11 Perfect Times Actors Went Incredibly Dark

4. Macaulay Culkin - The Good Son

As the tag-line for The Good Son cheerfully proclaims, "Evil Has Many Faces" but you still would never pick the angelic face of Home Alone's pre-teen hero as one of them.

Remarkably though, Macaulay Culkin's role in Ian McEwan's The Good Son was carefully engineered by his father Kit to try and develop his son's range for roles. It came at the height of Culkin's powers (and was actually written into his Home Alone 2 contract as a guarantee) after he'd brought Kevin McCallister to the world.

Ridiculously, the script was picked up by Fox after they'd ignored it for years when Home Alone and The Silence Of The Lambs did well and the studio believed they could make a Frankenstein's monster out of both. Culkin clearly had the thirst for violence, as Home Alone had proven, but his turn in The Good Son is surprisingly great. The film's not great, but his blend of cherubic innocence and cold, casual fascination with death almost makes him the perfect precursor to Norman Bates.