Section 7
DEVILISH DAUGHTERS
A sub-grouping of the killer-girl films (The Bad Seed,The Haunting of Julia, The House That Dripped Blood, The Brood) suggests that the girl kills because she has "inherited" something evil from her mother. Because the child is still growing, because she is a "seed" without "boundaries" she is capable of developing in any direction, intensifying her evil nature, becoming even more evil than her adult counterpart. Like her possessed sisters, she is also without clearly defined boundaries in that she is particularly susceptible to an evil or dominating influence--this occurs in relation to her mother to whom she is linked, not just by blood, but--unlike her brother--by sex. The devilish daughter, being female, is doubly dangerous. When woman is represented as monstrous in the horror film, her abject nature is directly associated with her sexual and reproductive functions. The horror film construct woman as a womb monster. They also portray her female offspring as abject, presumably because the daughter--like the mother--is potentially a womb monster, that is, a woman.
The Bad Seed was probably the first film to attack openly the belief that childhood is, by definition, a period of innate innocence and goodness. The heroine, Rhoda (Patty McCormack), an eight-year old girl appears to be kind, thoughtful and sweet; but in reality she is a cold-blooded killer. She murders a small boy at school, who wins the penmanship medal that Rhoda believes should be hers, and kills a caretaker whom she thinks has evidence that will reveal her guilt.
When Rhoda's mother, Christine, finally realises her daughter is a murderer she investigates her own origins (she always felt her parents was not her "real" ones) and discovers sh was adopted at birth; her real mother was a convicted killer Bessie Denker, a beautiful, intelligent, ruthless woman who poisoned her own father. Christine also seems to know "unconsciously" about her own mother--she is disturbed the mention of her name, and strangely affected when she reads a story to Rhoda about a fairy who poisons a knight. When Rhoda's mother learns the truth, that she was adopted, and her real mother was a cold-blooded killer she knows her daughter has inherited this curse. Rhoda has taken on the "sins of the mother" and she knows she must kill her daughter before she strikes again.

The Bad Seed 1.1MB quicktime movie Rhoda is portrayed as the model daughter--clean and tidy, polite and obedient. Her blonde hair is restrained by two tight plaits, her clothes always neat and tidy. There is something sinister, even eerie, about her too perfect demeanour and manner. Rhoda's mother is worried about her daughter's precocious behaviour. "There is a mature quality about her that is disturbing in a child," she explains to Rhoda's teacher. It is Rhoda's precocity that marks her as unnatural--even abnormal. The opposite of the innocent, she is advanced beyond her years, exhibiting the characteristics of a cold, calculating adult, unable to empathise with or feel for others.
In her informative discussion of the child-as-monster, Kathy Merlock Jackson analyses various reasons for the depiction of Rhoda as evil. One is that the film's "exaggerated portrait of the seemingly perfect little girl who is really a killer reflected a growing awareness of child delinquency" (112) According to Jackson, there is no doubt that delinquency was on the national agenda; by the mid-50s more than a million young people--many from good families, were reported annually to the police.
Hollywood explored this problem in the fifties, with films like Rebel Without A Cause (1955), The Wild One (1954) and Compulsion (1959). The latter, a film about the famous Leopold and Loeb thrill killers, who came from wealthy, society families, and who murdered a young boy, seemingly without a motive certainly reinforces the "evil-by-nature" argument. The themes of these three films seemed to be that anti-social, criminal behaviour occurs without obvious reason. Perhaps the most feasible explanation was that America, having experienced the inexplicable horrors of World War II, and unwilling to accept any blame for world's woes, felt happier with the argument that anti-social or criminal children are born not created. A good home and two loving parents are not enough to stem the growth of evil in Rhoda which, the film seems to argue, is innate.
The theme of inherited evil is explored in a number of horror films in which the "curse" is passed, almost always, from mother to daughter. The Haunting of Julia (1976) presents the mother-daughter bond as one steeped in blood and murder, a closed circuit from which there is no escape.
(The film's original title was Full Circle). Julia (Mia Farrow) is forced to perform a fatal tracheotomy on her daughter, when the young girl chokes on her food. In a desperate attempt to save her life, Julia cuts open her throat. Suffering from a nervous breakdown, Julia separates from her husband and moves by herself into a house which is haunted by a young girl who once lived there with her mother. The girl was killed by her own mother because she savagely castrated a small boy. Julia is finally murdered by the mysterious girl (her daughter or the killer daughter?) who materialises in the house and slits her throat--just as Julia cut her daughter's throat. The two mother-daughter groupings, in which the mothers kill their female offspring, are pointedly similar. If we regard the mothers as interchangeable--the daughters also--then we are left with the disturbing thought that Julia wished to kill her daughter, and that the daughter wished also to murder her mother. But murder, in the context of the horror film, is never a straightforward act of evil.
The Haunting of Julia horrifies by suggesting that mothers and daughters are irrevocably held together by ties of blood-letting. By killing her own daughter, the mother takes her child back into her body through death; similarly by killing her mother, the daughter baptises her mother with blood. Against her husband's wishes, Julia moves into the house where the stage is set for the reunification of mother and daughter. The ghostly daughter murders Julia in a drama that has been pre-ordained. Carrie also depicts this blood cycle in which mother and daugh bring about each other's death.
The Haunting of Julia shares several key features with Don't Look Now (1972), in which a daughter brings about the death of her father (Donald Sutherland). Overcome with grief at his young daughter's accidental death, the father catches a glimpse of "her" on the canals of Venice, where he is restoring water-damaged churches. His dead "daughter" appears to him as a small figure dressed in the red raincoat she was wearing the day she drowned. The mother (Julie Christie) becomes friends with two elderly sisters one of whom claims to be a clairvoyant and in touch with her daughter. Through eerie images and sounds, the film suggests the sisters might be witches. When the father finally catches up with the little red figure, it turns out to be an evil dwarf who severs his neck with a machette. What is most disturbing about Don't Look Now is its suggestion that all of the women--mother, daughter, the mysterious sisters, the dwarf--are in league together, and have joined forces to bring about the father's death, a death which he himself foresaw in a vision of his own funeral. The homicidal red-capped dwarf is represented as the dead daughter's doppelganger, a dark self that--like Amy and Irena from Curse of the Cat People--wishes to lure the father into the underworld of the dead. The child's eerie cries, the imagery of dark uterine canals, water, and the colour red - all of these converge to suggest the deadly aspect of the female.
Similarly, the episode from The House That Dripped Blood, based on short stories by Robert Bloch, called "Sweets to the Sweet", depicts another homicidal daughter in the grip of her mother, reputed to be a witch, and out to dispatch her father to the land of the dead. Guided by her dead mother, the daughter I gleefully murders her father (Christopher Lee) by sticking pins into a wax effigy she has made under direction from her mother.
One of the most chilling horror films to explore the theme of maternal evil, passed from mother to daughter, is David Cronenberg's, The Brood. The mother, Nola Carveth (Samantha Eggar) has suffered a serious illness and is a patient at the Somafree Institute of Psychoplasmics, a clinic headed by Dr Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed). Raglan teaches his patients how to express their inner rage which manifests itself in the form of sores and skin eruptions on the body. Nola is his special patient who he keeps isolated from other patients as well as from her husband, Frank (Art Hindle). The only visitor she is allowed to see is her young daughter, Candy (Cindy Hinds).

The Brood1MB quicktime movie After a series of strange murders, Frank discovers that the victims, who have all threatened Nola in some way, have been murdered by inhuman, midget-like beings. In the film's climactic scene, Frank learns that the creatures are all part of a brood and have been born from a hideous birth sac attached to Nora's ribs. These are the creatures of her rage. Connected to her emotionally, they enact her murderous desires. Wlien Frank learns the truth, he strangles Nola and escapes with Candy. As father and daughter drive blindly into the night, a close-up shot draws our attention to a hideous skin eruption beginning to form on Candy's arm. She has inherited her mother's illness and her murderous rage. By its very title, The Brood, draws attention to the maternal origins of what will become Candy's rage and lead her to commit murder--no doubt her father will be her first victim.