Silly Molly, Movies Are for Adults!
COLUMN BY Molly Schoeman.

I never used to have a high tolerance for scary movies; my first experience in a movie theatre ended abruptly with me being led out into the lobby sobbing uncontrollably after Snow White became entangled in the Enchanted Forest. (A similar thing happened a number of years later, when I saw Bio Dome, but that’s a little more understandable.)

Last week though, in a (Kahlua-induced) fit of nostalgia, my roommate Laura and I spent 45 minutes in the video store and emerged with The Secret of Nimh, an animated movie about magical rats and mice which has struck fear into the hearts of more young children than clowns and ‘multi-use’ thermometers combined. This is a movie in which even the good guys have red, glowing eyes. Even now, more than 15 years later, I have a more vivid memory of certain scenes from it than I do of the first apartment I ever lived in. Early in the film, several rats are shown being injected with some sort of experimental serum; this image may or may not be related to with an entire summer I had ruined after kindergarten, due to an unceasing worry that I was going to have to see the doctor before going back to school, and that he was going to give me a shot. (I never claimed to be a well-adjusted child). Another scene of horror featured tiny, terrified mice being blown through a ventilation tunnel to their deaths (all right, so maybe my subsequent fear of ventilation tunnels was unreasonable, but I still had it in spades after seeing The Secret of Nimh.) I can’t imagine how my parents sat six-year-old me down and patiently explained the scene in which you see sad little cartoon laboratory animals huddled in dank cages as a voiceover explains how they were tortured for science. As a child I could hardly bear to watch as the Trix Rabbit was regularly denied cereal.

I did come away from The Secret of Nimh having learned three very important lessons. One was something about having courage in the face of danger and impossible odds, another was that a magic amulet can enable a field mouse to lift a cinderblock, and the third was that a cartoon mouse that is wearing nothing but a cape for the first half of the movie looks freaky and naked when it takes the cape off. All are lessons which I carry in my heart to this day.

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