Kids, eh? I’m sure any parent could tell you a few stories of tantrums to send a chill down your spine. Beyond all that, horror fiction certainly has a penchant for featuring children within its pages. In some cases that will be in the role of the innocent victim, fighting against or being protected from some greater evil out to claim them. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist would stand out as a wonderful epitome of that sort of story, with a child’s life and soul hanging in the balance.
But every bit as common would be the trope of the ‘scary child’, where a youngster for whatever reason either becomes something else, something other, within the tale, or gives in to their darker urges and truly loses their sense of a moral compass. And in a moment of pure horror confessional, the scary child is something that has always gotten to me, both on film and on the page – and that’s one of the reasonsall these years later…
