Check out these other Sony “Action Unleashed” DVDs!

Super 8

Movies with children in peril tend to be pretty scary to kids, obviously because they see themselves in the middle of the action. And the action in Super 8 is as terrifying as you can get without veering into R-rated, too-shocking-to-resonate territory (I guess you could subject your inner child to Irreversible or The Last House on the Left, but what’s the fun in that? In addition to being scared, your inner child might feel a bit empowered too, since most of the anti-alien-monster heroics in Super 8 are performed by children.

It

Nothing is scarier to children, inner or otherwise, than evil clowns. And It, based on the novel by Stephen King, features the king of the killer clowns. Pennywise, played by Tim Curry, has the power to transform himself into whatever his victims fear the most. And for much of the movie, his victims (and the protagonists of the story) are little kids. No matter how tough your inner child is, he or she won’t be feeling the urge to go to the circus any time soon.

Here are seven epic movie battles between kids and monsters.

Super 8

This year’s Super 8 was a classic example of kids vs. monsters. You’ve got a small band of nerdy child filmmakers who accidentally get embroiled in a government cover-up of a giant alien monster they’ve been experimenting on for decades.

It

Don’t think the kids from It have it easy just because they’re in a made-for-TV monster movie. As anyone who saw this movie will tell you, the monster from It, which preys on fear and has the ability to take the shape of anything that frightens you, is a lot scarier than the majority of big-screen movie monsters. His most terrifying form is as a murderous clown played by (of course) Tim Curry. If you’re still doubting the legitimacy of this monster, remember that by the time he was defeated, the kids had grown up into adults!

_{This is why I don’t do laundry anymore.}

Back in 2009, Warner Bros. hired screenwriter Dave Kajganich to tackle a big screen adaptation of Stephen King‘s novel It. I’ve never read the 1,104 page book because come on, it’s over 1,000 pages, but the 1990 mini-series scared the living crap out of me when I was younger. It ruined so many things for me, including chinese food, sewers, old ladies, Jonathan Brandis, and sewers. In fact, Googling images of Pennywise the Clown just now triggered my post traumatic stress disorder and my bladder.

Dave Kajganich spoke recently to the Stephen King fansite Lilja’s Library, and told them how he’s working on damaging our psyches with a killer clown again:

I told the studio from the beginning that I felt I needed to be able to write for an R rating, since I wanted to be as candid as the novel about the terrible things the characters go through as kids. They agreed and off I went. … I think the biggest difference [between the big screen adaptation and the miniseries] is that we’re working with about two-thirds the onscreen time they had for the miniseries. That sounds dire, I know, but it doesn’t necessarily mean two-thirds the amount of story. I’m finding as many ways as I can to make certain scenes redundant by deepening and doubling others.

I can’t image how he’ll take over 1,000 pages of source material and cram it into a two-hour film. Obviously a lot will be cut, but will all the crucial elements hold together is the question. Also, Tim Curry delivers such a fantastic performance in the original mini-series it’s going to be hard finding someone who can top it. But the bigger question here is, what’s up with Richard Thomas’s mole these days?

Yep, still enormous.