The Kid's Got A Knife !: A Study Of Evil Children In Horror Movies

“The Kid’s got a Knife!”: A Study of Evil Children in Film When pure innocence mixes with pure evil in film the result is often a terrified audience. This frightening combination is present in the wildly popular evil child genre of horror films. Because everyone has interacted with children, many people find evil children are inherently terrifying because they can imagine themselves as the adults in the movie. Critics of the genre often only identify evil children through the child themselves, but all evil children in horror films should be analysed through the lens of parental fears, because connecting all genres of evil children in film through the parent reveals a great deal about the common fears of parents in society that would be lost if we viewed each archetype singularly. Through analysis of evil children in Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive, Brian De Palma’s Carrie, and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist I will argue that all monstrous children in horror films represent the cultural fears of parents such as the fear of unsafe medicine harming an infant, the fear of telling a child about sex, the fear of discipling too harshly, and the fear of dangers in the home.
The feral child is usually taken as warning against human’s inherently evil nature, while the monstrous infant warns of the dangers of new medicine. Often the only archetype which is connected the parents is the possessed child; the root of the possession is often tied to family problems at home. Because there are three distinct genres of evil children in film, each primary source in this essay falls into one of the genres of evil children: It’s Alive is a story about a monstrous infant, Carrie is about the feral child, and The Exorcist is about a possessed