The original evil child movie, The Bad Seed (1956), features a self-contained eight-year-old girl who inherited psychopathy from her serial killer grandmother. An adorable little boy with heterochromatic eyes “like David Bowie,” he begins “using some words” by age six months and attending a special preschool at age two because his “intelligence is off the charts.” But while his “brain is extremely well-developed in certain regions there are other areas that appear to be delayed.” So Miles is asocial … and at age eight becomes aggressively antisocial. When he’s born to parents who “tried so long to have” him, his mother declares, “He’s perfect,” and he certainly seems to be. Furthermore, parents- good parents, anyway-want the best and fear the worst for their children, so a child afflicted by something seriously wrong or who goes seriously wrong is their worst nightmare.Īnd the tagline for The Prodigy (2019) is “There’s something wrong with Miles.” But at first it seems there’s “nothing wrong” with him-quite the opposite, in fact.
After all, children are nonthreatening to and naturally elicit tender and protective feelings from adults, so evil ones disturb us deeply and catch us off-guard. So it shouldn’t surprise us that one of its most popular tropes is that of the “evil child,” the preadolescent who’s either innately evil or possessed by an evil entity. Horror fiction- good horror fiction, anyway-plays upon our deepest fears, threatens our sense of existential normalcy, and subverts our standards of human decency. REBORN TO KILL: A REVIEW OF THE PRODIGY (2019) SANS SPOILERS
Evil child, horror, Jackson Robert Scott, Jim Wallace, reincarnation, Serial Killer, Taylor Schilling, The Bad Seed, The Exorcist, The Omen, The Prodigy, transmigrationĬAST: Taylor Schilling, Jackson Robert Scott, Peter Mooney, Colm Feore, Paula Boudreau, Brittany Allen, Paul Fauteux
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