The 'Evil Child' in Literature, Film and Popular Culture

Karen J. Renner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415538923
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317966739
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The 'evil child' has infiltrated the cultural imagination, taking on prominent roles in popular films, television shows and literature. This collection of essays from a global range of scholars examines a fascinating array of evil children and the cultural work that they perform, drawing upon sociohistorical, cinematic, and psychological approaches. The chapters explore a wide range of characters including Tom Riddle in the Harry Potter series, the possessed Regan in William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, the monstrous Ben in Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, the hostile fetuses of Rosemary's Baby and Alien, and even the tiny terrors featured in the reality television series Supernanny. Contributors also analyse various themes and issues within film, literature and popular culture including ethics, representations of evil and critiques of society.

This book was originally published as two special issues of Literature Interpretation Theory.

Evil Children in Film and Literature

KAREN J. RENNER

In 2010, Meredith O'Hayre published a book entitled The Scream Queen's Survival Guide, which promised to teach us how, if suddenly plunged into a horror movie, we could conquer its clichés and emerge if not unscathed, then at least alive. The subtitle of the book offers three brief directives: to Avoid Machetes, Defeat Evil Children, and Steer Clear of Bloody Dismemberment. That “evil children”—and I will discuss that problematic term in a moment—are mentioned alongside machetes and dismemberment speaks to the serious and pervasive threat they have come to represent within the horror genre. But this threat seems largely a contemporary one: we would be hard-pressed, I think, to discover many instances of wicked youngsters in earlier literature, even though plenty of examples existed in the real world.¹ However, during the second half of the twentieth century, such figures began to possess the imaginations of a wide number of writers and filmmakers. A number of scholars have examined the role of children in literature and film, some even focusing upon evil children in particular, but this pervasive plot convention has not been given adequate attention.² In fact, this collection is the first book-length study devoted to the subject.

EVIL CHILDREN IN FILM AND LITERATURE: A BRIEF HISTORY

Stories about evil children began to first proliferate with serious regularity in the 1950s. What is noteworthy about these early texts is their tendency to claim that evil children are born bad. In Ray Bradbury's “The Small Assassin” (1946), a newborn emerges with the innate desire and ability to kill; while no motive or reason is confirmed, the baby's father, David, surmises that since “[i]nsects are born self-sufficient” and “most mammals and birds adjust” in a few weeks, perhaps “a few babies out of all the millions born are instantaneously able to move, see, hear, think” (383). Such a child, David muses, would have the capacity to avenge all the perceived wrongs associated with its removal from the womb where it had been “at rest, fed, comforted, unbothered” (384). The implication is that all infants are enraged by their birth but most lack the ability to enact their feelings of anger upon the figures they feel responsible: their parents. If they did, many parents would experience the same vindictive acts of violence that David and his wife suffer. Bradbury's “The Veldt” (originally published as “The World the Children Made” in 1950) explores similar themes but does so in a futuristic world in which technology can transform playrooms into virtual reality spaces that are based upon “the telepathic emanations” of whomever's in the room (268). When the world made by the story's children—the suggestively named siblings Peter and Wendy—takes on a menacing air, their father decides to disengage the room, but the children beg for one last round of play, and he acquiesces. The children then conjure virtual lions to attack and devour their parents. Although the story hints that the parents are much to blame for their children's lack of emotional attachment in that they have allowed many of the gadgets of their futuristic world to take over their child-rearing duties, the overt reference to J. M. Barrie's novel Peter and Wendy (1911) also suggests that Bradbury may, like Barrie, have considered children as naturally “gay and innocent and heartless,” always “ready, when novelty knocks, to desert their dearest ones” (emphasis mine, 148, 100).

Richard Matheson's very short story “Born of Man and Woman” (1950) is narrated by a monstrously deformed child who never clearly details its own appearance, but the fact that it describes its own blood as an “ugly green,” refers at one point to “all my legs,” and explains how it can “run on the walls” suggests it is a human-sized, spider-like creature (514, 515, 515). The “child” is kept locked away in a basement, is beaten regularly, and thus is an object of some pity. At the end of the story, however, the child alludes to prior acts of aggression and hints that more are soon to come: “I have a bad anger with mother and father. I will show them. … I will hang head down by all my legs and laugh and drip green all over until they are sorry” (515). While the creature is incensed by its parents' abuse, it seems to have been quite violent to begin with and certainly born with the most monstrous of appearances.

The tendency to see evil children as inherently so continued to dominate later works from the 1950s, such as Jerome Bixby's short story “It's a Good Life” (1953), William Golding's The Lord of the Flies (1954), and one of the most famous stories about an evil child, William March's The Bad Seed (1954), all of which were quickly adapted for the screen.³ Anthony, the three-year-old terror in Bixby's short story, can read the minds of the adults around him, and if they or anything else displeases him, he punishes the perceived transgressor in whatever way he sees fit simply by thinking it so (though on the suggestion of his father, he kindly teleports his victims out to a cornfield, so that the sight of them will not upset the townspeople). In the opening scene of the story, for example, Anthony is controlling a rat with his mind, “making it do tricks” (523); by the end of the scene, the rat has “devoured half its belly, and … died from pain” (525). Anthony's abilities and tendency to act on his rage is inborn: “when Anthony had crept from the womb and old Doc Bates … had screamed and dropped him and tried to kill him, … Anthony had whined and done the thing” (541). Obviously, baby Anthony was reacting in self-defense; however, throughout most of the story, what we witness is a petulant three-year-old who has the magical ability to make his deepest desires come true and who has not yet learned the empathy or self-control to use his powers humanely. Similarly, Golding himself has claimed the boys in Lord of the Flies descend into savagery not because of the trauma of being stranded on an island but because they “are suffering from the terrible disease of being human” (Fable 89). In titling his novel The Bad Seed, March also implies that evil is a congenital condition, and the book confirms this claim, for Rhoda Penmark, the child at the center of the novel, seems to have inherited her penchant for murder from her grandmother, the accomplished serial killer Bessie Denker.

Interest in evil children continued into the 1960s, though with somewhat less ferocity. During this decade, texts indicate less interest in children who are born bad but rather in those who have been made so. Jack Clayton's adaptation of Henry James's 1898 novel The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents (1961), adds details that make the children far more flagrantly malevolent than in the novel but also makes it more obvious that their abnormal behavior is due to their “possession” by the ghosts of former caretakers who corrupted them. During the 1960s, several well known authors, among them Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates, also turned their Gothic eyes upon the subject of children. In Jackson's novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)—the last she was to publish before her death in 1965—we discover that the eighteen-year-old narrator murdered her parents, aunt, and younger brother six years earlier by lacing the sugar bowl with arsenic. O'Connor's short story “The Lame Shall Enter First” (1965) features a street urchin named Rufus who convinces the son of the man who kindly takes him in to hang himself, and Oates's Expensive People (1968) opens with the provocative line “I was a child murderer” (3), and the narrator, Richard Everett, goes on to reveal that the act that earned him this designation was committed at the tender age of eleven. Rather than looking to children endowed with special abilities or deviant predilections from birth, these novels are far more interested in how social conditions and adult influences might move a child to murder.

The decade then concluded with Ira Levin's Rosemary's Baby (1967), a story about the most evil child of them all: the son of Satan himself. Roman Polanski adapted the novel into a film the following year, and both received popular and critical acclaim. While many narratives in the 1960s had scrutinized the psychological forces and familial dynamics that might produce an evil child, Rosemary's Baby took the approach more popular in the previous decade, presenting the evil child as simply born that way. Influenced by and perhaps hoping to capitalize upon the success of Rosemary's Baby, authors in the 1970s and early 1980s produced an enormous number of texts about evil kids, many of which were instantly seared into cultural memory, and directors were quick to offer their cinematic renditions. In fact, the 1970s produced so many fictional evil children that one Newsweek editorial worried that the era was one of “growing anti-child sentiment,” pointing to a recent poll of 10,000 mothers, 70% of whom said that if given the choice again, they would opt not to have children (Maynard 11).

Although Rosemary's Baby steered the conception of the evil child in the direction of the demonic, both types of evil child—the satanic and the psychologically deviant—were explored. The most successful venture into the first category was The Exorcist.⁴ Indeed, William Friedkin's 1973 adaptation of William Peter Blatty's 1971 novel caused such a stir that, according to Nick Cull, many viewers fainted and one even “charged the screen in an attempt to kill the demon” (46). Friedkin's film prompted many imitations, even a Turkish scene-by-scene remake entitled Seytan (1974).⁵ Richard Donner's 1976 movie The Omen gave birth to yet another satanic threat with Damien, whose name has become shorthand for any kind of monstrous youth. Thomas Tryon's bestselling novel The Other (1971) offered psychological rather than metaphysical explanations for his evil child. In the book, eleven-year-old Niles commits a series of disturbing and violent acts, which he attributes to his twin, Holland, whom we later discover is dead. The Other received a cinematic tribute in 1972, and though neither are well known today, Tryon's focus on insanity rather than demonic possession helped set the stage for later texts that would increasingly examine childhood manifestations of dangerous derangements.

It was also during the 1970s that several writers who would later become virtuosos of horror launched their careers with stories centering on evil children. Dean Koontz started early, publishing Demon Child in 1971 under the pseudonym Deanna Dwyer.⁶ However, his first big success in the subgenre came with Demon Seed (1973), which tells the story of a woman impregnated against her will by the computer that controls her house, Proteus; the book was made into a 1977 film starring Julie Christie.⁷ In 1976, Anne Rice published the first and most popular of her Vampire Chronicles, Interview with the Vampire, a considerable portion of which is devoted to a girl vampire, Claudia. The relish with which Claudia feeds—“I want some more,” Claudia says in a petulant voice after feeding on her first human (93)—while all the while exuding the charms of young girlhood is one of the most horrifying aspects of the novel. Stephen King, too, first received serious attention after publishing his novel Carrie (1974), and Brian De Palma's 1976 cinematic adaptation only bolstered his reputation. King promptly went on to write several other stories about evil children, including “Children of the Corn” (1977), The Shining (1977), Firestarter (1980), and Pet Sematary (1983), all of which were eventually made into movies. Indeed, the 1984 adaptation of Children of the Corn has prompted an unrivalled franchise of evil children films, with six sequels and a recent remake in 2009.

These early horror texts were largely responsible for moving horror from a peripheral genre to a mainstream interest, making room for other lesser-known writers who, at least momentarily, made a career out of books about evil children, including John Saul, Andrew Neiderman, and Ruby Jean Jensen.⁸ As a result, the covers of novels from the late 1970s to the early 1990s began to feature a veritable bevy of creepy kids, as Will Errickson has shown in his blog Too Much Horror Fiction.⁹ Even canonical authors called upon the trope of the evil child, such as Toni Morrison in Beloved (1987) and Doris Lessing in The Fifth Child (1988). Even television proved eager to get in on the action. Bart Simpson made his debut on the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987, and though Bart is more errant than evil, he paved the way for one of the most despicable cartoon children ever to make an appearance: Eric Cartman of South Park (1997-).¹⁰ Soon after, the creators of Family Guy (1999–2002; 2005-) would offer their own animated evil child in Stewie Griffin.

Nowadays, the evil child is almost a trite plot device. The International Movie Database, imdb.com, lets you search for films using the keyword of “evil child,” and Netflix allows you to cater your “Storylines” taste preferences to announce that you “often” watch movies that feature “evil kids,” thus ensuring that Netflix will make relevant recommendations for you in th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Evil Children in Film and Literature
• 2. My Baby Ate the Dingo: The Visual Construction of the Monstrous Infant in Horror Film
• 3. Monstrous Children as Harbingers of Mortality: A Psychological Analysis of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child
• 4. Spoil the Child: Unsettling Ethics and the Representation of Evil
• 5. Private Lessons from Dumbledore's “Chamber of Secrets”: The Riddle of the Evil Child in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
• 6. Terrifying Tots and Hapless Homes: Undoing Modernity in Recent Bollywood Cinema
• 7. “The Power of Christ Compels You”: Holy Water, Hysteria, and the Oedipal Psychodrama in The Exorcist
• 8. How to See the Horror: The Hostile Fetus in Rosemary's Baby and Alien
• 9. Extreme Human Makeovers: Supernanny, the Unruly Child, and Adulthood in Crisis
• Index