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Comment by zo1 | Hacker News Reader

If by "adult" you mean horror/grotesque movies, then yes. I watched them from a young age with (I have no idea how) my parents blessing.

To this day, I struggle being alone at night. I'm jumpy, imagine all sorts of weird and nasties creeping and crawling around the dark recesses of whatever room I'm in. It's not debilitating, as I've learned to consciously reason out of my fear of irrational things, but it still pops up in my head. Still makes me jumpy. Still makes my heart-race, and still pisses me off that my mind would do that to me.

Needless to say, I'm not showing any such movies to my kids until they're at-least mid-teens.

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To counter your anecdote, my parents never really censored what I viewed as a kid either. Aliens was (and is) one of my favourites as a kid. My babysitter used to "force" me to watch horror movies, she and my parents thought it was funny or something. I don't feel I'm any more or less uncomfortable in the dark by myself than the average person is.

zo1's anecdote shows that at least some kids get lifelong anxiety issues from watching horror/slasher movies at an early age.

Your anecdote shows that at least some kids do _not_ get those lifelong anxiety issues from the same.

How does yours "counter" zo1's in the slightest? That would be like the tobacco industry saying "but look at all the smokers who never got cancer!".

I'm (honestly, as a human being to another) glad you don't seem to have been affected (overly) by your caretakers abusing you, but you can't seriously be advocating this kind of behavior, enough to argue for it?

> zo1's anecdote shows that at least some kids get lifelong anxiety issues from watching horror/slasher movies at an early age.

No it doesn't.

It shows that at least one person has lifelong anxiety issues that they attribute to having watched horror movies.

I don't have anxiety issues and I watched horror movies at a young age, maybe I would have anxiety issues if I hadn't? Maybe on average it has a positive effect on anxiety? Maybe it's completely unrelated. You can't draw any conclusions from a couple of anecdotes

zo1's anecdote shows he has lifelong anxiety issues. Not sure how you diagnosed the cause to be horror/movies and not something else.

>>To this day, I struggle being alone at night.

I think most people do, actually, regardless of what types of movies they watched when they were little.

Darkness invokes a primal fear in animals that have not evolved to operate comfortably in it (such as felines).

I don't get why you were downvoted.

Anyway, I think so too. Humans seem to have an innate fear of the dark, and any recent memory of danger will increase that effect. Heck, I'm an adult and still after watching something like Aliens I get seriously stressed when going to bathroom at night. And my closest friend openly refuses to watch scary movies when she expects to be alone home at night.

Not trying to be "that guy."

This is not evidence, it's an anecdote. It's speculation on your part that this is the reason you're scared. It could be, and maybe it's even likely--but it takes a wider study to have any kind of assurance that you're correct.

Fair enough, of course. I guess I am just assuming the link between the two. But it's a little hard not to see a link as the things I imagine/see are based on the things I saw in those movies.

I saw "Pet Sematary" when I was ~10 and I regret. I haven't seen the movie again but I remember that as a traumatic episode.

I have seen a lot of movies rated for adult with my daughter but not horror like that. I think every person is different, use the common sense.

Also anecdotally: as a young teenager I'd remember scenes from movies like Aliens in order to psyche myself up for doing things that were scary. Like: "Okay, self. You can go into that dark basement. It's scary, but not as scary as a bunch of marines going into an alien-infested death trap."

Don't get me wrong: Aliens was really freaking scary to me. Probably the most a movie has ever scared me. As soon as they encounter the first xenomorph it's pretty much sheer terror for the next hour.

> To this day, I struggle being alone at night. I'm jumpy, imagine all sorts of weird and nasties creeping and crawling around the dark recesses of whatever room I'm in.

That is one of the reasons that I got a dog. Having another being in the house is a massive difference from being alone, even if that being can't talk and is a bit of a scaredy cat himself.

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