5) Hide and Seek
"Do you like games?" "I love games. Would you like to play one?" "I'm already playing." Dakota Fanning plays Emily, who moves to the country with her dad David (Robert De Niro) after the death of her mother. Naturally, she is withdrawn, but at the new house she occasionally perks up - and it's all thanks to her rather troublesome imaginary friend Charlie. Whenever anything goes wrong (writing on the wall, dead cat in the bath, that sort of thing) Emily insists "Charlie did it!" and whether she is innocent or not, she is effortlessly terrifying. She is the freakiest, creepiest kid on the block (well, the deserted village in the middle of nowhere) with her big, glassy blue eyes and hollow, pinched little face. She says ominous things like "You should go... you might get hurt" to visiting small girls, before mangling dolls' faces (And let's face it, dolls are scary enough without having their faces pushed in). Robert De Niro might be the bigger name, but Dakota Fanning wipes the floor with him in this. The level of eeriness she manages to convey is incredible, especially compared to her standard "cute little girl" performance in War of the Worlds.