When Danielle Keaton was seven, her homework was to open her eyes as wide as possible and stare. She had just secured a role in director John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned – a horror film about inhuman psychic children with violent tendencies – and had to perfect her creepy glare. “We had to practise not blinking for a very long time,” says the actor and coach, now 38 and based in LA. “We would have to look in a mirror and hold the stare without laughing.” On set, the children would have staring contests with Superman star Christopher Reeve.
As the spooky season enshrouds us like mist on a mountaintop, many of us are pressing play on classic horrors, eager to be chilled by tropes as old as time. One such trope is the “creepy kid”, arguably first popularised in 1956’s The Bad Seed, in which eight-year-old Rhoda manages to commit several murders while maintaining pristine blond plaits. Ominous infants quickly became a movie mainstay, popping up in The Exorcist, The Omen and The Shining (“Come and play with us”).
