The Bad Seed
By Maria Rodriguez
The Bad Seed, released in 1956, is a psychological horror film that appeared just two years after its debut on stage and in print form as a novel.
The story follows a little girl, Rhoda, who has a loving family, a happy home, and is the picture of sweetness and polite curtesies.
Prior to the film, there are two deaths of friends of the family. One was a classmate of Rhoda’s, the other was an elderly neighbor of the family.
No one finds the causes of their deaths overly strange, though the young boy drowned and the elderly woman fell down a flight of stairs.
It isn’t until later that Rhoda’s mother becomes suspicious of her child’s behavior and begins to make horrible conclusions about her only child.
Naturally, the film becomes increasingly heavy and worrisome.
At the center of the story is the (then new) study of genetics. Nature versus nurture, the characters say to each other. If your parent was a murderer, does that make you one too? Or is it all down to the situation a child is brought up in?
These questions haunt the adult actors as the discoverey of the evil in the most unlikely places comes to light.
