Why Gen X is Haunted by Traumatic Movies and TV Shows

A generational trauma bond

Bring up traumatic movies with any Gen Xer and you'll get an earful. We love talking about specific scenes from movies and TV shows we watched in childhood that continue to live rent-free in our brains — the kid-eating shark in Jaws (1975), the decontamination tent scenes from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), the nightmarish boat scene from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), the face-melting bad guys in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), the creepy wheelers attacking Dorothy in Return to Oz (1985), or every single bunny death in Watership Down (1978). Even Old Yeller , although from 1957, played on cable enough times to sear that scene into our minds.

“There’s a running joke among Gen Xers that the movies and television they watched in their youth were darker than the media consumed by Boomers before them and Millennials after them,” says Shalon van Tine, a cultural historian whose current research focuses on Gen X’s relationship with media. “Ask any Gen Xer and they will tell you that some of these disturbing images have remained imprinted in their minds forever.”

But are we really all that different from other generations? Plenty of Baby Boomers have vivid memories of being freaked out by the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz (1939). And my son and his teen friends insist that they’ve all been traumatized by the video game Five Nights at Freddy's (2014). But somehow, the movies and TV shows that impacted Gen X left deeper scars. Or at least that’s what every group of 50-somethings at every dinner party I’ve attended in the past few years keeps insisting.

The problem is, there’s not much research on the topic. Nobody was really studying Gen X and our relationship with pop culture back when it mattered. Recent research, like a 2023 study from the Netherlands, examined how movies can fuel social intelligence in children. But they focused on recent kids’ entertainment like Inside Out, a 2015 film that makes Lidsville, a bizarro Sid and Marty Krofft show from the ‘70s, look like Taxi Driver.

As for the long-term effects of media on different generations, “we do not know a lot (read: nothing),” admits Rebecca de Leeuw, a professor at Radboud University in the Netherlands who authored the Inside Out study. But she suspects that movies probably do dig into our psyches in ways we don’t realize until much later. But how exactly? She’s not sure, other than confessing that she loved The Lion King as a kid but “I still cry when Mufasa dies.”

The latchkey (and cable TV) kids

One theory for why Gen Xers have so many complicated emotions about our childhood entertainment is because we were essentially raised by it. We were, according to a 2004 marketing study, “one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history." So we turned to TV and movies, with far more viewing options than our parents ever had, and almost no adult supervision.

“Our common language is pop culture,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who’s studied generational impacts for more than 25 years and is a Gen Xer herself. She’s also the author of Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers and Silents — and What They Mean for the Future. “We saw a lot of the same movies together at the same ages, and a lot of the same TV shows at the same ages. You can sometimes strike up a conversation with someone by talking about the pop culture of our youth.”

Our parents, the Boomers, may have watched the same movies together, but thanks to the cable channels and video stores that became ubiquitous during Gen X childhoods, “we could watch the same movies together over and over and over again,” Twenge says.

I learned my lesson. I won’t be forcing my Gen Alpha son to watch any more iconic movies from my youth. I don’t need to be reminded that “the shark in Jaws is so obviously fake” or “David Bowie isn’t creepy or scary in Labyrinth, he just looks like an EDM DJ.” And I certainly don’t want to be told that crying over a horse sinking in quicksand is “no big deal” and “not something a grown man should be getting all weepy about.”

Unless you were there, watching NeverEnding Story on cable in the ‘80s for the hundredth time because your parents were out late again and the TV was your only babysitter, you wouldn’t understand.