Nothing
delivers good scares like a creepy or a killer kid movie. The reason is simple:
there is a persistent mythology of childhood that is part of the American gestalt. The reasons are legion, and the
culprits are many, but chief among them is the notion that kids are supposed to
grow up in this Mark Twain-esque, Norman Rockwell-like setting where the colors
are all saturated and there’s good fishing at the pond, and teachers still get
apples on their desks, and children are completely innocent and devoid of
negative images, feelings and emotions until they magically turn eighteen and
then are eligible to be killed in foreign wars.
This
is all crap, of course. All kids are born feral and require constant vigilance
to ensure they don’t turn out to be creepy or killer kids. They all play with
bugs, poop, and dead things, and they see and hear all manner of stuff that
they shouldn’t, often without context or explanation, and so they form their
own weird associations with things like death and violence.
And
that’s why Killer Kid movies are so scary. They show us the thing that we don’t
ever want to acknowledge or admit to ourselves, and it’s this: the myth of
childhood is actually a lie. We can’t protect our children from death, from
dying, from craziness, from monsters, from any of it. That’s extremely frightening
to most people, and it’s largely the reason for the myth in the first place.
