2) Esther in The Orphan
"I have a special surprise for you, Mommy!" Isabel Fuhrman plays the little girl with a big bad secret in this yuppies-in-peril schlock horror. A classic aspect of the mother / child horror genre is that disliking your child is so wrong, so abhorrent... how can anyone fear their own offspring? Orphan sidesteps this by oh-so-sensitively making the danger an adopted kid; like the urban legend tells us, how will you know who (or what) you are welcoming into your home? Here we have all the brilliantly corny platitudes; the mother whose suspicions sound like paranoid ramblings, an early warning of Esther's nature when she willingly puts an injured bird "out of its misery", and (this is my favourite bit) classic lines such as "The orphanage says they have never heard of her!" So, the plot is not what you would call cryptic (would you pick out a child with soulless black eyes, Victoriana style clothes and an accent which suggests links with the KGB?) but it is a standout performance from Isabel Fuhrman. She handles every scene with ease - even the ones which would get social services' knickers in a twist (Esther appears to have an unusually accurate understanding of what mummies and daddies get up to). There is also an infamous "twist" which provides an explanation for Esther's behaviour but doesn't really add anything - she is hair-raising enough, without any bells and whistles.