There are plenty of classic frights on film that scare us every October...
The hockey-masked Jason who wields his machete and mommy issues to carve up teenagers on Friday the 13th...
The fedora-adorned, sweater-wearing Freddy Krueger who wields his razor fingers to haunt the nightmares of teens living on Elm Street...
There's a hooded Ghost Face who's had multiple faces beneath the mask to make suburban teens Scream...
The, uh... let's just call it leather-face wearing Leatherface who likes to make teen massacres with his chainsaw in Texas...
And of course, the masked-menace Michael Myers and his butcher-knife give babysitting teens grief on Halloween.
While all terrifying in their own rights, there's another Halloween-based movie that traumatized me more as a kid than any of these slasher film monsters and scream queens ever did. Billed as a heart-warming family feature, it's often overlooked when it comes to frights, but has given many young kids a good scare.
It's Steven Spielberg's E.T.
What? You don't think it's terrifying? Consider:
A young child gets left behind, in the dark woods of all places. And is seemingly forgotten because the parents never come back to look for him until after they receive his plea sent across the stars.
Another young child confirms that something is definitely hiding out in the shed at night while alone in the backyard. A rolling softball scene has never been so intense. Then those fears materialize in a cornfield of all places, with a horrifically screaming alien.
A child gets possessed by an alien entity and then is remotely intoxicated, causing some terribly embarrassing actions in front of the whole class.
These are just the little scares... the worst of them all?
Watching the life fade from Elliot and the Extra Terrestrial as the human pleads with a deathly hoarse voice for E.T. to stay with him as the glow of the heartlight dims beneath the reptilian chest before it is extinguished? And then the next morning, Elliot wails as doctors fail to resuscitate his friend? It probably led to therapy for some, but it's not the worst either.
The most horrific moment of this "children's film" is when E.T. gets lost and Elliot returns home without him. Michael goes to look for E.T. and discovers a pallid, near-lifeless alien body lying facedown in a riverbed, about to get eaten by racoons, after trying to phone home all Halloween night. Again, a helpless E.T. was about to be devoured alive by raccoons. While I don't wake up in the middle of the night with that scene seared in mind any more, it could've pointed at my head and said, "I'll be right here" the way E.T. promised Elliot before going home. It was haunting. It was awful. For God's sake, it was a movie made for children...
Of course, after becoming a parent and showing this "family-film" to my own kids, I had a whole new scare from it: having to worry about them sharing some newly discovered vocabulary at elementary school.
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