Evil Children

The evil child is the monster nobody is allowed to see. A child is innocence by definition, and the form's whole engine is the gap between that definition and what is happening in the nursery: the accidents, the pets, the look on the stairs. The adults are trapped by their own decency. To believe the truth, they have to think the unthinkable about someone they love, and the film is about how long that takes.

The rules are domestic. A child, usually young, usually polite, who is wrong in a way only one adult can see. A family that cannot or will not believe it, often a father who dismisses and a mother who counts. A chain of accidents that are not accidents. An explanation, supernatural or not: a prophecy, a burial ground, a secret, a birth that should not have happened. And a confrontation that the form makes as hard as it can, because the thing that has to be stopped is a child.

The form starts with The Bad Seed (1956), adapted from the stage, with Patty McCormack as a pigtailed girl whose classmates keep drowning, and Village of the Damned (1960), from John Wyndham, with a crop of blond children who share one mind. The Exorcist (1973) made the child's body a battleground and The Omen (1976) made it a prophecy, with Damien Thorn and a score in Latin. The 1980s added Children of the Corn (1984) and Pet Sematary (1989), where the child is loved, dead and back. The 2000s brought The Ring (2002), whose ghost is a girl, and Orphan (2009), the form's best non-supernatural entry. The 2010s produced We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011), Goodnight Mommy (2014) and The Prodigy (2019), and Brightburn (2019) asked what Superman's parents would have done.

The signature techniques are about the look. The child in the background of a wide shot, watching. The drawing on the fridge. The accident shown from a distance, so you cannot be sure. The adult who says "she would never," and the cut to the child who heard it. And the confrontation, staged so that the audience has to want something it is not comfortable wanting.

Possession is the nearest neighbor, and The Exorcist is the bridge between a child who is taken over and a child who was always like this. Occult shares The Omen and its prophecy. Ghosts is where The Ring's Samara lives. Psychological horror is the neighbor when the film will not tell you whether the child or the parent is the problem, as in The Babadook. Killer dolls are the same fear with the child replaced by the child's toy, and serial killers is where the Esther branch goes when the child grows up.

For deeper cuts, try Goodnight Mommy (2014), an Austrian film about twin boys who decide the woman who came home in bandages is not their mother, cold and precise and very hard on everyone. The Innocents (1961) is the ancestor, Jack Clayton's adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, with two children who may be haunted or may be lying. And Who Can Kill a Child? (1976) is a Spanish film about a couple arriving at an island where the children have decided something, and the title is the whole plot.