It was a rite of passage. You were young and you got to stay up late, curl up on the sofa with a snugly blanket and buttered popcorn, and you watched Linda Blair get possessed by a demon in “The Exorcist.”
But were you able to go to sleep afterward?
Blair’s character, Regan MacNeil, is 12 years old in the movie. And while children star in a number of horror movies (see also: “The Ring,” “The Shining” and “The Omen”), is it possible to be too young to watch them? Parents, should we be adjusting the control settings on our streamers to prevent scarring our kids for life?
With Halloween movie season upon us, these questions seem timely. For help in answering them, I turn to you, reader: How old were you when you watched your first, true afraid-to-do-anything-alone-afterward scary movie? It doesn’t have to be “The Exorcist” — some of us (I won’t say who) subjected ourselves to Freddy Krueger when we were 7, and to this day, the sight of brown gloves makes us tremble. The first time I watched “The Silence of the Lambs,” I was in college and it was late at night. I made my friend Seth stay overnight just so I could sleep — after prohibiting him from using the word “covet” and discarding every bottle of lotion.
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