Note: Discussions of fictional child death including graphic descriptions, but no images depicting it. Spoilers for child death in all movies mentioned.
When Kids Die in Horror
Death, with her scythe and cloak is as old as time, a natural fixture of life. The death of a child, however, upsets the natural order. In film, there’s no bouncing back from the death of a kid; the genre firmly settles into horror or tragedy, injecting an infinite darkness to the narrative that demands to be reckoned with.
Teenagers
So why can we watch teenagers get picked off with glee? It’s a combination of the 32-year-old balding actors playing them and the writers’ inevitable choice to have them committing immoral fractions - sex, druggin’, boozin’, debauchery, sex - with only the virgin most innocent of them to emerge as The Final Girl, triumphant, allowed to live for her youth-adjacent purity (and newfound grit).
Teenagers are the stars of most slashers because slashers are about the gory kills! Sadness at the victims’ deaths would get in the way of a good slaughterin’ time. So they’re generally annoying and make stupid choices so we don’t empathize with them too much.
It Takes A Village
Children are innocent creatures. Unlike teens on the precipice of adulthood, they are supposed to be able to depend on their communities for safety.
In Pet Sematary (1989), the new neighbors were warned about the busy highway. But why wasn’t there a fence? Two fences? A sign? A speedbump? A speed trap? Why were there not multiple measures by the community to prevent toddlers from running out into traffic? It may be an accident, but even more than the literal hauntings to come for the Creed family, they will be haunted by The Lack of a Fence for the rest of their lives.
A kid’s death asks, where was the village? In the 1931 Frankenstein, it is the death of a child that urges the town to become a village - a village mob - pitchforks in hand to make up for their inability to protect a young girl.
The Meta Level
When a kid dies, the standard contract with the audience of ‘oh don’t worry we won’t do that’ is broken, and all bets are off with what comes next - what emotional terrors you will or will not be subjected to.
In Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997, 2007)1 the psychopathic killers torture a family of three, killing the kid first. They then lament they weren’t supposed to do that first - the timing is all wrong. It’s one of the many nods to the audience including explicit winking fourth wall breaks that flirt with the audience’s expectations and call us out for our love of violence.
Haneke said, “A film can…provoke so that some viewer makes his own thoughts about his own part in this international game of consuming violence, because it’s a big business.”2
How are we, the audience, complicit in this violence? We egg on the death of teenagers, just a few years past that simple age. When a movie kills a kid, it says, you cannot egg this on. This is something else.
I saw Hereditary opening weekend (before the memes), so when the brother accidentally decapitates his younger sister and goes to bed, leaving his parents to discover her headless body in the backseat of the family car, I was so shocked I half-got out of my seat. That movie does not hold your hand and whisper that some horrors are off-limits. It’s become a modern classic of the genre for a reason, and killing the kid is what unlocks that next level of cruelty, launching the film into another stratosphere of horror.
The Darkness
When a demon-tainted mastiff turns on a child in When Evil Lurks, we’re slung into a world where a mother can nosh on the brains from her baby’s head as if the organs were popcorn in a bucket.
It’s obviously a difficult topic to stomach and I’m not even a parent, but it’s a necessary catalyst for a much darker story. Maybe you think you wouldn’t reanimate your beloved son in the indigenous burial ground where Things Come Back Wrong, but Grief is a beast that rivals even the gnarliest creatures of the imagination. Once you no longer have that tether to innocence, to goodness, what will you do? What won’t you do?
Sometimes Children Die
The media is right! Haneke is right! Devouring hundreds of horror movies has desensitized me to violence, gore, and death - in fiction! So who cares!
In reality, the death of a child is one of life’s greatest tragedies. In fiction, I stomach the emotional toll onscreen so that I can delight in the horrors of what the characters will do in the aftermath of the Unimaginable.
I’m anticipating this will be one of my less popular newsletters.
Recommended Watchlist
The kids _ _ _.
The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
The lesser known Spanish Civil War tragedy from Guillermo Del Toro. It’s a beautiful ghost story, but they do blow up orphans. They blow up some orphans. Orphans blow up. And this one still isn’t as sad as the OTHER Spanish Del Toro-involved dead orphan movie, The Orphanage. What is it with that guy.
Don’t Look Now (1973)
Rest in peace, Donald Sutherland. An aesthetically gorgeous and sad thriller with magnificent use of the color red and the Venice location.3
Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Baby’s first slasher! Those chuckle muffins are never seen again.
Thanks for reading, you beautiful freaks.
xo,
the vampire starter kit your friend allie lembo sold you, because after she threw her life away to become a vampire she realized to thrive she needed to continue making more vampires, so while you already bought the kit, she’s also started badgering you to become a member of eternal night and you’re like ‘dude you’re in a pyramid scheme’ but she’s like ‘pyramid schemes are illegal, pack-based vampires have been around since the dawn of time’ and you might have to block her on social media
He directed a version in his native Austrian in 1997 and then a shot-for-shot remake in 2007.
I had difficulty researching ‘white sheets on chairs’ but I THINK similar shots are seen in some of the following: Identikit, The Sentinel, Burnt Offerings, Daughters of Darkness.