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In any case, evil children in horror movies are a recurring trope— one that never fails to inspire fear. Whether it came from the twisted sentiments of filmmakers’ views about children— theirs or otherwise, or merely a product of a wild imagination, evil children tend to be more sinister than the usual cinema monster. These ten films ought to prove that point.
Updated June 30, 2022, by Sid Natividad: There’s no shortage of evil children in horror films and even in horror TV shows. Be it their laughter, cries, or just their enigmatic stares, there’s just something about them that makes them timeless horror monsters. Some are more well-executed than others, and they actually work in turning these little human beings into wee monsters. Thus, here are five more evil children horror movies in case child-rearing isn’t frightening or stressful enough.
14 Brightburn
Release year: 2019
Brightburn is first and foremost, a depiction of an alternate Superman where he’s evil yet again. The film puts its own twist on this rather cliched superhero formula by turning it into a horror film. A disturbed child with Superman’s powers is nothing to scoff at, after all.
Initially, it starts off similar to Martha and Jonathan Kent’s story in Superman. A seemingly normal boy suddenly enters puberty and starts experiencing some oddities in his psyche and physique. Dark and evil forces are suspect here as the boy threatens those around him with destruction and his twisted urges.
13 It
Release year: 2017
Stephen King’s classic turned into a film; It is one of the biggest hits of the last decade. The main antagonist here is, of course, the iconic horror clown Pennywise as he terrorizes a small town. A group of outcasts takes the brunt of Pennywise’s transgressions, but apart from the clown, the Losers’ Club had to deal with local bullies.
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These aren’t just regular sand-kicking bullies, however. The Bowers Gang is murderous and perverse, often holding no reservations on mutilating members of the Losers’ Club. Along with Pennywise, they make life for the kids in Derry, Maine a living hell.
12 The Brood
Release year: 1979
The Brood is another classic way back in the previous century. It tells quite a unique story as far as horror films go, following the tale of a man and his murderous institutionalized wife and their efforts to fix her condition. The couple enlist the help of a controversial psychologist whose methods are unconventional and odd.
As the psychologist progresses with his “treatment” for the patient, strange phenomena start happening to the latter’s relatives. For one, the patient’s mother is suddenly attacked by monstrous deformed children, along with many other eccentric and violent events.
11 Who Can Kill A Child?
Release year: 1976
Who Can Kill a Child? explores the notion of the protagonists victims being helpless against their aggressors, since the latter are children. That’s explained well enough in the title. It begins when a lovey-dovey couple go for a vacation on a strange island.
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They soon discover that the island’s small town is mostly populated with children. Eventually, the couple discovers the madness that befell these children. It turns out the kids were responsible for the disappearance of all the adults in the town, having murdered most of them. As luck would have it, the couple is next in line in the grindhouse.
10 Goodnight Mommy
Release year: 2015
With a Shyamalan-like twist near the end of the film, Goodnight Mommy makes its audience unnerved with every minute and every frame they see in the film. It follows the story of twins, Elias and Lukas, whose mother suddenly became distant after getting facial surgery.
Soon enough, the twin boys start testing the limits of their mother’s patience and affection all the while conducting their own investigation into whether she’s still their mother or not. What makes it work is how the movie keeps viewers guessing or even questioning their sanity or the twins,’ or even the mother’s.
9 Pet Sematary
Release year: 1989
The power of grieving people isn’t to be underestimated in this Stephen King classic. Pet Sematary happens after a doctor named Louis Creed gets introduced to a place where dead creatures come back to life. He went there hoping to bring back a dead and beloved family pet.
Too bad pets weren’t the only creatures resurrected in the place as some other grieving family decided to help themselves to a dose of revival for one of their dead children. As it turns out, creatures brought back from the dead don’t take kindly to the world of the living.
8 The Ring
Release year: 1998
Whether it’s the American remake of the Japanese original, The Ring was iconic for popularizing ghoulish young girls with the power to kill using their minds. Sure enough, they’re also vengeful sociopaths. 12-year-old Sadako (or Samara in the US), is the most prominent among them.
Her origins are murky and best-kept secret, but she has a penchant for haunting people in phone calls and videotapes with a delayed promise of death by her visitation after seven days. Such a trope wouldn’t fly in today’s technological disposition, but back then, The Ring’s Sadako was the stuff of nightmares.
7 Orphan
Release year: 2009
There’s plenty that can go wrong with a horror film titled Orphan, and viewers can probably guess the cavalcade of problems with adopting a girl with a goth getup. Well, that didn’t stop a certain family from taking in dear innocent “nine-year-old” Esther after they lost their infant.
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Sadly, things started going awry for the household after Esther was brought in. Some freak accidents that look like they might have been orchestrated started popping up. Moreover, Esther’s gaze is a little unsettling for a nine-year-old. One could probably already predict the calamity about to befall the hapless couple, but it’s still worth watching Orphan for how it will unfold.
6 The Omen
Release year: 1976
It was only a matter of time before someone thought of making a clueless couple’s child the literal Son of the Devil. The Omen got dibs on the idea. It features Damien, a seemingly perfect kid of a seemingly perfect couple. Then, as Damien started aging up, bad things started happening around the family.
Bad things such as casual suicide and random deaths, as well as animals, suddenly going rabid. It’s a novel idea back then that doesn’t rely on jump scares or some cheap frights in order to instill the horror of having Satan’s baby in one’s arms.
5 Rosemary’s Baby
Release year: 1968
It’s probably safe to say The Omen wouldn’t have existed without Rosemary’s Baby. It was the first film that popularized the notion of a child being an actual spawn of Satan. In this case, poor Rosemary Woodhouse didn’t expect her neighbors to drug her and perform rituals that would let her conceive Satan’s baby; because Hell likely wanted its own Jesus figure or something.
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What follows is a disheartening hyperbole for pregnancy where the devil baby sucks the life out of Rosemary and makes her trimesters a living hell. The scarier part about all this is that Adrian, Rosemary’s unborn child, doesn’t actually get any screentime. Instead, it lets the viewer’s imaginations toy with their idea of what a demonic baby might actually appear.
4 Better Watch Out
Release year: 2016
Coming out barely a year after Goodnight Mommy, Better Watch Out solidifies the notion of children being nasty and sly wee devils propelled by severe psychotic disorders. In this case, Better Watch Out makes it so that the babysitter’s child is the culprit.
Ashley never saw it coming, and she also didn’t anticipate that her ward was a genius psycho capable of hatching up elaborate plans to kill her ex-boyfriends and torture her, all the while making it look like babysitter negligence. It’s a fresh idea through and through.
3 Children Of The Corn
Release year: 1984
One usually expects something unfavorable to happen while stopping over in a countryside whose landscape is populated with corn plants. However, murderous children are far from the list of suspects in such a scenario. Children of the Corn explores that take.
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Again, it involves an unfortunate couple who got trapped in a town that can only be summed up as a more violent version of Neverland, where the children’s inhabitants believe that anyone above the age of 18 is too old to live. That’s bad news for the two adults.
2 Carrie
Release year: 1976
Initially, Carrie never had the makings of a villain or an evil child, but thanks to bullying and a prom, she quickly flipped a switch and became a telekinetic killer. It’s also another of Stephen King’s classics where the buildup is slow and the payoff is huge.
Carrie wasn’t the most popular girl in school thanks to her mother, who preferred a more reclusive life for her. This turned her into an outcast, and for good reason. Carrie can just about vaporize anyone who earns her ire, and in a bloody manner too. Rather gruesome as a metaphor for puberty and coming-of-age.
1 The Exorcist
Release year: 1973
Last but not least is one of the most notable horror films of its generation, and it contributed a lot to horror cinema for decades. Even today, it still holds up well thanks to the excellent makeup and acting by Linda Blair. The story is simple enough; a girl starts off sick and progressively descends into a demonic trance while her mother copes with the difficulties of rearing such a child.
Here, the journey of the exorcism itself is worth watching, more so than waiting for the result. Never have exorcisms been this visceral or spine-chilling, and even to this day, many exorcism copycats still fail to reproduce the success nor the atmosphere of The Exorcist.
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