There’s something inherently frightening about a child villain. Perhaps it’s the way it undermines the innocence typically associated with youth—the notion that all children start life as a blank slate, unaffected until nature and nurture influence them. Or, it might symbolize parents’ deepest anxieties: the fear that despite their best efforts, the child they once adored could turn into an unrecognizable, feral, and uncontrollable being.

What distinguishes a decent portrayal of a child villain from the most chilling ones in film and television history is the ability of the actors to imbue their roles with depth, despite their limited life experience. Whether portraying emerging psychopaths or sinister supernatural figures, the presence of a child actor who either exudes a naturally disturbing aura or displays exceptional acting skill can be the key element that transforms a movie. These actors have delivered some of the most memorable performances.

Amie Donald from New Zealand, who began dancing at the age of five, was already an exceptional performer when she landed a role at 12 in the science fiction horror film “M3GAN.” This collaboration between James Wan and Blumhouse revolves around a prototype AI doll that becomes violently attached to the child it is programmed to protect. With the wrong actor, the character might have seemed overly cheesy. However, Donald’s extraordinary talent for physical acting brought the AI doll to life in a chilling way, making it one of the most unforgettable child villains. The iconic dance of M3GAN was not originally scripted; director Gerard Johnstone added it later, inspired by Donald’s dance moves seen during production.

“She’s so talented,” Allison Williams gushed in the film’s behind-the-scenes footage. One of the things that made her performance work so well was Donald’s natural body acting. Despite her young age, Donald performed many of M3GAN’s stunts, specifically impressing the production team with her ability to run through the forest on all fours at a high rate of speed and to eerily raise her body up without the aid of her hands, both of which helped her to convincingly play the unhinged robot child. According to movement coach Jed Brophy, “She loves anything where it kind of challenges her.”

Little Harvey Spencer Stephens was not yet five years old when principal photography began on “The Omen,” the horror film that had him cast as the ultimate nightmare child in the form of baby Antichrist Damien Thorn. One of around 500 boys to audition for the role, Stephens would earn a Golden Globe nomination in 1977 for his performance as the solemn-faced child. For the audition, film director Richard Donner instructed the lad to attack him. Stephens’ over-the-top response, which included a hit to Donner’s testicles and a flurry of punches, ultimately landed him the role.

The naturally blonde actor, who had his hair dyed much darker as part of his transformation into the young antichrist, barely understood what was going on while he was working on the film. “A lot of it went over my head at the time,” Stephens said in a 2007 interview with YouTube’s TwentyFour7TV. Whether it was just the natural expression of a gloomy-faced kid or if Stephens had an early gift for acting, we’ll never know; other than a small role in the 1980 biopic about Paul Gauguin titled “Gauguin the Savage” and a cameo as a TV reporter in the 2006 remake of “The Omen” starring Julia Stiles, Stephens has not pursued a serious acting career.

By the time Macaulay Culkin was in the double digits on birthday candles, he’d already racked up global notoriety as one of the most adorable and wholesome child stars to come out of Hollywood. At only eight years old, he played John Candy’s utterly charming nephew Miles Russell in the John Hughes film “Uncle Buck,” following it up the following year as the spunky Kevin McCallister in “Home Alone,” which would go on to become one of the world’s most beloved holiday films. The year after that, he broke everyone’s heart as Thomas in the absolutely gutting tween comedy-romance “My Girl.” So when the young actor showed up as a violent psychopath in the 1993 psychological thriller “The Good Son,” the only thing that was truly surprising was exactly how much Culkin positively ate in that role.

The film stars a then-12-year-old Culkin as the (ironically) eponymous “good son,” Henry Evans, alongside his character’s foil cousin, Mark Evans, played by a pre-Frodo Elijah Wood. While grieving over the recent loss of his mother, Mark goes to stay with his cousins, aunt, and uncle, where he immediately gets on well with his cousin Henry, an apparently well-behaved boy of his same age. But as Henry and Mark spend more time together, Henry’s mask of sanity begins to slip, revealing a dark and malevolent child with evil motives hidden underneath. After his previous string of sunny performances, Culkin’s Henry is nothing short of disturbing.

1993 was a good year for terrifying kids — just as Macaulay Culkin was terrorizing Elijah Wood, Alicia Silverstone’s obsessive onscreen counterpart was making life miserable for her downstairs neighbor in “The Crush.” Disregard the abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score and appreciate this film for what it is: a wonderfully 1990s cult film that cast a pre-“Clueless” Silverstone as the teen neighbor from Hell.

The story stars a very much in his prime Cary Elwes as Nick, an attractive magazine writer in his late twenties who has the misfortune of renting a guest house from the wrong people. At first, Nick gets along with homeowners Cliff (Kurtwood Smith) and Liv (Gwynyth Walsh) and their 14-year-old daughter Adrian (Silverstone) — but things start to become uncomfortable when Adrian takes an inappropriate liking to him. The situation sours rapidly as her affections turn to relentless pursuit, stalking, and vindictive behavior, all delivered from behind Silverstone’s gaslighting smile of coy, feigned innocence and plausible deniability.

Reflecting on Silverstone’s ability to balance a dark side under her fresh-faced smile in a ScreamFactoryTV interview, co-star Jennifer Rubin, who played Nick’s situationship, Amy, mused, “It’s very easy to be scared of Alicia because Alicia has this such a pleasant […] where she’s like ‘No, Daddy! Why would I do something like that?'”

Technically, Linda Blair played two roles in her first major film, “The Exorcist,” starring both as the tween actor’s child Regan and her demonic counterpart Pazuzu. When casting began on a film about priests battling it out with a demon over a child’s body and soul, the producers had struggled to fill the younger role, a fact discussed at length by director William Friedkin in his autobiography, “The Friedkin Connection.” According to Friedkin, the casting process was absolutely grueling. “For four months in 1972, half a dozen casting directors around the country put hundreds of young girls, ages eleven through thirteen, on videotape. Over a thousand girls eventually auditioned.” After viewing hundreds of tapes and interviewing more than 50 girls himself, Friedkin said he’d begun to question whether a child that age was capable of pulling off the complexity they needed for the role — not to mention whether it was wise to cast one in a movie with such dark content. 

Frustrated, the team had decided to start auditioning girls as old as 16 years old, but the results were just as fruitless — until an unassuming Connecticut mom named Elinore Blair strolled into Friedkin’s New York office unannounced one day, with her spunky tween daughter Linda in tow. A straight-A student with a passion for horses who had read the book ahead of her audition, Linda immediately impressed the director with her straight-shooting talk about the film’s controversial subject matter and ultimately landed the role that changed her entire life.

The first half of “American Horror Story” Season 10’s “Double Feature,” “Red Tide” is a domestic nightmare told in a palette of Instagram oatmeals and grays, and then-10-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong is nothing short of legendary in her performance as child violin prodigy-turned-vampire Alma Gardner. The six-episode story arc revolves mainly around Alma and her parents: pregnant, aspiring Instagram home design influencer Doris (Lily Rabe) and TV writer Harry (Finn Wittrock).

The story opens when the couple moves into a Provincetown home for a three-month stay in a “Shining”-style gig where Doris plans to refurbish the home while Harry works on his long-overdue television pilot. With her parents otherwise occupied, Alma becomes increasingly obsessed with mastering Niccolò Paganini’s notoriously challenging Caprice No. 24. After Harry becomes addicted to a pill that transforms naturally gifted artists into prolific but bloodthirsty vampire virtuosos and hacks into empty-headed, pale-faced ghouls, his young, violin-playing daughter wants in on the action. But it’s not the blood and sharp teeth that make Alma a terrifying villain; rather, it’s the ice-cold obsession the actor displays in putting her character’s craft above anything and everything else.

Like “The Good Son,” the 1956 psychological thriller “The Bad Seed” deals with a sociopathic child, but this one is decked out in adorable blonde pigtail braids and a pretty little pinafore. The story revolves around the parents of Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormack), a prim and proper little 8-year-old girl who loves good penmanship, her tap shoes, and being the best at everything. Not long after Rhoda’s classmate and competitor ends up drowned in a lake, her mother, Christine (Nancy Kelly), learns a dark truth about her own life: namely, that she was adopted as a child and her real father was a notorious serial killer.

Despite Christine’s fear that Rhoda has somehow inherited a serial killer gene, her adopted father, Richard (Paul Fix), believes that loving parenting plays a bigger role in a child’s development. But Richard’s belief is proved wrong when his granddaughter turns out to be a raging monster with a Shakespearean body count. In an escalating bloody rampage, Rhoda sets out to unalive everyone from the family’s elderly neighbor back in Wichita to the caretaker to the landlady. In a positively baroque film in an era where children were expected to be seen and not heard and the nuclear family was everything, Patty McCormack’s chilling performance left an entire generation of Baby Boomers utterly traumatized.

A Swedish romantic horror film about a bullied child in 1980s suburban Sweden who befriends a girl with a dark secret, “Let the Right One In” is the original film the American version “Let Me In” was adapted from. Central to the story is young Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant), a dweeby and hypersensitive kid who spends his free time fantasizing about going H.A.M. on his tormentors until Eli (Lina Leandersson), a girl who appears to be his own age, moves into the apartment next door. As the pair grow closer, what begins as a sweet puppy love situation changes, taking on a toxic twin flame air as Eli’s vampiric nature starts to show.

The film is one of the most highly rated vampire films of all time, with a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes rating. Leandersson is chillingly captivating as the bloodthirsty Eli, a role she auditioned for without any knowledge of its vampire aspect when she responded to an ad for a 12-year-old who happened to be a good runner.

Irish singer and actor Alisha Weir played yet another sharp-toothed tween as the spoiled child of an infamous crime boss in “Abigail,” a horror comedy about why it pays to do your research before taking on a new job. The film imagines a worst-case-scenario outcome for what was meant to be a simple kidnapping heist as a ragtag crew of questionably competent criminals teams up to hold the daughter of a notorious (and impossibly wealthy) mobster ransom for 24 hours, planning to split a $50 million payout for their trouble. But things quickly turn south when what they believe to be a sweet 12-year-old ballerina turns out to be a centuries-old vampire and the crime boss her even older vampire maker.

Weir perfectly nails Abigail’s entitled and almost otherworldly personality. The star, who learned ballet to take on the role, told The Times, “I couldn’t wait to audition for the part because I knew it would be out of my comfort zone. It’s not every day that you get an opportunity to play a vampire; not only a vampire but a ballerina vampire.”

He may not have supernatural abilities or a kill count, but 1940s nightmare child Scut Farkus (Zack Ward) is the cinematic embodiment of childhood bullies experienced around the world. The principal villain of “A Christmas Story,” the beloved holiday comedy film adapted from humorist Jean Shepherd’s semi-fictionalized memoir, Scut is what the old folks used to call a “holy terror.” A menace with braces and a coonskin cap, Scut spends his days making other kids miserable, especially film protagonist Ralphie Parker (Peter Billingsley) and his pals.

Scut’s hobbies include pushing kids to the ground, chasing them through the streets, and generally inflicting pain on those who are weaker than him — and Zack Ward captured the sadistic child’s essence perfectly. Ward, who himself suffered as a new kid in school eight times before taking on the now-iconic role, told Death Wish Coffee’s Fueled by Death Podcast, “For me, I was making fun of the bullies who beat me up, that I would get in fights with all the time.”

Netflix’s 2025 British crime series “Adolescence” has been hailed as a necessary (if painful) conversation starter about the manosphere, the predatory online community where influencers prey on the insecurities of lonely men and young boys for profit with little concern for the dangers this radicalization can lead to. The series begins with the aftermath of a young girl’s murder allegedly committed by 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), a boy who, by all outward appearances, seems to be completely normal and comes from an average, loving, working-class family.

Focusing mainly on Jamie’s arrest and interactions with law enforcement and psychologists, “Adolescence” slowly reveals the child had self-radicalized to adopt misogynistic attitudes about women while participating in manosphere communities online. As Jamie switches from a nonchalant child to reveal the violence and hostility bubbling under the surface, Cooper’s performance offers a frightening glimpse at the societal landmine we’re all standing on. The fact that each episode was shot in one continuous take and that this was the 15-year-old’s first acting role makes Cooper’s performance that much more impressive — and disturbing.

The same year Homelander showed up to prove that superheroes aren’t always the good guys, the world was introduced to another questionable supe in the form of Brightburn (Jackson A. Dunn). Like Superman before him, he arrived on Earth as a baby only to be adopted by the childless couple, Tori and Kyle Breyer (Elizabeth Banks and David Denman), who pulled the infant from a UFO crash site near their Brightburn, Kansas home. Naming him Brandon and raising him as their own, things seem to be going fine at first, though Brandon does struggle to fit in at school and suffers from bullying. But life for the young boy takes a mighty turn right around his twelfth birthday, when he begins to discover his superhuman powers — abilities that seem to fit rather nicely with the boy’s sadistic tendencies, burning drive for revenge, and imperative to take over the world.

Sort of a horror movie cross between “Adolescence,” “The Boys,” and Superman, “Brightburn” offers yet another terrifying metaphor for how puberty can seemingly turn some kids into unmanageable terrors overnight. To manifest the iconic villain, Dunn, who was just 14 at the time of the filming, tried to channel demonically possessed horror movie figures into his portrayal of Brandon.

“Orphan” is a horror movie inspired by the true crime story of Barbora Skrlová, a 33-year-old Czech woman and cult member who posed as a teen boy and girl at various times, at one point coercing her adoptive mother to torture her own sons. Like her real-world counterpart, the eponymous orphan, Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), turns out to be a woman in her thirties who uses her proportional dwarfism to convince her adoptive parents she is a child. And, like Skrlová, Esther is an absolute psychopath who takes pleasure in seeing others suffer.

After suffering a tragic stillbirth, parents Kate and John Coleman (Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard) turn to adoption, rounding out their family with a child whose age ostensibly falls between those of their 12-year-old son, Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), and 5-year-old daughter, Max (Aryana Engineer), who happens to be hearing impaired. But things seem off almost from the beginning with 9-year-old Esther, who wastes little time before she starts killing creatures and human beings. Fuhrman, who was just ten years old when she was cast in the role, received loads of well-deserved praise for her unsettling performance as Esther, which she would go on to reprise in the 2022 sequel.