taking as an assumption for our analysis that most horror monsters/villains speak to an existing societal anxiety, either by intentional literary device or the writer naively writing something they think is scary--

what anxiety does the creepy child speak to?

im gonna divide this in two bc i think their are 2 distinct categories of "creepy child"

  1. the more common version is the monster which is a child by aesthetics alone. creepy characters who look like children but act totally outside of what we expect for children (eg, being actively homicidal)

  2. the less common version that i find more interesting is when the monster/villain's childishness is integral to what makes them scary. so the quintessential example is the Twilight Zone episode "Its A Good Life", and I also feel like The Collector from the Owl House is a great version of this. but generally its contrasting not just the aesthetics of childhood, but the mannerisms and mindsets of childhood (or what the adult writer thinks those to be) with some kind of horrific power. they enact that power not in spite of the fact that they are children, but because of some fundementally child-like quality like imagination, curiosity, desire to play, and their innocence/lack of knowledge about consequences.

so what anxieties could these be playing with? discuss amongst yrselves


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