Sick Puppies

In the 1976 film The Omen, Gregory Peck played an American ambassador to Britain who learns that his son — played with puckish charm by Harvey Stephens — is the spawn of Satan himself. Sounds ludicrous (indeed, the film was), but there was something undeniably creepy about casting a sweet young thing in such an evil role.

While The Omen featured A-list casting (Lee Remick played Peck’s beleaguered wife) and garnered some decent reviews, some critics argued the film was simply a cynical effort to tap into the massive success of 1973’s The Exorcist, a landmark in horror that also featured Satan, a pair of exasperated parental figures and one unruly kid (Linda Blair).

Holy terror: Damien Thorn (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) is the spawn of Satan in a new remake of The Omen. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.
Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Films such as these subvert our basic assumption that children are moral blank slates; they suggest, instead, that kiddies can be every bit as calculating and knowingly evil as adults (especially when Satan is involved). These movies also function as disparaging cautionary tales about the potential pitfalls of procreation.

Even if it is a remake of a ripoff, John Moore’s new version of The Omen (opening June 6) is hotly anticipated by horror buffs. In the menacing role originally played by Harvey Stephens, child actor Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick has a lot to live up to. (Stephens has a cameo in the new version as a tabloid reporter.) Here’s a list of our favourite sick-puppy movies, in which youngsters refute the notion that all humans are born innocent.

The Bad Seed (1956)
This is the grandmamma of them all. Patty McCormack was the youngest person ever to be nominated for an Oscar in the chilling role of a young lass who secretly knocks off classmates, the gardener and anyone else she doesn’t like. Nancy Kelly plays her terrified mother, who clings desperately to the belief that her perfect little daughter is not a murderess. The overzealous censors of the day forced the filmmakers into writing an uplifting ending; it only enhances The Bad Seed’s over-the-top camp aura.

Achieving lift-off: Linda Blair gets the party started with Max Von Sydow and Jason Miller in The Exorcist. (CP Photo)
(CP Photo)

Village of the Damned (1960)
George Sanders plays a concerned professor who finds that his child is growing at an unusually fast pace and, when angered, has a tendency to shift eye colour and throw one mother of a tantrum. Soon enough, Sanders realizes that his entire town has been taken over by otherworldly children collectively bent on world domination. Village of the Damned says as much about audiences’ growing Cold-War anxiety as it does about naughty tykes.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)
This film set the standard for zombie movies. A young brother and sister take an innocent walk in a cemetery and soon find themselves under siege from the living dead. Along with a few other people, they seek refuge in a boarded-up house. One particular sequence stands out: as the groaning dead attempt to get through the barricades to feed on the uninfected, a worried set of parents descends into the basement. Their daughter (Kyra Schon) appears ill and has an open wound (never a good sign in the zombie-movie realm). As Mom and Dad bicker, the daughter regains consciousness, picking up a garden trowel and attacking her dear folks with it.

The Exorcist (1973)
After 33 years, this remains the class act of the demonic-children sub-genre. Linda Blair plays the endearing offspring of Ellen Burstyn, who portrays an actress struggling to get through a troubled film shoot. Things go topsy-turvy when Blair begins spewing pea soup and saying unbelievably raunchy things to party guests. The film features some dry comedy early on when doctors, unable to diagnose what on earth is plaguing the young girl, tell Burstyn there’s a possibility her daughter is possessed by the devil. Ha! While Blair did a great job as the tormented minor inhabited by Beelzebub, her “Satanic” voice was supplied by legendary Hollywood actress Mercedes McCambridge. (She was reportedly so distraught at being left off the credits of this movie that she left the Hollywood premiere in tears.)

It’s Alive (1974)
This one was a product of the wondrous mind of cult filmmaker Larry Cohen. An unsuspecting couple have a bloody-minded baby that escapes soon after birth and kills anyone who gets in its way. Cohen didn’t have a big effects budget, so we never really get a good look at the killer brat, but It’s Alive’s lack of production values is half the fun.

Demon Seed (1977)
In this truly wacky film, British beauty Julie Christie plays a scientist whose futuristic home is run by a computer that increasingly thinks it is human. It soon develops amatory feelings towards Christie, and in one of the most unusual sequences ever witnessed in a horror movie, rapes her. The so-called demon child in this film is the fetus growing inside Christie. The pregnancy provides the film’s central tension: what on earth is the little tyke going to look like when it’s born?

The Boys From Brazil (1978)
The brains behind Rosemary’s Baby (woman is impregnated by Satan) and The Stepford Wives (feminist retelling of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), novelist Ira Levin has a knack for paranoid, possibly insane conspiracy theories. In The Boys from Brazil, Levin imagines that prior to Adolf Hitler’s suicide in 1945, his trusted doctor Josef Mengele (played with relish by Gregory Peck) extracted cells from the Führer’s body to create a series of Hitler clones. Sir Laurence Olivier chewed up the scenery as a Nazi hunter clearly modelled on Simon Wiesenthal. But the real revelation here is young actor Jeremy Black, who plays multiple roles (with multiple accents) as a variety of young Hitler clones scattered across Europe and the United States.

Damien: The Omen II (1978)
As with many Hollywood franchises, this one was both a continuation of the original story and a quasi-remake. Two bankable stars (William Holden and Lee Grant) play a couple that takes in the orphaned, now-adolescent Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor). The film comes up with new and exciting ways for Damien and his followers to dispatch of goodie two-shoes who get in their way. Jerry Goldsmith’s exquisite musical score from the first Omen continues to enhance the chills.

The Brood (1979)
David Cronenberg’s cynicism about contemporary medicine again bubbles to the surface in the truly unnerving The Brood. Art Hindle plays a man whose troubled wife (Samantha Eggar) is in the grip of a shady shrink (played with relish by Oliver Reed). The film is punctuated by a series of attacks by a violent gang of mutant children, who show up enigmatically, like some sort of cosmic mistake. The murky mystery of their provenance is what makes the film so creepy.

The Good Son (1993)
By this point, Macaulay Culkin had endeared himself to filmgoers, playing bratty-but-sweet characters in My Girl and the Home Alone series. Director Joseph Ruben chose to cast him against type with The Good Son. Elijah Wood plays a lad forced to live with his aunt and uncle after his mother’s death from cancer. He soon becomes buddies with his cousin Henry (Culkin), who has some interesting notions about amusement — like shooting the neighbour’s pet dead with a crossbow. As demon-children movies go, this one is quite generic, but it’s fun to watch Culkin play it dark.

The Omen opens June 6 across Canada.

Matthew Hays is a writer based in Montreal.