I couldn't bring myself to build snowmen after that. Yes, he leaves his magical scarf behind, but the mood is significantly less joyful than finding Frosty's corncob pipe and magic hat in a puddle and thinking, "Oh, well, there's always next year!"


Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory: I always had a mixed reaction when Willy Wonka pushed open the door to the Imagination Room, as I knew it meant two things: one, that we were just about to go through a delightful sequence in which children and adults would eat chocolate and sweets in a giant room of amazingness, and two: that the super-scary acid trip boat ride was just around the bend. As soon as Willy Wonka's Wonkatania shows up on the chocolate river, things start to get creepy. Suddenly Wonka becomes possessed as the walls spin out around him, showing snakes and scorpions and god knows what else as he sings that legendary song: "There's no earthly way of knowing...in which direction we are going..." It's a completely insane sequence in an already insane film, and it ends as abruptly as it begins, with the boat docking and everyone rushing in to get a glimpse of the Everlasting Gobstoppers. Add in the overall creepiness of the Oompa-Loompas, the claustrophobia-inducing moment where Augustus Gloop gets stuck in the pipe, and the scene where Wonka calmly explains that Veruca and her father may or may not be incinerated with the garbage, and you have the stuff of nightmares.


The Sword In The Stone: If you haven't guessed by now, I had a lot of nightmares as a kid. I was pretty easily influenced by whatever I watched on television (or what I read right before bed). One of the films that gave me nightmares was Disney's Sword In The Stone, though I didn't remember it until years later, when I watched it with my then-5 year old niece. There's a scene where the main characters, Wart (King Arthur) and Merlin go underwater to learn about the sea, and they are subsequently chased by a giant, terrifying fish. As soon as the fish came on screen, I remembered how scared the scene had made me as a kid; the yellow eyes of the fish showed up in many of my nightmares. The next day, my sister called my mother to tell her that my niece had been up all night with bad dreams. "Something about a monster in the ocean," my sister said. Oh, tradition!

Of course, there are a ton of other movies that technically could be on this list, namely Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, though I consider those films to be somewhat intentionally scary, which is why I left them off. However, you are more than welcome to add your own traumatizing children's movie memories in the comments. Happy Halloween!

Earlier: A Totally Arbitrary List Of The Best Horror Movies Ever

In a story about young Lady GaGa copycats on YouTube, Strollerderby's Hannah Tennant-Moore writes,

I'm not one to get too bent out of shape if I hear kids singing along with Lady GaGa or Beyoncé. Throughout elementary school, I listened to songs with risqué lyrics (I remember performing a dance to "Like a Virgin" to my shell-shocked parents in fourth grade), and I didn't end up pole dancing for a living.

I have to agree with Tennant-Moore; I've admitted to dressing up up like a Playboy Bunny for Halloween when I was 13, and I definitely sang along to filthy/titillating lyrics from Prince, Madonna, et al. From "Daring Nikki" to "Push Push In The Bush," being inundated with racy pop culture as a kid did not mean that I grew into some kind of wanton strumpet. [coughSLUTTYFEMINISTcough.] Urinating on video aside, I think that my early interest in "dirty" songs — and later attraction to Anais Nin writings and the ancient Roman text known as The Priapea have had no effect on my being a generally upstanding person with a tightly wound moral compass.

That said, if I saw a little kid singing "F-U-C-K me," I would be appalled. It's not appropriate. But what about children posting videos to YouTube while singing sugestive lyrics? When the little Lady GaGa wannabe, seen in the video below, gives sassy eyes and says she's "bluffin" with her "muffin," does it seem a little too sexualized? Or is she just a kid, having fun?

Young Lady GaGa Copycats Flood YouTube [Strollerderby]
Related: Lil' Lady GaGas Sing 'Poker Face' [Urlesque]

I was recently sitting with a friend's 8-year-old for an evening, when she brought me to her room to show me a note a little boy in her class had sent her. "I know you have a boyfriend," he'd written in a large, childish scrawl, "but I need to have you in my life." He went on to say that her happiness was the most important thing to him; he'd included a flower, which she had thrown away. Maybe Alec Greven's on to something!

When some of us were in third grade, we were so tiny and borderline feral that romance was not really an issue: such interactions were limited to intense secret crushes, occasional haughty snubbings, and spelling competitions with flirtatious undertones. When one little boy did like me, I was so humiliated that I asked to be moved to a different desk group. One of my out-of-school friends lied about having an older 4th grade boyfriend, which made me very uncomfy. A few couples in my class 'dated,' which didn't mean that they went anywhere or actually acknowledged each other. And I have a very distinct memory of one little girl attempting to impress a boy she liked by bringing all her horseback riding trophies to school and casually arraying them atop her desk; she was regarded with pity by the rest of the class.

So, based on this, a perusal of old diaries and recent interaction with abovementioned babysittee, here is what our inner 9-year-old girl would advise with regards to dating boys:

-Always be nice. Even if you don't like someone back, never humiliate him and try to keep things private.
-Keep all notes.
-If you like a boy, don't bring all your horseback riding trophies to school and put them on your desk, because everyone will know what you are doing and you won't be able to open your desk.

Your turn, belles! If we want to compile something definitive here, we're going to need a lot of child-channeling and, more to the point, as much advice as you can get from real 9-year-olds. Sisters? Cousins? Pupils? Bring it on! We'll compile all the advice we get as a public service.

Earlier: The Book Of Love

Several Chinese news articles dated before the Olympics list birthdates for He Kexin, Jiang Yuyuan and Yang Yilin that would make them younger than the team now says they are — younger than the official Olympic age limit of 16. But a lot of the public reaction to these girls has been based on how they look. A commenter on the US News & World Report website, for instance, writes, "Some looked like they hadn't grown in all of their permanent teeth."

As someone who looked 14 until she was 20, I'll be the first to tell you that you can't tell how old someone is by looking. And there's something especially creepy about Americans infantilizing Asian girls. It's almost as though their very underage-ness is exciting.

Except to their competitors. "On average 30 pounds heavier and 3.5 inches taller than the doll-sized Chinese gymnasts," O'Rourke writes, "they had the sheen of aging starlets, imbuing the scene with a peculiar Sunset Boulevard feel." She continues with this disturbing analysis:

It was as if, worried that the Chinese might have an unfair advantage, the Americans suddenly became aware of their growing bodies, of the potential for harm, of how easy it is to make a mistake, of how fast time flies and the body stiffens, even for those who can flip through the air and perform ever more complicated release skills on the uneven bars.

Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether Alicia Sacramone really felt like Norma Desmond on the balance beam, the fact remains that younger gymnasts do have an advantage. The sport "rewards lightness and a low center of gravity," writes O'Rourke, "and the prepubescent tend, quite simply, to be more fearless." Some, including American coach and model of tact and restraint Bela Karolyi, think this means the Olympic Committee should simply remove the age limit. If a 14-year-old gymnast is as good as or better than a 21-year-old, he argues, why shouldn't she get to compete?

His argument has a certain logic — if you're 15 in 2008, for instance, you'll have to wait until 2012 to compete. That would make you 19 and, according to O'Rourke's reasoning, SOL for the gold. And if the Olympics this post to showcase the best athletes, should it really matter if the best athletes in a certain sport happen to be 14?

I posed this question to my dad recently, and despite his lack of specialized gymnastics knowledge or Olympic affiliation, he said something worth repeating: "I just don't want to watch children compete." To him it seems a little like child labor for a young girl to represent her country in grueling, internationally televised events. I tend to agree, especially since putting 14-year-olds on the world stage invariably results in half-disgusted, half-titillated cooing — "ooh, look how young she looks" — rather than a focus on their athletic prowess.

Then again, with the exception of Dara Torres, Oksana Chusovitina, and a few equestrians, most Olympic sports are the province of the very young. Is it naïve to expect gymnastics to be any different? Would you rather see only girls with their drivers' licenses navigate the balance beam, or the best of the best, regardless of age?

The Silver Lining [Slate]
The Chinese Gymnasts: Age Questions Remain [Time]
Public Opinion: Does The Chinese Women's Gymnastics Team Have Underage Members? [U.S. News & World Report]
Bela Karolyi Incensed About Underage Rules [NBC]