Susie O’Brien: Why parents shouldn’t take kids to see It

WHAT kind of idiot parent would take a five-year-old to It, which is being billed as the scariest movie of the year? Sometimes you need to parent instead of trying to be besties with your kids, writes Susie O’Brien.

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WHAT kind of idiot parent would take a five-year-old to It, which is being billed as the scariest movie of the year?

Given that the film’s first death occurs in its opening sequence, you’d have to be nuts to take kids along.

And yet one mum has admitted she took her three young children to see it.

Pennywise the Clown in a scene from Stephen King's It. Roadshow Films.

It is a movie based on a Stephen King book about a deranged clown that terrorises and kills children in the American town of Derry. Kids go missing and turn up maimed, or don’t turn up at all. Child corpses, as one reviewer put it, “pile up early and often”.

It’s certainly a long way from The Wiggles and totally inappropriate for kids under about 13.

Critics have called it a “collection of alternately terrifying, hallucinatory, and ludicrous nightmare imagery”, not to mention “horrifying and emotionally-resonant” and an “elaborate waking nightmare”.

I think it’s disgraceful that a mum called Lee told Nova radio’s Fitzy and Wippa that she recently took her children aged five, seven and 13, to see the new film and had “zero regrets”.

“On the weekend, I took my kids to see IT,” the mum said. “In the first 10 minutes I kind of thought ‘uh oh what have I done?’ but they’ve always watched horror movies.”

Stephen King attends a special screening of IT. Picture: Scott Eisen/Getty Images for Warner Bros.

According to kidspot.com.au, she’s taken her kids to see movies such as The Exorcist and all the Nightmare on Elm St ones.

The woman said she asked her youngest what he wanted as a reward and he said, “I really want to see the clown movie”.

“In the first 10 minutes, it’s very gory and I found it really scary. My youngest son ended up on my lap but he refused to close his eyes. I put my hands over my eyes and did it on him too but he kept opening my fingers to watch,” she said.

What kind of insane mother would put her kids through that?

The whole scary clown fiasco was devastating for kids — mine included.

Last year, adults dressed as deranged clowns wandered around Melbourne scaring kids senseless. In one incident, a creepy clown with an axe even terrorised people at a Moe fast food joint.

I certainly wouldn’t deliberately expose my children to this type of horror at the movies. It’s bad enough that they have to see it on the evening news.

It sounds to me like this mum is trying too hard to be besties with her kids, without thinking about what’s in their best interests.