Dumb America: Think of the children! Or, scary movie billboards offend sensible children.

“It’s the kind of thing that goes straight into your subconscious,” said Raye, who was determined to find out where all the other billboards were, so she could make sure her 11-year-old daughter would be spared the horrific imagery.

“The message is that this is what you do with women,” Cain said. “You kidnap then, you confine them, you torture them and you kill them.”

Peter Wilkes, a Lionsgate executive, told me the studio had nothing to do with the ads that bear its name. Lionsgate partnered with After Dark Films. So I talked to Courtney Solomon, who runs After Dark. He said the billboards were a mistake. That ad was one of 50 or 60 concepts under consideration, he said, and before any were approved, this one ended up at a printing plant and up on billboards in L.A., as well as on New York taxicabs.

“To be honest with you, I don’t know where the confusion happened and who’s responsible,” Solomon said.

I’m having trouble believing that two movie studios had not a clue that ads for their movie would be all over Los Angeles and New York, but Solomon said he ordered them all taken down after he received the first complaint and drove to see one of the billboards. He said he knew of at least 10 complaints forwarded to him by Lionsgate.

The billboards should all be down by Tuesday, Solomon said, carping a bit about how much it would cost him to have the ads removed. He apologized to those who were offended and said he hoped people don’t get the wrong idea about “Captivity.” It’s not a slasher movie, he said. “It’s about something that happens to 850,000 people in this country a year.”

I told him I was unaware of 850,000 people being abducted, tortured with cables stuck up their noses and murdered.

“This movie is about a story of what happened to one person who is abducted,” he said.

I guess that means there could be 849,999 sequels.

Can’t wait.

The horrible advertisements posted here without permission: