Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
Every Sunday night, from the ages of four through fourth grade, my parents dropped me off at church for SNicK (Sunday Night in for Kids). These two hours sans-parents typically involved pizza, games, and Starburst for correctly answered Bible trivia. Some nights we’d all collect in the church gathering space, sit on the chilly dark brown tile floor, and watch a movie on the TV the childcare leaders had rolled in from a closet down the hall. One night, the chosen film was Horton Hears a Who. The way my parents tell it, that Sunday evening they found me, obligatorily sitting on the floor with the other kids, facing away from the TV, huddled up in a ball, and crying quietly. Something about the film had petrified me.
Horton Hears a Who wasn’t the only piece of media to cause such distress. After we watched Homeward Bound, I sat in the car on the ride home inconsolable. Many years earlier, when I was shown my inaugural Looney Tunes episode, I shrieked in fear, apparently unable to bear the fact that Bugs Bunny would intentionally throw someone off a train to their (supposed) death.
These are just a few of the snippets that permeated my childhood movie watching experiences. A sensitive child, it didn’t take much to set off torrents of terrified tears. Movies and TV shows ranging from Great Migrations to Finding Nemo to Up tended to result in a face-wet, slightly trembling Elisabeth scrunched up in a ball of safety.
The specific triggers varied. In Homeward Bound, a dog gets attacked by a porcupine and then whimpers in pain as the spines are removed. Up was scary because the bad guy wanted to kill a bird! As for Horton Hears a Who, well, total genocide was on the line. I couldn’t bear to watch the wildebeests in Great Migrations cross an crocodile-infested river. Finding Nemo featured a mom getting eaten by a barracuda, and that was enough to give me nightmares for more than a few nights.
Some of these fears I’ve managed to overcome. I’ve since watched Ratatouille. I can now quite enjoy Looney Tunes and will happily hum “kill the wabbit” (otherwise known as Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries). But others, like Up, Homeward Bound, and Horton Hears a Who, I have simply refused to re-watch. They still have guttural feelings of anguish attached to them.
Part of me wants to laugh at past Elisabeth. Who could be scared by Looney Tunes? Horton Hears a Who couldn’t have been that bad. Yes, Homeward Bound is sad but not scary, and Up is an excellent story about environmental activism and found family (well, so I’ve heard, I’ve only seen it once and we know how that turned out). What is there to be afraid of? But to laugh would be remiss of me. Because I do have such deep affection for all the past Elisabeths. Including the ones who wept because they couldn’t bear to watch hard movies.
I’m also still not quite sure what I was afraid of. Yes, I can identify why I cried at each movie, but why did these scenes so frequently prompt fearful sobs? Bad guys are scary, injuries are scary, death is scary; but I think there’s an underlayer. A few years ago I learned that I have trouble identifying anger in myself because it physically manifests in similar ways to both stress and sadness. So part of me wonders if this hypersensitivity was just an expression of horror at injustice. At things not being how they should be. Perhaps the tears were an expression of outrage, an inability to fix problems, being faced with the violence of the world.
And so I refuse to laugh at past Elisabeth. Because what worth is there in trying to desensitize myself to the violence that permeates our world? Why should I not be outraged?
As for current Elisabeth, she hasn’t grown out of this sensitivity either. In high school, Gettysburg and Glory prompted similar bouts of horrified shakiness. When one of my college courses required me to watch and analyze eight war films, I carefully scoured the list for the ones that would be the least violent and gory. Despite this screening process, I still had to frequently mute the film, avert my eyes, or skip entire scenes.
So perhaps I am still afraid and angry and sad. And perhaps that’s not something to be ashamed of.
Elisabeth Stevens (‘25) graduated from Calvin with majors in Spanish and strategic communication and now is a graduate student in rhetoric at Penn State. She spends her free time running, swing dancing, baking, and finding new coffee shops at which to write.
