Parenting skills and pretentious film references can finally co-exist. If your Netflix categories and babysitting endeavors just aren’t lining up, now there’s a solution out there for those little tykes who would’ve otherwise been traumatized by your buzzkill Criterion Collection picks. Because artist and pop-culture nerd Todd Spence has created the Bleak Movies Coloring Book, something that is appropriate for children regarding all that is not appropriate for children. Well, besides porn, maybe. But one coloring book at a time, please.
Scenes from modern classics that are known for being either bloody or depressing now have absurd family-friendly illustrated versions safe for kids to color. So, if The Exorcist always gave you the creeps, grab your burnt-sienna crayon and scribble out Father Karras as he flies away gleefully on his jetpack. Vroom-vroom and whoopy! Similar interpretations exist for a slew of other movies that tell of lives even worse than yours: Reservoir Dogs, Seven, The Shining and Requiem for a Dream just to name a few films that get a light-hearted spin by Spence. See more on Break. And don’t forget the promises implied by the book’s “Volume 1” status, which could very well mean that in the next edition, Dad falls asleep in his plate of spaghetti at the end of American Beauty.
Kid-friendly spoiler alerts from the “Bleak Movies Coloring Book” below…