You often hear the old showbiz adage, ‘never work with children or animals.’ It’s a quote that is attributed to W.C. Fields, the much-characterized comedian and actor from a century ago. It’s a humorous but accurate reference to the various challenges of working with either on a film set and their unpredictable natures which can plague a director and a film crew.
When it comes to horror movies, children may not be any easier to work with, but some of their performances are so disturbing that the audience not only has a difficult time sympathizing with them, but they evoke such fear and repugnance that filmgoers have no choice but to root against them, sometimes for their very demise. That’s what this list is all about; those kids in horror movies who not only give us all chills, but make parents look at their offspring a little more closely when they say or do something a bit peculiar.
This list is of horror kids who are twelve and under. Evil teens are in a category all their own. Also, I only considered kids who play a meaningful, if not a significant role in the movie. As an example, Lonnie, the banjo-playing boy in Deliverance was off the charts creepy, and his presence helped create an atmosphere of tension and dread, but he didn’t get a lot of screen time in the John Boorman film. In fact, he didn’t even get an acting credit for the role as the young inbred from the back woods. He was also almost fifteen at the time the film was shot.
That said, I’m naming my top six creepy kids of horror in this list. Why six, you may be wondering. Six kids, six paragraphs, six sentences each; 6-6-6.
I start with Gage Creed from Pet Sematary, the 1989 film based on Stephen King’s novel. Played by Miko Hughes, Gage is an adorable 2-year-old until King does the unthinkable and has the boy run over in front of his house by a speeding truck. No problem, there’s a supernatural burial ground nearby that can reanimate the dead, and the toddler is brought back to life by his father. There’s a glitch, however, as the resurrected child is possessed by the spirit of a Wendigo, and little Gage is transformed into a snarling, evil monster who kills his mother and Herman Munster before he is finally put down humanely with an injection of morphine given to him by his father. Papa Gage doesn’t learn his lesson, burying his wife in the same burial ground. Gage may be a victim here, a product of his father’s grief and shortsightedness, but the boy was truly terrifying in this film, providing a new derivation to an infamous quip; ‘maybe the Wendigo ate your baby.”
As far as matricidal zombies go, George Romero did it first, and in my opinion better, with a bitten and infected Karen Cooper holed up in the basement of a farmhouse in the 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. The 11-year-old girl played by Kyra Schon eventually dies and is reanimated, and the first thing she does is devour the flesh of her dead father. When the girl’s shocked mother approaches her, little Karen guts her with a trowel without hesitation. It is as disturbing a scene to watch today as it was nearly sixty years ago, even with the low-budget effects and black-and-white cinematography. The child’s emotionless expression and black-rimmed eyes, one of which was mostly covered by her long, light hair that is reminiscent of Samara from The Ring, was truly ghastly. Karen joins the pack of zombies and seek to eat the flesh of the remaining survivors at the farmhouse, and while it is unclear what happens to her, it is likely that she was killed by the posse tracking the lumbering ghouls.
In the original film, 1976’s The Omen, Damien Thorn was born to an actual jackal on the 6th day of the 6th month at 6 AM, marking the birth of the Antichrist, the son of Satan. Talk about a rough start in life, this kid, played by Harvey Spencer Stephens, embodied the personification of evil in both his look and demeanor, without any special makeup required. The boy’s cherubic smile underscored the evil lurking within, and when the violence began, he observed it without any sign of remorse whatsoever. Damien wound up the adopted child to an American diplomat, Robert Thorn and his wife, Kathy, after their own child died during childbirth. To spare Kathy the trauma of knowing she’d lost the baby she was carrying, Robert didn’t bother telling her about the old switcheroo, and they go on to raise Damien as their own. That’s when all hell breaks loose, literally, and people start dying, though what is most noteworthy, and even more creepy, is that Damien actually does not commit the horrendous acts himself, they are done for him by his helicopter dad.
There are a lot of visually frightening elements in Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, not the least of which are the Grady Twins, played by real-life twin sisters Lisa and Louise Burns, who were 12 years old during the filming. The Grady girls had been killed by their father, a previous caretaker at the Overlook after he developed a severe case of cabin fever and ended up slaughtering his daughters in the hotel, where they appear as ghosts to Danny Torrance, who realizes his father is headed down that same ‘psycho’ path. Even with all their limbs attached, the appearance of these girls is chilling for all of us looking at them through Danny’s eyes. Just the way they stand close to one another, holding hands, wearing those matching blue dresses with the pink ribbon around the waist, and white knee-high socks with black shoes; brrrrrrr. What adds to the terror of the Grady girls is that they do not cause any physical harm to Danny, but instead inflicts severe psychological trauma. If you’ve seen Kubrick’s masterpiece, you’ll see these twins in your nightmare, forever and ever and ever.
Anthony Fremont is a 6-year-old boy who is featured in an episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone which many consider to be among the best of them all in this classic TV series. With his bowl-style haircut, menacing eyes, and gap-toothed grin, Billy Mumy looks every bit the part of a cruel young boy who possesses great psychic power that he is much too young to know how to handle it with the great responsibility that is necessary to keep those around him safe. He does childish tricks, such as blocking TV signals and disabling car engines, but he also creates grotesque creatures on a whim, such as three-headed gophers that he indiscriminately kills when they no longer amuse him. His family lives in constant fear of him, telling him how everything he does is ‘good’ or else he may just banish them to the “cornfield” for thinking unhappy thoughts. When a drunken neighbor calls Anthony a monster and encourages the others to overtake the boy and kill him, Anthony turns the man into a full-size jack-in-the-box, a dated but still grotesque transformation. The title of this story is It’s a Good Life, not It’s a Wonderful Life, but if George Bailey wished he had never been born, Anthony Fremont is a kid who could make that happen.
Regan MacNeil was a normal 12-year-old girl until she messed around with a Ouija board, and that’s when the trouble started, beginning with strange behavior including marking her territory in the middle of the family living room during a house party. Medical tests confirmed that the problem was not physiological, and things only get worse before a local priest came to suspect that the child was possessed by a demon and suggested an exorcism be performed to remove the evil entity that has taken control of young Regan’s body. Although The Exorcist is more than fifty years old now, it contains some of the most terrifying visual effects that you will ever see in a movie, and the transformation that Regan undergoes physically, and seemingly spiritually, by the end of the movie is what makes her the scariest kid in horror movie history. As such a young actress, Linda Blair’s performance as a possessed child is exceptional, making the audience believe that they are truly witnessing a real-life case of demonic possession. William Friedkin’s direction of the William Peter Blatty best-selling novel was so successful and terrifying that it may have spawned the ‘Satanic Panic’ of the 1980s in which people saw satanic ritual abuse everywhere.
The real problem with this list is that it can change, as evil kids are being spawned all the time.
Published 7/29/25