Job description: The American humourist Robert Orben once quipped: 'Do your kids a favour ... don't have any!' He'd probably just been to the movies. We all know what little horrors children can be, and I don't mean the ones in the back row at the cinema rolling sweets down the aisles. On the silver screen, evil, scary, nasty kids have given us some memorable characters (and some truly execrable trash) over the years. There's something compelling about subverting the paradigm (and rupturing the cliche) of a child's innocence. Indeed, ever since young Lizzie Borden played lumberjack with her mum and dad, pint-sized perpetrators have been getting away with murder. As Macaulay Culkin's character says during the 'interrogation' scene with John Candy in Uncle Buck: 'That's my job. I'm a kid.'
Recently seen in: John Moore's remake of The Omen, which at first smacks of stunt directing, to take advantage of the once-in-a-millennium date that occurred on Tuesday (6-6-06), or perhaps, as The Guardian suggested, to 'snag a little of the god-fearing overflow audience from The Da Vinci Code'. Early buzz on the film, however, is that it's pretty scary (and gorier than the original), and one of the better remakes of recent times. I remember being genuinely creeped out by the 1976 Richard Donner-directed original, what with that smarmy little antichrist Damien and his numerical birthmark, slavering rottweilers, servants of Satan and a cavalcade of untimely yet inevitable demises.
Instead of Gregory Peck and Lee Remick, this time we have Liev Schreiber, Julia Stiles and a respectable array of supporting actors in David Thewlis, Mia Farrow, Pete Postlethwaite and Michael Gambon.
Most likely to say: 'Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666.'
Classics of the genre: Horror-meister Stephen King knows all about evil kids. The movie adaptation of his novel Children of the Corn (1984) is a keep-the-lights-on classic in which a demonic child preacher brings the youngsters under his sway in a small Nebraska town, ordering them to kill adults in the name of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Then there's Firestarter (1984), another King-inspired kiddy kill-fest featuring Drew Barrymore as the titular psychokinetic pyromaniac.
Culkin swaps cuteness for nastiness in The Good Son (1993), where he's a wolf in lamb's clothing who throws his cousin out of a tree house, causes a multi-car freeway pile-up and even kills the neighbour's dog with a crossbow. Not the sort of kid you'd want to leave home alone, then. Weirdo auteur David Cronenberg serves up small-sized strangeness in The Brood (1979), when new advances in psychiatry lead to the births of evil mutant babies. And to prove the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, The Bad Seed (1956) recounts the story of a girl who inherits her mass-murdering grandmother's appetite for destruction.