Monsters in the Closet: Killer Kids and Queer Identity

Horror films are steeped in the symbolic order. Skilled filmmakers prey on explicit fears of strangers in the dark and arbitrary violence while simultaneously unearthing subconscious fears that play across the screen in subtler ways. Much has been made of the slasher flick’s schizophrenic relationship to young sexuality. Just as these films use youthful eroticism and explicit sexuality to appeal to viewers, they punish the sexually adventurous with painful death. By accessing an audience’s attraction to and revulsion from fornication, slasher films invoke an implicit cosmic order in which the wicked are punished. This subliminal sense of justice makes a film like Friday the 13th deeply frightening by displacing the ostensibly arbitrary attacks of the serial killer with the horrific notion that her victims deserve to die. That this justice is bound up with sexuality is unsurprising, but it does reveal the underlying conservatism of the horror genre. And nowhere is this conservatism more apparent than in the treatment of a far scarier monster: the evil child.

Like serial killer films, evil child movies exist in startling abundance. A distinction here must be made between films that portray pregnancy, birth and infancy as horrific experiences and those that portray adolescent children as homicidal maniacs. Rosemary’s Baby and It’s Alive gain their power from the ancient fear of giving birth to a demon, and usually focus on the psychological disturbance of the parents and not on the evil of the child. When the child is older and autonomous, the fears exposed are very different. Here children are portrayed at the cusp of puberty, nearing the moment when they shrug of parental authority and assume adult status. Evil children, then, come to represent a real threat to the heterosexual order, and in killing their families threaten the entire heterosexual fantasy of reproduction and family.

These children are usually sexless, often androgynous and always possess an adult’s intellectual sophistication but none of an adult’s restraint. Though far too young to be sexualized, they embody the heterosexual fear of the hedonistic, patriarchy-defying homosexual, which as Lee Edelman has pointed out in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, is itself rooted in a fear of the threat homosexuality poses to the idea of reproductive futurity. The disturbed and alien child may be queer or may be a murderer, but in either case his presence is frightening and must be destroyed for the sake of order, sanity and heterosexual desire.

Fritz Kiersch’s film Children of the Corn (1984) plays this threat out in its most extreme form. The film opens with a shot of cracked, barren earth and a portentous church reader board warning of God’s hand in the corn drought. We are in Gatlin, Nebraska, an idyllic farming community where families attend church on Sunday and gather in the local diner afterward for milkshakes and coffee. A father takes his son Job to the diner, and Job tells us in voiceover that he was the only child in church that day. His sister is home sick and all the others are in the fields with Isaac, a boy preacher of amazing, almost unnatural, power. Job’s father dislikes the strange Isaac and refuses to let his children come under Isaac’s spell. But soon a small army of scythe-wielding children butchers everyone in the café, leaving only Job alive.

Several years pass, and Gatlin is now in the firm hands of Isaac and his bullyboy Malachi. The children have displaced parental authority, destroying the harmony of the Midwest nuclear family root and branch. Isaac, the boy prophet, rules the children easily. He is a small, girlish adolescent with the wizened features of a witch and the voice of a very young child. His laws forbid all childish things to these children, who must create a new world with him. Malachi, with his flowing red hair and flirtatious, snarling lips, enforces the laws ruthlessly. Children of the Corn’s conservative message is safely buried under an apparent critique of evangelical Christianity. How can the children be viewed as a homosexual threat when they are ascetic Christian fanatics? The trick to cracking this kernel is to realize that the film offers no real critique of conservative religion. Isaac is a false prophet, leading the children from the comfort of Gatlin’s whitewashed church into the cornfields to worship a demon. Job and his sister Sarah escape Isaac’s seduction not because they aren’t religious, but because they remain in the true Christian Church, protected by their wise father and, presumably, his Heavenly counterpart.

The heterosexist imagination always posits the homosexual as a threat to the proper ordering of society. Isaac is a threat not only to nuclear families but also to religion itself, perverting it for his own ends no less than liberal revisionist pro-gay theologians pervert the Gospels to advance nefarious ends.

It is necessary to go further yet. While it is true that heterosexism insists that homosexuals are a threat to society, it does not logically follow that all threats to society are homosexual. When confronted with the complex symbolic system in Children of the Corn we must do better than this. And the film gives us everything we need to make up our minds. Late in the film we are shown a young man celebrating his eighteenth birthday. A girl cuts him, fills a bowl with his blood and passes it around the room in a gruesome parody of the Eucharist. Later that night, he is sacrificed to He Who Walks Behind The Rows. The children have gone much further than simply disrupting the nuclear family. They have followed Isaac and his demonic master to the very edge of civilization. In killing each child as he reaches formal adulthood, the children have rejected the future. Unable to become adults they are unable to re-establish the patriarchy by having children. The dead-ended nature of the children’s new society is impossible to read as anything but homosexual. Just as bachelors and spinsters always attract suspicions of homosexuality, so too will any culture that negates itself through a refusal to procreate be condemned as crypto-homosexual.

But Isaac didn’t reckon on a force more powerful than He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Vicky and Burt are a young couple on a cross-country trip who discover a child murdered by Malachi while attempting to escape Gatlin. These lovers venture into the town and find themselves fighting for their survival against the children of the corn. Along the way, they discover Job and his sister Sarah, who have lived freely as “unbelievers” with Isaac’s protection. Here, now, is the only weapon that can defeat Isaac. For Burt, Vicky, Job and Sarah together form a complete, heterosexual nuclear family. The children of the corn violated the commandment to honor they father and mother by killing their parents, and it is the reaffirmation of that commandment’s power that will destroy them.

In the ensuing climactic struggle, Malachi kills Isaac, who is resurrected by He Who Walks Behind the Rows in order to drag Malachi into the ground with him. As the children stand ready to slay Burt and Vicky, Burt delivers an impassioned plea for a religion based on love and family. Miraculously, the children are converted. All survivors hide in a barn, as the monster gains strength and tries to kill them. Burt, Vicky, Job and Sarah work together to fill the cornfields with ethanol and set them ablaze, burning the monster to death. This final destruction of Isaac’s dream directly invokes the fires from Heaven that cleansed Sodom itself of the homosexual menace, and like Lot and his daughters fleeing to safety, Burt, Vicky, and their informally adopted children escape the retribution. A touching scene plays out as Burt says “Would you like to live with us for a few days?” and Vicky says, “Or a week? How about a month?” The four wander off into the future, hand in hand, and although we never hear anyone say it, we’re sure they are all thinking “how about forever?

Children of the Corn, like nearly all horror films, scares us by playing out our fears, but soothes us at the end by reaffirming the solidity of the world. Isaac and his band of fey killer children succeeded in destroying the heterosexual social project and erecting in its place an alien community that defied adulthood and with it the heterosexuality necessary to maintain the family. What scares us is the radical potential in Isaac and his followers to destroy the conservative institutions of family, religion and heterosexuality. But the family would not so easily die, and our heroes re-establish the authority of the patriarchy, destroy the radical revolution, and reassert the power of heterosexuality in the face of a sinister, queering force.

But the threat to the family need not always be so obvious. In Joseph Ruben’s The Good Son, the threat comes from within the family itself and not from an outsider like Isaac. The Good Son opens with a nuclear family torn apart by the death of Mark’s mother. His father must travel abroad to close a “big deal” and leaves the grieving Mark (Elijah Wood) with his uncle on the rocky coast of Maine. This family, too, is in pain. Not long ago, Richard, the baby of the family, drowned in the tub and the family is still healing.

At first, Mark fits in easily and is quickly befriended by his cousin Henry (Macaulay Culkin.) Culkin, having built a career portraying angel-faced children, here begins to stretch his image, not so much breaking out of type as queering that type, revealing the monstrous potential underneath the sweet smile. Henry is a perfect child, with the same mischievous smirk we knew in Home Alone, that shock of blond hair and twinkling blue eyes charming us into complacency. But from his first appearance, there is something noticeably wrong with him. He is wearing a featureless plaster mask, and gives his cousin an identical mask. They stand for a moment, silent, heads cocked, faces blank, leaning toward each other with all the electricity of a kiss. They are bound in a disturbing rite of intimacy, and Henry is clearly in control. Later in his career, Culkin would create more explicitly queer characters, but his Henry undeniably prefigures the amoral and murderous buttboy of Party Monster.

Henry leads Mark deeper and deeper into a perverse world in which normal rules simply do not apply. Henry builds a sophisticated crossbow, which he uses to shoot animals with steel bolts. He crafts a scarecrow and tricks Mark into helping him use it to cause a pile up on the freeway. Hidden beneath a bridge, Henry responds to Mark’s horror by saying, “I told you I’d show you something you’d never forget. Where’s the gratitude?” And it is here, under the bridge, that Henry reveals the depths of his moral abjection. “Once you realize you can do anything, you’re free. You can even fly.”

It’s important to note that Henry’s evil emerges from a sophisticated, if twisted, philosophical position. Henry has assumed the stance of Nietzsche’s ubermensch, has defied the Judeo-Christian “slave morality” and insists on living as a master among the slaves. This is in contrast to an older film to which The Good Son owes much (including at least one complete scene), The Bad Seed. The Bad Seed gives us a girl who kills only for pragmatic, if insignificant, reasons. She kills to steal the penmanship medal she “should have won”, to stop a man from revealing her secret, and to inherit a glass globe filled with a fish from an old woman who has promised it to her when she dies. Rhoda possesses no understanding of moral law and the film declares that she has inherited this deficiency from her serial killer grandmother, much as she might have inherited her blond hair.

Henry stands in direct opposition to Rhoda’s “natural” amorality. Henry has built a moral system that allows him to do whatever he wants, because he is smarter than anyone else. He deserves to be exempt from ordinary moral law because he is an extraordinary person. He does not act for pragmatic, childish reasons. He kills simply because he can. In committing acts that he knows are crimes, he proves his power and superiority, gains his super-humanity by making choices that no normal person would ever consider making.

It is within this framework that Henry can be viewed as embodying heterosexual fears of homosexuality in a way that even Rhoda and Isaac, perverse as they are, cannot. Rhoda cannot help herself, and while she is a threat to society it is left to the natural order to destroy her. Her mother’s attempt to kill her fails and so that cosmic sense of justice inherent in horror films shows us that Rhoda is not guilty, because she lacks the moral sense to know her own guilt. She must, therefore, be treated as a pathetic victim of her nature. Henry is born to a normal family, develops a monstrous morality and attempts to destroy the family and convert his cousin to master morality. As should be obvious, Henry was responsible for poor Richard’s drowning, and later tries to kill his sister. He spends much of the first half of the film convincing Mark to join him in a long series of adventures that function as a seduction of the “pure” Mark by the “perverted” Henry.

But Henry’s seduction fails, and he turns on Mark. And it is here that he becomes too clever for his own good. At dinner he announces that Mark wants to move in to Richard’s room. Susan is horrified, and Mark protests that he never said it, but Henry’s father thinks it might be a good idea, hoping to help his wife move on. After Henry taunts Mark with vague threats against Susan, Mark attacks him and the two fall on the bed, faces inches apart, Mark holding a sharp pair of scissors against Henry’s throat. The scene’s coded sexuality is reminiscent of the hyper-sexualized scene in The Sound and the Fury in which Quentin holds a knife to Caddy’s throat as she begs him breathlessly to push it in harder. The violence marks not only Mark’s final break with Henry’s morality, but also an erotic consummation of their relationship, the film’s repeated moments of intimacy climaxing with the two boys panting on the bed. Like Faulkner, Ruben shows us that violence and sexuality, particularly deviant sexuality, are often knotted together so tightly that they cannot be separated, physically or intellectually.

Henry’s father walks in before Mark can kill Henry and Mark is banished to Richard’s room, and in this moment the nuclear families torn apart by the deaths of Mark’s mother and Richard are brought together. Henry, like the children of the corn, has broken the familial pact by killing his brother, thus severing their obligation to him as their child. His parents are left with only their daughter. But Mark, who believes that Susan is carrying the spirit of his mother, steps into the void left by Richard’s death. By taking his place in Richard’s bedroom he assumes the drowned baby’s place in the family and completes the nuclear unit that alone can defeat the threat of the homosexual-killer.

The film from here plays out predictably, with Susan catching on to her son’s evil ways and confronting him. Henry tosses her off a cliff, where she struggles to survive. Mark arrives just in time and he and Henry struggle while Susan climbs to safety. Soon the roles are reversed, and both children dangle from the cliff with Susan holding each with one arm. Henry plays on her motherly instincts, begging her to let Mark go and save her only living son. But Susan is not fooled. She knows that the real good son, the true child of her dreams, is the one who hangs on without begging to be saved, the one willing to embrace the martyrdom that Henry, following Nietzsche, despises as weak and pathetic. Susan lets Henry fall to his death, and pulls Mark to safety. Just as in Children of the Corn, the united nuclear family cannot be beaten even by the most evil of queering forces. Susan, unlike Rhoda’s mother, is able to enforce the cosmic order on her perverted son

Whichever form such films take, whether the more grotesque and drastic form of gruesome horror films like Children of the Corn, or the subtler but no less chilling form of good natured killer blonds as in The Good Son and The Bad Seed, victory is only to be had when the queer force can be faced by a nuclear family that fully realizes the dangers posed by the evil children. Rhoda’s mother fails not only because her child cannot help herself but also because she has no other children to form the necessary familial bond. She is alone, and therefore too weak to stop her deadly daughter. But Susan and Mark, or Burt, Vicky, Job and Sarah can form the united front necessary to protect the family from the alien forces of queer resistance.

Perhaps it is going too far to associate homosexuality with murderous adolescents. Maybe it’s enough that straight filmmakers have consistently portrayed queer characters as killers in films like Psycho and The Silence of the Lambs, that we need not add fuel to their arguments by claiming so familiar a relationship with Henry and Isaac. But this would be to miss the point. In watching these films through a queer lens, it’s impossible not to see them as another tool in the arsenal of conservative social politics. The defeat of evil is always the defeat of a radical social project or moral system, the evil always takes the form of a direct threat to heterosexual families and is always defeated by the concerted efforts of loving parents and children working together to build a future that looks exactly like the past.

Beneath the literal façade is the disturbing conviction that the greatest enemies of a family’s harmony come from within, and that the survival of the family sometimes depends on killing those members who refuse to conform to the heterosexual fantasy. Whether these children are actually homosexual is irrelevant in light of the threat they pose to heterosexuality, a threat that heterosexist culture will always and everywhere identify with queerness. The constellation of fears played on by the makers of evil-child films is not exclusively gay, but it is undeniably queer and the morality the films are meant to shore up is deeply conservative. It is difficult, in the end, not to feel defeated as Henry’s tiny body is swept out to sea, and along with it his resistance to the heteronormative order.