R-Rated Horror Roles That Kids Never Should Have Played
Horror movies are supposed to make us uncomfortable, but sometimes putting a child actor into the mix is a step too far. These actors were way too young for the roles they played.
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00:00Horror movies are supposed to make us uncomfortable, but sometimes putting a child actor into the
00:05mix is a step too far.
00:07These actors were way too young for the roles they played.
00:10As a child actor, Macaulay Culkin approached his work with such maturity that it was easy
00:15to put him in roles that may or may not have been too intense for him from a developmental
00:19standpoint.
00:20His role in The Good Son is a good example of this.
00:22He plays a sociopathic child who killed his younger brother as well as a neighborhood
00:26dog and plots at different points to murder his younger sister, his mother, and his cousin
00:31Mark.
00:32He was also 12 years old when production started.
00:35Constantly threatened by the relationships of the people around him, he dooms his family
00:39members when he senses that they're growing closer to one another.
00:42It's a dark role for a kid, especially because rumors persisted at the time that his father
00:47pushed him into taking on the character in an effort to shake up his image.
00:56In Orphan, Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard play a pair of grieving parents who, after
01:01losing their third child at birth, choose to adopt nine-year-old Esther, played by Isabel
01:06Fuhrman.
01:07But although she makes an immediate connection with their five-year-old daughter Max, it
01:10becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the fact that strange things tend to happen around
01:14Esther.
01:15Eventually, her homicidal inclinations are revealed, as is the film's major twist.
01:20Esther is actually a woman in her mid-30s, using her childlike appearance to escape suspicion
01:25as she goes on a murder spree.
01:27To be fair, Fuhrman is the best part of the film, and she handles the more difficult aspects
01:32of the character with the maturity of an actress twice her age.
01:35Only 10 years old when cast, it's hard to watch her in some of the adult scenes of Orphan.
01:40However, none of this stopped Fuhrman from uprising her role several years later in the
01:44twisty, bloody prequel, Orphan First Kill.
01:47There's a disturbing hint of truth to The Black Phone.
01:50Unlike many other horror films, which contain supernatural elements or franchised villains,
01:55it focuses on a small-town menace with horrifying consequences.
01:59This community in the 1970s has been besieged by a swath of missing children, the victims
02:04of a mysterious figure called the Grabber.
02:07He initially seems like a phantom, just a boogeyman invented to scare the kids.
02:11But then Finney, played by Mason Thames, finds himself trapped in the Grabber's basement,
02:16his only connection coming from a phone that allows him to hear words of encouragement
02:20from the Grabber's previous victims.
02:22Who is this?
02:24I don't remember my name.
02:27Why not?
02:29It's the first thing you lose.
02:31Thames has to carry nearly the whole film and convincingly portray the fear of his situation.
02:36That, combined with the real-life component of The Black Phone, the rare but terrifying
02:40specter of child kidnappings, makes this heavy material for a child actor.
02:45In Halloween, Kyle Richards as Lindsay Wallace manages to escape the majority of the carnage.
02:51Michael Myers targets the teenage babysitters in the film, after all, and the children come
02:55out relatively unscathed.
02:57But just because her character wasn't attacked by a homicidal maniac doesn't mean that
03:01the young Richards was developmentally ready to be involved in the film.
03:05Although she doesn't recall the actual filming experience as traumatic, attending the premiere
03:09of Halloween was another story.
03:11She told Halloween Daily News,
03:13I had no idea what I was in for.
03:15Seeing it for the first time all pieced together was a very, very different movie.
03:19It was just really scary.
03:21And I really did sleep with my mom until I was 15 years old after that.
03:25I was terrified.
03:26It's clear that when films cast young performers in horror movies, they need to consider not
03:30just what the child experiences on set, but throughout the whole production and post-production
03:34period, including the premiere.
03:37The members of the self-styled Losers Club, in IT, contend with a pretty significant string
03:41of bad luck.
03:43First of all, they live in Derry, Maine, a town plagued by a terrifying monster that
03:47kills and eats children, which, you know, isn't great.
03:50Together, the group of friends must fight to kill IT once and for all, so that it won't
03:54keep coming back every few decades to feed.
04:03All of the kids have a rough go of it, but the movie puts Beverly Marsh, the group's
04:07sole girl, in her own territory, making the role especially tough for a young actress
04:12like Sophia Lillis.
04:14Some of it boils down to how much the script centers on the character's budding sexuality.
04:18More than one of the Losers has a crush on Beverly, and there's an uncomfortable subplot
04:22that suggests even her own father is keenly aware of her progression towards womanhood
04:27and blames her for it.
04:28Lillis has to contend with some of the most uncomfortable moments in the film, though
04:32thankfully the adaptation left out a couple of even worse scenes from the book.
04:37We've had plenty of different takes on the classic vampire, and although The Eternal
04:41Child is a common theme in them, few films did it as well as with Ely in Let the Right
04:46One In.
04:47The movie centers on Oscar, a bullied child with few friends, until the mysterious Ely
04:52turns up in his apartment complex, making tentative efforts to befriend him but only
04:56appearing at night.
04:58Eventually, it becomes clear to him that Ely harbors a secret, and she's not a 12-year-old
05:02like him, but much, much older.
05:05Lena Lee Anderson brings an otherworldly, ageless quality to Ely, and it's easy to
05:10see her as a creature that has been alive for a while.
05:13The part that gets weird is her relationship with Haken, her human partner in crime.
05:17He's a much older man, although technically younger than she is, but he gets jealous as
05:22she grows closer to Oscar, knowing that he will likely be replaced by him.
05:27It's this pseudo-romantic relationship that makes Lee Anderson's role extra uncomfortable
05:31in an already tense and uncomfortable movie.
05:34To be fair, Jacob Tremblay is no stranger to disturbing roles.
05:38His breakthrough performance in Room came when he was just 9 years old, playing a child
05:43raised in captivity by his mother, a woman abducted and kept in a tiny shed for years.
05:48But he's harrowing in an entirely different way in Doctor Sleep, the sequel to Stephen
05:52King's The Shining, and he figures prominently in arguably the film's most gruesome scene.
05:57Walking home from a baseball game, he crosses paths with the True Knot, who ritualistically
06:02murder individuals they find who possess The Shine in order to absorb their essence.
06:13Although this murder scene isn't visually graphic, the violence and pain in Tremblay's
06:18screams are genuinely unnerving, so much so that it freaked out the other actors on set.
06:23When discussing the scene with CinemaBlend, he said,
06:32I guess maybe I'd start to freak myself out a little bit.
06:35Obviously, the actor tapped into something dark to perform the scene, which is a lot
06:39to ask of a 12-year-old.
06:42There's no The Omen without Harvey Stevens as Damien.
06:45The character is so iconic that the name Damien itself has become synonymous with a particularly
06:50evil child.
06:51In this 1976 horror film, a pair of parents become increasingly convinced that their child
06:56Damien is actually the son of Satan.
06:58Bizarre things always seem to happen around him, and death is never far from his side.
07:03For Stevens, the role likely wasn't too scary.
07:06The production team knew they had to cast a kid who wouldn't wilt when faced with
07:09the film's darker moments, and their solution was to instruct the young actors auditioning
07:14to attack them.
07:15As the legend goes, without missing a beat, Stevens started hitting director Richard Donner
07:19in the crotch and didn't stop, even after they yelled, cut.
07:24Damien indeed.
07:25But the level of infamy that came along with the role was a lot to put on a child's shoulders.
07:29Playing a famously evil child on screen is the kind of thing that follows you around.
07:34In the 1970s, horror films involving exorcisms and demonic possession were all the rage,
07:39and the possession of Joel Delaney ranked as a lesser-known entry into this subgenre.
07:44Shirley MacLaine stars as Nora, a woman with two children who begins to become concerned
07:48that there's something wrong with her younger brother Joel, whom she essentially raised
07:52after the death of their mother.
07:54It seems that he has been possessed by the spirit of a serial killer, leading to his
07:58increasingly strange behavior.
07:59Still, Nora doesn't believe it, until it's too late.
08:03David Elliott plays Nora's son, Peter, and although most of the film requires nothing
08:07more from him than traditional kid fare, there's one harrowing scene that no child ever should
08:12have been expected to take part in.
08:15When Joel holds the family hostage, he tortures each of them, forcing Peter's sister to
08:19eat dog food and instructing Peter to take off his clothes.
08:23Elliott is shown naked in this scene for a few moments, an exploitative and frankly
08:27distressing choice that never would have flown if this film had been made a decade or two
08:31later.
08:32We could have easily put the 1997 version of Funny Games here, but technically that
08:36film opened not rated, so it doesn't quite fit the bill.
08:39We'll settle instead for the English-language shot-for-shot remake that Mikel Haneke directed
08:44ten years later, which is just as disturbing as the original.
08:47It captures the horrors of a particularly brutal home invasion, in which would-be robbers
08:52hold Georgie, played by Devin Gerhardt, and his parents hostage.
08:56The so-called funny games they're subjected to are not so much funny haha, and more sadistic
09:01and terrifying.
09:02Haneke seems to have made the film as a commentary on the role of violence in mainstream cinema
09:12and how easily it becomes sanitized, but critics weren't universally convinced.
09:18The San Francisco Chronicle called it a vile cinematic exercise, while Richard Roper said
09:22it was grotesque and appalling.
09:24Either way, it's a tough movie for anyone to be in, let alone an 11-year-old child.
09:30Of all the kids who've appeared in horror films, Linda Blair in The Exorcist ranks among
09:34the most impressive and most controversial.
09:37When the film opened in 1973, it was met with immediate outrage from audiences, with many
09:42disturbed by its gruesome and sacrilegious content.
09:46An older actress, Eileen Dietz, performed some of the sequences the studios considered
09:50too inappropriate for Blair.
09:52Though somewhat shielded from the darkest material, that doesn't mean that Blair emerged
09:56unscathed from The Exorcist.
09:58During the scenes in which Regan rides in her bed, Blair was attached to a harness that
10:02allowed her to move unnaturally.
10:04But as Blair discussed on Cursed Films, one take went wrong.
10:08She said,
10:09In this particular case, the lacing came loose.
10:11I'm crying.
10:12I'm screaming.
10:13They think I'm acting up a storm.
10:15It fractured my lower spine.
10:17For the most part, she harbors mixed feelings about her time on the film.
10:21As reported by The Telegraph, she mentions that she wouldn't have allowed her child to
10:24take the role.
10:26She also recalls feeling pressured to perform as much of the unsavory content as possible,
10:30saying,
10:31Billy Friedkin came to me before we were filming and said,
10:33If you do not do all of this film, the film will be a joke.
10:36And that's to say nothing of going on press tours and discussing the nuance of the film's
10:41religious subtext.
10:42She said,
10:43I would be thrust in front of hundreds of people I often couldn't understand who were
10:47putting their faith into my hands.
10:48It was horrible.