The Best Horror Movie of 1956: The Bad Seed

This post is part of Paste’s Century of Terror project, a countdown of the 100 best horror films of the last 100 years, culminating on Halloween. You can see the full list in the master document, which will collect each year’s individual film entry as it is posted.

The Year

1956 is perhaps a touch weaker than the years that surround it, where we wouldn’t bother putting the likes of The Creature Walks Among Us into the list of honorable mentions, but thanks to a handful of classics it’s still a fairly strong year overall.

Yet another adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame graced the silver screen this year, this time starring Anthony Quinn as Quasimodo, but it’s less consequential than either the Charles Laughton or Lon Chaney versions of the same story. More accurately capturing the current zeitgeist is Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, which borrows the motifs of The War of the Worlds but capitalizes on the real life saucer craze of the era, brought to life through Ray Harryhausen’s state-of-the-art effects. The film contains numerous stop-motion FX shots that are now classics, especially the entire UFO attack on Washington D.C., which includes the sight of a crashing saucer smashing its way through the Washington Monument, which splinters like a toothpick. Harryhausen’s designs for the saucers themselves would become genre staples in their own right, as the static central cabin and rotating outer disc were often used as shorthand descriptions for a “typical” UFO, themselves symbols of 1950s science fiction.

It’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though, that stands as 1956’s other gem. Don Siegel’s film is the first of several adaptations of Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers, and although it lacks some of the more stomach-churningly weird sights of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake (like that man-faced dog!), it makes up for it with solid performances and its uniquely bright, complacent portrayal of human society being destroyed from within. As so many others have observed since the film’s first release, it’s the ultimate Red Scare-era parable for the coming conflict of East vs. West, emotionless collectivist vs. passionate individualist cultures, tapping into the simmering fear that the nation’s very identity was being secretly undermined by outsiders. The fact that the assimilations and “pod people” creations happen while we sleep only deepens the metaphor, implying the need for constant, ceaseless vigilance. Of course, these themes have kept Invasion of the Body Snatchers painfully relevant at any time in American history when xenophobia is running rampant, today being no exception. Embroiled as we are in another culture war revolving around oft-racist accusations of “un-American” behavior, there’s never been a better time to revisit the film than right now.

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1956 Honorable Mentions: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Rodan, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Creature Walks Among Us, X the Unknown

The Film: The Bad Seed
Director: Mervyn LeRoy

If Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the ultimate Cold War parable, then The Bad Seed is the ultimate cinematic argument in favor of “nature” over “nurture,” when it comes to the root of pure psychopathy. There have been a lot of evil little kids in the history of American horror cinema, but few as chilling self-righteous about their superiority as little Rhoda.

That’s arguably the most unsettling thing about 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark: She has no easily understandable reason for being the way she is, no excuse for the audience to fall back on in attempting to rationalize her behavior. She isn’t the victim of some form of serial abuse. She has two loving parents, although father Kenneth is absent due to his military duties. She has a comfortable upbringing, and is never implied to be the victim of discrimination or bullying. Rather, Rhoda is the bully, for no other reason than the fact that she’s determined she can get away with it. Does it make her character arguably less complex than one who has been shaped by a tragic past or corrupted by negative influences? Perhaps, but having no obvious impetus for her behavior also makes Rhoda that much more frightening. It implies the possibility of every parent’s worst fear: What if your kid is born wrong on the inside, and there’s literally nothing you can do about it? It presages the same painful realizations Tilda Swinton has to suffer through in We Need to Talk About Kevin, more than 50 years later.

That very scenario makes Nancy Kelly’s performance as Rhoda’s mother, Christine, powerfully sympathetic, with a bitter air of hopelessness. She’s reminiscent of Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, trying to hold a family together as the unsettling clues start building up, looking likely to crack under the strain at any moment. You don’t blame her for being desperate, so desperate, to believe every one of Rhoda’s excuses and rationalizations. After all, everyone else does. In fact, one gets the sense that even more than the dark stain within Rhoda’s soul, Christine fears the inevitability of how impossible it will be to convince others of what she slowly comes to realize about her daughter. She fears being labeled as an unfit mother for daring to show anything other than unconditional love at all times.

And Rhoda, psychopath that she is, capitalizes on these opportunities. Actress Patty McCormack is terrifying in The Bad Seed as the little hellion, who switches so casually between sweet flattery, faux sincerity and cruel displays of power. She has the supreme egomania of someone who regards all the other people around her as non-humans—in her mind, they aren’t individuals, they’re merely the herd. This she displays with startling maturity, possessing the depth of sophistication necessary to both understand social dynamics but operate completely outside of them. She understands precisely what it would mean to be detected, and to see that cunning in the eyes of an 8-year-old, it’s hard to look at any child the same way again.

Jim Vorel is a Paste staff writer and resident horror guru. You can follow him on Twitter for more film and TV writing.