I have to say being from the hood-we noticed. We pointed it out especially after repeat viewings.
In working class sexuality is a lot more obvious. A lot more.
Remember we were a generation of kids with songs like “Brenda Had a Baby” in which the uncle or a relative molest Brenda. Diamond D has “Sally” which was about a young girl using sex for material gains but is really hiding her pain.
These were 90’s songs written by teenagers. Which meant we all saw this in the 80’s
Obviously we didn’t noticed the film’s sexual politics day one.
But I saw BTTF 4 times that summer. Then one more time in the fall.
Got it the day it was available for purchase to own. Eventually our lives as kids in the 80’s clashed with the films sexual politics.
Per divorces the “other family’s” came out.
We knew adults were fucking. The hustlers weren’t wearing all that gold because they like how it matched their shoes. Ditto for buying the cars.
We knew a lot of the “how we met” was routine and boring and as about romantic as taking out the garbage.
We also picked up on there was something about the film’s sexual politics that was going against the grain.
In the 80’s for some bizarre reason, mothers were still held to this bullshit virtue standard.
The Dennis Quaid film Big Easy showed this aspect, Ellen Barkin is jogging and of course in New Orleans that’s all you need. She was dripping. She passed by the actress playing Quaids mom -an old school southern belle. She was appalled.
Women don’t “perspire” or do physical things like jogging might as well replace jogging with fucking.
That’s was the tone I got when I watched it -and again Gen X I’m like 14 going oh snap I get it! Women fart, curse, sweat, dig up their noses and they give birth to you in between. But some women developed this above it all shame about all of this.
I wanted to also say BTTF was a bit all over the place with its racial politics. I wasn’t feeling the “new 1985” which a black family is now in the Mcfly home which is of course is boarded up.
And then the terrorist in the first film. Could’ve just use Russia. We definitely was still beefing with them at the time. Yet they had a black mayor who though was now in charge of a dilapidated Hill Valley.
The interaction with the band which I knew at 10 they was smoking an L😜 I’m from the projects-can’t get that passed kids like me-the clash with Biffs crew was cool. Liked how the band didn’t just cower to some white kids whom they were older than.
Its racial politics were incredibly confusing, James. Incredibly so. I've read essays on the subject in the past - though never from a Black perspective, typically a white person writing about it. Which I don't disagree with; a lot of what's on screen is obvious today even to most remotely educated white people who have left their suburbs. But I'd love to see what the film meant to someone through the Black lens, especially what Marty McFly teaching Black musicians how to play one of the most iconic Black songs of the Fifties. That all said, I grew up extremely working class, trapped between urban Detroit and the trailer parks that hugged my town. I only point that out because I don't want you to assume my writing comes from a privileged perspective (though my life wasn't nearly as rough as yours, I would think; my friends from projects experience something very different than I did). I only grew into any kind of privilege in adulthood after a lot of debt and struggle...but I didn't drive a car that cost me more than $3K to buy until my 30s (and even then, I graduated to a lease).
I’ve tried to find out the class people just to get a feel. New York has an odd history. If I told you John Gotti and Mike Tyson are both from Brownsville, Brooklyn and aren’t separated by a ton of years it might surprise you. White flight hit white folks moved to Queens. Right outside my window was South Ozone Park, where Gotti’s family moved to. I saw his fireworks in July 4th way more than man Macys. Which you had to go to the roof to get a good look.
Anyway I say that to say it might sound odd but I can pick up working class white folk. That’s my background anyway. And in both environments-sex isn’t the quaint unspoken subject matter polite society portends it to be. This is why hip hop crossed racial lines. Who can’t understand layoffs and my car got reposed? So when the Message reached your part of the country it clicked.
As for the Marty “inventing” rock, yea what’s funny is by the 80’s the truth was coming out. Again this decade blew up the older order of things.
We started to hear from the old heads that black folk created rock. Blew our heads off. We knew blues, r&b, funk and of course gospel. As it would be PBS does a doc on the genre round the end of the 80’s if I’m not mistaken.
I got the scene. I did think it was funny. It was trying to be ironic. However I wasn’t an old enough fan of music to get the slight or what may have been seen as one. Ironically I became a huge hip hop enthusiast. My boys came to me for all news & songs hip hop related. I do see had I been born a decade prior I might have not liked that “your cousin Marvin Berry well listen to this”.
But the film goes to show you 20 years from now my nephews 6 year old will be baffled at what we were saying/doing now in what people feel are times of some kind of social reckoning with how some in our society are treated.
Thanks for sharing some of that personal biography, James. It made me realize how lucky I was to grow up when I did, where I did, because my understanding of rock 'n roll was -- as far as I can remember -- it was a Black thing white people turned into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. That was probably because, A, Motown (Detroit was steeped in the role Black people had played in American music, so it was very hard to run from it) and, B, the most celebrated white musicians I listened to wouldn't shut up about Black music they borrowed/stole from. I tend to call it borrowed because music is music and if you don't hide what you're doing, I find no fault in it. I wonder how I would've looked at American music had I been born even five years earlier...
Never thought about all of these crimes before! It’s really mind blowing. The only one that affected me as a child was Biff trying to rape Lorraine in the car.
I think it is necessary to view things from the past in terms of the age in which they were made. It’s important that we acknowledge the (often pretty horrific) attitudes they present but I don’t think they should be vilified for “not knowing any better” as it were. (Yes, I am being facetious with that comment!)
My daughter was horrified when we watched The Breakfast Club together a few years back by the assault perpetrated on Molly Ringwald by Judd Nelson when he puts his head between her legs under the desk!!!???! (Yes, really!) I had to seriously ask myself why it had never bothered me and all I could come up with was that I grew up in an era when bodily autonomy really was not valued and actually when many young women actually saw their purpose, at least in part, to be male gratification. Don’t even get me started on Ally Sheedy’s make over!
I personally think BTTF pales into insignificance when viewed next to something like Roadhouse which was practically made in the 90s for God’s sake! The women there make Lorraine look like a well-conceived fully fleshed out character.
Anyway, all this to say that I can love these films despite these flaws because at the time it was acceptable and therefore I choose to view them through that particular lens of nostalgia. As long as I am aware of their flaws, I think that’s ok.
I absolutely view BACK TO THE FUTURE in the context of the era it was made, but it is exceptional for the period or, realistically, any period given how sexual assault permeates every aspect of its plot from about 15 minutes in. You can't escape it for even five minutes. I can enjoy the film by myself today, but I'll never watch it again with my kids. One and done.
Goodness, it's strange how it easy not to see this - apart from Lorraine being creepy with 'Calvin Klein' and Biff pushing Lorraine down in the parking lot. I'm thinking that Peggy Sue Got Married is a rebuttal to all of this, as it's very much about consent.
Wow this is a great observation. Never thought of that, even after rewatching it recently. It seems prevalent with teen movies—bullies, unwanted groping, and getting even no matter how violent.
Yep. I've said this a few times in this comments section now, but BACK TO THE FUTURE is unique for its obsession with sexual assault. Once you reach the past, the film can't go five minutes without it coming up in some way.
I think you're correct to highlight those incidents as disturbing, and I wonder to what extent the acceptability of the plotline is not (purely) a reflection of 80s attitudes towards sexual assault, but also a tradition of broad comedy, which was not intended to correspond to what would be acceptable in real life (and, again, the acceptance of sexist genre elements does reflect something of social mores, but it isn't the same as saying that the movie directly demonstrates what was socially acceptable) .
"In my opinion the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence, and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct. It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance… is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering." -- Charles Dickens 1849
"An awareness of the prevalence of domestic abuse, and how Punch and Judy could be seen to make light of this, has caused changes in Punch and Judy performances in the UK and other English-speaking countries. The show continues to be seen in England, Wales, and Ireland—and also in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 2001, the characters were honoured in the UK with a set of British commemorative postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail. In a 2006 UK poll, the public voted Punch and Judy onto the list of icons of England. In 2024, a new version of the show was staged at London's Covent Garden. It was developed as part of the Judy Project, a three year study of the roles that women have played in the tradition of puppetry, by a University of Exeter team. The violence in this version of the show is directed more towards institutions of authority rather than an individuals and Judy questions the treatment she has received from Punch over hundreds of years."
It's a reflection of the fact that rape is a primary mover of plot in a lot of Hollywood films and a culture that not only witnessed its attempt once in this film, but several times and decided it was a family film anyway. Even last week, A-list actresses were talking about how rape as a backstory for female characters is still a constant in the work that's submitted to them. If BACK TO THE FUTURE is obsessed with rape, it's only because Hollywood is.
That's all true. I have hoped that things are improving. It did seem like the discussion about "women in refrigerators" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_refrigerators ) made a difference-- but perhaps only a difference of degrees.
As a side note, your post about John Wayne prompted me to look up Molly Haskell (best known for _From Reverence To Rape_), because I remember that she liked Wayne.
Good observations on the serial sexual abuses that drive the plot! Although the actual attempted rape was, even in 1985, unsettling, and it was a real WTF moment for me at the end where George and Lorraine say "If it wasn't for Biff, we never would have fallen in love." 😳 Turning the table on dick measuring is one thing, keeping your wife's attempted rapist around as a friendly handyman strains credulity.
OH and "Sex Crime #6" was completely unnecessary, a hat on a hat on a hat!!
(*The other thing that is heavily glossed over is that Biff tries to KILL Marty on more than one occasion. I mean, actually crush him with his car against a truck or the wall of a tunnel. He's not just a bully, he's criminally, irredeemably BAD. The writers really should have dialed him back a little.)
The astounding thing is that the film still...works. It's just so confident about itself that you don't stop and question most of these things - or its many other plotholes.
All of this glosses over another grim detail: in the original timeline, George and Lorraine are together, and it's hard to imagine Biff wasn't a terrible predator either, so it stands to reason that he has been a terrible shadow over their life all the way into the McFly's adulthood. It's really dark.
I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article, but your concern is that Biff sexually assaulted or attempted to sexually assault Lorraine after high school in the original timeline? Probably.
Fabulous read, Cole. I’m disturbed about many things, but mostly about the fact that when I watched this as a kid it didn’t register - just as you said. Yikes.
Hehe. An enlightened lens for sure. True all. There's a whole lot of 80s nostalgia that hasn't aged well in our collective, evolving emotional maturity. Someone already mentioned John Hughes, and he definitely had too many whiteboy misogynist tropes in his director's bag.
Absolutely, but as I replied to that comment, BACK TO THE FUTURE is unique for its obsession with sexual assault. Once you reach the past, the film can't go five minutes without it coming up in some way.
I always thought the point of Back to the Future was that the past is not as innocent as we believe and that nostalgia clouds our memories. That was why all those revelations made the movie so compelling.
He’s trying to save his own life and being forced to reckon with the reality of who his parents really were. But it is a comedy so it’s framed as jokes.
I never took it to be an apology for anything those characters did.
From my perspective, everyone in the film commits sex crimes or attempts to commit them or pretends to commit them and we're meant to like them anyway. However we were meant to feel about it at the time, Marty's reckoning with his parents is they're messed-up people and he, as their son, has a similar blasé relationship with sexual assault. I find it all disturbing. I didn't at the time, but I do as an adult.
Goes to show we are all kind of hypnotized until someone like Cole snaps his fingers. Thanks for writing this piece, I’ll never look at this movie the same way again.
Absolutely. I won't be sharing this with my kids again. I know it's not all the film is, but it's far too unsettling, as you put it, to be enjoyed as a family.
I have to say being from the hood-we noticed. We pointed it out especially after repeat viewings.
In working class sexuality is a lot more obvious. A lot more.
Remember we were a generation of kids with songs like “Brenda Had a Baby” in which the uncle or a relative molest Brenda. Diamond D has “Sally” which was about a young girl using sex for material gains but is really hiding her pain.
These were 90’s songs written by teenagers. Which meant we all saw this in the 80’s
Obviously we didn’t noticed the film’s sexual politics day one.
But I saw BTTF 4 times that summer. Then one more time in the fall.
Got it the day it was available for purchase to own. Eventually our lives as kids in the 80’s clashed with the films sexual politics.
Per divorces the “other family’s” came out.
We knew adults were fucking. The hustlers weren’t wearing all that gold because they like how it matched their shoes. Ditto for buying the cars.
We knew a lot of the “how we met” was routine and boring and as about romantic as taking out the garbage.
We also picked up on there was something about the film’s sexual politics that was going against the grain.
In the 80’s for some bizarre reason, mothers were still held to this bullshit virtue standard.
The Dennis Quaid film Big Easy showed this aspect, Ellen Barkin is jogging and of course in New Orleans that’s all you need. She was dripping. She passed by the actress playing Quaids mom -an old school southern belle. She was appalled.
Women don’t “perspire” or do physical things like jogging might as well replace jogging with fucking.
That’s was the tone I got when I watched it -and again Gen X I’m like 14 going oh snap I get it! Women fart, curse, sweat, dig up their noses and they give birth to you in between. But some women developed this above it all shame about all of this.
I wanted to also say BTTF was a bit all over the place with its racial politics. I wasn’t feeling the “new 1985” which a black family is now in the Mcfly home which is of course is boarded up.
And then the terrorist in the first film. Could’ve just use Russia. We definitely was still beefing with them at the time. Yet they had a black mayor who though was now in charge of a dilapidated Hill Valley.
The interaction with the band which I knew at 10 they was smoking an L😜 I’m from the projects-can’t get that passed kids like me-the clash with Biffs crew was cool. Liked how the band didn’t just cower to some white kids whom they were older than.
Its racial politics were incredibly confusing, James. Incredibly so. I've read essays on the subject in the past - though never from a Black perspective, typically a white person writing about it. Which I don't disagree with; a lot of what's on screen is obvious today even to most remotely educated white people who have left their suburbs. But I'd love to see what the film meant to someone through the Black lens, especially what Marty McFly teaching Black musicians how to play one of the most iconic Black songs of the Fifties. That all said, I grew up extremely working class, trapped between urban Detroit and the trailer parks that hugged my town. I only point that out because I don't want you to assume my writing comes from a privileged perspective (though my life wasn't nearly as rough as yours, I would think; my friends from projects experience something very different than I did). I only grew into any kind of privilege in adulthood after a lot of debt and struggle...but I didn't drive a car that cost me more than $3K to buy until my 30s (and even then, I graduated to a lease).
I’ve tried to find out the class people just to get a feel. New York has an odd history. If I told you John Gotti and Mike Tyson are both from Brownsville, Brooklyn and aren’t separated by a ton of years it might surprise you. White flight hit white folks moved to Queens. Right outside my window was South Ozone Park, where Gotti’s family moved to. I saw his fireworks in July 4th way more than man Macys. Which you had to go to the roof to get a good look.
Anyway I say that to say it might sound odd but I can pick up working class white folk. That’s my background anyway. And in both environments-sex isn’t the quaint unspoken subject matter polite society portends it to be. This is why hip hop crossed racial lines. Who can’t understand layoffs and my car got reposed? So when the Message reached your part of the country it clicked.
As for the Marty “inventing” rock, yea what’s funny is by the 80’s the truth was coming out. Again this decade blew up the older order of things.
We started to hear from the old heads that black folk created rock. Blew our heads off. We knew blues, r&b, funk and of course gospel. As it would be PBS does a doc on the genre round the end of the 80’s if I’m not mistaken.
I got the scene. I did think it was funny. It was trying to be ironic. However I wasn’t an old enough fan of music to get the slight or what may have been seen as one. Ironically I became a huge hip hop enthusiast. My boys came to me for all news & songs hip hop related. I do see had I been born a decade prior I might have not liked that “your cousin Marvin Berry well listen to this”.
But the film goes to show you 20 years from now my nephews 6 year old will be baffled at what we were saying/doing now in what people feel are times of some kind of social reckoning with how some in our society are treated.
Thanks for sharing some of that personal biography, James. It made me realize how lucky I was to grow up when I did, where I did, because my understanding of rock 'n roll was -- as far as I can remember -- it was a Black thing white people turned into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. That was probably because, A, Motown (Detroit was steeped in the role Black people had played in American music, so it was very hard to run from it) and, B, the most celebrated white musicians I listened to wouldn't shut up about Black music they borrowed/stole from. I tend to call it borrowed because music is music and if you don't hide what you're doing, I find no fault in it. I wonder how I would've looked at American music had I been born even five years earlier...
Never thought about all of these crimes before! It’s really mind blowing. The only one that affected me as a child was Biff trying to rape Lorraine in the car.
Same.
I think it is necessary to view things from the past in terms of the age in which they were made. It’s important that we acknowledge the (often pretty horrific) attitudes they present but I don’t think they should be vilified for “not knowing any better” as it were. (Yes, I am being facetious with that comment!)
My daughter was horrified when we watched The Breakfast Club together a few years back by the assault perpetrated on Molly Ringwald by Judd Nelson when he puts his head between her legs under the desk!!!???! (Yes, really!) I had to seriously ask myself why it had never bothered me and all I could come up with was that I grew up in an era when bodily autonomy really was not valued and actually when many young women actually saw their purpose, at least in part, to be male gratification. Don’t even get me started on Ally Sheedy’s make over!
I personally think BTTF pales into insignificance when viewed next to something like Roadhouse which was practically made in the 90s for God’s sake! The women there make Lorraine look like a well-conceived fully fleshed out character.
Anyway, all this to say that I can love these films despite these flaws because at the time it was acceptable and therefore I choose to view them through that particular lens of nostalgia. As long as I am aware of their flaws, I think that’s ok.
I absolutely view BACK TO THE FUTURE in the context of the era it was made, but it is exceptional for the period or, realistically, any period given how sexual assault permeates every aspect of its plot from about 15 minutes in. You can't escape it for even five minutes. I can enjoy the film by myself today, but I'll never watch it again with my kids. One and done.
Goodness, it's strange how it easy not to see this - apart from Lorraine being creepy with 'Calvin Klein' and Biff pushing Lorraine down in the parking lot. I'm thinking that Peggy Sue Got Married is a rebuttal to all of this, as it's very much about consent.
I'll have to give this some thought...
Wow this is a great observation. Never thought of that, even after rewatching it recently. It seems prevalent with teen movies—bullies, unwanted groping, and getting even no matter how violent.
Yep. I've said this a few times in this comments section now, but BACK TO THE FUTURE is unique for its obsession with sexual assault. Once you reach the past, the film can't go five minutes without it coming up in some way.
I think you're correct to highlight those incidents as disturbing, and I wonder to what extent the acceptability of the plotline is not (purely) a reflection of 80s attitudes towards sexual assault, but also a tradition of broad comedy, which was not intended to correspond to what would be acceptable in real life (and, again, the acceptance of sexist genre elements does reflect something of social mores, but it isn't the same as saying that the movie directly demonstrates what was socially acceptable) .
For example, there is this tension highlighted in the Wikipedia description of Punch and Judy shows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punch_and_Judy
-----------------quote--------------
"In my opinion the street Punch is one of those extravagant reliefs from the realities of life which would lose its hold upon the people if it were made moral and instructive. I regard it as quite harmless in its influence, and as an outrageous joke which no one in existence would think of regarding as an incentive to any kind of action or as a model for any kind of conduct. It is possible, I think, that one secret source of pleasure very generally derived from this performance… is the satisfaction the spectator feels in the circumstance that likenesses of men and women can be so knocked about, without any pain or suffering." -- Charles Dickens 1849
"An awareness of the prevalence of domestic abuse, and how Punch and Judy could be seen to make light of this, has caused changes in Punch and Judy performances in the UK and other English-speaking countries. The show continues to be seen in England, Wales, and Ireland—and also in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. In 2001, the characters were honoured in the UK with a set of British commemorative postage stamps issued by the Royal Mail. In a 2006 UK poll, the public voted Punch and Judy onto the list of icons of England. In 2024, a new version of the show was staged at London's Covent Garden. It was developed as part of the Judy Project, a three year study of the roles that women have played in the tradition of puppetry, by a University of Exeter team. The violence in this version of the show is directed more towards institutions of authority rather than an individuals and Judy questions the treatment she has received from Punch over hundreds of years."
It's a reflection of the fact that rape is a primary mover of plot in a lot of Hollywood films and a culture that not only witnessed its attempt once in this film, but several times and decided it was a family film anyway. Even last week, A-list actresses were talking about how rape as a backstory for female characters is still a constant in the work that's submitted to them. If BACK TO THE FUTURE is obsessed with rape, it's only because Hollywood is.
That's all true. I have hoped that things are improving. It did seem like the discussion about "women in refrigerators" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_refrigerators ) made a difference-- but perhaps only a difference of degrees.
As a side note, your post about John Wayne prompted me to look up Molly Haskell (best known for _From Reverence To Rape_), because I remember that she liked Wayne.
This interview with her is interesting, and also makes me think that a lot has changed (in part for the better): https://www.rogerebert.com/mzs/molly-haskell-on-feminism-censorship-screwball-comedy-and-life-after-andrew-sarris
Also, it was an '80s movie about the '50s. Need I say more?
Good observations on the serial sexual abuses that drive the plot! Although the actual attempted rape was, even in 1985, unsettling, and it was a real WTF moment for me at the end where George and Lorraine say "If it wasn't for Biff, we never would have fallen in love." 😳 Turning the table on dick measuring is one thing, keeping your wife's attempted rapist around as a friendly handyman strains credulity.
OH and "Sex Crime #6" was completely unnecessary, a hat on a hat on a hat!!
(*The other thing that is heavily glossed over is that Biff tries to KILL Marty on more than one occasion. I mean, actually crush him with his car against a truck or the wall of a tunnel. He's not just a bully, he's criminally, irredeemably BAD. The writers really should have dialed him back a little.)
The astounding thing is that the film still...works. It's just so confident about itself that you don't stop and question most of these things - or its many other plotholes.
OH it's just fantastic. And speaking of questionable, I loved this spot-on article on "BTTF's Terrible Newspaper":
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/01/back-to-the-futures-terrible-newspaper.html?mid=facebook_vulture
Amazing! I never noticed the degree to which those headlines are absurdly unrealistic.
All of this glosses over another grim detail: in the original timeline, George and Lorraine are together, and it's hard to imagine Biff wasn't a terrible predator either, so it stands to reason that he has been a terrible shadow over their life all the way into the McFly's adulthood. It's really dark.
I'm not sure if this is relevant to the article, but your concern is that Biff sexually assaulted or attempted to sexually assault Lorraine after high school in the original timeline? Probably.
Yeah exactly, BttF (one of my favorites of all time) is definitely built on a lot of really dark stuff!
It's like the casual suicide jokes in The Apartment in that way.
Fabulous read, Cole. I’m disturbed about many things, but mostly about the fact that when I watched this as a kid it didn’t register - just as you said. Yikes.
I'm glad to hear the piece resonated with you, Belinda. Thanks for reading.
Hehe. An enlightened lens for sure. True all. There's a whole lot of 80s nostalgia that hasn't aged well in our collective, evolving emotional maturity. Someone already mentioned John Hughes, and he definitely had too many whiteboy misogynist tropes in his director's bag.
Absolutely, but as I replied to that comment, BACK TO THE FUTURE is unique for its obsession with sexual assault. Once you reach the past, the film can't go five minutes without it coming up in some way.
I always thought the point of Back to the Future was that the past is not as innocent as we believe and that nostalgia clouds our memories. That was why all those revelations made the movie so compelling.
He’s trying to save his own life and being forced to reckon with the reality of who his parents really were. But it is a comedy so it’s framed as jokes.
I never took it to be an apology for anything those characters did.
From my perspective, everyone in the film commits sex crimes or attempts to commit them or pretends to commit them and we're meant to like them anyway. However we were meant to feel about it at the time, Marty's reckoning with his parents is they're messed-up people and he, as their son, has a similar blasé relationship with sexual assault. I find it all disturbing. I didn't at the time, but I do as an adult.
I will never see this film the same way again
Goes to show we are all kind of hypnotized until someone like Cole snaps his fingers. Thanks for writing this piece, I’ll never look at this movie the same way again.
There is enough trouble in the world without searching for more….life can devolve down to some form of constant assault^^
Absolutely. I won't be sharing this with my kids again. I know it's not all the film is, but it's far too unsettling, as you put it, to be enjoyed as a family.