:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46513734/shutterstock_258145550.0.0.jpg)
Alex Falcone, who writes film criticism for Portland, Oregon's Willamette Week, had a problem. Universal wasn't screening Jurassic World in time for him to meet his review deadline. But the movie is unquestionably the biggest release of the week, so Falcone needed to write something about it.
Enter Una, a 10-year-old acquaintance of Falcone's. Una likes movies, dinosaurs, and scary things. That made her the ideal person to discuss Jurassic World. So Falcone interviewed her, under the absolutely perfect headline "Clever Girl."
What's most important here, however, is that Una has the best advice ever for dealing with scary movies. If you're easily terrified, Una has got you covered:
Alex: Yuck. Una, it seems like you’re kind of into scary things. So when you watch scary movies, how do you deal with it?
Una: My friends always watch movies before me, so they tell me the scary parts and then I watch those scary parts on YouTube 10 million times to prepare myself.
Alex: That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.
Una: It works pretty well. In Lord of the Rings there’s this scary part where this gross orc jumps out of the mud, and it’s like, "whaaa," so I watched that like 10 million times until I got used to it.
Alex: That would give me nightmares!
Una: I didn’t get nightmares from that. But when I was 6, I probably shouldn’t have been watching a Scooby Doo movie, but I did, and I had a nightmare about a mutated wrestler chasing me and my dad.
Alex: If you had to rank them, which of those three things is the scariest?
Una: Um, I would say mutated wrestler, then orc, then dinosaur.
Solid advice, Una. (For the record, we believe an orc to be scarier than a mutated wrestler.)
More and more film critics who work in print media are coming up with creative ways to deal with the very situation Falcone found himself in, as studios increasingly wait to screen their movies until the absolute last minute. Sometimes this means the movie is bad; sometimes it just means the director is working on it nonstop.
But so long as it results in fun stories like this one, who cares? Falcone can share his Jurassic World thoughts later; Una's scary movie advice is eternal.
Read Falcone's full interview with Una. It's well worth it.
