‘The Watchers’ Parents Guide: Movies’s Age Rating Explained

‘The Watchers’ is an upcoming American horror movie directed by Ishana Night Shyamalan, based on A. M. Shine’s novel. It features Dakota Fanning in the main role as Mina. The story follows Mina, a 28-year-old artist, who gets stuck in a remote Irish forest with three strangers. They’re all stalked by unknown creatures at night. The film was shot from July to September 2023 and will be released on June 14, 2024. Now since the movie’s premise sounds quite intriguing but also scary, we decided to analyze the movie’s rating and see whether it’s appropriate for children.

‘The Watchers’ is heavy on the psychological horror elements

Now without spoiling everything in advance, based on the book, ‘The Watchers’ will follow a group of people who are stuck in a remote forest “house,” with seemingly no way to return to civilization. Why? Because they are being hunted by strange forest creatures each night. Their only salvation seems to be a brightly lit room with a one-way mirror window that allows them to be seen each night by the horrific creatures. Now this is as much as I can reveal without giving away the whole plot of the movie but it doesn’t sound so bad. Some elements certainly sound like the show ‘FROM’ that deals with a similar theme of being trapped in the middle of nowhere with no way to escape because the night belongs to the monsters.

As far as gore, violence, and similar things go, you don’t have to expect too much of it. Yes there are some violent scenes in the book, and there is some gore briefly mentioned (there’s also some present in the teaser trailer) but it’s really nothing too bad. You can easily see more blood and gore and action in some action shows or movies.

The main emphasis of the movie will be on the psychological torture type of things and survival themes.

Expect little to no romance or foul language

When it comes to sexual themes, romance is pretty much non-existent in the book, it’s really not about romance at all. Our characters are focused on surviving and solving a massive mystery, there should be no explicit scenes or substance abuse. The main character is a smoker, but as soon as she enters the forest she pretty much runs out of tobacco almost immediately hence no smoking should be in the movie all that much.

There’s also no foul language except for the occasional “S****” but your kids can easily hear worse things just walking on the street. So this shouldn’t be a problem.

So, why the “R” rating?

The movie despite not being overly violent or gory, still focuses on violent and dark themes primarily on the “hostage-captor” dynamic and this isn’t something to be taken lightly. Judging by our approximate rating, teens younger than 17 shouldn’t watch the movie without parental guidance, but in my opinion, teens younger than 15 shouldn’t watch the movie at all. Despite them having a surface-level understanding of what they will see it’s highly likely that they will feel weird about it and will have nightmares (there’s one specific reason why but I can’t reveal it without spoiling the whole premise).

15 and 16-year-olds can watch the movie but only if you explain what to watch beforehand. Ultimately it’s up to you as a parent to prepare your child, and it’s up to you to decide what the child should be exposed to as no child is the same and they deal with difficult subjects individually.

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