Badmovies.org Forum

Why is it that children, the most precious gift in life, the paragons of innocence, etc. are so often used, effectively, as a way to sell a horror movie.

I think I have heard a kid's voice used to advertise two recent movies (Freddy Vs. jason, Cold Creek Manor). and a Sci Fi original.

Other examples are the Sixth Sense, The Ring, and tons of other stuff i cant even remember right now.

So how is it that a child can be so innocent and so scare inducing simultaneously? Can someone shed some light on to this subject.

Anyways, thanks Andrew for fixing whatever so that I could use this site efficiently again.

An evil kid is scary because it's something that we're not supposed to expect.  Take Pet Semetary, for example.  I hadn't read the book before I saw it, so it was a surprise to me at the time (I think I was about 10 when I saw it) that the little kid came back to life and started wreaking havok.  Just wasn't something that I was expecting to see.

Nick

True, it is our own ideas of childhood innocence that make it so chilling to associate them with evil. It just feels wrong, and it's disturbing. Much the same way stories with haunted dolls and toys are so scary.

There is also the vulnerability of children. Children can't defend themselves. Something that prey's on children is all the more evil. In general, a child in danger strikes a chord with most of us. It's something that a lot of movies take advantage of, horror or not.

Pet Sematary, which was mentioned, was so disturbing that Stephen King sat on it for a while before he felt comfortable having it published. As a father, it freaked him out.

We like to believe children can't be evil, and they aren't supposed to know evil or death. Something that violates those deep beliefs is disturbing indeed.



Post Edited (09-05-03 17:07)

"Children can't be evil, and they aren't supposed to know evil or death. Something that violates those deep beliefs is disturbing indeed."  Depends on if you've seen The Bad Seed.  Or if you've had a two year old.  Back upon a time when the average movie-going person was familiar with at least one variant of Christian theology, the concept of "sin as a primary nature of all people" was common.  (I'd go into details, but I'm not here to sell Jesus nor invite pseudo-intellectual complaints about Christian fundamentalists.)

I was doing a piece on Cathy's Curse, but my hard drive dropped my draft along with several other files.  (Useful nerd note: Don't try to create mpeg files greater than 4 GB on a FAT system.  You don't want to know what that'll do to your hard drive's alloc table.)  As an intro to that piece, I recalled the early eighties, when Siskel and Ebert did a show on "evil children" movies.  They went on about the subject like it was a new thing.

It struck me odd they could've forgotten about things like The Bad Seed and Lord of Flies or Night of the Living Dead.  They cited The Exorcist, but they didn't hit what seems so obvious now in retrospect.  It wasn't so much that there was a sudden rush of evil children movies during the seventies/early eighties as there were several horror movie rip-offs at that time.  Plenty of variants on The Exorcist meant plenty of children behaving badly.  Some variation on a scene in Night of the Living Dead with nuclear fears yeilds The Children with their black fingernails.

Or so it has seemed to me.

regards,

Apostic

Then there's the "children left to their own revert to savagery" theme, as in Lord of the Flies, and in the movies with the kids in Barbarella.

I'm surprised Ebert forgot about Night of the Living Dead....I believe he blew a gasket over the film's violence when it first came out.

the whole kid being evil thing is a pretty good idea.  i thought that the end to the ring was really good, one of the only real scares ive gotten out of a film in a while.

just thinking of identity... i think the evil kid thing was really underplayed.  he could have been a lot scarier.  that movie focused on the wrong things, it wasnt bad, but wasnt too fantastic

Children are evil. They have no acting skills.

Besides this, harming them is probably a more deeply rooted social taboo than eating urinal cakes.

When children are evil, they are less inhibeted then adults. But, by that same token, they are less effective at it.
Thats why Mom know when your up to something, and you wondered "How did she know i was tatooing the  next door neibors cat?" She's been there, done that, and had to buy a new cat!

We need to distinguish between being naughty and being evil. Kids can, at times, be mischievous, tactless, selfish and disobedient, but that's normal, to a point. Mostly, it's because they have a lot to learn. A lot of what kids do is excused because they are innocent.

There are also the kids whose parents haven't taught them very well, but we won't get into that.

Really, when we see a rare news item about, say, two 11-year-olds who abduct and murder a 7-year-old, it is unbelievably disturbing - even more disturbing than if an adult had done it. Those kids have done something evil.

It's the collision of evil with our ideals of childhood innocence that disturbs us.