Horror 101: The Very Best Evil Children Movies Ever Made

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill’s new urban legend combines the idea of a cursed image from The Ring with an early notion of viral fame in the form of the demon Bughuul who becomes the obsession of a writer (Ethan Hawke) desperate to rekindle the successes of his early career. A twist on the “father who sacrifices his family for fame” a la Rosemary’s Baby, what happens when the family wants their dad to be famous as much as he does? Taut, beautifully-performed, possessed of a few genuine scares, its best moment is a fight between struggling parents worried about how to pay the mortgage. The source of horror is the disintegration of these bonds that tie. Sinister gets that. And also, an entire family gets lawnmower’d to death.

Where to stream Sinister

Diplomat Robert (Gregory Peck) and his young wife Katherine (Lee Remick) suffer a stillbirth. To save his wife the pain of it, Robert adopts little Damien (Harvey Stephens). Damien, it turns out, is the literal antichrist. A simple construction, really, that’s wonderfully played by Peck and Remick. Attached to it, almost subliminally, are issues of America’s dire influence in the developing world, the arrogance and entitlement of Americans hand-in-hand with their essential cupidity and hopefulness, and issues that can arise when a couple has so great an age gap. (We’ll see that last again further down the list.)

Along the way, there are also paranoid suggestions of conspiracies nursed in the antagonisms between classes and finally the tackling of the taboo of “blood” in adoptions raised by the progenitor of this subgenre, The Bad Seed. At its heart, The Omen is a “stolen child” parable of a faerie child snuck into the good graces of a human couple, raised as one their own when its sole purpose is to facilitate The Rapture. Largely seen as big budget camp, The Omen has unusual staying power.

Where to stream The Omen (1976)

Not Hideo Nakata’s version (though that’s also good, and arguably better than his Ringu that launched a franchise and familiarized the West with the J-horror stable of little ghost girls); instead, try Walter Salles’ English-language adaptation that finds single mom Jennifer Connelly trying to make it on her own in a questionable apartment complex run by creepy super Pete Postlethwaite. I love Nakata’s ideas, not so much his execution (I even prefer Gore Verbinski’s The Ring to Nakata’s original), and so here we are with this water-swollen piece, shot in a mold palette all brown, black, green and yellow, in which the ghost of a little girl starts expressing her ardent wish for a mommy. Themes of grief and regret at bad decisions made shoot through Dark Water. It’s exceptional.

Where to stream Dark Water (2005)

Looking to capitalize on the surprise success of Witchfinder General, here’s this odd, absolutely unforgettable, folk horror masterpiece concerning the goings on in a small, 18th century English village where a series of fur-covered body pieces keep getting unearthed. Fur of the same variety, as it happens, that’s growing on some of the community’s children. What follows is self-mutilation, rape, and unholy and ancient rituals in which the kids, under the powerful sway of a demon called “Behemoth,” use their own bodies as the piecemeal vehicle for its manifestation in the Earthly plane.

Where to stream Blood On Satan's Claw

Self-characterized as the only one of his films that isn’t funny at all, Cronenberg’s The Brood was made during an acrimonious divorce and, as such, manifests all of his feelings of intense disillusionment at even the notion of love and family. Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar deliver fascinating, committed performances, as the film suggests that just as there are children born of love, there is the possibility of “children” created in hate. The sequence where Eggar reveals how, exactly, she’s expression an unholy pregnancy – and the subsequent discovery of a nursery full of these adorable kids, is at once horrifying and alien; and queasily-familiar.

The Madonna & Child pose where the Madonna is biting through a birth sack and… sufficed to say, once seen it can never be unseen. Arguably Cronenberg’s first mature film and first masterwork, just Howard Shore’s jarring score is enough to raise all the hairs on your neck. It’s astonishing. If you like it, try out the It’s Alive! trilogy.

Where to stream The Brood

Based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, George Sanders plays in his inimitably world-weary way a school teacher in a small English village married to a much younger woman (see also: The Omen) when, one day, everyone falls asleep in the middle of the day and all the women wake up, well, pregnant. Their kids are all blonde, precocious, possibly telekinetic monsters who also seem able to read minds, meaning that as all the adults begin to get hip to the risk these kids pose to humanity, the kids are prepared to fight back. It’s up to our man Sanders, whom the kids still trust as kids do their teachers up to a certain age. But probably it’s already too late.

Like The Brood, the subject of a bit on “The Simpsons,” Village of the Damned had an underrated remake helmed by John Carpenter, and enough intimate discomfort and show-stopping ideas to fuel a sequel – Children of the Damned. A stone, cold classic.

Where to stream Village of the Damned

A hallucinogenic, nightmarish mind-trip of a psychosexual horror show by the master of such things, Alejandro Jodorowsky, this one is set in a circus where a child, Fenix (Jodorowsky’s sons Adan at 8 and Axel at 20), under the smothering influence of his trapeze artist mother Concha (Blanca Guerra), does unspeakable things first as a child and then years later after escaping from the asylum where he’s been kept for most of his childhood. Fenix functions as the armless Concha’s literal arms; the expression of her desires and her art as a kind of homunculus that gradually begins to mutate into incestual desire and fits of uncontrollable rage. Concha also happens to be a priestess in a cult that worships a saint whose arms have been severed for fighting off a rape, meaning that her loss of agency, and her regaining of it through her son pushing his arms through holes in his mother’s dress, is fraught with deep, almost archetypal symbolic resonance.

Full of unshakeable moments like an elephant’s death and funeral, it’s not for the faint of heart. And it’s one of the great visionary classics of psychotronic cinema. Oh, and Fenix, like another good son Norman Bates, despite or because of the profound love he has for his mother, is bad.

Where to stream Santa Sangre

A frozen masterpiece, we meet bullied, lonesome Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) practicing stabbing his schoolyard bullies with a little pocket knife. He gains the attention of a little girl living in his apartment complex, Eli (Lena Leandersson), who reaches out to him in her own isolation and the two form a tenuous friendship. Odd that Eli never really seems to leave her apartment — especially during the day — and even odder that her guardian doesn’t seem to be related to her in any way, but still does whatever he’s told.

On the one hand, it’s a gorgeous piece about friendship; on the other, it’s a terrifyingly empty-feeling piece where you come to realize that Oskar’s fate is probably the same as Eli’s guardian’s, and that the affection he feels for Eli is likely not reciprocated in any meaningful way. As precious and ferocious as a fairy tale, it’s one of the best films of the last twenty years.

Where to stream Let The Right One In

Adapted from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw by one Truman Capote, Clayton’s masterpiece is a study of Victorian sexual repression in the body of a naive Governess (Deborah Kerr) retained to care for two young children Miles (Martin Stephens) and Flora (Pamela Franklin) on a sprawling, mostly empty, country estate. From the start, there’s something off about the kids: Miles is a little too flirtatious for a child, Flora is a little too charmed by the spider eating the beautiful moth, and the Governess is concerned by stories of her predecessors indiscretions with a demonic groundskeeper and the influence such carnal knowledge may have had on the kids. Sex is the beast in the jungle in this play and as her imagination runs wild, and her libido continues to be stitched tightly to her bosom, the Governess becomes increasingly sure that the ghosts of those who have passed before are haunting them and, eventually, possessing young Miles. The only way to save him may be to kill him: frozen in his innocence.

Ravishing and evil, it’s one of the defining films of the culture-shift of the 1960s and of British cinema as a whole. Scary, suffocating, elegant and sublime, this psychosexual ghost story is one of the great movies.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2021. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Where to stream The Innocents