Editorials
The 5 Most Obnoxious Children In Horror!
As in most movies, children can play an important part in horror movies. Sometimes though, those children can hamper your enjoyment of the film you’re watching. Be they bratty, evil, murderous, or just plain stupid, children in horror movies have the worst track record when it comes to being likable. Here are five of the worst offenders!
***SPOILERS BELOW***
Mara Chaffee – Village of the Damned
Village of the Damned may not be one of John Carpenter’s best movies, but it features one of his most memorable and brattiest villains. Mara (Lindsey Haun, True Blood) is a bitch of the highest order. The leader of a group of telepathic and mind-controlling children, her mere presence is enough to make you want to jump through the screen and give her a good slap across her face.
Lex Murphy – Jurassic Park
First of all: yes I’m qualifying Jurassic Park as a horror film. Many people group Lex and Tim together when talking about how annoying they are, but I maintain that Lex is the true obnoxious child of this duo. At least Tim snaps out of his fear and get shit done. Lex, with the exception of her restoring power to the control room, is just a whiny, cloying pre-teen. Some slack must be given to her since it is understandable for a child to be so freaked out while being attacked by dinosaurs, but she took it just a smidgen too far.
Charlie Sandin – The Purge
It’s not that Charlie is consistently annoying throughout the course of The Purge, it’s just that he makes one really stupid decision. On Purge night, when everything is supposed to be locked down, he opts to raise the security walls in his house to let in a stranger (Edwin Hodge) being stalked by a group of Purgers, thereby setting up the main conflict of the film. Of course, without that stupid decision, there would be no film, so you can’t complain about it too much. Actor Max Burkholder is no stranger to playing obnoxious children (anyone who watched him play Max Braverman on NBC’s Parenthood knows this better than anyone), so he gave it his all in The Purge.
Esther Coleman – Orphan
If you know the twist in Orphan, then you know that her inclusion on this list may be a bit of a cheat, but until that twist is made public, Esther is a demon child straight out of your nightmares. She’s also such a self-entitled little brat that even her quick death by neck-breaking doesn’t seem like it’s harsh enough.
Samuel Vanek – The Babadook
You didn’t think I would make a list about obnoxious children in horror movies and not include this little douchebag, did you? While he was played to perfection by actor Noah Wiseman, Samuel is hands down one of the most annoying children put in a film, horror or otherwise. It got to the point where you were practically begging for the titular bogeyman to eat him (or whatever it is the Babadook does, since he doesn’t actually kill anyone in the film). I get that the film is about a mother trying to get over the grief of losing her husband (with the Babadook as a personification of that grief), but this kid was too much. I wouldn’t have spent a single second saving him.
What are some other children in horror movies that bugged the crap out of you? Let us know in the comments below!
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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