Yet, even in that regard, Muschietti fails, precisely because killing kids isn’t taboo anymore. Whether its mainstream bids like It and Stranger Things, or more outré projects like V/H/S/Halloween and the Terrifier series, kid-killing is in. Worse, it’s boring.
A Well-Trod Transgression
Carpenter orchestrated the death of Kathy to both shock the viewers and establish the moral order of his universe. Drawing on Night of the Living Dead and Westerns such as Fort Apache, which depicted Indigenous peoples as non-human savages to whom reason does not apply, Carpenter wanted to establish in the audience’s mind that the essentially ghouls would be laying siege to the titular precinct. And even then, Carpenter later expressed regret about the scene, calling himself “young and stupid” at the time.
Carpenter certainly wasn’t the first person to threaten a kid on screen. Fritz Lang’s 1931 mystery M focused on the search for a child killer, and the 1955 Charles Laughton film The Night of the Hunter was driven by the threat that drifter Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) would kill the kids living in the boarding house with him. But neither of these movies were explicit in their depictions, and realized the weight of what they were doing, as did Carpenter. Perversely, the same is true of exploitation films of the 1970s and ’80s that pushed buttons by killing children. When teens repeatedly drive over a young bike rider in The Toxic Avenger (1984) or a posse opens fire on a group of tots in Beware! Children at Play (1989), one can almost hear Troma founder Lloyd Kaufman giggling in glee.
That same giggle echoes in modern kid-killing movies. Despite their over-abundance of lore, the Terrifier films exist as little more than sizzle reels for (really impressive) gore effects, which creator Damien Leone deploys in sadistic set-pieces. There’s an unearned self-satisfaction to the moment in Terrifier 3 when the Christmas-themed sequel has Art dress up as Santa and start handing out “toys,” and the movie even teases the audience, making them think that the tots will actually survive the encounter before finally blowing them up, and sprinkling kid parts across the screen.
It’s not scary. It isn’t even shocking, because the movie knows we’re expecting it. After watching Georgie get massacred in It and seeing the kids from Hawkins get hunted by Vecna on Stranger Things, we’re used to thinking about childhood coming to a horrible end.
No film illustrates the problem with this tired taboo better than V/H/S/Halloween, the latest entry in the long-running anthology series. Despite gathering names such as Alex Ross Perry (Listen Up Phillip, Her Smell), Casper Kelly (“Too Many Cooks”) and Paco Plaza (REC), Halloween is perhaps the weakest V/H/S film precisely because it relies too much on the shock of killing kids.
