Is Neil Gaiman’s Coraline too Scary for Kids? Good!

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The Henry Selick-helmed film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s horror novella, Coraline, opens in theaters this Friday; while it looks like a children’s movie on the surface, some people are suggesting that it’s anything but. We’ve seen (and loved!) the film, but a story about an 11-year-old girl who stumbles into an alternate reality where everyone is forced to replace their eyes with buttons might be a little much for some kids. The fact that Gaiman just won the 2009 Newbery Medal for his equally macabre The Graveyard Book will only add to this confusion.

But maybe that’s not a bad thing. The inadvertently scary movies we watch in childhood shape us — or land us in therapy. After the jump, find the trailer. We’ve also asked Flavorpill staffers to share the flicks that freaked them out the most as kids. Share your own with us in the comments. It will help you heal.

Our own super scary flicks: 1. “Time Bandits.” 2. “IT. I steered clear of sewage drains for some time after seeing that.” 3. “E.T. I was scared to death of it ’till I was 13.” 4. “I was scared of the movie Congo as a kid… Something about the weird blurry movements of the gorillas combined with their screams gave me nightmares for a long time. Now I just see it as a silly movie about a gorilla using sign language.” 5. “The Wizard of Oz. Sweet Jesus! Those flying monkeys were SCARY!” 6. “The Wizard of Oz terrified me until my late teens. I don’t know what caused more nightmares for me as a child — the crowd of munchkins or the flying monkeys.” 7. “Teen Wolf.” 8. “Gremlins. I was so scared, in fact, that I never watched it all the way through.” 9. “The Neverending Story. I still refuse to watch the scenes with that ‘Nothing’ creature in them.” 10. “The Last Unicorn. It’s a cartoon but the ending is really scary. But I was/am still a baby.” 11. “Doctor Who with Tom Baker.”