Blood on the Streets

As horror films lure in ever more youthful audiences, parents wonder: How much, how young?

Kids can get violent images from movies, TV, DVDs, the Internet. Yet the latest outrage over the feeding of gore to the very young came from one of the oldest forms of commercial communication: the billboard. Ads with grisly graphics from such fright films as Captivity and Dead Silence loomed over children as they went to their Los Angeles--area schools. And if the images didn't scare the young, they upset many parents--and detonated the latest installment in an old debate: Are scary things bad for kids?

Used to be, the young had to go to a horror film to get that sickly-sweet...

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