Parents' Guide to

The Mothman Prophecies

By Nell Minow, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 15+

Psychological thriller may deeply upset some kids.

Movie PG-13 2002 119 minutes
The Mothman Prophecies Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

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age 15+

Based on 3 parent reviews

For all of us
For all of us Adult
November 29, 2020
age 17+

Paying attention

Unnapropeiate scenes; One scene with a naked female showering, two scenes in which the men are taking the clothing off their women to initiate sex then interrupted, several scenes in which a picture of Richard Geres wife is showing several inches of cleavage
davispittman
davispittman Adult
October 9, 2019
age 12+

Very intriguing thriller

This is a very intriguing thriller that will make your hair raise. A few scenes in particular are nightmare inducing, not from anything visual but from sound. I highly suggest this to people who like creepy thrillers. There’s one f bomb and a couple uses of godd**n. One brief scene involves two people starting to have sex but being interrupted before anything graphic happens. I think 12 year olds and up will be alright as long as they don’t scare too easily.

This title has:

Too much sex
Too much swearing
See all 3 parent reviews

What's the Story?

In THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, Richard Gere stars as John Klein, a star political reporter who thinks his life is going just right when, following a car accident, he finds out that his wife (Debra Messing) has a rare brain tumor. After her death, he sees some odd, angel-like drawings that she made in the hospital. Two years later, he suddenly finds himself in the midst of all kinds of nutty stuff, mostly in a small town in West Virginia on the Ohio River. Mysterious circumstances lead him to the town. When his car dies, he goes to a nearby house to ask for help. The man in the house (Will Patton) holds him at gunpoint, saying that John has been there three nights in a row. A skeptical policewoman named Connie (Laura Linney) tells John of odd happenings, including sightings of a winged creature with red eyes who looks sort of like the drawings John's wife did. So John tells his newspaper that he's working on a story and settles in at the local hotel to investigate.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (3 ):
Kids say (8 ):

Director Mark Pellington knows how to handle suspense and throw in some "boo!"-ish surprises. But the happenings themselves are so un-compelling that it hardly seems worthwhile. Maybe it's because they decided to be true to whatever really happened (though they had no problem moving the time of the story up more than 30 years to take place in the present). But even the Mothman at his most ominous just didn't seem that scary to me.

Another problem is the way that, after all that business with having voiceprints done on the Mothman's recordings and having the sightings substantiated by many different people, the movie hedges its bets at the end by telling us that it all might be a post-traumatic manifestation of John's grief over losing his wife or guilt over thinking about letting her go so that he can move on. It's possible that both are true -- that it was the grief that made John available to otherworldly messages and that he decides to walk away from it. But that still leaves us with a big "so what?"

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about why many people like mystery/spooky movies like this one. What makes a good spooky movie?

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