A helpful website for movie-goers, book-readers, and more.

Have you ever been watching a movie when suddenly a scene you weren't expecting caused anxiety or triggered a strong emotional reaction? For instance, my mom tangled with a humongous rattlesnake while in her youth, and from then on if she saw an image of a snake-- even a harmless garter snake--she freaked out!

Well, I recently came across a helpful website that gives people the "heads up" for frightening, disturbing, phobic, traumatic elements that might cause distress. It's titled Does The Dog Die (doesthedogdie.com).

The website  contains "emotional spoilers for movies, tv, books and more." This site is crowd-sourced, and they track 80+ categories of potentially upsetting scenes. You can either look up a specific title and find a list of possible triggers, or you can look up a category, such as "Are there snakes?" and it lists the titles of shows, video games, books that have snakes, along with a brief description... for instance... yes, there are snakes, but seen in a distance.

On the site, you can specify the type of media you want to search... books, movies, magazines and more... even podcasts and comic books. And you can filter by "yes" or "no". For example, my mom could have looked for "Are there snakes?" and selected "movies" and specified "no" to search for movies that did not have snakes.

Here are a few samples of categories for the site:

• cheating
• someone uses drugs
• heads get squashed
• an animal dies
• flashing lights or images
• someone says "I'll kill myself"
• someone is sexually assaulted
• there's gun violence
• someone is buried alive
• there are clowns

Check it out. There are oodles of categories and if you don't see the particular trigger scenes or topics that concern you, you can request that they add it.

Does The Dog Die (doesthedogdie.com)