The Bad Seed - child murderer from the fifties

June 7, 11:12 AMHorror Movies ExaminerJeff Swenson

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The Bad Seed movie review

I am perplexed as to why I had never seen this movie before. It is brilliant and creepy and yet I'm not sure modern day horror fans will have an appreciation for it. The reason is because it is from 1956. It is one of those classic horror movies that haunts the imagination.

Throughout The Bad Seed you keep wondering exactly how the murder happened, similar to when we get reports of real murder from the news media and everyone is talking about an unwitnessed event. Pieces and clues are thrown at us without an actual reenactment and that's what makes the movie so special.

I am not one of those Netflix prudes who leaves comments complaining about why horror movies have to be so explicit. I love explicit, but I do have an appreciation for older horror movies that were restrained by their era from showing certain things. And often it is a true cliche that the imagination is more powerful that special effects.

The premise is familiar to most who have watched numerous horror movies with villainous kids, only The Bad Seed has an edge because it takes us back to a time when kids were supposedly more innocent and well behaved. Rhoda, the little girl at the center of the alleged killing, scares us because she is indeed well behaved and perfect--too perfect!

Hints are dropped to the audience at the beginning of The Bad Seed that Rhoda lost a spelling contest at school to another little boy and that little boy received a shiny medal for his triumph. Rhoda insists the medal is hers. She seems fixated on it so much that when the subject comes up she breaks out of her perfect mold and curls her fist to throw a tantrum.

After being dropped off at a school picnic, the mother Christine goes home and we see how "wonderful" her life is. She has a loving husband, currently off on a military assignment, an active social life, a beautiful home which is leased to her by a charismatic landlady (I've never seen an apartment that big), and basically a domestic life that was envied by most married women of the time, or dare I say even today.

That's the setup. It's like a "Leave it to Beaver" illusion. The clues that start pouring in begin to melt the facade. Rhoda becomes every mother's nightmare, a secret that has to be kept from friends and family as to what she's done and what she may do in the future.

As the afternoon progresses and friends are chatting with each other about various topics--including murder--the radio is switched on at one point and an emergency is announced--a little boy has drowned at the lake during the school picnic. It just happens to be the same little boy Rhoda was angry with for winning the spelling bee medal.

I don't need to go too much further into describing the plot because the script doesn't try to hide the fact there is something wrong with Rhoda. We just don't know how wrong yet until we get to the end of the film. And the ending has some of the darkest humor I've ever seen from a fifties horror flick.

I will warn viewers who don't have patience for plays that they may not be able to tolerate all of the dialogue. It is the dialogue that reveals secret by secret as to why Rhoda is the way she is and what she may have done in the past before her classmate's drowning.

I personally found the conversations engaging. It was like hearing gossip where you wished you yourself could ask questions of the characters. Some viewers may not even consider The Bad Seed to be a horror film, more of a murder mystery. I would argue that we already know who the murderer is long before the movie ends and that the focus is on the horror of who Rhoda is and the reason for her killing tendencies.

Very few movies impress me these days because horror is spat out of the Hollywood machine without much thought. Going back to another era with all of its perfect ideals that are extolled by moral traditionalists is one way to get the creeps put back into you.

Because those moral traditionalists only remember the slick exterior put on the face of a society filled with dark secrets.  The only reason we don't feel as comfortable with the current era versus the past is that everything is exposed--we feel naked. Here's hoping that The Bad Seed will not be remade by Hollywood for the present. The little girl Rhoda is the horror of the past.