Rock and Reel

Kids Can Kill Too »

“Oh yes, children often commit murders, and quite clever ones too,” explains Reggie Tasker, a writer with criminal insight in The Bad Seed. In horror films, kids are often the helpless victims of an evil villain, but there are also plenty of young boys and girls thirsty for blood. Whether the scares are frighteningly realistic or wildly supernatural, young murderers in the movies challenge us with questions of nurture versus nature. Let’s check out five movies with kids that would make any grown man or woman run away in fear.

Top 10 Movies of 1986

1. Blue Velvet (David Lynch)

2. Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)

3. The Fly (David Cronenberg)

4. Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Hayao Miyazaki)

5. Down by Law (Jim Jarmusch)

6. Aliens (James Cameron)

7. Platoon (Oliver Stone)

8. The Great Mouse Detective (Ron Clements, Burny Mattinson, David Michener and John Musker)

9. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes)

10. She’s Gotta Have It (Spike Lee)

Updated: December 29, 2011

See Also: Top 10 Albums of 1986, Top 10 Movies of 1953, Top 10 Movies of 1957, Top 10 Movies of 1962, Top 10 Movies of 1972, Top 10 Movies of 1984, Top 10 Movies of 1989, Top 10 Movies of 1992, Top 10 Movies of 1999, Top 10 Movies of 2002, Top 10 Movies of 2003, Top 10 Movies of 2004, Top 10 Movies of 2005, Top 10 Movies of 2007, Top 10 Movies of 2008, Top 10 Movies of 2009, Top 10 Movies of 2010, Top 10 Movies of 2011

The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) »

On the surface, the movie combines science fiction paranoia, gross-out body horror and even an unexpected romance for a genre-bending experience. But the film exploits its most extreme elements for a result that is both a profoundly moving tragedy and an incredibly thought-provoking study of the flesh.