My dads brother visited us one time - when I was around 7 years old - and they sent me to bed and watched a movie together on TV. I’m not sure where my mom was, perhaps taking care of my little brother, but I quietly went down the stairs and saw them watching the movie, and I stayed very quietly so they would not know I’m there.
It was a Bruce Lee movie, “The Big Boss (1971)”. In that movie Bruce works at a ice factory and his boss kills some people and puts them into the ice. That’s not the worst of it. They then have those big ice blocks and a big blade saw and that saw cuts the big blocks into smaller peaces. It also cuts those bodies in the ice blocks into smaller pieces.
I couldn’t believe what I saw and went back upstairs and couldn’t fall asleep. I never told my parents.
E.T. --specifically the scenes starting with the government showing up to take care of him while he’s dying. E.T. being lifeless in that clear body bag will never be removed from my mind.
E.T. is a funny one. It was the first movie I saw in a theater, as a smallish child on a school outing. And I was traumatized by it. That weird alien skin and eyes, those creepy bony fingers. As I remember, it literally gave me nightmares. But to this day I have never met anyone who didn’t find E.T. “cute” as a child. Possibly I was just too young.
That color… How pale he was. Mom used to buy frozen burritos at the time. I felt uncomfortable eating them for months…