Quentin Tarantino Reveals the Two Most Disturbing Movies He Watched as a Kid and One Is a Disney Movie
Director Quentin Tarantino has a very distinct style of filmmaking, with bloody violence, stylized wordy dialogue, and deep, quirky characters that he cultivates in his scripts.
He’s a self-proclaimed cinephile that has loved film since he was a child, and he could talk forever about films of any genre, but one category he recently opened up about in his book, Cinema Speculation, was the kinds of films he watched as a child.
He recalled watching a number of violent and sexually explicit movies as a child. He rhetorically asked if there was a film he couldn’t handle as a kid. The movie that came to mind was Walt Disney’s Bambi.
“Bambi getting lost from his mother, her being shot by the hunter, and that horrifying forest fire upset me like nothing else I saw in the movies. It wasn’t until 1974 when I saw Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left that anything came close.”
The Last House on the Left has been referred to as one of the most disturbing and violent movies of the 1970s and it was censored in many countries. But Tarantino felt just as upset by the Disney classic Bambi as the horror flick The Last House on the Left.
He went on to talk about how he believed his experience with Bambi wasn’t unique:
“Now those sequences in Bambi have been f****** up children for decades. But I’m pretty sure I know the reason why Bambi affected me so traumatically.
Of course, Bambi losing his mother hits every kid right where they live. But I think even more than the psychological dynamics of the story, it was the shock that the film turned so unexpectedly tragic that hit me so hard. The TV spots really didn’t emphasize the film’s true nature.
Instead, they concentrated on the cute Bambi and Thumper antics. Nothing prepared me for the harrowing turn of events to come. I remember my little brain screaming the five-year-old version of ‘What the f***’s happening?'”
Tarantino felt betrayed by the film’s sucker punch of a left turn, and I have to agree. It’s a messed up movie to market to kids, and it’s one I’ve never shown my kids. What “kids” movies messed you up as a child? The Land Before Time, The Fox and the Hound, and My Dog Skip are a few that spring to mind.
via: CheatSheet