WILLIAM WANDLESS
For the seasoned viewer, horror tends to be a commonsensical genre. One does not need many screenings to grasp conventional prohibitions (good things seldom come, for example, to those who enter the woods or the basement), and contemporary fare like Scream (1996) and its sequels have nudged formulae to the fore, where they may be subjected to ironic vivisection. Evil routinely appears in recognizable guises, and in some cases the primary responsibility of the audience is to flinch on cue. When one presses past clichés and commonplaces, however, one is apt to discern a second set of indications and intimations that require thoughtful response. The Exorcist (1973), for instance, shocks and appalls as a sacrilegious spectacle, yet it also confronts viewers with a weightier obligation, calling for circumspect evaluation of the dynamics depicted and choices made. As Cynthia A. Freeland notes, representations of horror engage viewers in robust interpretive activity: “We are thinking as we follow features of the film that guide our emotional response: We make judgments and evaluations as we watch, react, and listen. We may experience standard or predictable emotions … but then we also reflect on why and whether it is right to do so” (3). At its most challenging, cinematic horror appeals to the full array of spectatorial faculties as it raises disquieting questions about the world in which we live. Depictions of evil children dependably number among such provocative offerings, as they implicate viewers in an unsettling analytical, essentially ethical, exchange from which they cannot turn away.
A film like The Exorcist , centered on the possession of a twelve-year-old girl, spares the audience certain kinds of interpretive effort by turning explanatory emphasis away from the child and toward the presence inhabiting her. Offerings like The Ring (2002), Godsend (2004), and Grace (2009) likewise shift evaluative emphasis away from children and toward the paranormal abilities, congenital conditions, or unearthly entities they incarnate. When horror productions involve evil enacted by children with their own methods and motives, however, they task viewers with appraising iniquity of a different order. If supernatural reckonings are tabled, if the behavior of wicked children originates in their volition and abilities, then viewers must account for evils derived, at least in part, from families, institutions, and circumstances not unlike their own. The representation of such children in credible domestic contexts accordingly elicits an uneasy explanatory effort, one that seeks to remedy an agitation inspired by recognition of situational similarities. Depictions of developmental difference may offer conditional relief, but if the maturational arc appears indeterminate, the audience is obliged to look elsewhere for an impetus that could explain the child's malevolence. Characterological analysis of the child also may expose oddities associated with iniquity, as may a survey of siblings, parents, and influential authority figures. Some films nevertheless frustrate the search for catalysts even then, denying viewers recourse to unambiguous environmental triggers that would explain the child's deviltry. Such productions, devoid of diegetic cues that might easily explicate evil, spoil the child for the audience, fouling the comforts that come with interpretive certainty. As I will demonstrate, however, those same offerings afford the audience compensatory consolations, the findings of a critical gaze turned back upon itself.
That I might address these prospects in detail, I will focus on four films: Halloween (2007), Joshua (2007), Home Movie (2008), and, by way of conclusion, Orphan (2009). These films epitomize a constellation of concerns about the slippery status of the child, and they brace these matters in analogous terms. Joshua and Orphan examine evil in the shape of precocious nine-year-olds; Halloween and Home Movie represent the unrest caused by ten-year-old terrors. All four films feature children who possess an uncanny aptitude for malice, yet that uncanniness speaks not to superhuman endowment but rather to the contrapuntal quality of the evil child: the coexistence of the sweet and the subversive in a play of surfaces and depths. Psychoanalytic criticism offers one valuable means of wrangling with this correlation, yet the extent to which pop psychology pervades the orthodoxies of the genre and our diagnostic parlance suggests the need for an alternative, less deterministic approach to the discrepancy between seeming and being, one that accounts for the fraught relationship of cinematic representation and audience response. To connect the indexical and the ethical—to account for the way depictions of evil children attest to essentially unknowable depths that nevertheless call for characterological explication—I propose a dialectic that addresses the discomfiting incongruity embodied by such children and the interpretive enterprise required to appraise their strangeness, an anxious effort that implicates children, their parents, and the audience.
In children, we find much to be nurtured, much to be feared. The idea of the child elicits a response that, according to Emmanuel Levinas, exceeds love and assumes a transcendent form in fecundity, the self-perpetuating “goodness of goodness” (Totality 267–69). At the same time, the sign of the child comprises an antisocial egotism and implacability, a distillation of difference that occurs as “crude otherness, hard otherness” and that belongs to “childhood, lunacy, [and] death,” as Jean Baudrillard suggests (124, 128). Cinematic representations of children regularly balance these forces in suspension, their magnetism and meanness capable of inciting tenderness or trepidation. A variety of films depend on this representational fluidity, yoking innocence and affecting vulnerability to recalcitrance and a propensity for lashing out. Such eruptions, of course, do not a monster make. A tantrum is not commensurate to malice aforethought, and even sophisticated ideation might be mitigated by a childlike sense of outcomes. The attribution of elemental evil obliges viewers to proceed warily. When dealing with the handiwork of a seemingly evil child, the viewer must ascertain the competence of the culprit. As Claire Elise Katz implies in her Levinasian appraisal of Cain, the audience must weigh matters of responsibility, situational awareness, and moral education in light of a desire to assign guilt (220–22); if a child is “not yet a fully developed ethical subject,” evaluative emphasis changes (223). In horror films we often witness unequivocal iniquity, the work of seasoned ethical agents capable of awful calculation, individuals who grasp the implications of their acts and commit them anyway. The malevolence of such knowing offenders allows for a full array of evaluative options; we may deem them evil and trust the sign has been equitably applied. Wickedness committed by children, however, does not release or relieve the audience so readily. Their acts rouse a hunger for judgment, but questions of consciousness, development, and environment alter the complexion of what may justly be judged.
In the discussion of Halloween, Joshua, Home Movie , and Orphan that follows, I will demonstrate how depictions of evidently evil children depend on a pattern of indicative interplay, one that exploits, gratifies, and undercuts the desire for evaluative support and interpretive certainty. Reassurance in these films occurs as a superabundance of signs, telling gestures that facilitate the recognition of villainy and the assignment of a loaded label we are at pains to apply to a child. To deem Michael Myers, Joshua Cairn, Jack and Emily Poe, and Esther Coleman evil —to find them confirmed in iniquity at the age of nine or ten—the audience requires substantiation sufficient to overcome reservations about their ethical aptitude and to distance these children developmentally and characterologically from ordinary others. More importantly, to yield meaningful relief, the telling gestures must be perceptible and intelligible: comprehensible evidence must correspond to consequent pathology, or else the heightened anxiety that comes with the depiction of wicked children persists undiminished. When behavior seemingly arises from a logical, conventional prompt (the Oedipal complex, for example), the audience may complete the portrait of pathology intuitively, finalizing a diagnosis implied by symptoms in the child or triggers in her environment. A correlation of causes and effects confers comfort, as it implies that developmental deviations might have been avoided and character defects recognized. When the representation of the evil child denies viewers a plausible correlation, however, they must come to terms with increased interpretive pressure. That pressure may be answered with a rational default, the expedient verdict of unmotivated madness, or it may be addressed with an earnest search, a speculative, self-reflexive survey of formative forces that might yield evil. Such scrutiny, conducted when obvious interpretive prospects are exhausted, brings the audience's own ethical sensibilities into focus as they are defined and tried in light of the dynamics onscreen. In the absence of those comforts that come with effortless legibility, this trial of the viewer, this attempt to make ethical sense of the unsettling representation of the evil child, compensates for interpretive uncertainties with conscientious consolations of its own.
Horror films embrace derangement, and the management of the monstrous sometimes requires little more than a glancing allusion to madness. Insanity serves as a formal shorthand, for example, in cases as disparate as those of Rhoda Penmark and Jason Voorhees: her wickedness in The Bad Seed (1956) appears as a tendency inherited from a murderous grandmother, while his mayhem in the Friday the 13th series (commencing in the second installment of 1981) arises in response to the decapitation of his mother. No further delving is required to grasp what these children will become or why. Such efficient explanations simplify the interpretive efforts of the viewer, who may forego the work of inferring motives. Recent films like The Cell (2000), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006), and Hannibal Rising (2007) elaborate on this explanatory theme, as they epitomize a fascination with the origination of evil in childhood. These films connect popular psychology and pathology explicitly, yet they also disengage the audience to a meaningful degree. In The Bad Seed and Friday the 13th uncommon causes yield terrible effects; in these new offerings we behold singular, inimitable catalysts (a baptism synchronized with a seizure in The Cell , for example, or traumatic witness to cannibalism in the case of young Hannibal Lecter) that give rise to elaborate pathologies and locate evil beyond the pale of all but the most appalling domestic situations. Circumstantial rarities limit the implication of the audience, and while viewers might derive many pleasures from the spectatorial experience, an occasion for self-appraisal is lost. A merger of representational modes—the subjection of less exotic formative moments to more meticulous scrutiny—casts emergent evil in a decidedly different light, a stark illumination that unsettles the viewer but makes available compensatory consolations.
Viewed in this light, the second most comforting film of the new millennium may be Rob Zombie's Halloween (2007). It is not, of course, a comfortable film. Rendered with the same grittiness emphasized in his earlier directorial efforts, Zombie's update of the John Carpenter classic proceeds as an homage to and radical revision of the 1978 original. The film retraces the steps of Michael Myers, the iconic killer, who escapes from Smith's Grove Sanitarium, returns to Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, and menaces the heroine, Laurie Strode, slaughtering all who would impede his pursuit. Where the film departs most provocatively from its source, however, is in the depiction of the developmental throes of the ten-year-old Michael. Comfort comes in the form of legibility, of a manifest ethical progression that relieves the viewer of the most fretful, uncertain interpretive work.
The opening of the film features distilled domestic dysfunction, a cluster of cues that builds causal, catalytic momentum. Ronnie, the abusive boyfriend of Deborah Myers, Michael's mother, refers to the boy as “a little bitch” and contends that “he's probably a queer.” Michael's sister, Judith, taunts her brother in a similar vein, telling him to “stop jerking off” in the bathroom and simulating masturbation when accusing him of “stroking” his pet rat to death. Against this backdrop, of course, viewers already know that Michael has butchered the rat with a penknife—he is washing blood from his hands at the moment his sister first mocks him—and a later scene will reveal evidence of violence against other animals that even Ronnie reads as a mode of compensatory empowerment. In the midst of this belittlement, Michael's affectionate exchanges with his mother serve as an opposing force and a point of origin from which a rote Oedipal dynamic unfolds. This trajectory becomes overt at school, when Michael confronts a bully named Daryl. He endures Daryl's abuse of Judith in glowering silence, but when his tormentor produces a newspaper clipping featuring a photo of Michael's mother, who dances at a gentlemen's club, and details his plans to exploit her sexually, Michael responds with wild violence. The principal separates the boys and calls Deborah, but by then the stage has been set for an ethical descent viewers can easily anticipate.
It comes as little surprise that Daryl proves to be Michael's first victim. Wearing a clown mask, Michael batters the bully to death, pausing only to claim the clipping from Daryl's pocket. Convinced of the import of Michael's behavior by Dr. Loomis, a consulting psychiatrist, Deborah (unaware of the extent and escalation of his bloodlust) confronts her son but indulgently grants him a night of trick-or-treating while she is at work. The film answers any uncertainties about the orthodox Freudian character of the boy's maternal attachment in the subsequent scene, which crosscuts images of a disconsolate Michael with Deborah's performance. The boy sits sullenly on the curb, ruefully watching passers-by, while his mother dances to the tune of Nazareth's “Love Hurts.” Following the parallel sequence, Michael acts on his dejection. He murders his mother's boyfriend in the living room, Judith's boyfriend in the kitchen, and finally Judith herself in her bedroom. He considers her upturned bottom in an unhurried point-of-view shot before trading his childish mask for the expressionless latex face formerly worn by her lover; he then caresses his sister's thigh and, following an altercation, stabs her in the stomach. The change of masks implies an untimely coming of age, a maturation that coincides with Michael's annihilation of all challenges to his sexuality and disposal of all perceived competitors for his mother's attention. The second act of Halloween finds Dr. Loomis delving into the boy's troubled psyche, but the first furnishes the viewer with all the gestures necessary to apprehend the essence of his adult character.
Zombie's efforts yield a psychological origin story: the audience, almost certainly familiar with John Carpenter's iconic creation, witnesses incidents that give rise to the mind that inhabits the mask. Michael's ethical destiny serves as the overriding interpretive term, and the 2007 film retrofits the original narrative with a prefatory arc designed to illuminate that characterological consequence. By the time Dr. Loomis closes out his sessions with the boy—“The child christened Michael Myers has become a sort of ghost,” he concedes in a voiceover—prevalent Freudian tropes allow viewers to reach the same foregone conclusion about the maladjusted man: an explicit yet unvoiced desire for the mother, a sealed system of Oedipal issues, built pressure in a crucible of abuse and exploded. As Philip Simpson suggests, a double-edged advantage comes with such determined derivation: recourse to “one or two easily identified scapegoats as root causes of the violence” tends to “provoke and reassure” the audience by confirming its deeply held beliefs, even if those beliefs amount to paranoia, prejudice, or oversimplification (18). Armed with a trebled awareness—of what the child seems to be, what he is, and what he will become—viewers may take comfort in the developmental differences that make a Michael Myers possible. If catalysts like Oedipal obsession and abuse generate interpretive confidence yet summon compassion for the boy inside the beast, however, Halloween offers brutal reassurance to the audience that the condemnation of the adult Michael is ultimately warranted. Viewers might consider the demise of figures like Daryl and Ronnie as intelligible juvenile retribution, but when Michael in his mid-twenties savages janitors, orderlies, guards, and teens indiscriminately, the audience is absolved of uneasy claims to empathy. Carpenter briskly strips his creation of humanity, while Zombie gradually assimilates the boy into the boogeyman. Both directors supply viewers with a secure interpretive purchase that conceives of the child as a palimpsest, discernible yet scarcely legible beneath the boldfaced text of the murderous man.
In Zombie's Halloween , evil has an origin, history, and destiny. The development of Michael Myers can be understood and anticipated as it trends toward a logical, inescapable conclusion. This reasoning depends on representational selectivity and interpretive oversimplification, yet the comfort it confers is no less gratifying. Armed with the requisite psychological suppositions, the audience enjoys the illusion of ethical expertise: the origins of evil are made appealingly plain, and cursory self-assessment will find most viewers innocent enough should they reflect on their own behavior and relationships. The familial dynamic that spawns Michael Myers reveals and reassures; it offers viewers a glimpse into a credible domestic situation and sends them away uplifted by a fiction “which produces the deviant subjectivities opposite which the normal, the healthy and the pure can be known” (Halberstam 2). Michael's mature malevolence eclipses those formative moments that might otherwise give the audience pause. In the absence of such forward-looking finality, however, viewers must contend with thornier questions, the likes of which are posed in Joshua .
A temporal shift in Halloween lets viewers know that little changes for Michael despite the passage of fifteen years: his character remains determined by the onset of violence. His adulthood echoes his origins, and his pursuit of Laurie Strode, the baby sister he adored as a boy, emphasizes the rigidity and finitude of his fixation and the limit of the viewer's evaluative responsibility. Even if Michael's mayhem remains a source of interest, character and motive recede as points of necessary reference. In contrast, the evil child proper—in the midst of ethical development, as a source of interest in his own right—changes the shape and nature of audience response. Resorting to madness as a shorthand explanation for pathological behavior becomes more difficult, as the culpable subject is no longer a finished product but a work in progress. Psychoanalytical sensibilities may help viewers apprehend developmental events, but the audience cannot perform a facile, finalized diagnosis when faced with inexplicable and inchoate wickedness. The evil child inspires different activity, a search for indicative differences that compensate for comforts lost. Joshua offers such solace, but not without undercutting expectations and waking apprehensions of its own.
Joshua originates in a domestic dynamic that instantly solicits sympathy. Although the title implies the centrality of the eponymous nine-year-old, the director, George Ratliff, aligns the progress of the film with the maturation of Joshua's sister, Lily. At “19 Days Old” we find the Cairn family—mother Abby, grandmother Hazel, and grandfather Joe—huddled around the newborn as Brad, the father, records their interactions. Joshua opens the scene playing the piano with his uncle Ned but soon loses his companion to the party fawning over the baby. He continues to play even after his mother requests an intermission, but his disobedience does not strike the assembled Cairns as inordinately willful. Only a subsequent visceral reaction—Joshua vomits as the family serenades Lily—signals the presence of an undefined undercurrent. The scene is strewn with allusions to Abby's depression following Joshua's birth, yet no subtext seems prominent enough to threaten the welfare of the family. In the absence of other indications, initial circumstances in Joshua suggest little more than a boy's understandable fear of displacement.
Subsequent scenes, however, introduce a strangeness into the household. Joshua, in a conversation with his father, inaugurates an equivocal distance. “Do you ever feel weird about me, your weird son?” he asks. Brad reassures Joshua every time this line of inquiry recurs, but his reactions reveal increasing uneasiness. Brad acknowledges the call to responsibility elicited by his son, but he struggles to discover a resemblance on which he might found a more settled relation. As Levinas suggests, fatherhood alone does not instate such a correspondence:
Paternity is the relationship with a stranger who, entirely while being Other, is myself, the relationship of the ego with a myself who is nonetheless a stranger to me …. Then again, the son is not any event whatsoever that happens to me …. The son is an ego, a person. Lastly, the alterity of the son is not that of an alter ego. Paternity is not a sympathy through which I can put myself in the son's place. (Time 91)
“We're so different,” Brad later concedes to Joshua's teacher, epitomizing the boy's alterity and his own inability to establish empathy. He struggles with his son's extraordinary intellect, his esoteric interests (such as Egyptology), and his idiosyncratic behavior, although he makes regular attempts to find common ground. Brad dramatizes the potential for frustration in the Levinasian “face-to-face relation,” a critical enactment of ethical exchange (Time 78–79; cf. Hand 63); something about Joshua remains unfathomable to his father, and only Ned seems to possess the intuition needed to appreciate the boy's idiosyncrasies. Joshua's aloofness occurs as a puzzle, but Brad determinedly works to meet his son's perceived emotional needs.
Abby also recognizes Joshua's difference but is more engrossed in the care of Lily, who cries incessantly in a way that recalls Joshua's infantile implacability. Under pressure to pacify Lily, she conveniently converts Joshua's strange behavior into proof of his preternatural maturity. She offhandedly allows him to donate his toys to charity (“I'm starting over,” he informs Brad, before preparing a stuffed panda for embalming), and later, when he asks for permission to deliver another donation, she grants it immediately, allowing him to go unattended despite Ned's concerns about his age. “Oh, come on,” she sighs, “does he seem like your typical nine-year-old?” At this point viewers already have some sense of how shiftily atypical Joshua is: he is hiding nearby when Abby first responds to Lily's cries, and his screening of a videotape of his own first weeks of life suggests he might be irritating Lily to reestablish his mother's former exasperation. Joshua's motives are obscure, but his willingness to victimize his mother and his sister reveals concerted coldness. In the absence of any clear objective, however, his cruelty exceeds the prompt, a fear of displacement, that ostensibly inspires it. Symptoms of Joshua's difference proliferate, but they resist and defer interpretation.
Despite the persistence with which Joshua executes his plan, Ratliff offers few cues that might illuminate his intentions. While his efforts speak to his tenacity, neither affect nor dialogue suggests that the boy's measures are meant to be punitive, vindictive, or conducive to any end the audience can foresee with certainty. With only two exceptions, in fact, Joshua does not show emotion to any degree that is entirely intelligible. As Lily's cries and Abby's depression take their toll on every facet of the family dynamic, Joshua's absence of affect becomes a telling index of his difference. Viewers cannot determine if he is satisfied or disappointed, or if he finds the plight of his mother delicious or sickening. Like Rhoda Penmark, Joshua exists in what Chuck Jackson calls “an eerie emotional vacuum” (69); even when his mother steps on broken glass and dreamily smears blood on her calf, Joshua simply looks on, expressionless. What seems even more chilling is Joshua's recognition that failure to display emotion might be a liability. Shortly after Abby's accident, the family dog, Buster, dies. A heartbroken Brad searches for a cause (Buster's demise suggestively recalls the fate that befell animals tended by Joshua's class), yet none can be discovered. Distraught, Brad drops to his knees, hugs Buster, and chokes down tears to offer words of parting to his beloved pet. In the midst of this spontaneous grieving, Joshua falls to his own knees, embraces the body, and delivers the same lines with the same intonation. Brad recoils, and his reaction suggests that he has reached a new understanding of Joshua's stilted performance of childishness (cf. Jackson 70–72). While he hesitates to think ill of his son, whose “weirdness” suffices as an explanation for most behavior, the scene carries the viewer to increasingly unambiguous indices of Joshua's monstrous oddity.
A decisive shift occurs when a panhandler approaches Joshua at the park. In response to his solicitation, Joshua makes an offer: “I'll give you five dollars if I can throw a rock at you.” The viewer alone witnesses the disclosure of this straightforwardly sadistic dimension of his character, and the scene anticipates an escalation. Shortly thereafter, Joshua persuades Abby to join him in a game of hide-and-seek. She thoroughly searches the house on crutches, only stopping when she discovers Lily is gone from her crib. Her foot bleeding freely, Abby climbs to the penthouse above the Cairns' apartment and collapses; Brad later carries her home, showing her that Lily is safely asleep with Joshua watching over her. With mock petulance, Joshua whines, “Did you even look for me, Mommy?” and Abby's appreciation of his malice sends her into a frenzy. Within the milieu of the film, she alone understands that Joshua spirited Lily away; the ferocity of her reaction implies her realization that he has conducted a siege against her sanity. Brad, who has witnessed only Abby's behavioral unevenness, commends her to psychiatric care. The audience, however, knows that Lily's disappearance was not a product of addled imagination. Although they enjoy the advantage of knowing she searched earnestly, viewers have no way of determining if the removal of Abby represents a means or an end. Joshua's cruelty remains illegible, leaving the audience to grapple with questions of intent.
Fuller revelation of Joshua's ambitions emerges, albeit unclearly. Brad quits his job to mind the children, and he returns home to learn that Hazel has taken Joshua to the museum. Feeling nostalgic, he plays the video of Lily's arrival, only to discover the recording has been taped over. At the close of the new sequence, the camera hovers over Lily's face and a voice whispers, “Nobody will ever love you.” The baby cries, and a final shot reveals Joshua hiding in the nursery closet, his expression illegible as ever. Disturbed by the footage and aware of the provocation that produced his daughter's misery and his wife's breakdown, Brad races to the museum. He seemingly arrives just in time: Joshua stands with Lily's carriage at the edge of a flight of stairs, and Brad's presence prompts the boy to linger long enough for Hazel to catch up with her grandson. Brad bears the stroller to safety, but moments later Hazel—after taking Joshua's hand—tumbles after Brad. When he looks up to Joshua, the son impassively considers the father before feigning concern and hastening down. The scene is perplexing: what seems like a scheme thwarted, a plan to end competition with Lily by engineering her demise, gives way to what appears to be the impulsive murder of Hazel, and this assumes the audience, like Brad, believes Joshua pushed his grandmother. The seeming ease with which Joshua shifts between equally eligible atrocities further frustrates the search for an intelligible motive.
Given recent experience, Brad surmises that Joshua plans to dispose of Lily and takes steps to protect her. He concedes the limits of his understanding—“I know what you're doing, Josh,” he maintains, “I don't know why you're doing it, but I'm on to you”—and Joshua claims not to understand, although he finds the apartment Joshua-proofed. This impasse continues until a psychologist visits at Brad's behest. Brad loves his son despite his suspicions, and he hopes diagnosis will show him a way Joshua might be recovered. Those hopes, however, are dashed when Joshua produces a drawing that strikes the psychologist as textbook evidence of abuse. Disconcerted by the doctor's insinuation, Brad announces plans to send Joshua to boarding school. Joshua runs away and reappears with a huge bruise, convincing Brad he really has suffered abuse at unknown hands. The boy's entreaties earn him entry into his parents' bedroom, a space Brad had denied him. Joshua turns his father's affection against him, using the subtlety Baudrillard describes as the special province of the child, a strategy by which “children … let adults believe that they, the children, are children” and exploit the assumption to infiltrate and effect “the eventual destruction of the superior—adult—world that surrounds them” (168–69). A second subterfuge occurs the following morning, when Brad finds Joshua and Lily missing. His relief at discovering them safe, the brother tenderly feeding his sister, saps Brad's resistance, and he submits when Joshua requests a trip to the park. As a result, Brad ventures unwittingly onto a stage Joshua has prepared, the site of an endgame he apparently had in mind all along. That endgame begets an unsettling act of unmasking—of the father, the son, and the audience as well.
The machinery of the decisive scene is appallingly mundane. Joshua fiddles with Lily's carriage and runs away; Lily wails, and Brad discovers that her pacifier is missing. Convinced that Joshua has taken it, he commands the boy to return. Joshua mimics him instead, refusing to come back and obliging his father to catch him, acting very much like a nine-year-old. The mockery continues even then, and at last Brad slaps his son. The blow elicits a feral grin from Joshua, who hisses the words he whispered to Lily: “Nobody will ever love you.” The taunt incenses Brad, and he assails Joshua with such fury that two nearby fathers must pull him away. Brad is arrested, and Joshua claims a history of abuse to the police. The lie delivers him into the custody of Ned, and Joshua unselfconsciously reveals his feelings about the new arrangement: “Ned, I'm glad you're here. I mean you, me—this feels right, doesn't it?” Seated at the piano, Joshua sings an impromptu in which he implies that his parents “should've saved themselves.” During the last bars of the song, the film cuts back and forth between the piano and Joshua's room, where movers encounter evidence even viewers have not yet seen: a rubber glove, drawings that reveal Joshua's bloody sensibilities, and a dead gerbil with its belly sewn shut. Back at the bench, Joshua beams at his new guardian, finishing his song with the line “I only ever really wanted to be with you.” Judging by his expression, Ned seems to appreciate the mendacious nature of his nephew, and though it affords them little relief, viewers do as well.
Joshua offers a modicum of closural comfort: intentions are revealed, and the sinister son is delivered to a more knowledgeable guardian. The viewer's position at the conclusion of the film, however, begs a battery of retrospective, self-reflexive questions. The completion of Joshua's design reveals deep premeditation; his methods are sophisticated, involving a perfect understanding of domestic and societal dynamics. As an awful prodigy who orchestrates his liberation by manipulating the adults around him, Joshua belongs to an order of conniving creatures viewers will find reassuringly rare. Nevertheless, his machinations raise troubling questions about ethical maturity, as the reconstitution of the family with himself at the center occurs as an objective fit for a nine-year-old boy. Moreover, disclosure of this motive obliges viewers to abandon a viable hypothesis, an account of behavior that proposes the punishment of the mother and destruction of the rival as understandable ambitions. Such a shift erodes interpretive confidence, and a surplus of evidence (the scene with the panhandler, the deaths of Buster and the classroom animals, and the eviscerated gerbil) urges viewers to press further, to conceive of pathologies darker than the central scheme implies. The emergence of an intelligible motive allays some anxieties, but Joshua embodies an evil that exceeds inclusive explication.
That such excess might arise in an unremarkable, even healthy, family confronts the audience with a second source of discomfort. While most viewers have neither suffered nor perpetrated the abuses featured in Halloween , they are likely to reflect on Abby's understandable distraction with mingled censure and sympathy and on Brad's thrashing of Joshua with a distress leavened by cathartic satisfaction. However, Joshua's plot lays bare the manipulative tactics in which most children are versed and, given the consequences that attend intimations of abuse, the asymmetry of the parent-child relationship in the eyes of ethics and the law. Joshua offers a disquieting reminder of a lopsidedness that places adults at the mercy of subversive children, and it confronts viewers with the terrible dependency at the heart of the family. The film features a discomfiting disclosure, what Philip J. Nickel calls “a sudden tearing-away of the intellectual trust that stands behind our actions,” a rending that exposes “our vulnerabilities in relying on the world and on other people” (28). Viewers may feel some pleasure in being thus undeceived, but the film unkindly reminds us how much we depend on deception.
Nickel approaches such revelation in sanguine terms: the tearing-away viewers experience reminds them of the “epistemological choice” on which the illusion of security depends (17), and he reassures them that such comforting constructions are indispensable (28–30). As I have suggested, however, the suspension of soothing convictions, especially as a result of the encounter with the evil child, yields ethical repercussions that persist after threats have been disclosed or dispelled. The representational strategies used in Joshua speed the resumption of trust, but they do not leave the viewer's universe undisturbed. In addition to exposing the motives and machinations of the young and reminding adults of their vulnerability, horrific depictions of children call into question efforts to realize positive, predictable developmental outcomes that correlate to responsible parenting. We may find ways to manage or mitigate the risks that come with the existence of children, helpless as we are to evade them. We may also try to foster creativity, model morality, and cultivate virtue. As Brad's example implies, however, the dangers we pose to ourselves and to others as a result of our impulses, assumptions, and attitudes cannot be so easily exhumed and forgotten. The extent of our knowledge and imagination, the faith we repose in our institutions and relationships, and our reliance on the tools we use to identify and remedy illness and iniquity may also be challenged and ultimately shaken. These are the matters Home Movie explores.
Home Movie unfolds as a faux documentary, a chronicle of life in the Poe family. David, the father, is a pastor, one who hams it up before the camera and jokes impishly behind it. Clare, the mother, is a child psychiatrist who treats the camera as a professional tool but indulgently yields to her husband's cinematic caprices. They are the parents of twins, Jack and Emily, and the narrative proper begins with footage of their tenth birthday party on Halloween night. David and Clare caper around the dining room in high spirits; Jack and Emily, however, sit silent and unmoving, wearing stylized dragon masks. As with Joshua , conflict emerges immediately, if enigmatically: when the children realize their father decorated their cake with inextinguishable novelty candles, Jack douses it with water. The film cuts to the family playing hide-and-seek in a basement maze; at the rear of the cellar, the children find a dragon puppet. At the close of the scene, as the camera fixes on the exit at the end of the darkened hallway, Clare exclaims, “Did you just bite me?” The addressee is never identified, yet themes introduced in the sequence—dragons, masks, and biting—eventually resurface and offer unsettling responses to the unanswered question.
Despite their participation in the game of hide-and-seek, the children seem reluctant to engage with their parents. Their sullenness contrasts starkly with the exuberance of David and Clare, who tirelessly exert themselves to engage Jack and Emily. The director, Christopher Denham, tasks the audience with reconciling the dispositions of the elder and younger Poes, but the morbid sensibilities of the children resist assimilation to the parental dynamic. As Colette Balmain suggests, “in the contemporary monstrous-child horror film, the family unit itself is figured as innocent,” and the children occur as products of “another irreducibly different world” (136). For the majority of the film, the children inhabit that world; they do not speak to their parents at all. Strategic editing omits the dialogue of Jack and Emily whenever it would occur; missing footage and scrolling videotape yields uncanny silence broken only by gibberish exchanged between the twins in the middle of the film. “It's like their own language,” Clare complains, and she scolds the children for keeping secrets though David encourages them to do so. Those secrets, however, become inflected with menace as a result of the children's rebellious behavior. While malice emerges gradually in Joshua , leaving viewers to guess the extent of Joshua's implication in the anguish of the family, Jack and Emily express mutinous animosity in every gesture. Their malevolence is legible, even though their intentions are not.
The gulf widens after the birthday party, as a session of batting practice ends with Jack hurling a rock at his father. Clare, in search of a lost baseball, encounters her daughter drawing outside the children's playhouse. A sign outside reads “Jack and Emily's Clubhouse—No Parents Allowed,” and Emily denies her mother entry before grudgingly consenting to be wheeled to the backyard in a wagon, eyes closed and arms folded. David punishes Jack with yard work, but the boy finds a dead insect that engrosses his attention. His father urges him to throw the bug away (“Dead things go in trash bags,” he explains), but the scene ends before Jack complies. Almost every attempt at bonding, discipline, or dialogue ends in some failure to connect, disrupting a dynamic characterized primarily by parental attentiveness. Only the telling of a bedtime story, “the most vastly inappropriate fairy tale I've ever heard,” according to Clare, yields some semblance of togetherness, although the composition of the shot, featuring all four Poes huddled in bed, seems like a parental contrivance. The story describes the trickery employed by a two-headed dragon to earn the trust of children; he dons a paper-bag mask, impersonates a child, and then devours his new peers. Jack and Emily find the story riveting, and the viewer soon learns that the tale anticipates their own growing appetites.
The earliest manifestation of this hunger occurs when Clare allows Jack to make his own lunch. She tries to guess what he has concocted, yet the key ingredient proves to be a goldfish. What might initially be understood as ghastly error, however, soon yields to blatant cruelty. Emily crushes a frog in a vise, and on Christmas morning David finds the family cat crucified. For interpretive purposes the crucifixion is pivotal: that callousness cannot be dismissed as accidental, and it occurs to Clare as a symptom with an unknown cause. “My children need help,” she concedes, and many viewers will recognize the abuse of animals (as was the case with Michael Myers, an age-mate of the twins) as a token of additional pathological prospects. As their indifference to animals implies, something is lacking in Jack and Emily. In Levinasian terms, as Katz explains, that lack occurs as an incipient evil, “the inability to be attuned to the other” (215). Clare balks at the recognition of such coldness, yet she sets out in search of a source and finds an eligible origin instantly: her husband's drinking. The connection between David's dependency and the insensitivity of the children at first seems tenuous; the notion gains traction, however, when Clare discovers an inebriated David in bed with both children, their bodies gouged with bites. The children blame “the man in the closet,” but the film allows the viewer to entertain the possibility that David is guilty. Clare reveals that David was abused as a child, and her account is cross-cut with shots of him swilling whiskey. “There's a lot I don't know about my husband,” she admits, but by the end of the scene she turns to bedrock fact: “The man in the closet is not real. The bite marks are.” The audience likewise has evidence from which a hypothesis might be derived, reference to the familiar trope that links pathological practice explicitly to a precedent catalyst. The inclinations of Jack and Emily accordingly might be explained away by David's drunken transgressions.
Circumstances soon reveal the culprits, but not before marital tensions complicate the viewer's interpretive work. On Valentine's Day, Clare prepares to take Jack and Emily to her mother's house, away from David. In response, David fumes, “Our kids are not normal,” and he indicates that Clare's normalizing design, “to move into the middle of nowhere and raise them in a Norman Rockwell home,” simply “didn't work.” He rehearses their misconduct and concludes with new information: “I saw them eating raw meat.” The film juxtaposes that surprise with a later recording made by Clare. She reveals that the children have been expelled for cornering and biting a boy named Christian; David then discovers a drawing that indicates they planned the attack. In an effort to understand the incident, Clare administers a Rorschach test to Jack, while David has a tête-à-tête with Emily. Counseling and confession, however, prove ineffectual, and their inability to fathom the intentions of their children prompts Clare and David to counter radical otherness with radical measures: Clare medicates Jack and Emily, and David attempts an ersatz exorcism. The sequence ends with all four Poes whimpering and spent. When the footage resumes, however, Clare declares victory: “Two months have passed. I'm happy to report that since my last report Jack and Emily's antisocial behavior has surceased.” As David hides Easter eggs, Clare offers a self-satisfied statement of faith: “There is no good child; there is no bad child. There is only diagnosis, and with the diagnosis, treatment. I have treated my children.” The viewer, of course, has good reason to doubt her success, since Clare has silenced symptoms without addressing underlying causes. The third episode of biting, intimations of an unspecified trouble that spurred the family to relocate, the abuse of animals, and the disquieting appetites of the twins reveal the insufficiency of prior efforts to explain away their behavior vis-à-vis David's drinking. Clare's conviction provides a momentary respite, yet generic expectations brace the viewer for an upending of that confidence.
Prior to the egg hunt, Jack and Emily are giggly and loving. They speak intelligibly for the first time and express affection openly. They have also befriended Christian, which Clare takes as proof of the virtues of her treatment. That certainty, however, is short-lived, and panic ensues when the parents discover that all three children have slipped from the bedroom. In a frenetic scene shot by David as he sprints to the clubhouse, the viewer learns that Jack and Emily have butchered the family dog (his head is mounted on a stake); have rejected their parents altogether (the camera pans across a photo with the faces of Clare and David scratched out); have resumed their cruelty (their walls are adorned with gutted frogs); and have stuffed Christian in a trash bag, tied him to a table, and—as evidenced by the utensils Jack brandishes—turned to cannibalism. The script then takes advantage of a narrative contrivance to keep the children at home (Jack and Emily are remanded to the custody of their parents due to the holiday), and their detention yields a confrontation that shatters any illusion of a cure. “The Jack and Emily Show” follows, with Emily manning the camera as brother and sister prepare snares for their parents. The trap is sprung, incapacitating both mother and father, and the recording eventually concludes with David and Clare stuffed in plastic bags themselves, tied to the dining room table, flanked by their children in paper-bag masks, forks and knives in hand. The ending transforms the viewing experience, as it implies that the children produced the final cut of the faux documentary. The staging of those closing scenes further complicates the work of interpretation, as it imbues the iniquity of the children over the course of the entire production with a measure of performative self-awareness. Moreover, the months-long “surcease” of symptoms and consequent simulation of childishness is exposed as a preternatural pretense. Such a conclusion sets viewers adrift, leaving them with provocative yet partial explanations of pathology and fresh sources of distress.
In response to Clare's claim that the tale of the dragon and the paper-bag mask was dreadfully inappropriate, David alleges that the story has an obvious moral: “Don't trust strangers.” That those strangers might assume such an innocuous guise yet express such an appalling pathology is the greatest of the ironies Home Movie entertains. The prospect that the children have turned to cannibalism—an appetite inspired by birthday masks, a puppet, and a bedtime story—alters the complexion of the viewer's interpretive work as well. While Joshua's machinations might be understood as products of a deep design hatched in an atmosphere of parental inattention, the games of Jack and Emily encourage the audience to find the care of David and Clare itself blameworthy. The alternative is to locate blame beyond the pale of the family, to account for the malevolence of such children via madness, inherency, or the influence of diabolical forces (cf. Hantke 9, Jackson 66, and Sobchack 150). The genre makes such prospects possible, yet resorting to them represents an abdication of the viewer's most significant responsive opportunity. As Martin F. Norden suggests, horror filmmakers routinely employ the image of the Other as a figure that viewers can inscribe with intolerable content (xxviii; cf. Halberstam 85, Santilli 176); in the case of evil children (the masked Michael, the expressionless Joshua, the unfathomable Jack and Emily), viewers find especially eligible opacities, surfaces on which they can imprint a variety of motives, appetites, and inclinations. Such inscription, however, represents only half the input that filmmakers spur viewers to contribute. If the children wear masks, literally and figuratively, on which viewers must write desire, formulating explanations that speak to inscrutable iniquity, the adults around those children serve as screens on which viewers must project themselves. The self-reflexive ethical assessment that attends the consideration of bare and masquerading faces—what Levinas describes as the way the face of the Other “summons me … recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question” (“Ethics” 83)—asks the audience to appraise methods and intentions, attitudes and practices, and frailties and failings in an effort to make sense of what might seem senseless. That occasion for observation and critical self-articulation is the principal positive term that the depiction of the evil child makes available to the audience.
Even a cursory appraisal of the collapses that occur in the midst of such creative ethical engagement is sobering. As my earlier reference to Nickel hints, encounters with evil children rob viewers of the illusion of safety—“there is no resolution to our fears,” he contends, “except to go on” (20). Going on, I would argue, is irrevocably altered by that face-to-face exchange. In Joshua and Home Movie , husbands learn to doubt wives, wives to mistrust their husbands; psychology fails, and faith founders; the law stands idly by or villainizes victims. Adults reliably underestimate what Baudrillard calls “the intelligence of evil” (86); they lack the imagination to contend with that against which there is no acceptable defense. If the child-as-monster serves a cultural function by policing normative borders, making audiences mindful of what dwells beyond the preserve of the permissible (cf. Cohen 12–16, Creed 10–11), it also insists there are traitors among us, outsiders hiding in plain sight. If the image of the killer, as Stephen Hantke proposes, promotes a proliferation of efforts by which we might grasp and answer evil (11), evil children stifle such efforts, calling the authority, integrity, and sanity of their accusers into question. If viewers are perpetually threatened by the return of evils ostensibly vanquished (cf. Kristeva 4, Santilli 185), the persistence of the evil child reminds us that these monsters are often homegrown. The invitation to inscription, which prompts the audience to appraise the childlike faces of evil and spurs viewers to turn the same critical, ethical gaze on themselves, offers a kind of consolation for our otherwise insupportable condition, the inescapable anxiety that attends the ubiquity of children.
In light of that anxiety, the most comforting film of the new millennium may be Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan , which improves on the representational relief provided by Halloween . The narrative presents viewers with telling incongruities that make Esther, the titular orphan, reassuringly singular. From the beginning, when prospective parents Kate and John Coleman discover the lonely girl, evidence of her eccentricity occurs unremittingly. Esther is Russian and dresses exclusively in frocks. According to Sister Abigail, director of the orphanage, Esther is “very mature for her age”; she wears ribbons around her wrists and neck, and attempts to remove them (per the nun) have met with vehement resistance. When asked why she is not playing with her peers, Esther remarks, “I guess I'm different.” Difference surfaces in increasingly obvious ways when Esther enters her new environment. She locks the bathroom door when she bathes despite guarantees of privacy; she shrieks when a classmate snatches at the ribbon around her neck; she coolly crushes a dove her brother, Daniel, has wounded with a paintball gun. Kate and John, obliged to reckon strangeness along with the audience, account for their new daughter's behavior via the “discourse of difference,” and they approach her as an innocent alien, one who must be “understood, liberated, coddled, and recognized” (Baudrillard 125, 128). Intimations of Esther's otherness become comprehensible, even quaint, when attuned to their expectations of a precocious nine-year-old.
What seems explicable given Esther's origin and the pressures of adjustment, however, quickly becomes sinister. When she shoves the offending classmate from a slide, the audience must sit in judgment: can the incident be understood as impulsive retribution, or is it an index of an inward condition? Although her new sister, Max, proclaims Esther's innocence, the film supports the second prospect, hewing close to stock Freudian logic. While Esther cultivates an affectionate rapport with her father, she resists her mother's attempts to connect. Kate soon becomes suspicious of Esther's performance: “She's always on her best behavior with you,” she complains to John; “she's completely different with me.” Sister Abigail later seconds Kate's opinion, and Esther confirms all suspicions soon thereafter, bashing the nun with a hammer. Unaware of the murder, Kate nevertheless delves into the mystery of Esther, while John remains willfully benighted. The audience, in contrast, bears witness to a clandestine escalation. Esther, who suspects that Daniel might have witnessed the assault, accosts him with a knife; she throws a tantrum in secret, releasing rage she concealed when meeting with Kate's therapist; she switches the black light in her aquarium on and off, revealing a ghastly gallery of fluorescent images superimposed over her cheery paintings. In keeping with the theme of analytical insufficiency, Kate's therapist finds nothing wrong with Esther. Kate ironically performs a more incisive diagnosis via the Internet, but John rejects her findings and questions her motives. After an affront that recalls Joshua's mockery of Brad, Kate's authority is undone in an altercation with the conniving child: she grabs the girl by the arm, and Esther, exhibiting uncanny resolve, later snaps the limb in a vise. A confrontation follows, and Esther, fully aware of her power over her “abusive” mother, razes the illusion of innocence. Kate asserts her parental prerogative and tries to send the girl to bed, to which Esther replies “Honestly, we're past that now, aren't we?” And Kate, in a manner that mirrors the viewer's inability to account for the duplicity and audacity of this wicked little girl, helplessly concedes.
The filmmakers heighten anxiety in subsequent scenes, exposing the potential for evil that abides in every child. Threatened by Daniel's attempt to recover evidence of the murder, Esther sets his tree house ablaze with him inside. Later, at the hospital, she cunningly manages to smother him, only to see him resuscitated by the medical staff. Kate, enraged, strikes the girl, and orderlies sedate Kate just as she receives a call from the Saarne Institute, a hospital she contacted in an earlier effort to unearth Esther's past. As she drifts into unconsciousness, an exasperated John announces plans to take the children home. The following scene concludes the narrative trajectory the audience has been encouraged to anticipate, an attempted consummation of the Electra complex: in a dress stolen from her mother, Esther mingles childlike and adult gestures in an unnerving effort to seduce her father. Her forwardness prompts him to recoil and rebuff her, and only then is the audience relieved of the evaluative anxieties inspired by Esther's unsettling presence.
In the hospital, Kate connects with the Saarne Institute and learns that Esther is not a nine-year-old Russian girl: she is Leena Klammer, a 33-year-old Estonian whose hypopituitarism has allowed her to pass as a child. Cutting back and forth between the hospital and Esther's bedroom, the viewer learns that the ribbons she wears hide scars from the straitjacket she once wore, that wrappings conceal the curvature of her body, and that she killed seven people prior to her flight to the United States. Kate calls the police and races home, but she arrives too late to save John; Leena springs from the shadows and savages the man who spurned her advances. Using his gun, Leena shoots Kate, but despite her wound Kate incapacitates Leena and escapes. A second skirmish finds the pair fallen through the ice at a nearby pond; Kate clutches the edge of the broken surface, and Leena clings to her. With a knife behind her back, Leena, assuming the guise of Esther once more, pleads with Kate: “Please don't let me die, Mommy!” she cries. Kate, fully aware of the nature of her “daughter,” responds with an imprecation—“I'm not your fucking Mommy!”—and delivers a vicious kick that breaks Leena's neck. With that muscular denunciation, Kate exorcizes the deceptions and dependencies embodied by the figure of the evil child on behalf of the viewer.
The anxious interpretive work that attends the evaluation and condemnation of an immature ethical agent and her hateful behavior yields to the effortless indictment of Leena Klammer, a mature murderess. She replicates the strangeness of a boy like Joshua, yet her physical difference, seemingly prodigious intellect, and behavioral idiosyncrasies are readily explicable. Her performance of childishness surpasses that of Jack and Emily, yet the film deepens the gulf between the player and her persona, endows the actress with a lifetime of practice, and treats the role of “Esther” as a consummate act of passing. Her discomfiting desire for possession of the father, a mirror image of the formative forces that drive the monstrosity of Michael Myers, becomes a legible expression of frustrated adult lust. In addition, vivid symptoms like her shocking self-injury smack of settled insanity, a madness that predates the events of the film and absolves viewers of interpretive accountability. Hers is not an equivocal iniquity, not an “insipid simulation,” as Baudrillard might say (124), but a species of unqualified evil that completely answers the ambivalence of the audience, the reluctance to condemn the child and thereby scrutinize our idea of childhood, our families, our institutions, and our own ethical selves. With clean consciences, with a certainty and righteousness denied to us in our dealings with representations of legitimate children, evil and otherwise, the audience, like Kate, can send the threat that Esther represents drifting down into the dark.
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