By Svetlana Fedotov
The fifties were a weird time for horror. Alfred Hitchcock was the darling of the horror world with his psycho-sexual twists and anything not done by him came in the form of giant ants or giant blobs or giant tomatoes. With psychological crusades and atom bomb fears fed in nightly news bits to houses across the country, it was no surprise that author William March used the former to create one of the most feared little girls in the country: Rhoda Penmark. Though The Bad Seed, like many great works, didn’t get famous until his death a month after its release, it forced a whole new generation of parents to look at their kids cross-eyed whenever they seemed just a little too polite. Unfortunately, the book didn’t exactly age well, but luckily, I’m a sucker for old horror and just managed to stick it out long enough to type up this review.
As mentioned, the book revolves around little Rhoda Penmark, the world’s most polite little girl: with blonde pigtails and matching blue eyes, she is the image of a perfect childhood, but underneath all that lies the heart of an ice cold killer. Despite her mother Christine choosing to ignore the most obvious signs of a serial killer, even she can’t turn a blind eye when bodies start piling up everywhere the child goes. Soon, Christine begins researching her bloodline and what she learns will shock her family to the core. Where does little Rhoda get her murderous tendencies and how does Christine tie into it?
The Bad Seed reads a lot like the movie adaptation that came out two years later, that is over-acted, drawn out, and closely shot. It sounds like an awkward description of a book, but the writing is such a product of the cinema at the time, that you can actually imagine the characters acting out the story in that flowery, post radio acting that was so popular at the time. Unless speech patterns have greatly changed between now and then, the dialogue is very stiff and it doesn’t seem like how people would interact normally. It’s very kitschy. The story was pretty solid though. I mean, who doesn’t love murderous children? The out-layer of the story, that is, not delving any deeper than the words on the paper, is a lot like a Twilight Zone episode. Moral and ethics and all that jazz, and it has a pretty interesting twist at the end. If you do decide to ‘read into’ the story, it’s a very obvious metaphor for the nature vs. nurture angle in terms of teenage crime. Is Rhoda a product of her environment or is was it something more primordial? Honestly, it rings of pro-eugenics.
Even the characters are thinly veiled metaphors for different aspects of the human psyche. Greed, jealousy, indecisiveness, evil, yadda yadda yadda and along with the pseudo-psychotherapy quirks of side character Monica Breedlove, the whole work quickly devolves into some kind of Fruedian wet dream (who, yes, does get mentioned in the book). Really, the book is only scary if you have never picked up a psychology book in your life or you’re Dr. Suess and you’re already terrified of children. So is there any reason to read it? Well, I’ll tell you the same thing I tell people about old horror comics: when this work came out: it was the first one to do something like an ‘evil child.’ Sure, now it’s simply become a tired trope, but this is where the tired trope came from. This book was one of the foundations of modern horror, just like Tales from the Crypt was for modern horror comics. It’s worth the read just to see how it all started. The Bad Seed brought new ideas and set new standards to an emerging field of cinema.
Though, if anything, you can always watch the two movies instead or see if Eli Roth ever delivers on his promise of a remake. I haven’t seen either the fifties or the eighties version, but from what I hear, aside from the ending, it’s exactly like the book.