The Scariest Kids In Horror Movie History

When Stephen King originally wrote Pet Sematary, he kept the manuscript locked in a desk for many years because the content of the story was beyond disturbing, even to the man who thought it up. The main reason for this was the horrific death of Gage Creed, a baby who's hit by a huge truck just off his family's home, as well as Gage's subsequent resurrection by his father, Louis, in the ancient burial ground where the dead don't stay that way. 

Played by Miko Hughes in Mary Lambert's 1988 adaptation, Gage Creed goes from being one of the cutest kids on screen to easily the scariest after he's brought back to life and turned fully evil because his father couldn't bear to say goodbye. Even all these years later, watching Gage terrorize the adults with a medical scalpel is a skin-crawling experience. Thanks to Lambert's excellent use of practical special effects — things get really gory – Pet Sematary has aged incredibly well, and Gage Creed is as scary as ever.

After a series of family tragedies, John and Kate Coleman decide to adopt an orphan to round out their family, which already includes their son and hearing-impaired daughter. They meet an enchanting young girl named Esther, an orphan from Russia who seems wise beyond her years and quickly takes to the Coleman family. But as strange and violent things begin to happen in Esther's orbit, including murder and disappearances, the Colemans discover that Esther isn't who she says she is at all ... nor is she a child. 

No doubt inspired by Nicholas Roeg's Don't Look Now, Esther is revealed to be a 30-something woman with a genetic condition that makes her look like a child. Worse, Esther has joined and destroyed multiple families over the years, making the series of deaths look like terrible accidents. Esther is played to perfection by Isabelle Fuhrman, and it's hard to believe the actor is an actual teenage child playing a psychopathic woman, making this character easily one of the scariest children in horror movie history.

If horror movies featuring monstrous children transgress social and cultural boundaries, the events of The Ring bring this violation of the natural order into the physical realm in both the Japanese and American versions of The Ring. Young Samara/Sadako by herself is terrifying as she haunts a videotape that guarantees death in seven days after you've watched it ... unless you show the tape to someone else to receive the same fate. 

But the moment that deeply shocks and unsettles even the most hardened horror audiences is when the veil between the screen and reality is pierced as Samara/Sadako crawls out of the television, revealing this is how she scares her victims to death. It's a shocking and unexpected turn of events, made all the worse by this demon child figure being the one causing so much damage and chaos. The Ring questions the very nature of evil, positing that evil is born innately in some people, unlike other horror movie children, many of whom become monstrous figures due to outside circumstances.

It's one thing to be cursed with a bloodlust and immortality through becoming a vampire. But it's another thing entirely when this terrible process happens to a human child, now forced to spend millennia trapped in a young person's body. In the Swedish horror noir Let the Right One In, we meet Eli, a pre-teen girl with the eyes of an adult who has seen terrible things. Eli walks around in the snow barefoot and without a coat. She can jump huge distances. And she lives with an old man who doesn't seem to be her father. But if she enters your home without an invitation, she begins to bleed from every single pore in her body. 

After befriending her bullied neighbor, Oskar, Eli not only helps him defend himself, she even ends up brutalizing the people who tried to kill Oskar, and this odd pair run away together. Lina Leandersson's performance as Eli is so nuanced and adult it's hard to believe she was only 12 when filming Let the Right One In. Eli isn't just a terrifying figure as she kills adults for food and revenge, she's also a tragic figure forced to spend her long life in the body of a small child.

After Robert Thorn is told his newborn son has died, he keeps the news a secret from his wife and adopts another child whose mother supposedly died in childbirth. Years later, Robert gets a much-coveted role as the US ambassador to the UK and moves his family, including the boy Damien, across the pond. Already a rather strange character, Damien's behavior gets even more bizarre after the move, having fits to avoid going into church and seeming to have an odd, violent effect on animals that come near him. 

As the story unfolds and Damien tries to kill his adoptive mother, Robert begins properly investigating the circumstances around his adoption to discover that not only was his new son born to an actual jackal, Damien is also the Antichrist reborn. Robert tries to undo his terrible mistake, but Damien's evil is much stronger, and his reign of terror only begins in The Omen. What's remarkable about Damien as one of the scariest kids in horror movie history is that he actually does very little that is scary himself — it's what he provokes around him that's beyond disturbing.

While the 1960 horror classic Village of the Damned might be a little bit dated today, the children it features remain stupefyingly scary. After an unexplained incident knocks everyone in Midwich, England, unconscious for a few hours, it's discovered months later that every single woman in town is in advanced stages of pregnancy. When born on the exact same day, all the children have almost identical platinum hair and weirdly luminous eyes that suggest they share parentage, even as the mothers have no clue who the father(s) might be. And it just gets worse from there. 

The children have psychic powers and begin moving through town, killing folks who upset them. They also have the ability to make people do things against their will, forcing suicides and other self-harming bouts. All the while, the children display no human emotion at all, and they're completely devoid of empathy as they wantonly murder. Their glassy eyes reflecting the light brings to mind the devouring gaze of a shark as it seeks out prey. The fact that we never find out exactly who or what created this horde of monstrous children only adds to the horror of this movie.

Both the 1990 and 2017/2019 adaptations of Stephen King's It feature the terrifying machinations and many faces of the child-eating monster Pennywise the Dancing Clown. But alongside Pennywise is a perfectly human child who equally terrorizes the other children of Derry, Maine — Henry Bowers. Henry has no supernatural powers. Instead, he's a pure psychopath and sadist who enjoys killing neighborhood pets and cutting up his classmates. He even murders his own father in cold blood. He becomes an eventual vessel for the evil of Pennywise, but it's only because he already has that level of darkness living inside him. 

While the 2017 version of Henry presents a brief moment of sympathy for him as we meet his abusive father, it doesn't fully account for the horrible acts of violence Henry enacts as a child. And unlike many of the scariest kids in horror movie history, Henry actually grows up on screen to continue committing violence against children and his peers, putting him in a class of his own.

Most horror movie kids don't have huge body counts to their name, it's just the fact that they're children hurting others at all that makes them terrifyingly remarkable. But this isn't the case in the least for Isaac in the adaptation of Stephen King's Children of the Corn. Not only is this 12-year-old the leader of a religious cult made up of children, he goes ahead and brutally slaughters every adult in the fictional hamlet of Gatlin as a sacrifice to the god he calls He Who Walks Behind the Rows. The only adult Isaac leaves standing is Diehl, a mechanic who provides petrol and other assistance in exchange for his life. 

Isaac also happens to be one of the creepiest looking children in genre history, with his piercing blue eyes and old-fashioned style of dress. Isaac didn't just make us scared of what kids might do when supervised by a religious fanatic, he also made us scared of fields of corn in general.