' WATERSHIP DOWN ' : CHILDREN'S HONOUR FILM

'' HORROR FOR CHILDREN '' : The value of horror is that it gives us a safe space to process fear. And why the animated film about woodland creatures Watership Down is a horror film.

When I think of my first encounter with horror, I don't think of a vampire, a witch, or even a possessed girl's head spinning around [ I saw  The Exorcist at the age of seven].

I think of a Sun God, I think of teeth and claws slocked with blood. I think of the Black Rabbit of Death. And he wasn't even the bad guy.

I'm not talking about some campy folk horror from the 1960s. I'm talking about the 1978 animated version of Richard Adams' Watership Down.

I was perhaps four when I  saw it. The opening sequence remains a core memory : the myth of the Prince with a Thousand enemies, the Original Rabbit, rendered in gorgeous animation that evoked Aboriginal art via the films of New Zealand artist Len Lye.

Then, the great crimson wave of blood flowing across the fields. Death, cold and indiscriminate, was coming to the gentle slopes of Watership Down.

That was the moment I first felt awe and terror at the fragility of life. And the utter indifference of death. The kind of awe and terror we assume children's mind can neither comprehend nor bear.

And that was just the beginning.

It's easy to assume that because Watership Down is a cartoon about woodland animals, it must be gentle. It isn't. And that's why it's so powerful.

My parents had already let my older siblings and I watch the campy spectacle of Hammer Horror at Halloween, but they couldn't have guessed the deeper impact of Adams' rabbits -they let me watch alone from the safe distance of the shag rug one sunny afternoon in 1984.

Nothing terrible had yet happened to me. I hadn't known grief or loss. Watership Down cracked that open.

For the first time, I understood viscerally, that all the earth's creatures - including myself - are mortal, and that death was coming for us all.

The World Students Society thanks Aislinn Clarke, a lecturer in Film Studies at Queen's University, Belfast in Northern Ireland.