GET OFFA MY LAWN!!

Children.

Adorable moppets or murderous harbingers of doom?

Kid isn't even BORN yet and she's suspicious.  She SHOULD BE.  She should be...

In terms of horror movies, regardless of HOW sweet a child might be, you HAVE to be careful because kids are devious.  In fact, lying is actually something we ALL did as part of our natural development.  It's part of how we learn to separate fantasy and reality and everybody does it as a means of staying out of trouble as a child because nobody likes a time-out.  They're boring and serve no purpose other than a mini-nap.

This is not to say that all children in horror movies are minions of Satan.  Often times, a child can be just as innocent as he appears.  Andy in Child's Play, for example.  All he wanted was a doll.  It's not his fault he got a voodoo-enchanted tyke-bomb containing the soul of a serial killer.  He was still blamed for the whole thing, though.

Night-night.

But the face of innocence is one thing.  The face of innocence disguising the heart of evil is another.  From the ancient Greeks who glorified Zeus in the murder of his father to the present day with movies like Orphan and Case 39, the killer kid has made many a movie-goer consider voluntary sterilization.  Just FYI?  That won't help.  The evil kids, most times, are the ones visiting or that you adopt.  That's right.  You don't have to be a biological parent to end up dealing with a pint-sized psychopath.  

Let's take The Bad Seed, for example.  Rhoda Penmark is a pretty, prim and proper little girl but bitch needs some professional help.  The little freak drowned a classmate because she didn't win a penmanship medal.  You know?  My handwriting sucks.  I just would not be that concerned about it but Rhoda just kind of nonchalantly says "mine" and pushes a kid off a wharf.  Who does that?!?  The original ending of the book had the mother dying and Rhoda surviving to kill another day but the 1956 movie was changed.  The Hays Code wouldn't allow evil to go unpunished so how do they end it?  Mom lives and Rhoda gets a spanking.  A SPANKING!  Seriously?  For murder? 

Do they really think this will work?

The 1985 TV remake kept the book ending and we were all grateful because tacked on corporal punishment is just freaky and wrong unless you hold a very particular fetish.

Along this vein, probably the best performance of Macauley Culkin's career was Henry in The Good Son and this is a fantastic example of why the enfante terrible works.  It works because no one WANTS to believe that a kid is capable of this.  Poor Elijah Wood spent that entire fucking movie trying to tell Aunt Susan "Hey, your kid is a twisted motherfucker," but given that he was actually threatened by Henry in that standard "If you tell, I'll kill you" sort of way he couldn't just out-and-out say it and even when he did, she didn't listen and Henry got away with murder.

Even worse is when the creepy kids work in tandem.  Village of the Damned, Children of the Corn and Disturbing Behavior show us the power of the Drama Club.  If ONE killer ankle-biter is bad, what happens when you get a herd of them?  Nothing good, that's for DAMN sure.  

We have scarecrows.  Why not scare-children?

Seth Grahame-Smith tells us, by the way, that the best ways to end an infestation of children in your corn is to crop-dust with pot or introduce the girls to tank-tops.  Either they'll be too high to resist when you relocate them or the change in clothing will cause the boys to kill each other over who gets to touch boobs first.  (The girls will kill each other either trying to be the first set of boobs touched or through slut-shaming.  Toss a tube of lipstick in there and there'll be a bloodbath.)  Either way, a pitchfork should be enough to clear them out.

So, given all of this, don't be surprised if I shoot you dirty looks in the grocery store when your kid is throwing a tantrum.  Your crotch-dropping is not a special unicorn princess, they are a potential menace.  Rein that shit in.  Cut the psychopathic mini-me off at the pass and you won't be looking at missing pets and an increasing body count.