Current Events > Is The Matrix scary?

(+) Yeah! (+)

My wife and I have been trying to give our 23-year-old son a decent film education, which basically means that we all watch a movie together every Friday afternoon. We've shown him modern classics, actual classics, movies we grew up on, and other stuff we think he'd like or are important for him to see. So this coming weekend, I decided to show him the 1999 cyberpunk classic, the Matrix.

My wife objected. Vehemently.

She claims that the film is terrifying. Not because of the tension or violence - my kid can deal with that kind of stuff - but because of the existential horror, the implications that the world we live in is not real. She claims that she herself had never been as scared by a movie as she was by this one, and that there was no way I was going to expose my son to that kind of film.

Personally, I have no idea what she's talking about. I found the Matrix (the first one, of course; we're not going to mention that the others exist) to be a fun science fiction romp, with several ideas that may have been new to mainstream cinema, but which I was familiar with from years of SF reading. And it's not as if my kid's unfamiliar with the concept of a virtual world, either - they've done Matrix rereads on several of his TV shows, including, I'm fairly certain, SpongeBob (and frankly, I'd think a long-term SpongeBob watcher like him would be immune to existential horror).

So what say you? Am I about to break my child's mind? Does anyone else find the film legitimately frightening? Or is it just my wife's misgivings?