Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and this video is all about the narrative of the child psychopath. That’s right, our monsters are purely metaphorical today, but I think you will see that this figure is treated as just as much of an inhuman demon as actual demons – and in some ways, perhaps even more so.

Before we get into that, however, just a quick reminder that I am currently running a fundraiser! I am starting a program of book clubs and educational mentorship services for teenagers, and I am raising money to get that off the ground in a way that will keep costs low and accessible for the future participants. The link to the Indiegogo preview is in the description, as well as the link to my interview with two of my dissertation project participants to learn more. Different tiers of donations have different perks that include personal feedback on written work and YouTube shorts on topics of your choice. So sign up to get notified when the campaign goes live.

In the meantime today, I will be discussing three films: The Bad Seed, from 1956, The Good Son, from 1993, and We Need to Talk about Kevin, from 2011. All of these movies concern fictional evil children, but in order to analyze them, I will be discussing some real cases where unfortunately actual violence, sometimes lethal violence, was committed by young kids. I’m not going to get graphic with it, but I just wanted to let you know up front that there is some info in this video that’s going to be a real bummer, to put it mildly. I think that this is an important topic, though, because it really speaks to how conditional our collective cultural parameters of “childhood” can be. Childhood is not just a matter of age, societally speaking. It is also a matter of behavior, and the wrong types of behavior can get certain kids ejected from the category. What exactly does that entail, and what does it say about our views on childhood in general? That’s what we’re going to explore today.

            Regarding terminology, I could have gone with either psychopath or sociopath for my descriptor of this topic. I chose the former because that’s the term that most of the scholarship I’ve found uses, but colloquially, they are used essentially as synonyms for a kind of person who is incapable of feeling empathy and who seeks to do harm to others. That, of course, is just a lay definition; the academic definitions get a lot more complicated – and I’m not really looking for arguments about those definitions in the comments, because that’s going to be a little bit beside the point. But it is important to note that neither sociopath nor psychopath is an accepted diagnosis in the DSM-V, aka the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which includes the symptoms and descriptions of the disorders that an actual practicing doctor is capable of diagnosing someone with in the U.S. However, this does not stop various practitioners of psychology from using these categories in their research, particularly those who work in the criminal justice system.

            I’ll unpack more of that alongside my discussion of the films, but at this point, I might as well tip my hand. I went into the research for this video already very much not a fan of the child psychopath narrative, and already quite skeptical of the medical and social construction of psychopathy to begin with. I have emerged from this research even more so. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think there are people who do absolutely heinous, violent things that they sometimes seem to enjoy doing, or that, unfortunately, sometimes children do those heinous, violent things, too. I mean, it’s not actually possible to argue either of those positions: we all can see heinous violence unfolding in the world around us every day. I don’t think, for example, that the current leaders of my country have anything resembling a functioning conscience. And we’ve all met sort of lower level cruel people in our own lives who seem to revel in that cruelty – and sometimes those people seem to be like that even when they are still kids. For example, I had a neighbor when I was little who was a little older than me, so he was probably around ten, who was violent on purpose to animals. It’s really upsetting and unsettling when you run across someone like that. What I will be arguing, however, is that I think that “psychopathy” as a culturally-maintained narrative framework is, at best, unhelpful. Fiction about child psychopaths is particularly troubling, because whatever thought it provokes is not, I believe, in actual children’s best interest.

            So with those cards on the table, let’s take a look at the movies. What are the stories that we tell about monstrous human children?

HEREDITARY THROWBACKS: THE BAD SEED

            The Bad Seed is the 1956 adaptation of a 1954 play that was an adaptation of an also 1954 novel. From that very quick timeline, I think we can surmise a particular interest in the topic of this story in the mid-twentieth century. The plot itself is straightforward, albeit salacious. A sweet little elementary-schooler named Rhoda has her parents and her neighbor/landlady, Monica Breedlove – and yes, that’s the character’s actual name – wrapped around her ladylike little finger. She and her perfect blonde braids are always presentable, never messy like the other children. She loves the fancy gifts that Monica lavishes upon her, including her sparkly sunglasses – the discussion of which lets us know that Rhoda has blue eyes, in case the black-and-white film left that in doubt. Monica says that Rhoda is “Such a natural little girl. She knows what she wants and she gets it.” She’s not like those “neurotic” children. (Monica fancies herself an amateur psychologist. She’s even met Freud.) Rhoda is excellent at all of her endeavors, like piano and penmanship – and it’s with the latter that we get our first indication of a problem.

            You see, Rhoda did not win the class penmanship award; a little boy named Claude did. This absolutely incenses Rhoda. Side note – Rhoda’s last name is Penmark, so we’re really not doing things like subtlety in this film. Despite her tantrum on this topic, no one in her household believes that she is anything other than a lovely little girl, with the exception of Monica’s gardener Leroy, who pretends to be, I guess, intellectually disabled, but is actually a devious creep who sees through Rhoda in a “takes one to know one” kind of way. Monica, meanwhile, thinks that Leroy is a “schizophrenic with paranoid overtones” and she treats him like garbage because of that. So there’s a lot going on there.

            Rhoda and her class go on a field trip to a lake and Claude, the winner of the penmanship competition, mysteriously drowns. I assume you can all guess what happened there.

            Evidence that Rhoda was somehow involved in Claude’s death begins to mount up, sending her nervous mother Christine into a tailspin of anxiety. Rhoda’s teacher is pretty ready to believe that Rhoda knows more than she’s saying. The teacher had already opined that “There’s a mature quality about her that’s disturbing in a child.” She had hoped that her school’s old-fashioned discipline would help Rhoda behave in a more childlike way, to which I say: what is that supposed to mean? Anyway, clearly that didn’t work, so now the teacher is ready to just pitch Rhoda out of school, despite not being able to prove what happened.

            Meanwhile, Rhoda is not helping her own case by being extremely nonchalant about Claude’s death. When Christine presses her about how she feels in the aftermath of the “accident,” Rhoda says, “I don’t feel any way at all.” When Christine learns that Rhoda had been chasing Claude around all day trying to take the penmanship medal from him – and then later was seen walking back from the wharf shortly before Claude’s body was discovered – Christine is understandably disturbed, especially when she is also told that the medal is now missing. Claude’s mother Hortense comes over to see if Christine knows the whereabouts of her dead son’s medal. Hortense is drunk and rambling, and she talks about how she is not wealthy and classy like the tremulously polite Christine. Christine defends Rhoda to her detractors, but when alone, she searches for and finds the medal. When she confronts Rhoda, Rhoda tries to play on her mother’s affections to change the subject, but Christine cuts her off by saying, “I know you’re an adroit liar.” Christine tries to explain how upset Hortense is, but she realizes that this simply makes no impression on Rhoda, who asks why Hortense doesn’t just go and get an orphan to replace Claude. Christine then recalls the mysterious death of a previous old neighbor whose belongings Rhoda had coveted, and she begins to connect the “my kid is a killer” dots.

            This leads to Christine confronting her father about her own past. She has always had dreams and fears of being adopted – and if you are keeping track of how many of the horror movies discussed on The Monster & The Child hinge on adoption, we are now up to four! The other three so far were The Omen, The Ring, and Orphan. That is objectively too many! Christine’s dad is a journalist who dabbles in psychology like seemingly everyone else in this movie. He has staked his claim that violence and criminality are entirely environmental, but he is challenged by a younger psychiatrist who claims that such traits can be hereditary, resulting in child murder prodigies. This younger man says, regarding the conscience, “It’s as if these children were born blind.” Christine, once alone with her father, presses the issue, and though he still insists that hereditary criminality is impossible, he admits that Christine’s hazy early childhood memories are, in fact, real. She was the daughter of an infamous female murderer who her, indeed, adoptive father was investigating. After the murderer was arrested, he just scooped Christine up, I guess. Christine reacts to this news by pummeling herself in the womb and saying that she wishes that she had died. Her dad is understandably distressed by that behavior and protests that he loves her and he’s glad that she exists – but the film itself certainly seems to agree with Christine on this one.

            Christine confronts Rhoda again and gets her to confess to Claude’s murder. Rhoda insists it was Claude’s fault, and credit where it’s due, this young actress performs an impressively unhinged yelling fit that then flips into attempts at flattery to get her mother back on her side. Christine is repulsed by Rhoda but still loves her, so she vows to protect her. She returns the penmanship medal to the lake to try to divert suspicion. The situation continues to devolve, however, with more evidence revealing Rhoda’s involvement – she may be a murder prodigy, but she is not a covering-her-tracks prodigy – and Christine eventually attempts to kill Rhoda with poison, and then she shoots herself. She fails to actually kill either of them, however, and as Christine recovers sadly in the hospital, professorial men contemplate the case. A doctor protests that, why, if people believed that someone could be born bad, then no one would adopt or ever even have kids of their own! Just in case you missed the fear that this movie was trying to instill! Rhoda, meanwhile, contemplates killing Monica to get her pet bird. But before she can do that, she sneaks out in the middle of a thunderstorm to retrieve the penmanship medal and gets struck dead by lightning. The end!

            It’s worth pointing out that the novel and play did not end on such a patently absurd note. Christine actually dies from her self-inflicted gunshot in those, and Rhoda lives. This ending was not allowed by the Motion Picture Production Code, aka the Hays Code, which governed studio films at the time and stipulated that villains were not permitted to succeed. So instead we get the most ridiculous implied divine intervention that I have ever seen. Meanwhile, in the credits, the actor who plays Christine gives the actor who plays Rhoda a mock spanking, while “Rhoda” yells and kicks. The 50s!

            Okay, so there’s obviously a great deal to unpack here. Let’s start with the fiction narrative and then work backwards to the underlying psychological and social narratives. Even people who uphold the legitimacy of the psychological construction of psychopathy have some beef with the way that this category is portrayed in fiction. In “Portrayal of psychopathy in the movies,” Morten Hesse defines psychopathy as “a psychological construct that describes chronic immoral and antisocial behavior, a lack of consciousness, and the ability to lie and deceive without feeling guilt or discomfort” (207). Hesse acknowledges that this is a wobbly category that is “often used interchangeably with sociopathy, dissocial and antisocial personality disorder, and shares many features with histrionic and narcissistic personality disorder” (207). Dissocial personality disorder is in the ICD-10, which is the World Health Organization’s classification manual, whereas antisocial personality disorder is in the DSM-5, which is developed by the American Psychiatric Association. So even here, we see that there’s no universal agreement on these categories. But Hesse points out that, within this proliferation of diagnostic or pseudo-diagnostic terms, the general consensus around psychopathy, which largely centers around the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, or PCL-R, also known as the Hare test after the guy who made it – and we’re gonna come back to that – is that psychopathy is related to “two dimensions, antisocial behavior and affective disturbance” (207). The latter includes things like glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, pathological lying, irresponsibility, and what has become the defining characteristic in the minds of the public, lack of remorse and empathy (207). Not all of the effects or outcomes of this constellation of symptoms catches either researchers’ or the public’s attention equally. Hesse explains that “The main research in psychopathy has been in criminal behavior, at times at the expense of the more interpersonal aspects of psychopathy” (207). This Hesse finds problematic because not all people who’d score high on the PCL-R are, in fact, violent criminals, but probably all of them do have a lot of turmoil within the relationships they have within their immediate circles. But addressing that is messy and difficult and doesn’t really make for simple movie plots.

            Instead, what makes it to fiction media is what Hesse calls the “narrative of the human monster” (208). This narrative entails “a social order wherein people live safely. However, a single individual with deviant beliefs and a deviant system of morality plots to change the social order – either for some specific gain, or simply to upset the current order” (208). In Rhoda’s case, the social order that hinges upon not murdering people at random is less important to her than her perceived deservingness of accolades. Hesse notes that this individualistic narrative appears to be broadly more compelling to audiences than complex breakdowns of social order. He provides the examples of portrayals of Hitler as an ultimate supervillain versus depictions of the deep and entangled roots of World War II, as well as the figure of the evil drug kingpin versus deep dives into the contexts of addiction. Even more troubling, in Hesse’s view, is the fact that “The narrative of the human monster invariably does not end up with harmony between the monstrous person and society. The human monster may be exiled or killed, but he is unable to change and live within society” (208). That is exactly what makes it a monster story (and obviously that caught my attention when I read it). Monsters, as I so frequently argue, are constructed as the antagonistic opposites of humanity. They are not something that can be reintegrated into our human systems and categories.

That perhaps goes double for instances of the child psychopath in media. In “The Social Function of Child Cruelty,” Monica Flegel and Christopher Parkes investigate “why the cruel child looms so large in the cultural imagination” (2). They point out that the development of the capital-R Romantic construction of childhood innocence coincided historically with “the emergence of the modern industrial state” (4). Citizens in the industrial state are resources for the workforce, resources that the state doesn’t want to lose. Even offenders against society can still be resources, through things like prison labor, or, if they are children, by retaining them in education and trying to retrain them into the kind of productive citizen that the nation-state needs. Flegel and Parkes argue that “the emergence of the hyper-inclusive nation-state often came into conflict with the old desire to cast out that which is considered deviant, abnormal, and threatening” (5). Evil child narratives reinforce that “old desire” by concocting situations in which the offender cannot be retained or retrained. Flegel and Parkes write, “The evil child dares us to be tough enough to cast out that which is seemingly deserving of protection, and mocks us when we baulk at doing so. The evil child, in other words, warns the inclusive society that it can be played for a sucker” (6). Death or at least complete and permanent exile are presented as the only viable options for the “evil” child – even when that evil is presented as a psychological phenomenon.

            And what exactly is that psychological phenomenon? The Bad Seed presents it explicitly as an entirely genetic issue. That should raise some eugenics alarm bells. I talked all about eugenics in my videos about childhood and disability, but put very simplistically, eugenics refers to both the philosophy that the human race can be made more perfect through selective breeding, as well as practices that further that philosophy. Such practices have historically included the forced sterilization of people deemed to be unworthy of reproducing. Eugenics is inherently ableist, as well as inherently white supremacist. Rhoda’s pristine blondeness may seem to contradict the latter, but as Karen J. Renner points out in Evil Children in the Popular Imagination, the evil kids of horror films are usually white precisely because that whiteness is associated with innocence. Their whiteness heightens the perceived contrast between what childhood is supposed to be and the devious version of it that is presented on screen. And in this case, it also serves to underline the film’s thesis that psychopathy – particularly in the form of violent criminality – can hide in plain sight, even within the best of families.

            This notion of hereditary evil is portrayed as daring and controversial in The Bad Seed, but it was by no means new in the 1950s. It had just gone by different names. This is one of the main things that Jarkko Jalava, Stephanie Griffiths, and Michael Maraun explore in The Myth of the Born Criminal: Psychopathy, Neurobiology, and the Creation of the Modern Degenerate. They use that term “degenerate” deliberately, because they trace the current construction of psychopathy back to nineteenth century notions of literal degeneration theory, the idea that certain classes of people, including criminals – or, I should say, the criminalized – were “evolutionary throwbacks” who often could be identified by physical “aberrations,” which, wouldn’t you know it, were defined by deviations from ableist and white supremacist norms (5, 37). This, the authors point out, is a total misapplication of Darwinian theory, which is all about traits positive for survival being selected, so there would not really be any such thing as a “throwback” to something we that had subsequently evolved away from, since those are the traits that … wouldn’t have been selected. They’re not supposed to be there anymore. Like, they’re not able to be passed down. But that didn’t stop degeneration theory from continuing on into the twentieth century, and in what is probably the least surprising sentence I will say all day, it proved to be a particularly attractive theory to fascists. Nowadays, degeneration theory has been scientifically rejected – but, Jalava et al. argue, it has not entirely gone away. Instead, in the late twentieth century, it would end up lending a lot of its underpinnings to the more modern construction of psychopathy. So let’s take a look at a late twentieth century version of the human monster narrative in The Good Son.

EVIL JUST IS: THE GOOD SON

The Good Son tells the story of two very opposite children, Mark, aka baby Elijah Wood, and Henry, portrayed by Macaulay Culkin at the height of his child stardom. Mark’s mother has just died of cancer, and Mark’s dad is balancing work with his new single parenthood. Mark’s uncle steps in to encourage his brother to close “that deal in Tokyo” to secure his family’s finances, and promises that he will look after Mark up in Maine for the couple of weeks it will take to do so. Mark, who’s grown up in the Southwest, does not know his uncle’s family, so this is the first time he’s meeting his cousins Henry and his little sister Connie (played by Quinn Culkin). Mark and Henry are the same age, and at first it seems like they’re going to get along – though only because Mark passes the first of Henry’s tests. Henry kicks Mark pretty hard under the table at dinner, and Mark responds by kicking him back but not ratting him out. Both the boys grin at this, as they bond through hidden transgressions. Mark is intrigued by Henry’s daring, as he does things like throw rocks to break other people’s windows and steal cigarettes. There is the germ of something interesting here about boyhood and violence and masculinity, but the film doesn’t actually follow through with any of that.

Mark and Henry have some early confrontations, such as when Henry presses a little too hard about the subject of Mark’s mom. Henry is fascinated by death, and he compares Mark’s answer about what his mother looked like dead – “kinda pale” – to what his own younger brother, Richard, looked like after “accidentally” drowning in the bath: “He was completely blue.” Mark, distressed by Henry’s “scientific” interrogation, says, “Shut up or I’ll hit you.” Henry escalates immediately, telling him that if he tries it, he will throw Mark down the well. Then, much like Rhoda, he alters his affect and apologizes ingratiatingly. Mark is shaken but buys it – for now.

            However, he is less able to shake off Henry’s cruelty to animals. Henry has a homemade crossbow – never a good sign – and though he claims he didn’t mean to shoot the neighbor’s dog, his dead-eyed flat delivery of “I was only trying to scare him” is not convincing. Which is sort of an interesting connection again between Rhoda and Henry: they are charming when they are flattering others, but their manipulativeness isn’t as effective when they’re protesting their own innocence. I wonder what these movies are trying to say with that. That there’s always a tell? Or is it that because they’re still so young, they haven’t perfected their manipulative craft yet? Or simply that innocence itself resists convincing impersonation for too long?

            Things continue to escalate. There is a child psychologist on the scene, and she is completely ineffective. The family has sought her out for Mark in his grief, which is reasonable, but she fails to provide Mark with any useful help when he begins asking probing questions about evil. The psychologist says, “Evil is a word people use when they’ve given up trying to understand someone.” Mark asks what if there is nothing to understand: “What if there is no reason? What if it just is?” The psychologist says, “I don’t believe in evil,” and Mark portentously answers, “You should.” Now, me, I feel like I’d have some follow-up questions there, but okay. At this point, Henry has not only caused a multi-car accident by pushing a dummy off an overpass, but he has also begun to make things more personal. He is extremely possessive and jealous over what he perceives as his, and that includes his mom. Mark has understandably grown very attached to his aunt, who he sees as his dead mother returned to him. Henry does not like this. He goes from trying to make Mark his partner in crime to targeting Mark as his enemy.

            Henry is also jealous of any positive attention that Connie receives, which results in her attempted murder, and of course any viewer who has even half been paying attention has already figured out that he was responsible for his little brother’s drowning, too. Mark tries to tell the adults around him that Henry is violent and dangerous, and they do not believe him. In fact, Susan, Henry’s mother, lashes out at Mark when he attempts to warn her. Throughout the film, Susan is portrayed as calm, kind, literally nearly angelic, the reincarnated soul of motherhood, but when Mark tells her that Henry tried to kill Connie on purpose, she slaps him. I doubt that would make it into the movie if it were made today, but it’s significant to note that the overall framing of Susan’s kindness is not impacted at all by the fact that she slaps a child, which I think is telling. Remember, when “corporal punishment” is done against adults, that’s called “physical assault.” Even though this film does demonstrate how hard it can be for a child to get adults to listen to them and take them seriously, it doesn’t do so in a way that interrogates the broader constructs of childhood that create those conditions. The reason the adults don’t believe Mark is that they just can’t conceive of an evil child, which the film ultimately upholds as an aberration, a violation against what a child is supposed to be. The adults aren’t necessarily wrong to find it hard to believe, because, the film argues, such a thing should never exist.

            And just like in The Bad Seed, that evil child cannot be reintegrated into society. There is no possibility of redemption or rehabilitation. Susan comes to realize that Mark has been telling the truth when she discovers that Henry had hidden Richard’s bath toy, one which he knew that Susan had searched for and craved as a memorial to her son. Henry, when caught, says that it was his toy first, revealing the possessiveness that led to Richard’s murder. Like Rhoda, he tries to turn on the flattery and charm again, but it no longer works. So instead, Henry tries to kill his mother by pushing her off of Chekhov’s cliff, which she’s been standing on the edge of the whole movie while she grieves for Richard. Mark intercepts him, a scuffle ensues, and both boys go rolling off the cliff and are caught by Susan, who has one kid in each hand. Except she can’t hold on to both of them like this – she needs two arms to haul one of them up. Henry, in a weirdly calm voice, tries to convince her to choose him by saying that he loves her. Mark, meanwhile, is overcome with fear, begging and crying. The gap between the “naturalness” of their behavior is clear. The Hays Code no longer prevents anything but divine intervention from killing the evil kid, but while the movie does allow Susan to make a choice, her culpability is still lessened by the contrived trolley problem of the circumstances. Susan lets go of the psychopathic child to save the innocent child – the “real” child.

            The Good Son’s release was well-timed in the most horrible way imaginable. The year it premiered, 1993, was a year already marked by discourse about violent childhood. To be clear, this wasn’t planned on the filmmakers’ part; the script had been in development for years before it wound up actually getting made. But in the most terrible possible coincidence, seven months before the movie came out, two ten-year-old boys in England abducted and murdered a two-year-old, Jamie Bulger. This crime was premeditated, and it was absolutely brutal. I am not going into any more detail about it than that, and I do not recommend looking it up. What’s relevant to this discussion is how the public – and even more importantly, the press – reacted to the shock. In “Killing the Age of Innocence: Newspaper Reporting of the Death of James Bulger,” Bob Franklin and Julian Petley write, “For the most part, press reporting of the case was highly sensational and vilified [the perpetrators] as ‘monsters,’ ‘freaks,’ ‘animals’ or simply as ‘evil’” (136). This dehumanization coincided with issues of classism – it’s England, what do you expect – and the perennial panic about the breakdown of the nuclear family (146). But the press didn’t stop there: many took their conclusions about the young offenders and extrapolated them to apply to childhood writ large. Reporters took to suggesting that “the ‘innocent angels’ of an earlier social construction of childhood were replaced by ‘little demons’” (136). Viewers of this channel may recall that the “little demons” construction was not actually new; this was the historical view of, for example, Puritan theology, which held that children are born with innately sinful natures that have to be broken by righteous adults in order to deter them from the path of damnation. Franklin and Petley accept the Enlightenment and Romantic philosophies of innocence, or at least tabula rasa, more uncritically than I prefer as a Childhood Studies scholar, but I do agree with them that going back to the demon framework is not a desired outcome, either. Their larger point is that the panic about childhood sells: it pushed a lot of papers in 1993, without, they argue, actually adding anything useful to the conversation about childhood violence. Switching one’s view from “children are innocent” to “children are devils” does not, as it turns out, help one understand the real causes of cruel behaviors.

            The Good Son, premiering in this year of the murderous child conversation, doesn’t really offer answers, either, other than Mark’s assertion that sometimes evil just “is.” The film does not include any environmental explanation for Henry’s violence, nor does it offer a genetic explanation in the way that The Bad Seed does. If there are any secret adoptions from murderers in Henry’s lineage, we don’t hear about it. Though The Bad Seed is a clear influence on this film, The Good Son is markedly less interested in psychological theories; again, the only psychologist present here is basically completely useless. But the film did come out in a greater context of a renewed interest in the figure of the biological psychopath. In the late twentieth century, there was an explosion of studies into the differences between the typical brain – “typical brain” – and the psychopathic brain, as aided by advancements in brain imaging technology and techniques. Meanwhile, while Robert Hare had developed the first iteration of the Psychopathy Checklist in the 1970s, the revised version – the PCL-R that brought him fame – was published in 1991. So The Good Son came out smack in the midst of psychopathy fever, culturally speaking. Though the scientific community had theoretically dispensed with degeneration theory and no longer believed in the 100% genetic explanation that The Bad Seed supports, there was a renewed fervor for quantifying moral deviance and classifying “the psychopath” as a biologically distinct kind of human. As you can guess from the title of Jalava et al.’s book, The Myth of the Born Criminal, there are critics of this quest, and I would at this point count myself among them.

            Jalava et al. provide a bunch of disclaimers to their critique, and I’ll echo them for myself here. They acknowledge that a lot of the studies that have been conducted since the late twentieth century do, in fact, show statistically significant neurobiological differences between the brains of those who report or have exhibited symptoms consistent with Hare’s definition of psychopathy – and/or the DSM-5’s definition of antisocial personality disorder, etc. – and those who do not. They also acknowledge that the scientific consensus that these symptoms are derived from an interaction between biological and environmental causes is also probably true – albeit because that’s true of, like, all human psychology. They write, “when we say that an interaction is at the root of psychopathy we are both (a) probably right and (b) not saying much” (13). Jalava et al. also impress upon the reader that they are not denying that many of the people who have been classified, in one way or another, as psychopaths can do and have done real harm, sometimes in absolutely horrific ways. I’m frankly extremely glad that I’m only doing one video on this topic, because the real-life cases, including the Jamie Bulger case, that I came across in my research are extremely upsetting to read about. I will stick to my fantasy monsters, thank you very much. But even though we can all agree that there are people, sometimes including kids, who clearly do not have adequate access to consideration of other humans’ lives and rights, the point that Jalava et al. want to make is that the question of why that is is not nearly as settled as many people in psychological professions would have us believe.

            Take, for example, those brain imaging studies. Many studies in the past thirty to forty years have been performed that demonstrate quantifiable differences in brain activity and function among, for example, violent criminals and non-violent people. Different areas of the brain have been targeted in these studies, but a popular one is the frontal lobe, which is the center of a lot of decision making, as well as expressions and experiences of mood and personality. If any of you took a high school psych class, you will recall the nineteenth century case of Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who took a piece of pipe through the dome after an explosion, and subsequently became much more erratic and aggressive in his behavior for a time. This was attributed to the placement of the brain injury in the frontal lobe. Important note: this case is also not as clear-cut and settled as it was taught to me in AP Psych, 2007. I hope since then the curriculum has improved; let me know if it has in the comments. In any case, this incident at least has a clear before and after, Jalava et al. point out that the brain imaging studies don’t. (And, they also point out, most of the time, the scientists conducting these studies do include that caveat in their published papers, but that caution frequently doesn’t translate to popular interpretation of data.) There is no way to know whether the neurobiological differences are causal for psychopathy or violence, or if they resulted from, for example, environments of violence or even were caused by carrying out acts of violence, as opposed to the other way around. Again, usually with something as complex as the brain, the answer is all of the above, plus plenty of other stuff that we didn’t even know to account for.

            Another major issue underlying many of these studies is a whole slew of problematic definitions. Psychopathy, which again, is not an official psychological diagnosis as sanctioned by any of the governing bodies of diagnoses, has taken on a very broad array of symptoms. I’m sure we’ve all seen plenty of pop psychology about psychopaths, including psychopaths at the top levels of corporations and governments, for example. While I would certainly agree that a great deal of evil is done at those levels, especially where I am in the U.S. in this historical moment, it takes a wide net to catch both serial killers and senators. And don’t get me wrong: the actions of the latter can frequently cause considerably more deaths than an individual member of the former category. But the literal behaviors are undeniably different, and behavior is usually a major factor in creating psychological classifications. A person who wants to kill multiple people by their own hand and a person who would be repulsed by doing so but is fine with signing off on forever wars both definitely have something wrong with them, but, Jalava et al. argue, saying that what’s wrong with them is the same innate biological thing really muddies the waters if we’re trying to understand either of those expressions of violence.

            The next critique may sound like a contradiction of the one that I just laid out, but I think they do ultimately fit together. Jalava et al. explain that a lot of definitional criteria for psychopathy in various settings, including in the PCL-R, specifically point to criminality, which is not a biological classification, but a sociocultural one. Laws, and therefore breaking laws, are contextual and profoundly influenced by social hierarchies and systems of oppression. That’s why, for example, more children of color become criminalized – that is, policed and punished by the criminal justice system – than white kids. I clearly need to do a video on “superpredators” at some point. I do talk about that a bit back in my childhood, monstrosity, and race video, so you can go check that out. But again, the evil children in The Bad Seed and The Good Son are not only white but blonde, and that’s because that visual distance from cultural categories of guilt is meant to be part of what shocks us. The implication is that audiences would be less shocked by depictions of violence from kids of color – and why wouldn’t they be, when that is a preexisting mediated narrative in things like the news and political rhetoric? In reality, though, “criminality” is not the same category as straight-up murderin’, though obviously that does break a law, and treating it as such in classificatory criteria is going to literally create, on paper, more marginalized “psychopaths.” And there’s a temptation to counter this with, well, okay, let’s cast that wide net, then. You know, some of our “psychopaths” like the CEOs and presidents are the ones whose un-empathetic behavior is more socially sanctioned. That’s true, but I would argue that these two problems are part and parcel of a larger issue of trying to pathologize evil, which leads to Jalava et al.’s overarching critique: trying to shoehorn cultural systems of morality into static biological categories just will never work on any satisfactorily explanatory level. All we’re doing is finding new ways to position evil as something inherently outside of non-pathologized – non-disabled – human experience.

            And that starts with these depictions of childhood, because how better to show the category of evil being different, Other, from the very beginning? I obviously found a lot to appreciate in The Myth of the Born Criminal, but one critique I had is that I wished the authors had talked a little bit more about the childhood aspect of this conversation, since it’s pretty central to the whole “born” part of the equation. But I suppose that’s where I come in as the Childhood Studies person. Though The Good Son doesn’t offer a specific psychological or biological cause for Henry’s violence, it absolutely portrays him as a born criminal who could not – and should not – be saved. He is portrayed as just as much of an inhuman monster as the journalists covering the Jamie Bulger case portrayed that child’s killers. Frankly, The Good Son is more optimistic than the Jamie Bulger coverage, because it shows the other children in the film as still innocent; Henry is an aberration, an imposter child, as I discussed in my second disability video. The reporting around the real crime basically called all of childhood innocence into question, which The Good Son stops short of doing. But both share a fear-mongering core: you, adults, can’t trust the kids. You don’t know which one might be out to get you, might be a monster in disguise, might deserve death over growing into their own adulthood. After all, those psychopaths we’re all hearing about in the 90s have to start somewhere, right? So what if they’re right there in your own family or your own neighborhood, invisibly but undeniably wrong?

What have child psychopath narratives looked like more recently? The ones that acknowledge that “interaction” between biology and environment, as opposed to presenting a kid that just pops out whoops, all evil? And are the updated narratives any better, thematically speaking? To address these questions, we need to talk about We Need To Talk About Kevin.

“MOMMY WAS HAPPY BEFORE WIDDLE KEVIN CAME ALONG”: WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

            Cinematically and structurally, We Need To Talk About Kevin is a more highbrow-looking film than The Bad Seed or The Good Son. While the latter two are straightforward linear thrillers, We Need To Talk About Kevin jumps around in time. The color palette shifts with the mood of the scene; the camera lingers on environmental details. The viewer gets the sense that they are watching something Artistic with Something To Say.

            Okay, yeah, you can probably tell that I didn’t like this film any more than the other two.

            Through the various timelines, we learn the story of Eva Khatchadourian. Because of the nonlinear nature of the film, we already know that Eva somehow ends up alone and ostracized by her community. But as a newlywed, she was blissfully happy – though she is considerably less so when she becomes pregnant with her first child, Kevin. She is viscerally uncomfortable in her pregnant body and dissociative after giving birth. I have never been pregnant, but from everything I understand: fair. Pregnancy and childbirth are famously not a great time, physically speaking. Eva’s discomfort with motherhood continues as Kevin proves to be a difficult baby – but seemingly just for her. He’ll cry nonstop only to quiet down as soon as her husband Franklin returns home from work. Franklin is enamored with their infant, and he says, “You just have to rock him a little bit.”

This disconnect between the parents only grows as Kevin gets older. He continues to display a clear preference for his dad, which on the surface seems pretty reasonable, as his dad is the one who actually likes him. But Eva interprets Kevin’s animosity as deliberate manipulation, and I think the film itself supports that interpretation. When he is a little bit older, still a baby but no longer an infant, Eva tries to coax words or really any form of social interaction out of him, to no avail. When he does start talking, it is primarily to his father, and he deliberately avoids the word “Mama.” As a toddler and preschooler, he resists toilet training, but otherwise is “good” for dad and “bad” for mom. More on that in a bit, but before we even get there – when Kevin is still just a baby – in anger and frustration, Eva speaks to him in a mocking baby talk: “Mommy was happy before widdle Kevin came along, you know dat? Now Mommy wakes up every morning and wishes she was in France.” Franklin overhears her and shakes his head in utter disappointment.

So to me, this is the crux of the film, regardless of anything that comes after. Was Kevin born bad, or is he just responding to Eva’s distaste for motherhood? I think the film is trying to leave that open-ended, but in practice it just seems like they’re trying to have it both ways – and I think either answer pushes some really harmful cultural narratives. So, first off, like I said, parenthood, and especially biological motherhood, is very difficult, but acknowledging it as such is often a major societal taboo. If childhood is upheld as innocence incarnate, then motherhood is glorified as the holy sanctuary of that innocence – in just as dehumanizing a way. It’s all about the big categories, right: all children, all mothers. If there are individuals who fall outside of those constructs, then they are aberrations – monsters – who need to be expelled from the categories. This film may want to be subversive by portraying a mother who doesn’t like motherhood, but it implies that that can result in a literally evil child, so I don’t think we’re subverting so much as fully upholding the construct, you know? Now, the usual disclaimer applies here when I’m talking about an adaptation: I don’t know if this is made more complicated in the novel on which the film is based, because I haven’t read it. But judging the movie solely on its own merits, one of the options we are presented with is that reluctant motherhood leads to psychopathic kids. I am just as troubled by that option as I am by Option B, which is the same old born bad narrative as The Bad Seed or The Good Son.

Now, that doesn’t mean that I think that Eva does no wrong. Ideally, people who don’t want kids wouldn’t have them, but if they do wind up in a situation where they do, it is incumbent upon them as adults to not mistreat those kids, and that includes not saying hurtful things to them, even if you don’t think they can understand you yet. Like, the kid didn’t ask to be here, either, and also kids are people. Thus sayeth the Childhood Studies scholar. I suppose one reading of Kevin’s behavior as a baby could be that he is responding to Eva’s demeanor – that he cries for her as an infant because of how tense and upset she is, and he relaxes for his father because his dad is more chill. I don’t know enough about infant behavior to know if that would be realistic, but I can see it as a potential interpretation, right? But I get really stuck on how quickly Kevin becomes actively manipulative in terms of playing his parents off of each other, and how the film seems to include his infant crying within that as like the start of this pattern of behavior. I do know that a literal infant is not capable of conscious manipulation, and neither are toddlers, despite often being accused of such if they are not “behaving.” Like, yes, they might be trying to get their way with tears, but not in a dishonest way. That’s just historically what’s worked in their very limited experience of the past. Manipulation requires you to understand the thought processes of others – famously difficult when you’re, like, three – and also to be capable of emotional deception on your own part. I just don’t believe that very young kids are cognitively able to do that at the ages that Kevin is portrayed as such.

Even when he hits preschool age, where I could believe that a kid would treat his parents differently based on how they treat him, Kevin is portrayed as coldly calculating. Obviously, this is meant to make him seem unnatural, but Hesse points out that this isn’t necessarily realistic for adult “psychopaths,” either, even though cool and collected is the favored mode of the movie psychopath. In reality, people who meet the PCL-R criteria or have been diagnosed with things like antisocial or narcissistic personality disorder exhibit “a marked lack of purpose and a high degree of impulsivity” (209). People who struggle to connect emotionally to their social worlds often have very chaotic experiences of life, as opposed to operating like little Bond villains. Kevin does display impulsivity, but not necessarily a lack of purpose, at least where his family is concerned. Through most of his life, his clear, singular purpose appears to be make his mom miserable, and make the rest of the family think she’s crazy. He draws all over the walls of her office which she’s painstakingly wallpapered with maps (of all the places she resents not being able to go to anymore), and he soils his diaper at her twice in a row. The second time, Eva reacts violently, throwing him against the wall and breaking his arm. But Kevin then covers for her, much to her bewilderment, telling his dad that he just fell off the changing table. He then acquiesces to toilet training for the first time, implying that he could do it all along, but was just choosing not to to spite his mother.

The most genuinely complex and therefore most interesting part of the film is this throughline of Kevin potentially actually caring about his mother more than he does anyone else. When she physically abuses him, he treats her almost as a partner in crime. As a teenager, he describes the memory of the abuse as “the most honest thing” Eva ever did. When he is still a young child, he gets sick, and while he is feverish, he softens towards Eva, telling his father to go away while his mom reads him a Robin Hood book. Eva is delighted, but the fondness fades along with his fever. Kevin does, however, continue to treasure the book, which leads him to an all-consuming interest in archery that lasts into his teenage years.

In the intervening time, Eva has another child, a girl, Celia. She conceals the pregnancy from her husband until it is implied to be too late to abort, which Franklin seems upset about. I don’t know if this is explored in more detail in the novel, but it is an interesting little twist in the movie, as until this point, one would expect that Eva would be the one who wouldn’t want to have another child. It’s left up to the viewer’s imagination what her motives are – perhaps a second chance at a normal kid – “normal kid” – as well as what Franklin’s are for his disappointment. Their marriage is under strain and has been for years, mostly due to their differing feelings about Kevin. Kevin, for his part, charms Celia as he does his father, even though he tosses off cruel comments at her, which upset Eva more than they do Celia herself, who seems content to write it off as just teasing. But Celia also has a closer and more seemingly typical relationship with Eva, with none of the animosity or manipulation. I don’t think that is explored nearly enough for the themes that the film is trying to have. For instance, we aren’t shown how Eva felt during her pregnancy with Celia or much of Celia’s infancy, and when those things with Kevin are so central to the question of why he turned out the way he did, then glossing over them with Celia feels either a) disingenuous or b) like the movie is nudging us towards that conclusion that Kevin was, in fact, simply born bad.

Anyway, Kevin and Celia are left alone one evening, Celia somehow has an accident with Drano that leads to her needing one of her eyes removed, Franklin blames Eva for leaving it out, Eva says she didn’t and obviously suspects Kevin of hurting Celia on purpose, and things in the family go downhill from there. Franklin wants a divorce because of Eva’s seemingly irrational hatred of their son, and Kevin overhears their conversation. Shortly thereafter, he uses his bow and arrow to murder Franklin and Celia, then locks several classmates in the school gym and kills them, too. That is why Eva is alone and a pariah in the latest timeline of the movie. She visits Kevin regularly in prison, presumably as some sort of self-imposed penance. In the final visit, a couple years after the murders, Kevin expresses fear about being transferred to an adult prison now that he is aging out of juvenile detention. Eva asks why he did what he did, and Kevin answers, “I used to think I knew. Now I’m not so sure.” Eva then embraces her son, and he hugs her back. The end.

So there are a few things to unpack here. First, clearly the figure of the school shooter has become a major touchstone in constructions of child psychopaths since the Columbine shooting of 1999. The tight family focus of this film doesn’t make much room for a look at like Kevin’s social life with his peers, so we don’t get much of, for example, the bullied loner trope that has become so common in this discourse (and that in itself can often be often misleading; a link to more on that in the works cited). Of course Kevin’s weapon of choice is also different from your typical school shooter, which both strengthens the link to his mom via the Robin Hood book and also fits into his manipulativeness. His father only ever saw archery as a cool athletic endeavor and overlooked its violence. That might be a little harder to pull off with guns, although lord knows plenty of fathers and sons bond over guns in this country. Kevin is an adolescent before he grows into a murderer, unlike Henry and Rhoda, but this kind of just gives him a larger reach. The child psychopath’s kills are close and intimate, whereas the adolescent psychopath can branch out.

Though Kevin doesn’t die, he is effectively removed from society, as Hesse argues that the “human monster” or fictional psychopath must always be. His removal is about to become even stricter and more permanent with his graduation to adult prison. His mother, at the end, does not reject him as Henry’s and Rhoda’s do, but as a hated pariah herself, she has also been largely cut out of society alongside her son. And at their heart, all three of these films turn on the same fear that they hope to induce in their audience: wouldn’t it be awful if this happened to you?

So then who is the “you” in question? Not the kids themselves, but the parents. The white, well-to-do mothers, in all three cases. And just a note on the whiteness here in We Need To Talk About Kevin: Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly, as the parents, are both fair, as is the girl who plays Celia, and then there’s the dark-haired, dark-eyed Kevin, played by the Jewish Ezra Miller as a teen and a couple of fairly ethnically ambiguous child actors. So, despite having pointed out the problematic implications of the very blond evil kids in The Bad Seed and The Good Son, I don’t think “the one dark member of the family is the evil one” is any better! But the parents, and more specifically, the mothers, in all of these movies very much exist in spaces of whiteness and wealth – the material beauty of their homes is emphasized in all three – which, in my admittedly not charitable reading, is intended to raise the stakes of everything that they have to lose by producing an evil child. Look at everything you have that the psychopath you birthed can bring down. To protect this standing, Eva should have either not had kids or been better at it; Christine should have definitely not had kids for eugenics reasons; and for poor Susan, there wasn’t a damn thing she could do to stop it, because the born criminal just happened. Everything falls apart – family, success, happiness – when the child is not innocent like they are supposed to be.

CONCLUSION

            Over here on The Monster & The Child, your humble scholar clearly loves monster stories – but not all monster stories. Or, to frame it another way, I do think that all monster stories are fascinating and worthy of study, because they all have a lot to say, and a lot to reveal about our culture. But sometimes – and honestly, historically, a lot of the time – what they reveal is a lot of regressive, reactionary fear-mongering around the categories that our cultures have really built up as the load-bearing pillars of society. Childhood is absolutely one these pillars, and I think that the “human monster” story within child psychopath narratives is definitely revealing, sure, but also fundamentally irresponsible. To my mind, all these films manage to do is to encourage a greater wedge of distrust between adults and children. Yes, they call our social construction of childhood innocence into question – which you may recognize as something that I also try to do, all the time – but they do so in a way that swings to the other end of dehumanization. If kids are not angels, then they are devils. They can dress this up in seemingly scientific notions – science that, as Jalava et al. have shown, is not as settled as the public imagines it is. But they do not offer any notion of help or rehabilitation for the kids in question. Where does that leave real kids who have committed violence? Does it serve literally anyone, us or them, to further this belief that they are born broken and beyond help? Because the total excision from society that these films portray, particularly those that end in death, does not actually match the reality. We can’t and shouldn’t just throw away any kids who are exhibiting antisocial behavior – even dangerously antisocial behavior. We still share our society with them, and it would behoove us all to maybe spend more of our research time and research money and narrative time and money on things that would help those kids – and those adults – as opposed to determining how exactly they’re literally biologically not like the rest of us so we can feel better about being “real” humans in our brains and bodies, unlike those psychopath. That latter impulse is not, to put it mildly, helpful.

            As with many child monster stories, the fictional child psychopath reveals much of the instability of our constructions of childhood, particularly innocence. It’s easy to sell fear of that construct toppling. And selling fear about childhood going wrong is big political business. I’m not saying that the people pushing like MAHA wellness grifts about childhood diet or anti-vaccination or the people using childhood protection as a Trojan horse for destroying online privacy, for example, are saying that if they don’t enact these exact policies your kids will literally become psychopaths … but they’re not not saying that, right? Like, they are saying that there will be something irrevocably wrong with their brains or bodies. Maybe they weren’t born bad, but they can go bad really early unless you buy what we’re selling or vote like we tell you. And honestly, while I don’t think The Good Son or We Need To Talk About Kevin necessarily intended it – The Bad Seed is a different story, because that one’s actively eugenicist – I do think that the place the child psychopath narrative occupies in our culture makes those grifts easier to pull off. I’m not saying we shouldn’t tell stories about childhood and violence; we should. But if we’re going to agree that those topics are important, then we need to have more care about how we tell those stories.

            So what are your thoughts about child psychopath narratives? Let me know in the comments down below. Remember to like and subscribe, and to head on over to Indiegogo to help me start my program of book clubs and educational mentorship services for teens. Counteract this slight downer of a video about narratives that are bad for kids by doing something good for kids! There are fun rewards on the Indiegogo for donations, and if you can’t swing it but can share it, that is also extremely helpful. My Patreon is also in the description, and super thanks is enabled on here. I have a lot of exciting plans for future videos, and I really appreciate any and all interactions that makes the algorithm remember that I’m here. Next week, I will be back with more chapters from my YA manuscript, Our Sharp Forsaken Teeth, and in two weeks’ time, we’ll have a new video essay about parental rejection of the monstrous child, and in that one, I will be talking about Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. I hope you will join me for that. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• The Bad Seed, dir. by Mervyn LeRoy (1956)
• The Good Son, dir. by Joseph Ruben (1993)
• We Need To Talk About Kevin, dir. by Lynne Ramsay (2011)

References:

• Booth, B. (2026, Mar. 8). Online age-verification tools spread across U.S. for child safety, but adults are being surveilled. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/08/social-media-child-safety-internet-ai-surveillance.html
• Choi, J. & Frazin, R. (2025, Sept. 9). MAHA strategy released: Targets vaccines, chronic disease, childhood nutrition. The Hill. https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5494225-trump-health-strategy-report/
• Flegel, M. & Parkes, C. (2018). The Social Function of Child Cruelty. In M. Flegel & C. Parkes (Eds.), Cruel Children in Popular Texts and Cultures, pp. 1-14. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Franklin, B. & Petley, J. (1996). Killing the Age of Innocence: Newspaper Reporting of the Death of James Bulger. In J. Pilcher & S. Wagg (Eds.), Thatcher’s Children? Politics, Childhood And Society In The 1980s And 1990s, pp. 134-154. Routledge.
• Hesse, M. (2009). Portrayal of psychopathy in the movies. Int Rev Psychiatry, 21(3), 207-212.
• Jalava, J., Griffiths, S., & Maraun, M. (2015). The Myth of the Born Criminal: Psychopathy, Neurobiology, and the Creation of the Modern Degenerate. University of Toronto Press.
• Langman, P., Petrosino, A., & Persson, H. (2018). Five misconceptions about school shootings. San Francisco, CA: WestEd. Available from https://www.wested.org/resources/ five-misconceptions-about-school-shootings/.
• Renner, K.J. (2016). Evil Children in the Popular Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan.