What would we do in this time period without movies? They are one of the major sources of entertainment for us. Movies provide us with almost any type of entertainment from comedy, horror, action, romantic, and many others. There’s a movie for every mood we experience. The scriptwriters and technologies have evolved throughout the history of movies to keep us interested and in the movie theaters and keep wanting for more. But is evolving a good thing? Now a days, there are so many violent and expletive scenes that it feels like every other movie should be rated R. Although movies are crucial source of entertainment, they may have an adverse affect on the minds of young children.

The primary example of these adverse affects includes smoking. Smoking has existed for a long time and many people have incorporated into their lives. Millions of Americans are addicted to cigarettes and need several of them daily to function properly. Many of these addicts began smoking because they thought it would make them look “cool”. The main reason behind this is because almost everyone watches movies, and most of the movies are rated PG-13, meaning it’s for kids. Depiction of smoking by the characters in these movies leads to kids thinking that they would be “cool” if they try it.

Jennifer Warner of Webmd.com stated that, “teens exposed to the average number of smoking scenes from PG-13 movies were 49% more likely to have tried smoking. Those exposed to the average number of smoking scenes from Rated R movies were 33% more likely to have tried smoking”. Even though movies rated R are suppose to be more explicit in their content, they are not the main cause of teens smoking. It is PG-13 Rated movies that drive the force behind teens smoking.

Horror films have been around for a long time. Some people love them, some people hate them, it all depends on the person’s preferences. It is one of the most famous, exciting, and polarizing genres. Films in this genre also bring in a lot of money especially around Halloween, which is based around scaring people. When kids, who don’t yet understand difference between real and fictional, watch these kinds of movies it leaves them with a lasting fear from the movie.

In a study done by the University of Michigan and Wisconsin concluded, that even though short term effect of these movies might be scary, but for some people it leaves them with fears that stay with them throughout their lives and the way they deal with it is by either trying to stay out of situations like they saw in the movies or trying to convince themselves to understand that, whatever they saw was just a movie and it was not real. Fears from horror movies can be categorized into 5 categories: animal, environmental, blood, situational, and sound effects. Most of the fears developed from movies can most definitely be categorized into these categories. When kids watch these movies and they get frightened, if the fear from the movie doesn’t go away in the next week or so then it will most likely stay with them throughout their lives or until they don’t try to get rid of it. So parents must exercise extreme caution when they let their kids watch some of these horror movies because they can be so scared from them that it might affect them for the rest of their lives.

Hollywood movies are much more liberal in terms of displaying sexual scenes then other cinemas around the world. For example, Bollywood, the Indian movie industry, didn’t start showing people kissing on screen until mid 2000s. When movies show sex scenes like they are not a big deal like in some Hollywood movies, it gives the message to the kids that it’s totally safe and has no consequences. This leads to kids having sex at a younger age, having more girlfriends/boyfriends, and less prone to use condoms, according to Janese Silvey of Columbio Tribune.

Author of the book Global Bollywood and a professor of telecommunication at UGA, Dr. Kavoori, claimed in an email that Indian public isn’t that comfortable with having that much exposure to sex. That’s why most of the Bollywood films don’t show it but lately they have been shifting towards a more western philosophy and have started showing more sex scenes in films. American people never had any problems so the films show this with more liberty, which does have, a negative effect on the kids. Showing off these explicit sex scenes in movies like Wolf of the Wall Street, leads to not just our kids thinking of sex in a common way but also it ruins the society that we live in.

Sometimes movies give us some of the most helpful advice and teach us a lesson on how to deal with problems but there is also a bad side to that. Our kids, who are very fragile to their environment, watch what is normal in this day then they are not going to be learning the right stuff so we have to take necessary actions like watching over them at all times and approve of all the movies that they go and watch or we have to make our censor board much stricter. The realistic solution is to watch what they watch because changing the way censor board looks at these things will take too much effort and movie studios will not let this change happen. Even though movies are essential to us, we have to know what the consequences are while watching some of the movies that are being made right now so we can protect future generations and ourselves.