Fifty Horror Clichés That Need to Die in a Fire

#42: Creepy Children

When it comes to the typical horror story, there is nothing authors love to do more than turn harmless concepts into outright terrifying fodder. The regular sweet feline is turned into a demonic zombie-like creature that attacks its owners similar to the starving tigers in Joe Exotic's zoo. Apples are transformed into potent venomous containers that are meant to fatally poison the fairest maiden of the land. A simple tree outside of a modern American house becomes a murderous plant bent on impaling your children into a kabob. Anything can be made scary so long as the author has the demented imagination to do so.

This is especially true when it comes to the miracle of many people's lives; children, whose goal it is to help pass on the family name onto the next generation. They are the precious fruit of many families, with the potential youth and imagination to innovate the world once reaching adulthood with the right moral compasses to look up to.  It is with children that various horror writers seem to have the biggest field day reimagining these innocent little rascals as creepy as hungry ghouls or outright bloodthirsty murderous monsters.  Hence, many famous examples are not complete without the creepy child value meal, which varies in dementedness depending on the story in question.

  Often, a child character is used as the killer in question.  The best example of murderous children in horror fiction is the famous short story and movie Children of the Corn, where the children of Gatlin, Nebraska go around murdering their families in cold blood and then themselves if they turn nineteen or disobey their new caretaker; the deity who guards the town's cornrows. 

  Then there is the other extreme of mind controlling the child in question, either possessing them or controlling them in the form of a zombie.  The Exorcist film is a prime example of a child getting possessed, where twelve year old Regan is possessed by a demon, who could potentially be the devil himself.  Pet Sematary is a literary example of the zombified extreme, where after being resurrected by the foul soil of the nearby pet cemetery two year old Gage Creed becomes a murderous vessel for the wendigo.

  Finally, there is the example of making the child in question a vessel for the dead to communicate with, creating a creepy factor for the cast members who are unaware of their power.  Danny Torrance from the novel The Shining is the strongest example of this extreme.  Throughout the novel, Danny has firsthand visions of the darkness flooding The Overlook Hotel, knowing before anyone else that the place was overrun by evil spirits.  Both of Danny's parents were creeped out by this power, wrongly interpreting his blackouts as seizures or strangely autism. 

  Because children are still developing their prime personality until late into their teenage years, some of the actions they commit look outright creepy to most adults.  What might be normal play for a child might look like outright possession to those uneducated with caring for kids, or a strange connection to the undead.  These "mysterious" actions are the prime fodder for so many children in horror fiction becoming the source of the creep factor, a tragic misconception that has over the years grown more and more into an irritating cliché.  Just because the actions of a child may be unexplainable for some does not mean all of them are demonic and should be feared by people.

  In the past, I have personally met a multitude of children from friends of my family or children of my relatives, who have merely acted "creepy" just because they were starting to observe the world.  A second cousin of mine has a habit currently at two to laugh at some horror-related movies that sometimes appear on TV, much like me when I was four.  The only reason both of us did such an action was simply because we did not know the content was supposed to be scary, thinking the characters on the screen were falling over and running to make us laugh.  Another example lives in my cousin who is a year younger than me that as a child would get easily frustrated and not knowing how to control her temper yet, would slam the door of her room and wish bad things on her mother.  She was merely an infant when these occurrences happened, and after learning that what she was saying was far from correct, stopped acting that way at all by the time she was ready for kindergarten.  Then there are the infants who pulled the tails of my family's pets due to curiosity, chased my Aunt's cats because they wanted to pet them, and dropped a dog or two because they did not know that canines do not land on their feet as easily as cats.  In every example, these children were unaware what they were doing could be seen as creepy and were just developing to the world around them.

  Children are far from the horror centers many writers depict them as.  They are just mailable clay trying to adjust to life outside of the womb.  All of the creepy things children have done 95% of the time are complete misunderstandings or curiosity going too far.  The only time children should at all be seen as potentially dangerous are in extreme circumstances that are rare, such as when they start torturing the family cat for no true motivation at all or lack any signs of empathy by the age of six.  It is only then that the child is not being curious about life and needs professional help.  However, even these cases should not be used as horror fodder in respect of the child that might be suffering from mental distress.

  So next time you write a horror novel, try adjusting the center of the horror to something other than a child.  As I said earlier, anything can be made scary with the right amount of imagination and effort.  Just be creative and come up with something a lot of people have not tried yet.  Children need a bit of a break from their depictions in the horror genre.