6. Leslie Falls In A Creek And Drowns - Bridge To Terabithia
If you've never seen
Bridge to Terabithia, it's probably not the movie you think it is. Instead of being all fun and CGI crazy like, uh,
The Spiderwick Chronicles, it's an emotional and actually pretty disturbing meditation on the nature of death. I say "disturbing," but it's not scary or anything - it's just disturbing in the sense that you're not expecting what happens to happen. That's to say, halfway through the movie adaptation of the wonderful book, the character Leslie Burke - outgoing, kind, creative, intelligent and talented - dies. She's in the fifth grade. So whereas lots of people who sought that movie out probably wanted magic creatures and mystical worlds, what they actually got was a nice girl getting killed when she falls headfirst into a creek and nobody comes to save her. Of course,
Terabithia is a much better movie because it's actually about something, but when Leslie's unexpected demise comes it really does change the tone of the flick dramatically. What's worse is, her only friend in the movie, who is also the protagonist, refused to meet up with her that day so he could hang out with his teacher. Also disturbing.