Third and final viewing.

The first time I saw this movie I was 10-11 yrs old. At that age it was pretty terrifying but I did not understand most of the sexual situations. I watched it a couple of decades later and was left cringing in phantom pain and thankful I was single at the time. I recently watched it again and I can honestly say I don't ever want to see it again. As a child it scared me and as a young adult it repulsed me. This last viewing left me with nothing but sadness. This was not a monster, but a child cursed with a monster for a mother. Fine, she hated his father with the all-consuming and blinding hate that can only come after the betrayal of all-consuming love. She could have murdered the boy, abandoned him, or gotten rid of him in any number of ways, including sending him to his father. Instead, she chose to falsify his death so she could spend her life inflicting unthinkable pain on an innocent child just for the sin of existing. A lifetime of unimaginable and neverending pain from the person who was supposed to love him, the person who did love him in his first years, turned him into a pathetic creature without comprehension of human contact without pain. It also made me wonder what would have happened if anyone had ever found out Giorgio wasn't dead, but a victim of insane hatred and sadism? When the true monster dies, all of the pain and death are still her doing. Giorgio tries to imitate the first relatively normal human he sees and knows he wants contact with this girl who he senses would not be immediately and irreversibly repulsed by him, but what he knows always outweighs what a tiny part of him may sense. To him all human contact is pain; it's his 'normal. He had no chance; he was incurably insane. Granted, even if the new residents had found him sooner he may still have had no chance and almost certainly would have died in an asylum, but he may have seen a small amount of humanity that did not give intense physical pain. In any case, his pain would have been dulled by drugs. Nothing makes his actions okay, but it matters that there was no malicious intention. It does not make the man who killed him wrong or bad; he was protecting his family. The lack of malice did not lessen the danger. But I have reached the point of not being able to see this movie as anything but sad.