Children watched a forbidden horror movie
Gee I hope I'm not posting too many questions about children and babies! I must look like an idiot. But I really need the extra support and I always receive such good answers here...
Yesterday my husband and I hired a babysitter for part of the evening, so that we could go out together. The babysitter is a teenager, the daughter of a friend of ours. I am a huge horror movie buff and I have a large collection of classic horror on DVD. Of course the teenager was very excited about this haha. I told her she could watch one of the movies from my collection after she put the children to bed. Well, she didn't put the children to bed at all, she let them stay up and they watched the movie with her!! Of course when we came home, they were sleeping and she didn't tell us anything about it. Then at around 1 am Shaina woke up screaming like I'd never heard her scream, and then Levi woke up too, absolutely hysterical! :eek: And then it all came out about how they watched the movie. We spent practically the whole night up with them, and they are scared to go to sleep tonight again. Ugh.
The really unfortunate part of all this is the movie they watched... it's called Phantasm (1979). For those of you who haven't seen it, the plot is, a 13 year old boy has lost both his parents in an accident!! Sound familiar? Then this alien "the tall man" is hanging out at the cemetery, stealing bodies and turning the bodies into slave workers for his home planet. Of course the boys parents were 2 of the slaves. Anyway. So now the children are worried that something like that might have actually happened to their parents. And 4 year old Levi keeps talking about the Tall Man coming to get him. They are absolutely terrified.
I am now resigned to having quite a few sleepless nights over this, especially given the nature of the movie. The timing couldn't have been any worse... sigh. Does anyone have any suggestions of what they did for their children after the kids had viewed a scary movie? Any help at all would be appreciated.