Evil Children
The movies, “The Ring”, “The Exorcist”,
and “The Woman in Black” all have something in common. They all feature an evil child. It seems our
culture has a great obsession with this kind of horror; Americans alone spend
billions of dollars a year viewing these movies. Last year, “The Woman In
Black” had a gross income of around $54,322,273 and the movie “The Exorcist” as
of 2003 had a grossed over $204,565,000 since 1973 (IMBD). When we look into horror films it seems our
culture is extremely frightened by this idea of evil children. Even the mere
presence of a child’s toy tends to have us at the edge of our seats. When you
type scary movies into a search engine such as Google, with kids is the first
auto-fill answer to pop up. We, as a society, find children most frightening in
horror films due to our cultures view of children being angelic and innocent,
and the hidden messages these evil children display.
Value Of Our Children
Our
culture places a great amount of value on children and finds nothing more
innocent and precious than a child. Some of our most controversial topics are
about children and to many people their proudest achievement is their child.
Our society is extremely over protective over children and when something
happens to a child we find it completely devastating. An example of this is the
recent Connecticut elementary school shooting. When this tragedy happened it
did not just affect the town that this unfortunate incident happened in, but
also our entire country was left completely numb and shocked by this tragedy.
Everything we have ever known is that children are innocent and helpless and
that we should do everything we can to protect them. In a scary movie when we
see a child that is inherently evil, we don’t know what to do and want to help
the child but at the same time, they are evil. There is the possibility that
they could harm us, and that is terrifying. What is the origin of these
horrifying children and how did this popular idea of evil children start? In Karen
Renners article, Evil Children In Film
and Literature: Notes Toward a Genealogy, she explains how in the 1950’s, the
idea of evil children as chilling characters really started to grip America. In
the 1950’s children were portrayed as being born evil in horror novels (80).
This all started with novels like Ray Bradburns, The Small Assassin where a newborn is born with the desire to kill.
These babies have no motives or reasons for their desires to kill; they just do
(80). The 1960’s then brings us to examine the psychological forces and family
dynamics that might produce an evil child rather than the child being born
inherently evil (81). Novels like Shirley Jacksons, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, is about an 18-year-old girl
who confesses to murdering her family 6 years before this theme started to
become increasingly popular (81). One woman, Ira Levin’s decided to go back to
the more popular approach from the decade before and wrote Rosemary’s Baby, a story about the son of Satan, who was born as an
evil child (81). This novel became a huge hit and by the 1970’s and 1980’s,
authors hoped to take advantage of the popularity of evil children and created
immense amounts of texts, while directors took advantage of this as well and
started to offer cinematic versions (82). Because both types of evil children
“the satanic and the psychological deviant” were such a hit the directors explored
both types (82). The first big hit of the satanic genera was of course, The Exorcist (82). Also Thomas Tryon’s
bestselling novel, The Other, offered
psychological rather than satanic corruptions for the child (82). The child of
this novel, Niles, commits a series of violent acts that he blames on his twin,
whom is later discovered dead (82). Tryon’s focus on insanity rather than the
demonic possession of a child “helped set the stage for later texts that would
increasingly examine childhood manifestations of dangerous derangement” (82).
Renner also states that according to Gary Hoppenstand, the author of Exorcising the Devil babies: Images of
Children and Adolescents in the Best-Selling Horror Novel, has argued that
these early text were largely responsible for moving horror from a minor genre
to a mainstream concern (83). This is where we find the origination of horror movies
as we know them. Today film directors still use both of these types of
children, the satanic and the psychological deviant in their horror films, and
they both still have the same horrifying, yet addicting effect on their
audience. But how did these views of evil children really start.
Puritan Vs. Romantic Period
To have a better understanding how these
evil children concepts were started, we have to know where these thoughts
derived from. From the 1600’s to the 1700’s was the Puritan age and was really
when the idea of evil children started. Moran and Vinovskis state in their article, The Great
Care Of Godly Parents: Early Childhood In Puritan New England, that the puritans did love their
children but they were considered evil until they were converted into
Christians, and babies and children who died without being converted were
considered damned (25). Children were thought to be filled with sin and
“puritan parents sought to counteract original sin in children by breaking and beating
down their wills” (26). This method of parenting most likely lasted quite a
number of years (26). In the early seventeenth century English minister and the
pilgrim pastor, John Robinson also shared his child-rearing ideas (26). In a
piece he wrote titled, Of Children and
Their Education, he writes, “And surely there is all children, though not
alike, a stubbornness and stoutness of mind arising from natural pride, which
must, in the first place, be broken and beaten down (26).” The puritan view
started to change around 1769 when the Romantic period began. The Romantic
period is when children began to be viewed how we perceive them today as innocent
and angelic. Jacqueline Banerjee writes in her article, Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children’s Fiction: The Child as
Innocent, The “cult of the child” really started to flourish in England
when William Blake and other Romantics expressed it in their poetry. Wordsworth,
another poet, also played a huge role on the holiness of the child, Banerjee states;
Both Blake and Wordsworth “give the joyful, pure-hearted, and inspirational
figure of the child added poignancy by contrasting it with the world of
experiencing which lies in wait for it.” The image of children as innocent and
redemptive can also be found in many different Victorian Period works such as Charles
Dickens’s books, Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop (Banerjee). Our current
view of children conforming along the lines of the Romantic Period is exactly why
these evil children scare us. We have been raised to love and cherish children
and not think they are evil. When a child is shown as evil in a horror film our
bodies are put into disequilibrium and we do not know how to react.
Technology and The Ring
To get a better feel to what exactly
these haunted children do in horror films to scare us I watched and analyzed
the movies The Ring and The Exorcist. The film The Ring is about a young girl, Samara,
that haunts people through a video and anyone who views this video gets a phone
call telling them they will die in seven days, and seven days later Samara comes
and kills them (The Ring). After
watching The Ring we begin to wonder
why this little girl scares us so much. The
Ring plays on the audience’s emotions in many different ways. One way The Ring plays on our emotions is
through the use of electronic devices. The
Ring uses televisions as a way of transport and telephones as a way to
inform someone that they are going to die. Our culture views these items as
safe and when people are scared, they usually turn on their TV to distract them
or call someone on their phone, but The
Ring portrays both of these items as dangerous. In Jacques Derrida’s short
clip, The Science of Ghosts, he talks
about how technology symbolizes ghosts and with our society being so saturated
with technology; we are now bringing more ghosts into our world (Derrida). I
feel The Ring is also sending this
message to our culture, but instead of telling us this they are showing it. In Valerie Wee article, Patriarchy
and the Horror of the Monstrous Feminine: A comparative study of Ringu and The
Ring essays she states that Samara’s use of television and
videotapes as an outlet for her vengeance is because it is all that Samara had
use of to access the outside world while she was locked in the barn (160). The Ring may be telling us that even
though we view these items as safe they really are not. Our culture has become
so technologically reliant that we forget all of the bad things that become of
them; such as our society slowly becoming less and less sociable, the
influences the media has on us, and that with just one click we have the accessibility
to know everything about someone instantaneously.
By far the scariest feature of The Ring offers is Samara. Samara is a
cute little girl with long black hair and big brown eyes who seems so innocent,
yet is the base of this horror film. During the
movie Samara is asked, “You don’t want to hurt anyone do you?” She replies
with, “But I do, and I’m sorry, it won’t stop (The Ring).” Samara represents the ultimate form of evil for a
child.
Samara’s ability to
frighten people so easily makes us question if there is something about girls
that makes them more frightening in scary movies. Many movies tend to use young
girls instead of boys as the center of their horror. The Ring may be representing how young women tend to hold anger. In
our society we usually view girls as being more dramatic and less forgiving
then men. Valarie Wee states,
The Ring’s central horror revolves around the realization that this
evil female force cannot be neutralized or contained even “over her dead body,”
for Samara’s ghost returns and defies all attempts to defeat her (161). Samara’s
horror is founded on her abjection, which she displays in life, and then is
confirmed in death” (161). Valerie Wee also analyzed both the Japanese and
American version of The Ring and Ringu. She says “The figure of the
vengeful female is a particularly common trope in patriarchal cultures and frequently
appears in both Hollywood and Japanese horror films” (152). Ringu the Japanese movie’s gender comes from the tradition of the
Japanese female ghost, expressing a growing masculine anxiety about
contemporary Japan and the undermining of the gender roles (152). Where the
American version of The Ring is
featuring more of what the American cultures views of gender are in general and
the popular representations of gender in movies (152). Valerie Wee states, our culture has a long
tradition of associating the female with motherhood, monstrosity and or death (159).
The Ring uses three primary females,
Samara, Rachel, and Anna and they all clearly have these traits between them
(159). Samara represents monstrosity in both life and death and her evilness is
depicted right from the beginning (159). Wee states, that The Ring portrays Samara “as simply and unambiguously the
embodiment of destructive, supernatural evil (160).” Anna is a woman “whose
desire for motherhood ends disastrously” (159) after the Morgan’s adopt Samara,
Anna starts to complain about terrible visions with Samara around (159). These
visions end up making her go completely mad and she finally submits to her
daughter’s evil powers and murders her daughter (159). “The Ring constructs both Anna and Samara as irrational, unnatural
and destructive (female) forces (159)” Wee also explains that Anna is Samara’s
tormenter in the sense that she locks her daughter up in the stable before
murdering her. Though Anna is also a victim of Samaras unnatural visions, (159)
this leaves Richard, Anna’s husband and Samaras father, trapped between these
women (159). Richard who seems to not be affected by Samaras visions tries to
solve the problem by first locking her in the stable and when that does not
work he sends her to a psychiatrist to try to help her (160). Valarie Wee
explains, The Ring “Overtly and
actively equates the female with irrationality, insanity and evil, pitting her
against the male who is aligned with logic and reasoning” (Wee 160) Samara
represents pure evil and there is nothing anyone can do to take that away from
her. This is terrifying to us as a culture because we view everyone as
“fixable”, especially children. When we see a misbehaving child we usually
think they will grow out of it or they can get help to fix their problem. Never
do we just loose hope in them, but with Samara there’s nothing we can do and
the only way to save yourself is to hand the video onto someone else. Samara is
a representation that even children can carry anger with them and that nothing
anyone can do will ever make her anger stop.
Messages To Our Culture
These horror films may be a message to
our culture that any unresolved issues we have should be dealt with. In Dino
Felluga’s essay, Modules on Freud: One
the Unconscious, Fellugas summarizes
Freud’s view on the unconscious. According to Freud, “Humanity’s very movement
into civilized society requires the repression of our primitive desires”(Fellugas).
Freud says in one of his essays Civilization
and Its Discontents, that our society is a “substitute-formation for our
instincts and drives”(Fellugas). Freud believed that there is a relationship
between the child’s development and the development of the species (Fellugas).
“The prehistory into which the dream-work leads us back is of two kinds-on the
one hand, into the individuals prehistory, his childhood, and on the other, in
so far as each individual somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the
entire development of the human race, into phylogenetic prehistory too”
Fellugas). Fellgas explains that Freud also says it is the “insistent return of
the repressed that can explain numerous phenomena that are normally overlook:
not only our dreams but also what has come to be called “Freudian Slips” ”A
Freudian Slip is a “Slip of the tongue or a slip of the pen.” James Reason
describes this slip in his article, The
Freudian Slip Revisited as, “A slip is the product both of a local opportunity
from the particular circumstances and of a struggle between two mental forces:
some underlying need or wish and the desire to keep it hidden” (610). These
horror films really center around the idea of the “Freudian Slip” in the sense
that most people in a horror film have something that they do not want to bring
to the surface, whether it is a broken family, a hidden desire, or secrets from
the past. These horror films then bring these repressed memories to the surface
by the form of an evil child coming into their life. The “Freudian Slip” can
also be seen in an evil child, as we find with Samara. Samara tried to repress
the powers she had and keep them hidden but when she was killed by her mother
all of her repressed powers came back to her and she became a murderous child.
These horror films may be trying to show us that repressing our unresolved
issues only hurts us in the end and we need to do something about them before
it is too late.
The Sexuality Of The Child
The
Exorcist, follows a
different path then The Ring in the
way that the director plays with the audience’s feelings. The film, The Exorcist is about a young girl,
Regan, who has been possessed by an evil being who claims to be the “devil” (The Exorcist). The Exorcist starts out by showing how sweet Regan is. They show
her laughing and playing with her mother and they show how much they care for each
other. When Regan starts to become possessed it brings out a parent’s worst
fear, which is that this could happen to their own child if it could happen to
a child as sweet as Regan. As Reagan’s features change the screen becomes
almost hard to look at, especially during scenes when Reagan is showing sexual
deviation. The few scenes when Regan is displays this, we find this completely
repulsive. A child is not supposed to even know about the things that Regan
does to herself. We cannot even fathom a child saying and doing the things she
does and giving us the idea in our head that a child could do this disturbs us.
Sigmund Freud did much research on the sexuality of children. In George Klein’s
essay Freud’s Two Theories of Sexuality he
explains that Freud had evidence “That a number of children, a much greater
than one would imagine, seem to show interest at an early age in sexual matters
and to find pleasure in them”(139). According to Freud this sexuality occurred
much before puberty in children (140). This being said, when we see Regan on
screen portraying these sexual behaviors, it shows Freud’s studies to be true,
and as a culture knowing that our young children may also be developing this is
a very frightening thought.
Who's To Blame?
In Renner article, Evil Children in Film and Literature II: Notes Toward a Taxonomy
she explains what causal factors bring a child to become possessed. She states,
a possessed child often has less to do with the child who remains innocent and
more to do with his or her parents (179). Renner explains, a possession “either
draws the family back together or magnifies the issues that caused fracture in
the first place”(179). The family may look like victims of a supernatural
presence possessed, but possessed children narratives usually show that the
child has been made vulnerable because of the breakdowns in the family unit
(Renner179). Renner states that, “Possession
narrative act as cautionary tales that warn us, in symbolic terms, that
children are vulnerable to dangerous influences when traditional family
structures are damaged and parents are negligent in their duties”(180). Even The Exorcist points to a failed family
structure. Regan’s parents are divorced and her father takes no parental
responsibilities and Regan’s mother is a successful actress who employs several
people to care for Regan while she works. Renner explains that paid childcare
is no substitute for the careful eye of a parent (181). The Novel Regan-as-a
Demon condemns Regan’s mother for putting her career before her child and says,
“It is you who have done it! Yes you with your career before your career before
anything, your career before your husband, before her”(181). Regan’s possession
does force her mother to become a stay at home mother to take care of Regan and
her mother soon learns that she needs to put motherhood before her job and
Regan then returns to her normal state (181). Renner states that, “This could
suggest that contamination can be removed if a child is given “proper” parental
attention in time to rescue him or her (181). Renner’s points make it quite
obvious to why we would be so frightened of these children. Our society is very
much for equal rights, which has many women now working full time and many
children are in daycare. Seeing these movies frightens people making them
question their parenting. Also with our society’s 50 percent divorce rate, many
children are left with separated parents (Bohlin34) The thought that your child
could become possessed because you are too busy with your job or you and your
significant other got a divorce would be enough to scare anyone. I think these
movies are trying to tell our society something, I believe they are trying to
show us the bad things, although usually not as serious as a possession, that
could happen if we put our jobs before our families or if we let our family
system break down resulting in separation of parents or a different lifestyle
for the child.
Child’s Toy—The DOLL
Even the mere representation of something
as a child’s in a horror film is enough to scare many. One of the biggest
devices that horror films use to represent children is a child’s toy. The toys
icy glare and disturbing smile staring right at you is enough to give anyone
the shivers. Dominic Lennard author of
All Fun And Games.. Children’s Culture in the Horror Film, from Deep Red (1975)
to Child’s Play (1988), says “Horrors persistent representation of children
with a means to resist adult power has made the iconography of childish fun
ironically synonymous with adult fear”(233) Lennard says the most recognizable
symbol of children’s culture is the doll. Lennard then talks about how Sigmund
Freud’s The Uncanny, addresses the
fear of the living doll. Freud points out that dolls are closely connected to
childhood life (233). Lennard also points out that Freud explains that
children’s games have a distinction between the animate and inanimate where
dolls undertake the same status as real people. Freud gathers that, “Children
have no fear of their doll coming to life, they may even desire it”(233), and
it’s that of these childish beliefs that trouble adults. Freud indicates that
the living child’s doll is something that upsets the adult’s sense of power of
the child. Lennard states, that the child’s tendency for believing of being
captured by phenomena that are unbelievable to adults means the living doll
character is able to be understood as a “paranoid demonization of the child’s
desire”(234). These dolls present childhood as something other than safe. They
create an unhappy space for an adult’s imaginations and one that consolidates
their belief of power.
Evil children in horror films are not
only a popular adrenaline provoking past time to for our culture, but are also
a message to our culture which horrifies many. These films frighten our society
because of our cultures value of children, the way these children are
presented, the messages these movies present to our culture, and the
representation of childhood through inanimate objects. These horror films are
frightening to our culture for a reason, and instead of being afraid of these
films our culture really needs to capture what they are telling us and look at
ourselves and make sure we are not doing these things that could so easily hurt
us in the end.
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