I remember watching Beetlejuice with my aunt when I was 4 or 5 years old. I was thrilled beyond belief, loving the goofy, yet grotesque world of both the dead and the living. My aunt however, was scared. I turned to her, "It's only a movie".

I certainly believe that I have been very desensitized to films as my parents took me to see such horrific films such as Total Recall and Look Who's Talking when I was so young. They even took me to see Howard Stern's Private Parts when I was 12 because my brother was interested in becoming a radio personality (and now he is). While Private Parts is of course an auto-biopic, that film and the other films I mentioned are relatively adult for a 4 or 5 year old.

I'm now 25 years old, and I often find myself telling people the same thing when they see movies. Yet I hesitate to agree with myself. Movies are not always just movies. Cinema can be, and often is art. Cinema is a language. Film can change who we are, who we want to be. Those films never made me want to replicate their scenes, and I learned at an early age that movies were a magical experience, and later that they were an artful experience.

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