Tonight, TCM does it for the kids. From The Bad Seed to Village of the Damned, TCM shows that even the kinder can get involved in the nasty business of violent intimidation, terror, and murder. Happy Friday, everyone! While I’d love to sit back and write about the top kiddie horror movies (“Top 25 Horror Movies with Children!”), I’m confident you can find another ten or perhaps 20 thousand articles on the subject elsewhere and before you can say, “Lazy Slideshow Article” you’ll be hooked into waiting 30 seconds for every new page to load thanks to the 17 different banner ads that pop up for each new slide only to find out that, surprise, surprise, they picked the tv girl from The Ring as the number one. Anyway, have fun with that. I’m going to talk about why kids are so effective in horror, instead.
Children have the capacity to be utterly helpless and utterly dangerous all at once. Because they are so uneducated about so much in the world, there’s a helplessness there that requires our guidance and leadership. At the same time, that lack of understanding can make them terrifying when the power of life and death is in their hands. A child doesn’t understand how much is lost forever when a person’s life is taken from them. Because they lack that understanding, there’s a sense they can’t be reasoned with or persuaded against taking action. In The Killing Fields, the most terrifying people that Dith Pran (Haing S. Ngor) has to deal with are the machine gun wielding children who would shoot him without a second thought. Indeed, it’s one of the reasons children were given such power with the Khmer Rouge and why other totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union relied on children to turn in adults: because the children wouldn’t fully understand the far reaching consequences of their actions.
A child cast as the monster of a horror movie is different than an adult. The child, not having the capacity to deal with or understand or care about the life they take, is like the shark at the center of Jaws, but with a human face. It looks like us but we know reasoning with it has just as much chance at success as trying to tell that shark to stop attacking people. It’s why the first Omen made far more sense than the sequels. I was never a big fan of any of them, to be honest, but in the first one, Damien as a small child, with an evil nanny and a bunch of vicious rottweilers at his beck and call, was a lot scarier because you had the clear sense that there was nothing you could say to him that would change anything. When he rides his trike into the stool his mom (Lee Remick) is standing on, sending her over the railing and down to the marble floor below her, it’s disturbing precisely because he’s so small. Hell, the weapon of choice is a tricycle! In the sequels, he’s a teenager and then an adult. You think, “Well, anti-Christ or not, maybe if I could just talk to him…” Of course, that’s not an option, but it feels like it could be one.
In The Exorcist, despite all the more famously disturbing moments that dominate the film’s reputation, the most shocking and disturbing moment for me, and it’s a quick one, is when Karras walks back into the room at the end to find Father Merrin dead on the floor and the little girl Regan, sitting on her bed, giggling. William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty had to come up with a way in which Father Karras would finally lose his cool. That moment provides it. The giggle, a sign of complete and utter disregard for what was a man’s life, a sign of a complete lack of understanding of the importance of what was just lost… well, that’s enough to send Karras into a blind rage. It signals to Karras that he’s dealing with pure evil that has to be purged, even at the cost of taking that evil into his own body. Rarely has something as innocent as a little girl’s giggle been used to such chilling effect.
Of course, it’s a fine line and often movie’s featuring children as the evil leads can really ham things up. Children of the Corn, a movie I “love” in the way a connoisseur of fine food “loves” candy corn, which is to say I think it’s pretty bad but I enjoy it despite itself (and one of the clunkiest endings in cinematic history), is a movie that takes children as evil and renders it completely laughable by employing some of the ripest child performances you’ve ever seen. Oh brother, it’s pretty bad. The movie makes the fatal mistake of making the kids act evil, instead of like kids. See, that’s the difference: it’s kids acting like kids, and then doing something horrifying, that gives child horror movie its power. Have the kids act like evil adults and you’ve missed the point.
One of the movies on the lineup tonight, The Bad Seed, gets it right by having the kid act like a kid. Village of the Damned isn’t quite the same because the kids in it are actually intelligent beings implanted in human-like children’s bodies. Still, they got it right: the kids don’t act like kids but they do act cold, uncaring, and unconcerned. Like bored children. And when a horror movie gets a kid being evil right, it can be downright unnerving. So enjoy the lineup tonight as TCM celebrates kids at their evil worst, by just being kids.