There’s Something Wrong With the Children (2023)
Evil Children
Quite decent Blumhouse film in which children suddenly go bad and begin playing malicious, murderous games with adults
Evil Children
Evil Children is a self-explanatory topic. Horror cinema features a good number of these. The first evil child came with The Bad Seed (1956), a defining work featuring an eleven year-old Patty McCormack prepared to kill to get her way. The trope of the psychopathic and murderous child has regularly appeared on screen since.
The Exorcist (1973) gave us a possessed Linda Blair mouthing obscenities and taunting priests as they attempted to exorcise her. The Omen (1976) featured Gregory Peck who comes to the realisation that his son is the Devil’s son.
Elsewhere, Village of the Damned (1960) gave us coldly emotionless children with superior intellect and vast psychic powers as a result of alien impregnation. A less used trope was in Pet Semetary (1989) with the child who is raised from the dead and returns ‘changed’.
Trilogy of Terror II (1996)
Horror Anthology
Sequel to the classic Karen Black-starring horror anthology tv movie with Lysette Anthony starring in a trio of horror tales
The Turn of the Screw (1992)
Psychological Ghost Story
Another version of Henry James’ classic psychological ghost story updated to the 1960s where the subtleties of the original are rendered in terms of crude effects
The Turn of the Screw (2009)
Psychological Ghost Story
A BBC adaptation of the classic oft-filmed Henry James ghost story in which we cannot be sure whether the ghosts are real or exist inside the heroine’s imagination. This treats some aspects of the story liberally but gets the essence of the story right
The Unborn (1991)
Sinister Pregnancy
Roger Corman produced film where Brooke Adams realises that something sinister might be happening with her pregnancy
Unholy Night (2019)
Christmas Horror Anthology
Modest and well-made low-budget anthology of Christmas horror tales from three Canadian filmmakers
Village of the Damned (1960)
Telepathic Alien Children
Classic adaptation of the John Wyndham novel about the women in a sleepy English village being impregnated and producing emotionless alien children with vast psychic powers. This translates the paranoia of US alien invasion films with considerable effectiveness
Village of the Damned (1995)
Telepathic Alien Children
Director John Carpenter did amazing things with his remake of The Thing but was not able to replicate such with his remake of Village of the Damned, which misses the taut atmosphere of the 1960 film
Vinyan (2008)
Haunted Journey Into the Southeast Asian Jungle
The second film from Belgian director Fabrice Du Welz is an intensely haunted albeit enigmatic journey into Southeast Asian jungles in search of a missing child
The Visitor (1979)
Satan is an Alien/Impregnation
Head-scratchingly strange Italian film that seems made as a crosshatch of 1970s Devil Child films and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Makes no sense in terms of story but worth watching for the bizarreness of its imagery
Vivarium (2019)
Couple Trapped in a Strange Suburb
A real mindscrew of a film in which Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg are a couple who enter a strangely unreal suburb of identical houses and find they can’t leave. Then things start to get really strange.
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)
Psycho Child
Almost an arthouse variation of the evil psycho child thriller but one stripped of thriller tropes and told in terms of an alternately striking and hauntingly elliptical tableaux of impressionistic images
Welp (2014)
Belgian Backwoods Brutality
Belgian Backwoods Brutality effort concerning a boy scout troupe who run afoul of a mysterious feral child and hunter in the woods near their campsite. Defying many of the expectation of the genre, this provides a series of often unearthly images
Where the Devil Hides (2014)
Devil Child Prophecy in a Religious Cult
This is a modestly effective effort that sits just on the dividing line between interesting and cliched – the undeniably captivating premise involves an Amish-like cult dealing with a series of prophecies about devil children and killings of their number
Who Can Kill a Child? (1976)
Children Kill All Adults
Fine Spanish-made killer children film inspired by The Birds where children inexplicably turn and kill adults. This has developed a modest cult and works with frequently unsettling effect
XX (2017)
Women-Directed Horror Anthology
As directors, women are underrepresented – in terms of the content listed on this side, for example, probably less than 5% has been made by women. As a believer in equal opportunities for all, one can only cheer on XX where five women have gotten together to make a horror anthology