If your life was a movie...

[fistor!@#]

I think where you and I differ is this: I wouldn't let my 5 year old watch a movie if I thought it would give him a nightmare. Nightmares are utterly terrifying to little kids. I just wouldn't subject my kid to that.

well, i'm not a parent. this is my friend's daughter. but that's probably why our opinions differ, in any case.
i have no idea whether or not she has nightmares over this movie. but i know she loves it. so much, that her mom deleted it off the dvr to get her to move on.
there's curiosity, there's imagination, there's scary images, and i think there's value in a kid learning that, no matter how much it freaks them out, nightmares can't really hurt them. enough to be worth the stress? i don't know. like i said, i can only speak on my personal behalf as a kid. and i'm fine with it.
nothing against you wanting to protect your child. of course you would. you're just protecting them from a movie.

I know it's not your kid.

Also, I probably would share your same stance if I were younger and didn't have kids. But the minds of children are extremely impressionable. They are sponges to everything around them. I feel it's important to try to fill their environments with as much positive stuff as possible. An R rated horror flick would not be on that list. In fact, I think that's pretty damn irresponsible, to expose a 5 year old to a movie like that.

And nightmares really can screw up a kid. Not permanently, of course, but they can really mess with a kid's mind. They're not equipped to handle the same stimuli an adult can. I can still remember some of the nightmares I had when I was that age, can't you? They profoundly affect children and really shouldn't be treated lightly.