Today the Mutants are going to unload some trauma — or perhaps low-key bragging — by fessing up to some movies that we saw at a very inappropriate age!

Justin: When I was six or seven, our parents went out and left us with a babysitter. After we went to bed, she put on Jaws — and I came down right during the opening scene where the girl is dragged through the moonlit water to her doom. For whatever reason, my sitter didn’t stop me from watching this, and thus I developed a very strong early fear of sharks. Nevertheless to say, my parents were NOT pleased.

It’s still a great movie, though.

Sitting Duck: I had often been dragged into my older sister’s TV and movie obsessions when we still lived under the same roof. For instance, after seeing Pirates of the Caribbean she sought out every Johnny Depp flick she could lay her hands on. Some of which proved to feature exposed titties (specifically From Hell and The Ninth Gate). But since we were legally adults at that point it wasn’t too big a deal.

More problematic was when she went on a Kevin Kline binge as a teenager after she had seen him in The Pirates of Penzance. Dave never felt plausible, though it wasn’t until I got exposed to Yes, (Prime) Minister that I recognized it as the Sorkin-esque wish fulfillment drivel that it is. I Love You to Death certainly had its moments, though Kline’s camp Italian accent is the real horror. But the real awkwardness came from the otherwise hilarious A Fish Called Wanda, what with Kline’s potty mouth and a naked John Cleese.

Wolfy: I have a couple of movies that I saw at an inappropriate age, actually, and both of them really changed my opinion about animation and what it could be capable of. Those were Heavy Metal and Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

If you’ve never seen either of those films, they stand as classics for a reason, if for nothing else as mile markers of artistry rather than astonishing pieces of fiction. Which is kind of the point as well as the impression they left; they both opened my eyes to the idea that animated film can have striking visuals and incredibly potent storytelling power above and beyond the silly Saturday morning cartoon schlock I was exposed to prior. I’ll always thank those movies for that.

Drake: Waaaaaaay back in the 1970s, quite a few local television stations used to buy programming in bulk, so they’d end up with a bunch of movies which would then get stuck into afternoon and late night slots. Which is how a young Mutant would often come across Italian crime dramas dubbed into English and not even realize that he was watching a poliziotteschi. And of course horror movies were a common bulk buy as well, especially for the weekend “creature features” that were so popular in that era. Generally those movies were fairly harmless, with Sandy Frank and Toho sharing small-screen time with old Universal flicks and early Hammer films.

But sometimes a movie would slip through unedited. I’m guessing that in this particular case, The Witchfinder General had probably been lumped in with a bunch of other American International Pictures movies. In fact, it had been renamed The Conqueror Worm at one point in the U.S., simply to trade on the popularity of the earlier Edgar Allan Poe adaptations by the studio and could well have been packaged with those films. But The Witchfinder General isn’t a Poe story. Although it does star Vincent Price, it’s a much harsher film than his usual fare, filled with torture, hangings, and other sorts of brutality as it tells the fictionalized story of real-life witch hunter Matthew Hopkins. It’s a very good film, but not one that’s really meant for an eight-year-old, Mutant or not.