5 Beloved Children's Films That Are Secretly Terrifying

So let's forget Belle and the Beast, and instead follow Mr. Potts through an average day. Does he wonder why he owns so many children's toys and brassieres? Does his bed feel empty at night? Does he own any family portraits, and does he look like he's hugging the air in them? Does he have the nagging sense that he used to buy far more food? Does he regret not marrying and having children? Does he ever look at a tea set and weep for no reason? Every day of his life would be like day one after deaths in the family, except he's never quite sure what's going on. It's incredible that he's even sane.

Mr. Potts ostensibly gets a happy ending when the curse is broken and his family is restored ...

Walt Disney Pictures

Walt Disney Pictures

... but that falls apart the moment you start thinking about it. He's aged a decade, but his wife and son haven't -- no one who was transformed did. So he lost out on ten years with his family, and maybe the sudden age difference is a massive strain on their relationship. It would be weird enough for your spouse or dad to suddenly be a decade older, but imagine a family trying to go back to normal when one person's coming out of a memory fog and the other two have had tea served out of them for years. That's some seriously twisted collective punishment, Enchantress.

To the audience, this makes perfect sense. We're watching a superhero movie, and we know that Parker is a good person who's Mary Jane's age. But what's going through MJ's mind? She doesn't know that she's the love interest in a story. All she knows is that 30 seconds ago, she was about to be sexually assaulted, and then, not for the first time, a mysterious dude in a gimp suit showed up and saved her. It's great that he helped, but maybe he's as bonkers as the guys he beat up. You've got to be at least a little unhinged to call yourself "Spider-Man" and go looking for violent trouble in the middle of a rainstorm. Or hey, maybe he's a great guy, but he's 45 and has a wife and kids. Does Mary Jane know she could be kissing an accountant named Gary who likes to build birdhouses on the weekend? But the script demands romance, so hey, she makes out with a latex-clad stranger in a dark rainy alley, like we are all wont to do.

In that scene from Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, the kids are learning transfiguration and Ron is told to transform his rat, Scabbers, into a water goblet. Naturally, he Rons it up, and Scabbers becomes the type of animal-object hybrid that David Cronenberg must dream of every night. It squeaks in pain, and it clearly doesn't enjoy being a ... whatever it's called now. "Cut"? "Rap"?

That's messed up enough on its own. While the animals are implicitly transformed back, it's reasonable to assume that suddenly being radically reshaped and unable to move comes with some long-term psychical and mental consequences. Oh, but there's more. Fans will recall that Scabbers isn't any old rat. He's later revealed to secretly be this dingus:

Warner Bros. PicturesSplinter's human form inspires a lot less respect than his animal one.

That's Peter Pettigrew, and he's responsible for getting Harry's parents killed. He betrayed their trust, then went into hiding. As a rat. Which came to be owned by Ron. Who then turned him into an un-cup. Yeah, he's a villain, but being transformed into half-living, half-dead abomination by a dumbass kid must have been excruciating. Try to picture the cup with a full-sized, panicked human limb growing out of it instead of a tiny rat tail. Imagine the existential horror of being and not being at once. And let's not forget all of the times he must have seen Ron jerking it. Dude just had a bad time all around.

Emmet's (the Lego figure protagonist) reality was built by Will Ferrell, and his adventures have all been orchestrated by Ferrell's son, who's apparently really good at putting together elaborate musical numbers on a moment's notice. Emmet can, with great willpower, move and think independently ... but still, he is barely his own entity in a reality that could be totally annihilated by an overexcitable dog.

Warner Bros. PicturesThe face of a man witnessing an indifferent god.

Now let's play a fun game where you imagine getting hit by a car and dying. You black out, then wake up not at the Pearly Gates, but in a basement that could really use a renovation. A giant child and his father are playing with everything you knew to be life -- your home, your loved ones, your pirate ship, all tiny and fragile in their hands. The entire universe as you knew it is just sitting on a crappy table. Then the child giant picks you up and drops you right back into the world. Maybe he gives you your old life back (the car that hit you was made of Silly Putty), or maybe you have a new life now. Either way, how do you face it?

Everything bad that happens to you -- getting fired, your friends and family leaving you, just generally having a lousy day -- is decided by the whims of a child deity. Emmet learned that free will, along with life as he knows it, is a lie. How does he carry on? Once all the chaos of the movie ends and he returns to a normal life, he's going to go nuts thinking about it.

Warner Bros. PicturesEverything is pointless! Life has no meaning, And I'm going to scream!

And what does this mean for the long-term fate of Emmet's world? What happens when the kid grows up and gets bored of Lego? When he moves away, and Will Ferrell grows old and dies? How long does Emmet's universe exist before it's dismantled and the pieces get shoved into a closet for 20 years before finding their way to a garbage dump? Under the right circumstances, plastic can survive indefinitely. Is Emmet going to enjoy a few years of happiness and then spend eons buried alone in the dark beneath tons of trash? Time and death have no meaning to characters in The Lego Movie, yet their world is constantly teetering on the brink of a collapse that would make any sentient creature long for oblivion. It's only a matter of time before their world becomes an insane void of endless agony. (That Batman movie was pretty funny, though.)

Mark is on Twitter and has a book.

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