Kids – Leave the Adults Alone

Children are terrifying. Not yet having acquired any moral scruples, emotional self-understanding or capacity for grasping the perspectives of others, it’s only the threatened withdrawal of Fruit Shoots and Toy Story action figures that prevents them from driving a sharp-edged Tonka truck deep into the skull of whichever simpering, devoted family member they perceive to stand in the way of the fulfilment of their arbitrary desires. Say a friendly hello to one and it will respond by staring back at you with an expression so chillingly blank it would disconcert Jeffrey Dahmer. It will spend an hour hitting things with other things, motivated by forces beyond comprehension. It will stop and start crying with the eerie abruptness of a broken toy. And worst of all, there is an unspoken and insidious cinematic taboo against killing the little bastards off, albeit with the occasional perverse exception made for the relatively nice ones like Cher’s son in Mask. (Notable departures from this rule are described below.) Given all this, it’s natural that filmmakers so often turn to infants when they really want to shit us up. Here are the top ten most frighteningly dead-eyed, morally vacant kiddies in cinema. (Note: this list is of course determined according to a well-defined scientific formula and not arbitrary personal taste.)

10. Miranda, Paulie, Leah and Nicky from The Children

Infected with a strange virus during New Year’s Eve, four children from two excruciatingly middle-class families start acting up at the dinner table. Before long, there are bits of Dad Number One’s head scattered across the garden, Mum Number One’s eye has been stabbed with a crayon, Dad Number Two is buried in the snow and Mum Number Two’s shin bone is poking out of her leg. Could all this carnage have been prevented simply by enforcing rigid parental discipline at an early stage, rather than offering unconditional ‘love’ and ‘understanding’? Why, yes. Yes it could.

9. Tomas from The Orphanage

Tomas is a little boy who is dead, deformed, super-strong and implicated in the death of another kid, but despite his malevolence we are invited to feel sorry for him, because he was killed when some other children were bullying him. He also wears a sack on his head. Sounds exactly like Jason Voorhees from pre-hockey mask Friday the 13^th, doesn’t he? But he’s not like him at all, really, mainly because he’s not in a dogshit film.

8. Jeca from A Serbian Film

There’s something that’s just not cricket about a little girl cheerfully goading a porn actor into repeatedly punching her mum in the face before ejaculating on her. Jeca seems to be the only participant in deranged pornographer Vukmir’s arthouse snuff flick that isn’t a bit taken aback by what’s going on, and this marks her out as a super-unnerving bad-ass anti-heroine, as well as future fodder for social services. If this is what she’s like now, imagine what she’ll be like in her teens – my heartfelt sympathy goes out to her guardians.

7. The Omen

In a perpetual grump punctuated only by impetuous bouts of murderous, telekinetically articulated rage, little Damien is given to cold-bloodedly killing his doting family and friends as they beg for mercy; naturally, he goes on to become a hugely successful CEO. Damien doesn’t even have the saving grace of being in the least bit cute; it should be obvious just from looking at his scowling fat face that he is out to wreak hellish destruction on the whole of mankind. Again, the culprit is a trendy, open attitude to child-rearing. Damien was given the run of a massive stately home and the loving care of a devoted family, and as an adult he was a sociopath who came close to inducing Evil to envelope mankind. Reagan from The Exorcist was tied to her bed and tormented by religious fanatics, and went on merely to become mildly neurotic. Therein lies a lesson for all prospective parents.

6. Eden Lake

Chavs. They’re young, they’re lower class, they’re… well, do you need more? Writer-director James Watkins plays expertly on his audience’s well-grounded fear of youths from the lower strata of society, pitting a nice, simple-minded couple drawn from the rapidly dwindling ranks of civilised English culture against a gang of tracksuit-wearing teenagers with a mangy dog and a ghetto blaster, who represent the gloomy future of this once great nation. Needless to say, things don’t go well for our protagonists. The moral of the story: kill obnoxious teenagers when you have the chance, preferably just before they actually have a chance to start being obnoxious.

5. The kids in Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy

Just look at them, the little shitpigs! With their remote controls they use sharp-toothed robotic dolls to attack the intrepid Jane Fonda’s legs as she attempts to negotiate her way through a galaxy populated by extra-terrestrial nymphomaniacs and mental defectives. Why this unprovoked attack?, you may well ask. But in the world of children there is no why. There are only colourful toys, giggling and a demented attraction towards evildoing, and preferably all three at once.

4. Don’t Look Now

Stop running around and stay where I can see you! A few well-chosen and firmly delivered words like these could have saved Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland a thoroughly depressing trip around Venice. But instead, having managed to drown their daughter, they pursue an apparition with a similar red cloak, meeting scary psychic women along the way. Mr Sutherland comes to understand that, absurd as they might seem to some, those leashes you can get for toddlers might not be such a bad idea after all; tragically, however, he is stabbed to death by a weird dwarf woman before he has a chance to make use of this newly acquired knowledge.

3. Reagan in the Exorcist

Reagan engages in attention-seeking behaviour, but does not seem to care whether she receives positive or negative attention. Like many children, she turns trivial concerns – like having an unusually limber neck – into a big deal, and apparently wants to control her mother’s life through studied psychological manipulation and high-powered puking. So, instead of designating a certain portion of the day ‘special time’, or trying to attend to good behaviour as much as to misbehaviour, or something pathetic like that, Mum ties Reagan to the bed and throws holy water in her face, with excellent results.

2. The children from Children of the Corn

If Stephen King has taught us anything, it is that we should at all costs strive to eliminate children with religious-sounding names and a sense of self-confidence. Children of the Corn’s opening sequence illustrates why: because, more likely than not, a creepy kid called Isaac is going to rise up against the over-18s and slaughter the lot of us, subsequently instituting a bizarre cult somehow involving corn fields and a mysterious devil-type figure to whom regular sacrifices must be made. Only Linda Hamilton can save us. As usual.

1. The Grady Twins in The Shining

“Come and play with us!” No.