With Terrifier 3 coming out soon and promising the deaths of between 1 and 200 children as Art the Clown brings his brand of bloody mayhem to the Christmas season, we thought there might never be a better time to dissect the greatest examples of one of the most controversial types of kill in horror movies: Child deaths. Now these don’t get the same negative reaction as pet deaths in horror movies because Letterboxd morality is a puzzle even Jigsaw and Pinhead couldn’t solve if they worked together, but still, if you express enthusiasm for a fictional brat getting butchered, you still get a lot of side-eye.
So let me say that nobody at Horror Press is advocating for child deaths in real life, obviously, but a good solid scene where a kid gets iced can spice up a horror movie in one of two ways. 1) It pushes the envelope, proving a movie is willing to transgress and really “go there.” 2) It has the same campy effect as watching an anvil fall on Daffy Duck (in a movie with the proper calibration of tones.)
This list is a blend of those two feelings, though I am trying to avoid going too miserable and joyless, so there’s no Pet Sematary on this list.
Oh, and it goes without saying that spoilers abound further down, so without further ado…
The Top 10 Instances of Child Death in Horror Movies
10. Prom Night (1980)
The beginning of Prom Night is the scene that provides the motivation for the killer’s entire rampage several years down the line, and it is the rare slasher prologue that totally earns it. The “Killers Are Coming” chant that the kids do during their weird tag-style game in the abandoned building is eerie enough, but when it builds to a crescendo with them backing a helpless little girl into a corner to the point that she falls to her death out a window, it is appalling, devastating, and fills you with rage toward those little shits.
9. Immaculate (2024)
I’m going to throw an extra SPOILER tag here because this movie is so new.
This one is weighted a little lower on the list because you technically see neither the child nor the death when Sydney Sweeney births her “immaculately” conceived baby and immediately smashes it with a rock, but otherwise, it’s superb. You get every last bit of information you need by watching the entire scene play out on her face, and it’s a hell of a gonzo way to close out a motion picture.
8. Silent Night (2012)
There aren’t that many child deaths on film where you can say, “She deserved it” without being at least a little facetious, but oh boy did this tween girl deserve the hell out of being cattle prodded by evil Santa and then impaled with a fireplace poker in Silent Night. Her entrance sees her barreling into the movie to knock her mom’s medicine out of her shaking hand. Actual dialogue:
Mrs. Morwood: “Those are mommy’s heart pills! I need those!”
Evil Brat: “You need to take me to the mall.”
Yeah, she got what was coming to her.
7. Halloween Ends (2022)
Another kid who very much deserved his fate is Jeremy Allen, the absolute gremlin who locked his poor hapless babysitter Corey Cunningham in the attic during the prologue to Halloween Ends. Was him being knocked 11,000 stories down his inexplicably tall Illinois home worth being the reason for the birth of one of the franchise’s most controversial villains? Honestly, yes.
6. The Ruins (2008)
Now The Ruins’ child death is ruthless and efficient, setting the stakes and the tone perfectly. Early on, when a character angrily throws a clump of vines at a child from the tribe, trapping them in the ancient ruin in the middle of nowhere, the child is instantly shot by his elders. This proves that 1) These people are not messing around when it comes to quarantining the vines on the ruins, and 2) This movie is going to be unrepentantly nasty. Both things continue to be true over the course of the movie.
5. Bloody Moon (1981)
Now here’s a silly one, as a palate cleanser. One of my personal favorites, a sequence in Jess Franco’s Bloody Moon sees the killer follow one of the most brutal murders in the movie (a tied-up woman getting decapitated by a masonry saw) by having the killer speed away from the scene in a car. A kid who has been playing in the area accidentally witnessed this and is now running down the mountain road to tell someone. While making their getaway, the killer absolutely creams this kid with their car and doesn’t even slow down. Two birds with one stone!
4. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Come on, you had to have known Halloween III would be on this list somewhere. A little piece of Stonehenge in his Halloween mask turns his head into bugs and snakes! Honestly, if I had to pick the way I shuffle off this mortal coil, this might be it.
3. The Good Son (1993)
The ending of The Good Son is absolutely wild for a multitude of reasons. The movie largely follows the tête-à-tête between innocent cousin Elijah Wood and evil murder-boy Macaulay Culkin, and the finale sees Culkin’s mom holding onto them both as they dangle off a seaside cliff and being forced to choose which one to save. So not only are you treated to the glorious sight of Kevin from Home Alone plunging to his death in the Atlantic Ocean, you’re forced to contend with the fact that his own mother is responsible for this. It’s dark stuff, and it’s yet another reason why The Good Son is a surprisingly gnarly movie.
2. The Blob (1988)
Poor Douglas Emerson. Somehow, playing Scott Scanlon as a series regular on season 1 of Beverly Hills, 90210 before his abrupt demotion to recurring in early season 2, at which point he was quickly featured in a Very Special Episode where he accidentally shot himself in the tummy at his own birthday party still isn’t the most horrible way he has died onscreen. Back when he was even younger, he had the shit Blobbed out of him in a sewer. What a way to go.
1. Hereditary (2018)
I mean… You know the scene I’m talking about, right?
You gotta.
The thing about the Hereditary car death, on top of the fact that it informs the entire remainder of the movie after it happens, is that it kind of combines the two aspects of onscreen child death that I described earlier. It is potent and grim and terrible, really helping you buy into Toni Collette’s grief as a parent. However, the fact that the movie resolutely refuses to show anything until that delayed, extended look at the rotting head on the side of the road is a little playful, in a gallows humor kind of way.