I HOPE YOU'RE proud of yourselves, you naughty, naughty children. Just look what you've done. You've caused Lee Remick to topple off the mezzanine. You've thrown up all over Max Von Sydow. You've even managed to unnerve Jack Nicholson. And that takes some doing. Since the mid-1950s, when Patty McCormack did awful things in The Bad Seed, the scary-starey child has become a staple of macabre cinema, writes DONALD CLARKE
Playing equally on the neuroses that occasionally accompany parenthood and the discomfort some childless viewers feel in the presence of little ones, the following films offer a series of queasily transgressive thrills. Don’t make me come up there, young lady!
THE BAD SEED
Mervyn Le Roy (1956)
Le Roy, director of once-controversial classics such as Little Caesarand I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, softened the ending of William March's source novel, but this peculiar melodrama still seems years ahead of its time in its willingness to imbue a child with the most malign instincts. Dressed up as a parody of the classic American munchkin, Patty McCormack plays Rhoda as a cunning psychotic driven by covetousness and fury. In the course of the film, Rhoda causes several deaths, but never expresses anything like remorse. Greeted with a combination of revulsion and adulation – McCormack received an Oscar nomination – the picture was one of the first to tease parents with their own suppressed frustrations.
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
Wolf Rilla (1960)
Based on John Wyndham's great novel The Midwich Cuckoos, Rilla's British horror has, despite the relative modesty of its cult following, exerted a surprisingly durable influence on popular culture. The women of a small town awake from a trance to discover themselves pregnant and, some years later, are confronted by a legion of blank-eyed children with telekinetic abilities.
Endlessly parodied – most notably in The Simpsons– the picture is often viewed as a comment on contemporaneous inter-generational tensions which, following the rise of rock'n'roll in the 1950s, would spawn open conflict over the coming decade. A sequel of sorts, Children of the Damned, Villagefollowed a few years later and John Carpenter remade to no good effect in 1995.
THE INNOCENTS
Jack Clayton (1961)
It is, to be fair, not really young Miles's fault. In Jack Clayton's flawless adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw– spookily lit, eerily scored – the unfortunate child has been infected with the spirit of a dodgy valet. "A damned hussy. You're a dirty-minded hag!" he screams at his governess as the chilling denouement looms. I can't imagine anybody had ever spoken to nice old Deborah Kerr like that before. Interestingly, Peter Wyngarde, who played the ghost, would later become the absurdly camp TV detective Jason King. Which makes him seem a tad less scary.
THE EXORCIST
William Friedkin (1973)
The baroque, unhinged, ne plus ultraof scary child movies. The concept of housing ultimate evil in an apparently benign form genuinely unnerved viewers when Friedkin's adaptation of William Peter Blatty's pulp novel arrived in cinemas. Nodding towards the psychological discomfort that accompanies puberty, the film features a genuinely gripping build-up and, in the early sections, some unusually grounded performances from Linda Blair and Ellen Burstyn. Okay, some of the broader shocks now seem a bit gratuitous and the effects show their age, but this remains an immovable landmark of horror cinema.
THE OMEN
Richard Donner (1976)
Appallingly reviewed on release – indeed, it appears in Michael Medved's The Fifty Worst Films of All Time– Donner's broad satanic thriller still looks very much like a less explicit, more conventionally gothic rip-off of The Exorcist. Yet it works. All mad stares and malevolent scowls, Harvey Stephens takes on the not-unchallenging role of the Antichrist's son and makes something properly unsettling out of it. To this day, men of a certain age, when annoyed by other people's children in shopping centres, will mutter "Damien" beneath their breath as they scowl their way to the exit.
THE SHINING
Stanley Kubrick (1980)
There are three candidates – or, rather, one individual and one pair – for consideration in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic. The murdered twins (kids of the former caretaker who lurk about the corridors of the Overlook Hotel) have offered parodists yet another image with which to tamper. Apparently, the girls who played the “twins” were, in fact, eight and 10 years old. Given Kubrick’s notorious perfectionism, we must view the visual dissonance as intentional. Mention should also be made of Danny (Danny Lloyd), mad Jack Nicholson’s psychic kid, who, though a benevolent figure, becomes very scary indeed during the “Red Rum!” episode.
CHILDREN OF THE CORN
Fritz Kiersch (1984)
A piece of grade-B (ahem) corn that, despite doing only modestly well at the box office, spawned six increasingly ghastly sequels and gained a secure place in the affections of pedophobic horror fans. Most of this is down to John Franklin's fine, messianic performance as the leader of a juvenile cult that worships a mysterious entity called "He Who Walks Behind The Rows". Based on a Stephen King story, the broad, frenzied film, set in deepest Nebraska, takes a similar attitude to primitive religions as did the peerless The Wicker Man. Franklin, who has a growth hormone deficiency, was, in fact, 25 when the film was made and continued to perform in scary-starey vehicles for another decade.
THE ORPHANAGE
Juan Antonio Bayona, 2007
Once again, an entire textbook of parental neuroses and fixations comes to the fore. Bayona’s contemporary classic finds a woman returning to the orphanage where she grew up and, after encountering visions, losing her young son. The most persistent of these apparent hallucinations – seen by the boy and his mother – features a child named Tomás who, for reasons later partially explained, wears a rough sack over his head. The film ends as an ebony-black fairy story, but the grim image of Tomás remains burnt on the brain long after that surprisingly wistful denouement has faded from the screen. An American remake is currently undergoing unwelcome gestation.
