9. The Bad Seed (1956)
I know several people who associate blonde hair with a long-standing creep factor and it's because of Children of the Corn. Neither that nor Spike on Buffy the Vampire Slayer holds the blame for why blondies are creepy. No, I place the blame in the hands of the people who adapted the book into the play and the play into the movie The Bad Seed. This is a dystopian era where kids had penmanship contests and went on school picnics and had names like Rhoda and Claude. This movie would have never flown in modern times because Rhoda, the psychotic little granddaughter of a serial killer, would have been labeled with whatever disorder got her a prescription for something to make her more socially typical. This movie, though, scares the spit out of me for a different reason. I have friends whose kids make a disaster area of my house because any time they are naughty, the parents snicker at how boisterous they are and take a hands-off approach to discipline. I volunteered as a choreographer/director for a summer theatre group a couple of years ago and walked into the dressing room one day to find a 12-year-old stealing my iPod touch because "Well, I saw it and it seemed like no one else would want it." This was the same 12-year-old who lived in a mansion. In Harry Potter, we see these kinds of characters turn into Dursleys and Malfoys and they're the most annoying, if not villainous, of characters. So, we take this laissez-faire attitude towards parenting, take it back a couple of generations and we get back to Rhoda and her mother, Christine. Rhoda beats a rival to death with her tap shoes at a school picnic. She sets the janitor on fire when he makes fun of her. She confesses to having murdered a neighbor in Wichita. Yeah. This girl takes what is not necessarily always a bad parenting style and shows that our worst fears are true. What is cool about this horror is that she is unstoppable. No, seriously, she's the Energizer bunny of bratty little kid. Even her mother trying to kill her off with sleeping pills doesn't work, but by golly, the hand of God smiting her with lightning finally does. For further reference, see Macaulay Culkin's nauseating attempt to imitate this in The Good Son.