Minor ThreatWhy are we so fascinated with horror movies about homicidal children?
Updated Tuesday, July 7, 2009, at 7:03 AM ETRead more from Slate's Summer Movies special issue.
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StumbleUponSometimes the evil-kiddie movie seeks to make a big point about the world we're leaving our kids. In Who Can Kill a Child? this takes the form of high-flown, not entirely coherent moralizing: The film starts with eight minutes of footage of children killed in the Holocaust, Vietnam, and African famines. Children of the Corn is partially a treatise on the deforming effects of religious fundamentalism—the evil kids take the Bible as their guiding text and claim direct communication with a bloodthirsty God. And Cold War-era anxieties about nuclear annihilation reverberate through The Omen, with its mixture of politics and the apocalyptic.
The evil-kiddie movie has been around long enough that new specimens must work hard to distinguish themselves from what's come before. In Orphan, there is an outlandish plot twist in which it's revealed that Esther isn't at all what she seems. (Skip this parenthetical to avoid the spoiler: She is, according to online reports, a midget ex-prostitute masquerading as an adolescent.) Far subtler are the variations that writer-director George Ratliff brings to the genre in 2007's Joshua. Ratliff, who made the fantastic documentary Hell House, knows about disturbing adolescents. Like Rhoda in The Bad Seed, Joshua Cairn is a wealthy, permanent-pressed overachiever who plays the piano constantly, a hobby that telegraphs both his precocity and creepy inward absorption. Joshua's means of destruction, unlike Rhoda's, are largely passive-aggressive: He exploits his parents' insecurities and weaknesses of character with virtuoso finesse, growing so expert at pushing their buttons that he drives them to behavior more unhinged than any of his own. In one of the most frightening scenes, he sends his mother into a nervous breakdown just by playing hide-and-seek very, very well.
While the moral calibration of other evil-kiddie movies puts a premium on the wholeness of the family, Joshua narrates a family's disintegration with a cold, merciless eye. "You don't have to love me," Joshua tells his dad early on. "It's not a rule." First he calls into question the basic premise of a family—because of blood, we love one another unconditionally—and then he goes about dismantling it, term by term, until his mother is in a mental home and his father's just some paranoid guy he shares an apartment with. Here is a villain more readily imaginable, and therefore much scarier, than any Armageddon-prophesying hell spawn, backwoods scythe wielder, or pigtailed death merchant: a 9-year-old deconstructionist.
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The horror, I think, comes from the thought that something you love with all your heart and are completely responsible for is evil -- the discovery that you have nursed a snake at your bosom. And the awful question of whether or not you could kill, or even turn in to the police, your own child. If you watch the news (or even an episode of Dog the Bounty Hunter), quite a lot of people can't bring themselves to help authorities hold their child accountable for his or her misdeeds.
I suspect that's why most of these movies make the evil child one who's been adopted by the family -- it's a bit of a cheap cop-out, in that it puts distance in between the parent and the psychopath child and creates an easy excuse -- "clearly, this alien child, who is no part of me, had problems that are not my fault." While I think a movie that dealt intelligently with the horror of an evil biological child could be fascinating, it may be too off-putting for popular audiences.
-- joy_ryde
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When my mother had cable, I'd occasionally find her watching the Lifetime cable channel. All their movies seem to revolve around variations of one theme - the boyfriend/fiancé/husband who is secretly a wife-beater/rapist/child abuser/murderer. I hope Judith Light got counseling after playing those roles. Both homicidal child and husband movies serve as the dark side of chick flicks - domestic emo-porn.
On a broader note, you could throw in the "check for pods" science fiction from the 1950 as well. All answer the same question: what if the people you trust the most turn against you? The enemy within may be more unlikely than aliens or homicidal thugs, but but that enemy is also more familiar, and thus perhaps more threatening than the garden variety monster.
-- JonFrum
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