What’s Wrong with the Baby?: Why Children Make the Best Monsters
I’m not saying I exclusively write about kids that scare the hell out of people, but I’m also not saying I don’t do that. See, if you stack my books side by side, a pattern emerges. You’ve got Seed—my debut—about a sweet little girl named Charlie who ends up doing some very bad things. The Bird Eater features a ghost boy who stalks the halls of an ill-fated house. The Devil Crept In tells a story of a woman who raises a literal monster. And in If You See Her, a girl emerges from the shadows. If you see her, well…you die.
In my latest novel The Unseen, a strange, off-kilter boy appears practically out of nowhere and shatters the fragile core of a grieving family. And this boy? He’s not destroying a family by demanding buttered noodles for dinner or throwing tantrums in the Target toy aisle. He’s just… wrong. Completely, unnervingly, get-this-kid-out-of-my-house wrong.
So why do I keep coming back to kids in horror? Simple. Kids are just plain weird. Like, beyond understanding, disturbingly strange. They say unsettling things in calm voices, like, “My real mommy died in a fire,” and “if you stop and listen, you can hear her inside the walls.” They stare for too long, zoned out and unblinking. They laugh when no one else is, sometimes bursting into cackles at the most inappropriate times. Like funerals. And while most of that is just typical developmental chaos, horror thrives in the uncanny valley—and, friends, there’s nothing more uncanny than a small, “innocent” child behaving in ways that feel not-quite-right. I’m a mother to a seven-year-old boy. Ask me how I know.
But let’s not pretend this is something new. I’m not some spooky baby trailblazer here. Horror has always recognized that kids are the perfect vessels for fear. Perhaps, it was Stephen King who sparked this fascination in me with Danny Torrance from The Shining. He’s not evil, but he’s incredibly unsettling. Hell, not a single person who has ever watched the movie will forget the bathroom scene where Danny talks to Tony for the first time. And let’s not forget the Grady twins. Twice the creep factor for the price of one. “Come play with us, Danny,” they say in unison. Like, sorry girls. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just stick to my Big Wheel and slow-growing mental breakdown as The Overlook comes alive.
Then, there’s Gage Creed in Pet Sematary —a kid who dies tragically, then comes back wrong. It’s one of the most heart-wrenching horror setups imaginable, and King doesn’t flinch. Gage isn’t scary because he roars back as a monster. He’s scary because he returns as something cold and hollow. He’s a shadow wearing a kid suit, and it’s utterly, horribly perfect.
And of course, we can’t forget the classics: Damien Thorn from The Omen, child of Satan and destroyer of nannies. Carol Anne from Poltergeist, whispering to ghosts through the static of a TV screen. And my personal childhood nightmare: Regan MacNeil, contorting, vomiting, and stabbing herself with crucifixes in The Exorcist. These are the characters who make us question our perceptions, because if kids can turn sinister, what hope do the rest of us flawed humans have?
Fortunately for us, the trend of eerie children isn’t disappearing anytime soon. Recent horror films have given us Esther from Orphan (spoiler alert: she’s not a child!), tapping into the fear that the unknown can hide in plain sight. And then there’s Brightburn. Oh, how I love this movie for flipping the tired superhero origin story by asking: what if Superman decided we were nothing but ants beneath his feet? Brandon Breyer is what happens when absolute power lands in the hands of a boy with no empathy. Unfortunately, we, as a society, see this time and again on the news. It’s real. It’s incomprehensible. And it’s terrifying.
That, ultimately, is the fear, isn’t it? We have no way of predicting what a child will become. It’s the timeless question of nature vs. nurture. Can someone be born wrong? That’s the unsettling thing—we don’t know what’s going on in their heads when they stare into the darkness before drifting off to sleep. Are they dreaming of robots and rocket ships? Or are they quietly communing with the dead?
I’m a mom, but I was writing about creepy kids long before I became a parent. Children are unpredictable, ultimately unknowable, and horror doesn’t just expose that mystery, it thrives in it. It’s why I write about family, why I write about kids. Because deep down, we’re all asking the same question: what’s wrong with the baby? And sometimes, the answer is, blissfully… everything.
