10 Movies From Your Past That Won’t Make Your Children Scream in Terror

“I think it’s time,” I said to my husband, one snowy night a few years ago. He looked up, and grinned.

“Where will we start,” he asked?

Where indeed? At the beginning seemed like a reasonable place, but the beginning wasn’t the most interesting.

“Number two,” I said, decisively. He was skeptical.

“Are you sure…?” But I wouldn’t be swayed.

It was time to introduce our kids to Indiana Jones. And contrary to chronological dictates, we would start with the second installment, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. It was the best one! The most exciting. I saw it in the theatre with my dad when I was eight; the same age my younger daughter was that night. Monkey brains! They’d love it.

They didn’t love it.

My daughters sat frowning through the first half of the movie while I sat across from them, hopeful my love for Indie, Short Round and Willie would be transferred to my kids. Skulls! Hands full of cockroaches! The extraction of a sacrificial live, beating heart!

My children clutched each other and started screaming — screaming — in horror.

My husband jumped up and turned off the TV. “I knew we should have started with Raiders,” he grumbled.

But that wasn’t right, either. After a little bit of reflection, both of us realized that what we should have started with was consideration of our children and who they were, rather than who we were at their age.

Context mattered. I had seen Temple of Doom at age eight, but I had grown up on TV shows, movies and pop culture touchstones that were much more explicit than my children had ever been exposed to.

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A little deflated, we began to search for retro movies we felt comfortable sharing with our kids. It was an eye-opening experience. So many seemingly innocuous films were cut from our list because, upon closer inspection, they were rife with casual sexism, violence and racism. We didn’t want to be hankie-clutching parents, but we were kind of glad our still-young children didn’t consume media full of characters constantly calling each other nasty epithets.

We did find many great movies for what we dubbed, “family movie flashback” nights. Some my husband or I watched in advance, and some we checked through various online sources that flag questionable moments throughout movies. We found that the IMDB Parents Guide was most helpful, marking instances of things like violence, sexuality, swearing and drug and alcohol use.

Here’s a handful of the films we watched during family movie flashbacks.

The Land Before Time (1988, original rating: G)

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989, original rating: PG)

Back to the Future (1985, original rating: PG)

The NeverEnding Story (1984, original rating: PG)

The Muppet Movie (1979, original rating: G)

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The Princess Bride (1987, original rating: PG)

Labyrinth (1986, original rating: PG) 

Willow (1988, original rating: PG)

The Goonies (1985, original rating: PG)

E.T. (1982, original rating: PG)

Though there are sometimes intense moments in these films, not one has ended with my kids clutching each other, screaming in horror on the couch. Indiana Jones is going on the backburner for a few years.