Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- Little Horrors: Introduction -- To Catch Them Unawares: Horror's Evil Innocents -- The Plot -- It's Only a Movie -- 1. Reaching the Age of Anxiety: The 1950s and the Horror of Youth -- Troubled Teens: The Juvenile Delinquent on Film -- Sowing Bad Seeds: Creating the Child as Monster -- Conclusion -- 2. Spoiled Rotten: Horror's Bourgeois Brats -- Killing with Class: The Bad Seed -- Heirs Aberrant: Village of the Damned -- Conclusion -- 3. A Scary Sight: The Looking Child -- An Uncertain Zoom: Power and Perspective in Halloween -- The To-Be-Looked-At Child -- Eyes That Paralyze: Village of the Damned -- Conclusion -- 4. "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle": The Child Villain's Malignant Mom -- Treachery on the Home Front -- Sons of Bitches: The Brood -- "All of them Witches": Maternal Alienation and Rosemary's Baby -- Conclusion -- 5. Vicious Videos, Missing Mothers: The Ring -- Murderous Work: The Career Mom and the Killer -- Home Alone and Hating It: The Postmodern Child -- Anxiety Reruns from the Golden Age -- Conclusion -- 6. Little Bastards: Patriarchy's Errant Offspring in It's Alive and The Omen -- The End Times for Patriarchy: The Omen -- Black Majesties -- "Somehow the identities get all mixed up": Fatherhood, Science, and Semen in It's Alive -- Semen Stains -- Conclusion -- 7. Past Incarnations: The Exorcist and the Tyranny of Childhood -- Little Dimi -- "Why you do this to me?" -- "Come into me . . ." -- Conclusion -- 8. All Fun and Games till Someone Gets Hurt: Hating Children's Culture -- No Place Like Home: Deep Red and the Iconography of Childhood -- Model Behavior: Child's Play -- Conclusion -- 9. Too Close for Comfort: Child Villainy and Pedophilic Desire in Hard Candy and Orphan -- Naughty but Nice: Hard Candy -- Surgical Separation: The Viewer and the Pedophile.

Adult Irresponsibility, or the Child with No Name -- The Reveal That Conceals: Excusing Improper Desire in Orphan -- "Fucking Children" -- "I don't know what to do!": Blurred Vision, Blurred Boundaries -- Conclusion -- Afterword -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.