James Tynion IV is right: E.T. genuinely is a horrifying movie (as long as you watch the right scenes)
Of all the things I ever thought I would have in common with comic book horrormeister James Tynion IV, a childhood fear of the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was not on the list.
Like everyone of a particular generation, I fell in love with E.T. as a kid; I was eight years old when the movie his theaters — because, yes, I’m a very old man — and I left that theater entirely in love with the story that I’d just seen, with every single piece of Steven Spielberg’s heartwarming sentimental movie magic working on the wide-eyed innocent that I was back then, as was entirely intended. As it happened, that wasn’t the mindset I had going into the theater.
Before I had a chance to pay my money and head to the theater, you see — well, sure, my parents’ money; I was eight, after all — a friend had a bootleg video of the movie of dubious origin that he’d declared with the kind of excited zeal that only eight-year-olds can have that I had to see. At that point, as a sheltered and eager child already in love with science fiction and movies, there was no way that I’d refuse such an offer, even when it was explained to me in a garbled manner that the video came from a friend who knew someone whose parents went on vacation in the States and knew a guy; this was E.T., a movie everyone was already talking about, and I was about to get a chance to see it early!
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