Creepy Child

Marge: (looking out the window to the front lawn) There's just something about flying a kite at night that's so unwholesome.

Bart: (turns head to the window. In monotone with glazed, glaring eyes) Hello, mother dear.
—The Simpsons

They look sweet, innocent, even angelic, but there's something not quite right about them. They're too calm, too knowing. They aren't really children any longer, not at heart.

Children should be innocent, in need of adult protection. By inverting this, the trope arouses deep-rooted fears. The Creepy Child might not be physically dangerous, but their profound unnaturalness is just as chilling.

Creepy children are frequently female, and often Emotionless Girls. They can be, among other things, a Robot Girl, an Oracular Urchin, a changeling, a Waif Prophet, a Strange Girl or Evil. As prophets, they emanate otherworldliness; as heroes, they may elicit distrust and contempt from the rest of the team sans the one female who wants to be surrogate mother, and as villains they remain cute even while the bodies pile up around them. They usually have an Ironic Nursery Tune theme.

May be holding a Creepy Doll. A girl who is a Woman in White is usually the Creepy Child. If a Creepy Child is shown drawing, it will usually be a Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book.

Compare and contrast Psychopathic Manchild and the usually much more proactive and physically dangerous Enfant Terrible. See also Undead Child and Ambiguous Innocence.

Examples of Creepy Child include:

Advertising

  • One cellphone commercial played with this trope, featuring loads of Creepy Children (including a pair of white-kneesocks-wearing twin girls sing-songing, "We want a cellphone"). It ended with a message to parents that they shouldn't be scared to buy cellphones for their kids, although if you had kids like that, wouldn't you be wary about giving them what they want?
  • The early "Dead Zone" ads for Verizon featured pairs of creepy siblings (two brothers in dress attire and twin girls in blue dresses).
  • An ad for Australian real estate agent L.J. Hooker ended with a creepy girl's gratitude "Thank you, Mr. Hooker". The really scary part was, she probably wasn't meant to be creepy.
  • Another unintentional example: the Tyson chicken nugget commercials. For some reason, the kids have white rings around their pupils as they list the foods they hate to eat.
  • The "Double Life" PlayStation advert, back in the late 90s/early 2000s featured a memorably creepy, world-conquering, Scottish child of indeterminate gender. Check it out, 43 seconds in.
    • Oh, hey, it's a relative of the "Mental Wealth" girl.
  • This TV spot for the 2006 Fantasia Film Festival features a creepy little girl.
  • This nerf gun commercial featuring a young Devon Sawa.


Anime & Manga

Everyone, everything, annihilated!

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion had Rei Ayanami.
    • Kaworu Nagisa. More creepy in the manga than the anime though.
    • Whenever Shinji Ikari or Asuka embraced their Ax Crazy sides, they were freaking creepy. More like batshit scary and givers of Nightmares to your waking dreams.
  • Welsper from the Ah! My Goddess manga, who took advantage of his appearance to get closer to Belldandy in ways Keiichi hadn't, such as sharing a bed with her.
  • If the flashbacks are to be believed, and if his dark side is of any proof, the titular character of Naruto was this when he was about 4–5 years old, at least until he decided he wanted to become Hokage and to stop feeling sorry for himself.
  • Johan Liebert in Monster. Though most of the story takes place in 1995, in which he is a very creepy twenty-year-old instead, he's been a sociopathic murderer and master of More Than Mind Control since he was nine. There is also Dieter, who has a genuinely creepy moment during the "Kinderheim 511" arc, despite being one of the most innocent characters in the story.
    • Also, Johan's twin sister Nina/Anna had trappings of this when we first see her.
    • Martin (from the episode A Child's View). While he may not be clever enough to be the next Johan, one could easily see him growing up to become like Roberto.
  • MW has Michio Yuki becoming this after inhaling the titular Psycho Serum.
  • In The Slayers, Hellmaster Phibrizzo, Man Behind the Man to Chaos Dragon Gaav (who is, oddly, another Big Bad but not The Dragon to Phibrizzo) and one of five ancient demon lords, takes the form of a ten-year-old child in every appearance.
    • In Evolution-R, Rezo the Red Priest in Pokota's human body.
  • In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Sympathy for the Devil", Spike discovers that his latest bounty is connected to a strange, sinister child who had stopped aging nearly a hundred years ago.
  • Vanilla H, the youngest of the Galaxy Angel haremettes, is an Emotionless Girl that spends most of her time praying. The anime plays this up to comically scary levels.
  • In the Fullmetal Alchemist manga and the Brotherhood series, Selim Bradley starts to show Creepy Child tendencies once he's revealed to be a homunculus. He's basically an Eldritch Abomination..
    • Bonus points because that form is his true body, so he looks that way while cutting people in half with his eye-filled shadows and eating his own allies, sometimes all done while smiling. As The Dragon he comes as the most terrifying and just plain evil of the Homunculi bunch.
  • The titular girls from Gunslinger Girl appear to fairly normal children—at least to outsiders. During their missions they change into relentless killing machines, showing hardly any emotion whatsoever, contrasting heavily with their innocent looks. Especially the actions of Rico are often jarring, since she is prone to kill innocent bystanders and remorselessly tortures people to get a confession.
  • Both Enma Ai and Kikuri from Hell Girl are excellent examples.
  • Sabrina, the psychic Gym Leader from Pokémon with a nasty habit of turning people into dolls. Actually, the real Sabrina (as seen in the games) is older, but her childhood form still wanders around as a doll bouncing a ball.
  • Guu from Haré+ Guu is a definitive Creepy Child when she's in her deadpan mode (i.e. almost always), but only Haré seems to notice.
  • Thriller Restaurant has an entire school of these kids. The most notable ones though are the protagonists Anko, Shou, and Reiko, who get involved in the ghost stories. Shou takes this trope Up to Eleven by living in a funeral home.
  • Zazie the Beast, in the anime version of Trigun. Unless he's actually some kind of midget.
    • Also from the anime, young Knives. He started out just Vash's more serious and mature twin brother, but even before he starts his Xanatos Gambit to wipe out the crew and crash the fleet he has started to give off some seriously creepy vibes.
    • Manga young Knives, in a very different situation, manages this briefly right before going Axe Crazy, with his Dissonant Serenity after The Reveal. He's faking Easy Amnesia. Until then, manga Knives is the sweetest little thing, who really believes that everyone can understand each other and everything can be worked out because everyone's hearts are the same.
    • Manga Legato, in his back story. I mean, yeah, when he's having his weird Meet Cute amid the rubble with Knives, then it's just the saddest Hope Spot ever, but before they found out his plot and started raping him to death he was this kid putting off his bid for freedom to be sure of being able to kill absolutely everybody he had ever met with his mind. Have we mentioned this is a Crapsack World?
    • Livio, back at the orphanage, although that's mostly the fault of Razlo, his Super-Powered Evil Side.
    • Despite being surprised to find out that he wanted to live when he was first shot around age eight, little Wolfwood seems to have avoided this trope.
  • Miyu from Vampire Princess Miyu. She's got the excuse of being mentally an older woman who has allowed to keep a teenage form to capture the Shinma.
    • The little girl form the first OAV, Aiko, also qualifies. We first see her as an Ill Girl in a Convenient Coma, but later we learn that she sold her soul to a Shinma after her parents died in a car accident where she was gravely injured and, out of trauma, she started calling herself a vampire since they donated their blood to her to save her life, right before perishing. She's both creepy and terribly pitiful.
  • When at her worst, Shokatsuryou Koumei (Zhuge Liang) from Ikki Tousen. She's a middle school Moeblob who never changes her expression and can devise the most amazing and shocking Xanatos Gambits... She's mostly on the side of good, adores her leaderess Ryuubi and is nowhere as villainous or ruthless as her rival Shiba'i, but she's still creepy.
  • The three espers in Akira (Kyouko, Masaru and Takashi) were young children who, due to government experiments to develop psychic abilities, were trapped in aged, pale blue shells of their child bodies. They speak largely in Creepy Monotone, especially Kiyoko (who also is a bed-ridden Ill Girl), and have a master plan which involves the resurrection of Akira.
    • Not to mention Akira himself.
  • Hansel and Gretel, the ultimate Creepy Twins, from Black Lagoon.
  • 2nd Grade Deadman Wonderland Undertaker Daida "Punishment" Hibana, who knows way too much about various methods of torture having apparently learned from her mother, shown in flashback watching over her "suspension". Understandably, she is a bit delusional having to invent nonsensical punishments for herself after her mother apparently committed suicide.
    • There's also Minatsuki Takami when she was a child.
    • The Creepy Twins Ichi and Hajime, who at first seemed to be a single, creepy Forgery kid with a lollipop.
  • Masato from Rumiko Takahashi's Mermaid's Scar, the second compilation of the Mermaid Saga. At first glance he looks like an eight year-old boy, living happily with his mother... but then, why does the mother look so sad to be with him? Why did she try to abandon him? Why is she trying so hard to kill him? He's also pretty handy with Razor Floss and an axe as big as he is.
  • Lain Iwakura from Serial Experiments Lain
    • And others as well. Like the one chasing people through the virtual reality game or that girl who commits suicide in the opening. This anime pretty much takes the cake for creepy children.
  • Anita from the Darkstalkers anime/OVA was a creepy Emotionless Girl. People kept picking on her, until she started breaking things with her Psychic Powers.
  • Laetitia and Poupee from Madlax. By the end, though, Laetitia loses a part of her creepiness and is accepted by her "creator" Margaret, who adopts her as her little sister
  • In Fruits Basket, Hanajima's brother Megumi deliberately exploits this to frighten the Yuki fan club.
  • Joshua Christopher from Chrono Crusade becomes this after Aion puts Chrono's horns on his head. Although most of the time we see him he's 14 and doesn't look quite like a child anymore, in his crazier moments he still acts like he thinks he's ten—which only helps the creepiness.
  • Czeslaw Meyer from Baccano!! is what happens when you take an Adorably Precocious Child, orphan him, grant him immortality alongside thirty or so self-serving, maladjusted individuals, have one of those self-serving, maladjusted individuals flip out and kill half of them, have another self-serving, maladjusted individual take the Adorably Precocious Child into his custody and torture him for 200 years, then make the Adorably Precocious Child's only means of escape be to kill that Complete Monster and take all of his thoughts and memories as his own. The fact that he's able to function at all probably calls for a medal of some sort, but that doesn't mean he isn't prone to lapses of absolutist, "kill-or-be-killed" insanity...
  • The Infant in Inuyasha. There's something very wrong with having such an articulate baby, especially one which is in essence, a cutoff from a man who is 99% Body Horror.
    • The Infant isn't the creepy, articulate one; Hakudoshi is. The Infant is just an infant and Naraku's heart. Of course, Hakudoshi looks like a four-year-old at most, so yeah, just as creepy.
    • Also the Emotionless Girl Kanna, who looks no older than 10 and is the most loyal of Naraku's cut-offs. And there's her Magic Mirror...
  • According to Rinko, Yuuto from Omamori Himari was one of these when she first met him. He gets better though.
    • Tama is many times worse. It doesn't help that she speaks with her mind, and that her side of any conversation is almost never seen.
  • In the Bleach arc Turn Back the Pendulum, Gin Ichimaru is shown to have been this. While his age isn't exactly clear, said arc's incarnation of Mayuri Kurotsuchi arguably qualifies as well.
    • Also Yukio in the recent Fullbring arc.
  • Near from Death Note pulls this off rather well, despite being almost 19 when the manga ends.
  • Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha occasionally steps into this. During episode 11 of A's, she seemed close to unnerving the Book of Darkness.
  • Sailor Moon has Hotaru Tomoe. Although she just wants to be loved, she houses a planet-destroying senshi spirit as well as an evil, inter-dimensional power bent on "silencing" the world. In the original manga she was ever part-cyborg, and is dark and sickly as well. Her status between The Woobie and totally fucking creepy is cemented best by the image of her on her throne, giving orders to the scientists that will help her succeed at destroying the entire world while surrounded by dolls or ripping an innocent teddybear. Made worse when you recall that in those moments, she's pretty much unconscious and the evil inter-dimensional power is in charge, and sometimes she either has nightmares about it or wakes up without any idea of what's going on.
    • Chibi Usa could be construed as a milder version of the Creepy Child, simply by the fact that she is over 900 when she appears but looks like a little girl (in the manga), is at some point turned into a psychopathic yet love starved adult version of herself when her own emotions are manipulated, and she is way too advanced for a normal child.
    • The Amazons Quartet. It is not known how old they really are, probably not older than 13-14, but they tend to act very childish and apparently find battles against the Sailor Team "fun". Yet, their tactics aren't anywhere near innocent.
      • Anime!PallaPalla is an extreme example. More often than not, she's a Third Person Person Bratty Half-Pint who often cries, throws tantrums, and demands to be entertained by her "sisters"/teammates. Then comes the episode with the dental clinic, where she declares that the best way to cure cavities is to rip the head off (which she demonstrates on a doll, creeping the fuck outta the other girls). Then the episode where she controls the senshi using an enchanted doll to make them repeat the doll's movements, and then she nearly tears said doll apart by its hands. And we also have the episode where she attacks dozens of people, rips out their Dream Mirrors, and then cheerfully claps and sings Where, oh were is the Golden Mirror ~ before Moon and Chibimoon's arrival.
  • Himeko, from Shinigami Trilogy is basically Mandy with the ability to be a Deliberately Cute Child. Add her shinigami suitor and she's an evil Mini-Mandy with Grim Jr.
  • When she was no older than 12, Silvana Greone aka Intoccabile from Noir scared the crap out of a pre-teen Mireille Bouquet when they played together, due to her unhealthy fixation with pointy objects. By the time she's in her 20's, she's a full-blown Dark Action Girl and still a thoroughly creepy Magnificent Bitch.
  • In the movie Pokémon 3: Spell of the Unown, Mii/Molly is a seemingly innocent child whose mother left due to her husband being obsessed with studying the Unown, and Molly's father is taken by the Unown themselves. While playing with the Unown tiles, she summons the Unown, who create an illusion Entei. She proceeds to use her innocent desire for friends and parent figures to have Entei kidnap Ash's mom and brainwash her into think that she's Molly's mother, get a LOT of the countryside covered in weird crystals, and, when Ash tries to get his mother back, she spawns waaaay too many of said crystals. In spikes. To make matters worse, she ends up being able to control the Unown, and ends up as a little girl in a grown woman's body trying to be grown up. She even has three crystal Pokémon, which are all based off three cute mons, but are all insanely powerful.
  • The writers of Yu-Gi-Oh!! were probably aiming for a more serious version of the Heartwarming Orphan here, but the child version we see of Seto Kaiba in flashbacks is incredibly unsettling. Mostly due to the way he talks, as he's incredibly cynical and mature for a child. Has enough intelligence to best a world class chess champion at the age of ten and becomes CEO of a huge military corporation a few years later.
    • And then, there's Noa. Dear God, Noa.
    • Mokuba's original form in the manga was pretty bad, too. Especially given he forces Yugi to play a rigged game with him, and until the Other Yugi comes out it's a fifteen-year-old who seems like a little kid facing a ten-year-old with the mannerisms of a mafia boss.
      • This troper liked the homicidal grin when he was cheating at roulette to poison Joey and Yugi to death.
    • Persons unaware of Yugi's real age can sometimes see him as this, especially when he goes all dark side.
    • You could say Bakura is this due to his deck, I mean I doubt his dark side was the one who made it.
  • Road Kamelot from D.Gray-man. She's the eldest of the Noah despite looking in her adolescence. She sings about killing people, acts like an excited child, and messes with your mind to turn you insane. She likes the taste of blood, and often cracks into hysterical laughter when maiming people. Also, as well as possessing a number of creepy dolls, she herself can transform into a creepy doll. And she has a crush on the main character, which she expresses by, within an hour of each other, a) glomping and kissing him and b) trying to force him to kill his friends.
  • Ciel from Black Butler seems to fit this trope. He's a cynical, jaded, and very driven 12-year-old (or 13, depending on how far you are in the series) who is a Chessmaster and wise beyond his years. He has no qualms about getting involved in dangerous missions and will command his badass butler Sebastian to kill someone without a second thought. Then again, there's a reason why he is the way he is now.
    • Alois from the second season is much worse. He's basically Ciel on Nightmare Fuel.
    • Also Alois' younger brother Luka. Being rather pleased that your Deal with the Devil killed a village is weird.
  • Vincent from Pandora Hearts, who in flashbacks displays signs of being the Yandere Manipulative Bastard he is as an adult.
    • Also Oz. Break even points it out.
    • Lily, when she's not busy being an adorable little Cheerful Child.
  • Reisuke Houjou of Mirai Nikki is a cute little 4-year-old boy who enjoys talking to his hand puppets, drawing pictures, and using his magical coloring book to commit murders.
  • Elfen Lied has Mariko Kurama or Number 35; appearing like just another cute little girl until she rips you open with her 11 meter long, inhumanly strong 26 invisible arms which she views as a fun game, and that her victims are her playthings.
    • In the manga she has even more arms with an extended range as well.
    • Also, Lucy when she was a child.
    • There's also the cruel kids from the orphanage Lucy lived in when she was younger. They often harassed her for her cute little horns, emotionless nature and loner status, and also because they were miserable themselves. It was even apparent that the teachers thought she was creepy and tried to avoid her as much as they could. Also, after she started caring for a puppy, the others forced her to watch as they quite literally kicked the dog and beat it to death with a vase, just to try and get her to show something. Even creepier in that the whole time they did this they all sported huge slasher smiles and laughed at her. They got more than they bargained for: Lucy snapped and left no witnesses.
    • There's also a girl that pretended to be friends with Lucy and later sold her out to the mean boys by telling them about the dog, fully knowing that they'd use the dog to torment Lucy further. She even cries for Lucy upon finding out that the boys beat Lucy's dog to death and made her watch, but as she does this we see her smile and her fake crying turns into peals of laughter. And in episode 9 there's a scene where Child!Lucy hallucinates and sees the mutilated dead bodies of the cruel kids come back to life and mock her. Afterwards she is seen talking with the voice of her DNA inside her mind, leading to her attempting to strangle Kouta. After finding out that Kouta lied to her about the gender of his cousin he was going to a festival with she goes on a rampage, murdering everyone in sight, including Kouta's father and sister, and tries to go after Yuka but Kouta tackles her and demands that she stops.
  • Anju, Karin's younger sister, is an Emotionless Girl vampire who carries around a knife-wielding talking doll that is possessed by a serial killer. She later proudly shows Karin her collection of creepy dolls and asks if she wants to hear their history. In response Karin rather understandably lets out some Tears of Fear and promptly exits the room.
  • Shiho from Zettai Karen Children.

Shiho: "The pain and hate of the fish which were brutally murdered... it's delicious."

    • In a flashback arc, we find out that before she and Aoi first met Kaoru (at the age of 5) Shiho was even more sadistic. One of her favorite ways of torturing Aoi was making crime scenes from Aoi's dolls. (In which she was creepily creative!)
    • Hyobu has his moment, when he suggests shooting enemy pilot in a forehead as the quickest method to deal with his plane. He is 8 at that time.
  • V.V. from Code Geass looks like a cute boy with lustrous Rapunzel Hair but he's actually a man in his 60's, because he got his Code at an early age so his physical growth was stunted. He is the older twin brother of Lelouch's father, Charles vi Britannia, and he murdered Lelouch's mother, Marianne vi Britannia entirely out of jealousy when she started getting too close to Charles for his liking. Not to mention he's head of the Geass Cult, a rather shady, creepy society in and of itself; and he tries to kill Lelouch, Charles son and his nephew. He is the creepiest character in the series, by far.
    • Rolo Haliburton/Lamperouge, who starts off as a Tyke Bomb sent to spy on and eventually kill Lelouch, until Lelouch uses the feelings of brotherly love Rolo's built up over the past year to manipulate him with the full intent of killing him once his usefulness runs out. This proves to be effective because Rolo, as a raised-from-birth assassin, has never known any form of real kindness. Unfortunately, this backfires when Rolo becomes so obsessive and fixated on being the only person his "brother" cares about that he murders Shirley, one of the few people Lelouch was genuinely close to, and plans on killing Nunnally, who's basically Lelouch's whole reason for living. He does manage to redeem himself by the end though.
      • There's also the scene near the middle of R2 when the Black Knights are in the laboratory where the engineered Geass-children are. About four of the children, after Geassing a Black Knight to shoot another, look up at Rolo and shout, "Big Bro Rolo, is that you?" all smiling and whatnot. Then Rolo smiles back, and promptly shoots them.
  • Ginger Bread from Katekyo Hitman Reborn is a vice-captain of the Millefiore Family's eighth squad, the enemies of the main protagonists in the future. He is also known as the Magician's Doll, primarily due to his usage of similar looking dolls that are clothed in a wizard's hat and cape, and have stars in their eyes (like he does), to fight. In addition, he uses spiders, summoned by what he calls sorcery. He claims to have had a hand in the death of Colonnello. As such, Lal Mirch engages him in battle, but after he loses, it is revealed that she was only fighting one of his dolls.
    • Mukuro Rokudo when he was a child as a result of his Dark and Troubled Past. He has a strong dislike for the Mafia due in part to the experimentation he suffered as a child at the hands of the Estraneo Mafia family. He killed his captors and he offered Chikusa and Ken, who were also victims of experimentation, a chance to join him in his quest to destroy the world. However, not only does he want to take revenge on the Mafia by destroying it, he also wants to cleanse the world of its filth by invoking universal suffering through a world war. Also, Mukuro was taken in when he was a child by a Mafia boss named Lancia. Except Mukuro betrayed and brainwashed Lancia with his Evil Eye which forced him to kill his entire family. And during his first meeting with Tsuna, he pretends to be a poor, innocent boy who was kidnapped by... Rokudo Mukuro.
  • Adorably Precocious Child Maki in Darker than Black. He'd be a little creepy even if he was just a sociopath with the power to make stuff blow up, but he also has a massive, crazy stalker-crush on his boss, Amber. Such an insane crush, in fact, that he completely abandons the usual Contractor "emotionless" act when he finds the guy Amber's in love with, and tries to kill him even though if he'd succeeded, it would have ruined Amber's entire plan, resulting in a genocide.
    • Any child Contractor has these traits. They are disillusioned killing machines, who lost their emotions and consciences, due to Gate's influence. Just like their adult counterparts.
  • xxxHolic: Creepy Twins Moro and Maru, Yuuko's two assistants at the shop. It's revealed early on that they have no souls, and later, that they keep the shop grounded between dimensions.
  • Vampire Knight: Maria, especially when possessed by Shizuka. She even has a scary theme song to match.
  • In Full Metal Panic!, Sousuke, as a result of his heartbreaking backstory. He goes from being a sweet, innocent kid to a child soldier who kills without batting an eye, has an extremely nihilistic view of things, and acts creepily unemotional. Especially noticeable here. In one of Gauron's flashbacks we see Sousuke as an 12 year old child soldier in Afghanistan, casually tossing bodies into a fire.

Kalinin: It's my belief that my nation... stripped that boy from his humanity.

    • Though, in Gauron's twisted world view, Sousuke was less the "Creepy Child" and more the saint of battle...
  • Ran from Texhnolyze.
    • Ichise too. As a child he was perpetually emotionless, even when he and his mother come across the body of his mutilated father hanging from the ceiling. While his mother cries at the sight he just looks at her with a confused expression on his face.
  • Souma's 14-year-old younger sister Sakurako from Sakura Gari. She was already plenty creepy as a teenager, but when we see her as a little kid in a flashback... oh, boy. She appears pointing at Souma with a blank expression on her face right after Katsuragi force Souma to kill Sakurako's mom for abusing him, and later she appears carrying around an oversized kimono, peeing herself and giggling madly during a cherry blossoms watching session.
    • Souma as well. In the first scene, he was barely 11–12 years old, and with his cynical smile he creeped the shit out of a detective investigating Lady Saiki's death. And then we learn why he is that way...
  • Natsume from Natsume Yuujinchou was often considered one of these when he was young because he kept on seeing spirits and Youkai that no one else could and didn't know not to tell people about them.
  • Boogiepop Phantom: Poom Poom, the balloon children, the robed girl.
  • Pluto: Astro falls into this occasionally. Wassily, too.
  • Aflame Inferno: Pandemonium's current body.
  • Ergo Proxy: Pino, before she left the city.
  • Shalott of Air Gear.
  • Kodomo No Jikan: Honestly, Rin Kokonoe's antics really border, and often cross into this trope. Kuro Kagami can be pretty scary, too.
    • In one episode, Rin is grateful to her teacher Kyouko Houin for helping her gain a certain insight. She cheerfully thanks Houin and tells her, "I'm glad I didn't," to Houin's evident confusion. The reason? Unbeknown to Houin, Rin almost tried to murder Houin by pushing her down a flight of stairs earlier in the episode, but stops at the last moment. The scene goes from heartwarming to chilling in two seconds flat.
  • Loveless is full of creepy children (and adults) with twisted pasts, but one that stands out is Kio's daughter, who looks ten, acts forty, is the head of the (very wealthy) family, and has no cat ears—meaning she's not a virgin, or possibly not a normal human seeing as Kio would have conceived her when he was ten.
  • Manna from Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise is one of the best anime examples - she doesn't really do anything creepy, per se (although she keeps a pet spider on a string!), but her muteness, sullen nature, and absence of anything even remotely feminine distance her from kawaii anime girls by a huge chasm.
  • James, of Gregory Horror Show, appears to be a typical Hotel Hellion who only wants to play. However, his idea of "playing" involves putting people in danger (his grandfather nearly chokes to death while James uses his body as a swing in one episode, and he doesn't even seem to care), and on several occasions he deliberately puts the Guest in life-threatening/terrifying situations, chuckling happily all the while. Hell, when the hotel is set on fire at the end of the second series, James uses it as an excuse to play "firefighter," and in the next episode acts very cheerful as he talks about how "cool" it was for his skin to burn off.
  • In Detective Conan, Edogawa Conan and Haibara Ai might not actually be seven year olds, but they certainly come off that way to everyone else. Conan is totally undisturbed by every gruesome murder they come across as he walks up to the body and looks for evidence. Haibara doesn't even bother acting like a little kid, foregoing that for her sarcasm and incredibly cynical worldview. And her occasional suicidal tendencies.
    • Besides, being seventeen and eighteen isn't that much less creepy when they're acting like that.
    • Sometimes Conan/Shinichi is just trying to be creepy. There's no other explanation. Like in a conversation between him and Takagi, right after Conan tells him exactly why they have other option but waiting to defuse a bomb in the same room as them until seconds before it explodes, in order to get a hint about where the next bomb is. It's even worse because Conan is the only one who can get to the bomb to defuse it. Because Takagi doesn't know that Conan is really a seventeen year old genius detective, this conversation follows:

Takagi: Tell me one more thing. W-Who on Earth are you?
Conan: Oh. Well if you want to know... Then I'll tell you. In the next world.

  • Luna Koizumi from the Gakuen Alice manga is an extremely Creepy Child, not only two-faced, but also being able to charm people into supporting her, while taking everything away from Mikan to make her life a living hell. She even tries to strangle the poor kid!
  • The Nightwalker anime loves this trope. First, there is an episode with Shido trapped in a well with a Breed and a child. Shido spends the entire episode trying to protect the "innocent little girl" but it turns out, the girl turned out to be a vampire,most likely an evil oe. There is another episode with a little boy who died and turned into a Breed and killed and mutilated pets and stray animals to feed off them. The child's mother, however, refuses to let Shido kill the Breed, convinced he is still her son... which leads to an even creepier resolution: Shido just leaves them alone.
  • Soul Eater's Crona flip-flops between being the Creepy Child and The Woobie. Also, little Rachel after Medusa takes over her body.
  • The Child from Berserk. The Child only appears on nights of the full moon, and has no name nor does he speak. The Child seems to have strange powers of controlling demons just as his misshapen form did. He has an uncanny resemblance to Guts and Casca and is strangely attracted to both of them, but he mysteriously disappears just as he reappears.
    • Rosine, too. She's the youngest of the Apostles and their local Dark Magical Girl, extremely broken due to her horrible past, also insanely powerful as well as cute-looking. And she's obsessed with Jill, a pre-teen girl who once was her best friend...
  • Mario Natsume from Mawaru Penguindrum. The first thing he said in the series is "SURVIVAL STRATEGY!", he has his own Penguin Hat, shows absolutely NO emotions otherwise, freaks the shit out of the otherwise Hot-Blooded Kanba when they meet up without saying a single word, is the center of his sister Masako's "Project M" and later becomes his grandfather's Soul Jar... eeeeeeep. Though he gets better in the Grand Finale.
    • Also Sanetoshi's companions Souya and Shirase. These two Creepy Twins dress and look like clones, finish each other's sentences, seem to be totally devoted to Sanetoshi, don't say almost anything except singing praises to him with creepy and child-like smiles... uuuuuh.
      • Little!Himari skirts this line. Especially when she coldly tells little!Shouma about what happens to the Unchosen people of this world. Thank God she gets better.

Himari: "This world is divided into the Chosen and the Unchosen. To be Unchosen is to die.

  • Btooom! has Kira Kyousuke, a 14-year-old boy who likes to crush small animals and who raped three women to death.
  • The Getter Robo Armaggedon incarnation of Genki Saotome. Usually the Cheerful Child, in this Alternate Universe Genki is terribly traumatised after the death of Michiru and becomes a really scary Cute Mute. There's also the small matter that Armaggedon!Genki is a girl Raised as the Opposite Gender... and after she gets better, many years later, she becomes the local Action Girl, Kei.
  • In Popotan, Mea meets a little girl who asks her to fix her doll. She seems normal at first, but starts to behave less and less innocently the more Mea speaks with her. She is later revealed to be not only capable of inflicting permanent sleep on people, but also dead.
  • The Emperor becomes one of these for a short while in Houshin Engi. Blame Dakki's influence and experiments, but he's pretty damn creepy as a kid. Doesn't help he's also been turned into a superhuman weapon.


Comic Books

  • The Cuckoo, from the Sandman arc "A Game of You," arch-enemy of the Narnia-like dream-fantasy "Land." Despite her name (and true nature), she mostly appears in the form of a young, pig-tailed, freckled blonde girl—in fact, the childhood form of Barbie, the arc's protagonist.
  • Lenore from Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl.
  • Innocence (AKA the Child) is part of a malevolent and extremely powerful living tarot arcanum called The Basanos in the Lucifer comic book. She takes the form of a young, barefoot blonde girl and appears most often as their spokesperson. Her power is the ability to make people "see the world with fresh eyes" - that is, in a harsh light without illusions, delusions, or rose-colored glasses. As an added bonus, this power is exhibited as she walks down a seedy avenue in Amsterdam's Red Light district, causing everyone from hookers to cops to street people to come subtly repulsed at what they're doing.
  • 30 Days of Night had a little girl vampire.
  • Layla Miller of Marvel Comics' X-Factor. Also an Oracular Urchin. Not anymore, though, since she underwent a Plot-Relevant Age-Up.
  • Valeria "Val" Richards, daughter of Reed Richards. She has genius level intelligence at just 2 years old.
  • Ariel Chylde in Manga Darkchyle isn't stoic and her voice isn't a harsh monotone. Adults find her creepy because at roughly 12 years old she's smarter than most of them and she reacts to literally everything with open hostility and condescension.
  • Cassie Hack battles the Undead Slasher Movie Serial Killer who Kills People In Dreams variety in Hack Slash.
  • In some incarnations, Batman, particularly after his parents' death. As an adult, he is also sometimes confronted by creepy children who killed their parents.
    • And Damian Wayne, who first appears around age eight and attempts to murder the current Robin so he can take his place. A result of being raised by crazy ninjas, and also possibly the combination of Al Ghul and Wayne genes. Living with Bruce helped somewhat, but it's actually Dick Grayson who's really helped him into a solid Heel Face Turn.
    • Talia accepted this and started to work on a replacement, eerily telling Damian "He'll be ten years younger than you when he's born" So, taking the above into account, when Damian hits 18, there's going to be trouble (or sooner, since there might be a Plot-Relevant Age-Up for the clone).
  • Little Keiko in Usagi Yojimbo. Her only relative was robbed and killed by bandits, and they were about to kill her too when Jei, the book's most stubbornly recurring villain, appeared, declared them to be "evil" and killed them. Keiko almost got the same treatment, but he randomly decided she wasn't evil. She's been traveling with him since then, calling him "uncle", and her ability to remain cheerful through massive bloodbaths is chilling.
    • What's also chilling that if this is a result of Jei's evil spirit suppressing her emotional development, the resulting emotional whiplash that is bound to happen if and when that suppression is lifted might likely traumatize her into insanity.
  • The X Wing Series arc "The Warrior Princess" has Plourr flash back to her brother, Harran, when they were both children. Very definitely Royally Screwed-Up, he was basically sociopathic, and the flashback shows him torturing an animal. Then Darth Vader, on a visit, used mental manipulation to transform his hot-blooded sadism into something cold and calculating. When a faction of nobles slaughtered Harran's family and one sister escaped, he tried to stop her so he could watch her die. She killed him and left his body to be eaten by scavengers. That's how she knows that the revolutionary calling himself Harran can't be her brother.
  • Fables has recently introduced us to the Literals and the Genres. Among the Genres, Horror is represented by a little blond girl in a pink dress.
  • An unintentional example can be found in Jack Chick's character of Lil' Susy. She's one of the many recurring characters Chick uses to spread his psychotic fundamentalist message and is supposed to come off as wise, sweet and caring but the Troubling Unchildlike Behavior she exhibits in her viciously aggressive stance against such things as Islam, homosexuality and Halloween, as well as her wide, staring, fish-like eyes (http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/1051/1051_01.asp) qualify her as a Creepy Child.
  • The latest incarnation of X-Men foe Apocalypse.
  • Gail Simone's run on Wonder Woman had the Crows, five immortal beings disguised as school children who brew up paranoia and hatred in D.C. both naturally (through the distribution of hate literature and phony terrorist threats) and supernaturally (through a Hate Plague) as revenge against Diana for the death of their father, Ares.


Fan Works

  • Rei from Aeon Natum Engel. 9 out of 10 nerds agree that she is creepier than canon, while the last one is still obsessive of her no matter what.
  • In the The Legend of Zelda Fanfiction Free as the Wind (on the Recommendation page), Toon Link, of all Links, suddenly switches between Creepy Child and Cheerful Child on many occasions, which almost never fails to shock the other characters around him (including two other Links.) Him switching back into Cheerful Child-mode can sometime be really relieving, since his Creepy Child-persona's knowingness is very unsettling at times.

"Everybody's going to die. Just not now."

"Oh fuck," Naruto muttered, a chill sweeping through. He knew now, beyond any doubt, that he was in for it, only the most evil of demons pretended to be little girls. It was a fact of nature, the more innocent looking the little girl, the more evil the demon. This girl was the picture of innocence, which meant Naruto now faced a majorly gruesome end.

  • The most recent chapter of ToyHammer gives us Emma, a creepy kid who appears and disappears out of nowhere, and gives the main character nosebleeds.
    • Though she's not so creepy any more because she's actually one of the Emperor of Mankind's reincarnations.
  • In the Firefly fanfic Forward, we have Inducer One-One-Nine, who becomes a retroactively creepy child when we discover it's Katie.
  • Fiona from Kira Is Justice is this, complete with bold dialogue.
  • In Cori Falls's fanfiction Where Angels Dare to Tread, baby!James was supposed to come as Wise Beyond His Six Months, but looks like this instead. Seriously, which baby deliberately cries in his christening and then looks all "I did it to screw my parents's plans for me!"?
  • So very many Super!Harry Harry Potter fanfics, a result of trying to get him off to a good fixit start while following the books' timeline. Often due to time travel, but also to various weird upbringings and instances of becoming a Child Prodigy. Both Lampshaded and not.
  • Never Never Land, a Harry Potter fic, has a sort of subversion. On the surface she's a creepy child. But really she's really 14, trapped in the body of a child by magic which makes it worse....
  • The child characters in Hogwarts Exposed are deeply, deeply unsettling without exception. Everyone in the fic falls into the Uncanny Valley of human behaviour, but the children get it especially bad because on top of that they're all sexually precocious and talk like adults. The only concession to characterising them as children is to give the toddler an inconsistent speech impediment.

Film

  • Cole, early in The Sixth Sense, is one of the most well-known examples of this trope.
  • The Grady daughters from The Shining are also a famous example of this trope.
    • Danny Torrence in his trance state also qualities for this trope.

Danny : Redrum... redrum... redrum... redrum...

  • Coraline: The Ghost Children. Especially the one with her mouth frozen open in an expression of perpetual horror. Depending on your point of view, the other Wybie could qualify in the beginning. There's just something creepy about his constant smile.
  • Mark Collins in Twisted.
  • Emily from Hide and Seek.
  • Practically every recent horror film has at least one of these; the American remake of The Ring may have kicked off the trend, though Creepy Children in horror go back much further.
  • The 1972 film Child's Play had a little blonde murderess.
  • Damien from The Omen is the Antichrist.
    • I actually thought he was pretty adorable with his cherubic face and at times sunny deposition (watch the birthday party); of course I'm talking about the 1976 version only. The remake plays the Creepy Child painfully straight
  • In Poltergeist, the daughter (Carol Anne Freeling) of the... abnormally-afflicted family has a few scenes where she just creeps the shit out of you. The main example from the movie is thus:

Carol Anne: Theeeey're heeeere.

  • In Men in Black, the rigorous selection process for potential Men in Black recruits involves an exercise where recruits take aim at cardboard aliens in a shooting gallery. While many of the recruits, the "best of the best of the best" of America's military academies, unload their weapons into the mockup aliens, Will Smith's character James "Agent J" Edwards fires a single shot into the forehead of a cardboard cutout of a little girl. In the aftermath, Zed dryly asks J "why you felt little Tiffany deserved to die".

James: Well, first I was gonna pop this guy hanging from the street light. But then I realized he's just workin' out, you know. I mean, how'd I feel if someone came in bustin' my ass while I'm on a treadmill? Then I was gonna shoot this snarling beast guy, then I noticed he had a tissue in his hand and I realized, he's not snarling, he's sneezing, there ain't a real threat there. Then I saw little Tiffany, and I'm thinkin', "eight year-old white girl, out on the street this time of night, middle of the ghetto, bunch of monsters, hangin' around with quantum physics books?!" She's about to start some shit, Zed! I mean, she's only about eight years old, those books are way too advanced for her. And, if I was an eight-year-old girl, I would be freakin' out seein' a buncha evil monsters. So, if you ask me, I'd say she's up to something. And to be honest, I'd appreciate it if you eased up off my back about it. [[[Beat]]] ...Or do I owe her an apology?

    • This is one of the factors that leads to James's induction into The Men in Black as Agent J. It's made even more explicit in the novelisation of the film, where Zed and K explain that, while fearsome-looking, the apparently vicious looking aliens are the intergalactic equivalent of small fluffy kittens, and that Tiffany was indeed the correct target.
  • The Devil's Backbone had quite a scary little Undead Child.
  • The eponymous star of Joshua, a 9-year-old genius, was rather disturbing to begin with, and only got creepier after the birth of his sister brought out the murderous, manipulative sociopath in him. It's a massively disturbing Xanatos Gambit to be with his uncle, the only person who seems to really understand him.
  • In X2: X-Men United, Jason Stryker, the son of Col. William Stryker, is a mutant with illusionist and mind probing powers who has been lobotomized by his father so that he follows his every word. When he tries to fool Charles Xavier into using Cerebro for him and Stryker, he creates a scenario in which he is represented as a young, slightly creepy girl who asks Xavier to look for all the mutants. The only thing letting on that they are one and the same is that they both share the same asymmetrical eyes.
  • The Baby from Eraserhead, although less of the sinister emotionlessness, and more of the Body Horror.
  • In the first Resident Evil movie, the underground base's AI's Hologram, The Red Queen, is a little girl, as is the voice.

(Background noise cuts out)
Hologram: You're all going to die down here.
(Hologram shuts off)

  • The twin girls from the 80's comedy The Great Outdoors. The theme tune for the The Twilight Zone even plays when you first see them.
  • The half-alien kids from Village of the Damned. Which had a sequel, Children of the Damned (that is the inspiration for the homonymous Iron Maiden song featured on the quotes page) and a remake.
  • The mental-trauma-made-flesh kids from The Brood.
  • The baby from It's Alive and the countless bad sequels does not fit the trope, as it lacks the superficial subtlety of the Creepy Child.
  • Children of the Corn.
  • The Strangers from Dark City had one among their ranks.
    • And he really stands out as the only one of the Strangers to even seem evil. They're mostly just desperate to save themselves by any means necessary, and another Stranger requires an injection of a serial killer's memories before he starts acting like a real villain. But Mr. Sleep is clearly evil from when we first meet him: he's flashing an evil grin everywhere when he's not just outright gnashing his teeth like a Cenobite, and he even viciously bites a guy's hand attempting to make him fall to his death.
  • Wednesday and Pugsley from The Addams Family films.
    • Pugsley's not so bad, but Wednesday is played to the brilliant creepy hilt by Christina Ricci.
    • Ironically this is the opposite in the comics and cartoons: Wednesday is quite sweet and normal-looking (and gets upset when she makes the dean's list) while Pugsley is a near carbon-copy of his Uncle Fester.
  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence has a Ridiculously Human Robot child, that sometimes behaves in an unsettling manner. Before he's imprinted on Monica, this means he speaks in a Creepy Monotone and smiles just a little too often; after he's imprinted, this means he's capable of smashing a duplicate robot's head off in a fit of possessive rage.
  • Lilo from Lilo and Stitch. She says things like "They need to be punished." while placing spoons decorated as her Hula Halau-mates from a previous scene in a pickle jar and watching them, all while sitting next to a book titled "Practical Voodoo". She gets better, this being a Disney movie. Completely justified, considering that the movie takes place shortly after her parents are killed in a car crash.
  • Claudia from Interview with the Vampire, especially the scene with the dead prostitute in her pile of dolls.
  • John Preston's son in Equilibrium has to go in here somewhere. A kid with no emotions? Run.
    • In the film's setting, even children are required to take the Librium drug. So all "good" children are creepy. If they're not "good", they still have to act emotionless to avoid getting the authorities' attention.
  • The titular child in The Good Son. He kills his three-year old brother, shoots a dog with a nailgun, and attempts to kill his same-aged cousin, eight-year old sister, and his own mother as well.
  • The title character in Mikey seems to be a perfectly normal happy-go-lucky child, but he has a dark past: he murders his first adoptive family—including a five-year-old girl—because he feels they didn't love him, he covers up this first series of murders by blaming it on an intruder and pulls a convincing story, then begins the second set of murders by first killing his friend's older sister's cat and blaming it on her boyfriend whom he also later murders because he has a crush on her.
  • Particularly striking example in The Great New Wonderful (2005), where a troubled child is Really, Really Creepy.
    • At one point his parents defend him, despite deep down knowing it to be a galling lie: "I mean, deep down he's a good kid." "He's actually a great kid." Speaking as the stern but fair voice of reason, Mr. Peersall (Stephen Colbert), replies "No, he's actually a selfish, incorrigible monster with a heart made out of shit and splinters."
  • Exorcist the Beginning had Joseph, who seems to attract bad luck everywhere he presents. Subverted since the one actually possessed is Sarah, the doctor.
  • Ginger Snaps 2 is a werewolf-as-body-horror film. However the unassuming star has to be the young pale girl called Ghost. Who calmly helps out the protagonists with disturbing skill, making among other things "Poly", an exploding polyester scarecrow, as well as subtly lying and scheming. She burned her grandmother alive and left her helpless in hospital, and convinced people it was a smoking accident. She also convinced the primary protagonist that the male nurse raped her, causing him to be left to a messy death; and finally, killed the sane responsible woman who comes in and tries to protect everybody from the slathering werewolves) to fulfill her ultimate goal: To be like her comic book heroine and have a pair of werewolves under her leash. Something which she seems well on the way to accomplishing. A masterpiece of low budget but skillfully acted creepiness.
  • Curtis and Debbie from Bloody Birthday; two out of the three child serial killers in the film, they are the smartest in school and can manipulate anyone, except for Joyce who sees through their tricks and psychotic tendencies. Another creepy thing about Curtis is he's very perverted and murders a couple having sex in a van.
  • The children of Hobb's End in In the Mouth of Madness. They were the first to be infected by Sutter Cane's books, and have gone correspondingly Axe Crazy whilst mutating horribly.
  • The ghost of Jodie Defeo from The Amityville Horror remake. Possibly subverted due to their being the small implication that she's not actually evil and is forced to do "bad things" by the much more powerful spirit of Father Jeremiah Ketcham.
  • Rynn, the main character in The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, is something of a creepy child, but the adults are creepier.
  • The children from The Innocents, the movie starring Deborah Kerr. No matter what the final explanation is, those kids are creepy.
  • In Who Can Kill a Child. there is an entire island full of them, the creepiest of whom is a young mop haired boy who blankly stares off into the sunset while fishing with human remains. The most horrible thing the children do is hang an old man like a pinata and swipe at him with a scythe until they chop his head off. It's later explained that the children turned into psychopaths because of something in the air. We also see that they can manipulate other kids just by staring into their eyes.
  • Star Trek shows us Spock as a kid. We're used to green blood, utter lack of emotions, and an almost monotone voice...on an adult. Been there, seen that, buried the Red Shirt. But you've got to admit that on a kid, it's still way creepy.
    • Up to eleven for this troper when he realized the child playing Spock also played Joshua in the aforementioned movie Joshua.
  • Besides Literature and Theater, The Bad Seed needs mentioning in Film since the 'perfect little girl' was so monstrous, the filmmakers the Hays Office apparently felt the need to add a new ending, killing her off with a divine lightning strike. And after that, at the end credits where the actors take their bows, the mother takes the girl across her knee and comically spanks her to relieve any further audience anxiety
  • Tommy, Kayleigh's little brother from The Butterfly Effect, is very creepy as a child, staring at Evan while twisting the head off a doll. When he is a little older, he is a full-blown psychopath who's overly protective of Kayleigh and hates Evan. When he sees them kiss, he loses it and attacks a man at the theater, brutally assaulting him with a pole. Later on, he steals Evan's dog and burns him alive. When they attempt to save the dog, he beats the shit out of Evan, Kayleigh and their friend Lenny with a 2x4. Later, Evan goes back in time to prevent this event from happening. It ends when Lenny stabs Tommy with a shard of metal after being traumatized by accidentally causing the death of a woman and her baby. Tommy had dared him to plant the dynamite in the mailbox and told him that if he didn't, he would kill his mother.
    • Tommy being a psychopath is justified by the fact that he had an abusive, pedophiliac dad.
      • It's implied that Tommy's dad sexually abused him as well as his sister. And in his defense, he apparently has a huge capacity for good as well as evil - one of his alternative futures is devoutly religious and helping the homeless, and in the novelization he's valedictorian and signs up in the Army.
  • Newt from Aliens has her moments. "They mostly come at night... mostly."
  • Esther Coleman, the title character of Orphan.
    • And Max to a lesser degree.
    • The Reveal shows that this trope is subverted. Esther is actually a 33-year old woman with a child's body... who is completely Ax Crazy.
  • Trick 'r Treat combines this with Magnificent Bastard in the form of Sam the trick 'r treater. It turns out that he cannot be killed, and isn't even remotely human. It's also strongly implied that he's actually Samhain, a Celtic god of death.
    • A lesser example would be Billy Wilkins, who is quite aware that his father is a Serial Killer and enjoys carving jack-o'-lanterns out of the heads of the dead.
  • Apocalypto. The girl dying of disease who predicts the destruction of the Maya and the death of the main villain.
  • Screamers. The "Can I come with you?" girl who turns out to be a Killer Robot, after this fact is revealed.
  • Young Michael Myers from Rob Zombie's retelling of Halloween is a very creepy child with an androgynous appearance who has a horrible family life, kills animals to take out his frustration, and after his mom isn't there to take him trick or treating he murders four people in his rampage. Later, at an asylum, it is shown he can't be trusted alone as he murders a nurse for saying that his baby sister is too cute to have come from such a family.
    • The original subverts this; despite him obviously being evil (he kills his sister at age 6 for no explainable reason other than she had sex, there wasn't even any indication of bullying) his face is quite angelic, if not adorable.
    • Also, Jamie from Halloween 4. An adorable, baby-faced little girl...who murders her adoptive mother at the end of the film.
  • Another straight example is the British 2008 horror movie named The Children.
  • Alessa in the 2006 Silent Hill movie is very creepy. Given what Alessa had been through thanks to that bitch Christabella, it's no surprise that she's a little... strange, to put it mildly.
  • Toshio the ghost toddler boy in Ju-On.
  • In The Paperboy Johnny McFarley is one of these. We find out he hated his mother, and killed her. He feels bad about it, so he kills an old lady and lures her daughter to her house so she can be his new mother. He becomes very obsessed with her and her daughter Cammie, going as far as spying on them and placing a walkie-talkie inside their wall so he can listen to her conversations.
  • Sid in Toy Story.
  • The unnamed little boy in Noroi the Curse. He follows his psychotic "mother" around, doesn't say a single word or make a single expression throughout the whole movie, and in the end it's heavily suggested that he's being possessed by Kagutaba.
  • Abigail from The Sorcerer's Apprentice. She's a young Morganian that was the only real witch at Salem. She's every bit as evil as Horvath, and managed to escape prosecution in Salem.
  • Lillith from Case 39 whose own parents tried to kill her because they believed she was a demon who feeds from feelings. They're right.
  • C.K. from the comedy film Madhouse is a destructive child who wants to do nothing more than kill things and blow stuff up. He states that his initials stand for either "Cat Killer" or "Confirmed Kills", and he is responsible for at least two of Scruffy the cat's deaths. Mark Lampshades his potentially dangerous actions and calls him a "psychotic little shit" at one point.
  • EVERY SINGLE KID in Dead Friend (aka The Ghost).
    • The slow chant "Hide well...Your hair might show. Hide well...Your hair might show" was especially creepy.
  • David Sandborn in the 2007 horror movie Whisper.
  • The So Okay It's Average 2009 movie The Hole (not to be confused with the Thora Birch movie of the same title) had an interesting take on this. The creepy little ghost girl had the face of a young woman about 17 years old - the age she would be now if she hadn't died as a child. It definitely contributed to the Uncanny Valley effect.
  • Little Michael in the So Bad It's Good Italian zombie flick Burial Ground the Nights of Terror is rather creepy, even before he becomes a zombie. Of course, this is mostly because he's played by a twenty-something little person in a bad wig.
  • Jack and Emily from Home Movie.
  • In Legion, a young boy is attacked by possessed people, and is saved by the main cast. Within seconds, they find out that the boy himself is possessed, suddenly sporting a blank stare and a digitally lowered voice.

Boy: Fooled you.

  • At the end of Back to The Future Part III, as Doc Brown talks to Jennifer, his younger son, Verne, issues a come hither gesture and points to his personal flux capacitor.
  • Silas, a Catholic school boy from the Adam Sandler movie Just Go with It, who constantly refers to Sandler's character as a "fornicator" and threatens to kill him. Sandler's character Lampshades his creepiness several times, calling him Damien, Chucky, and Child of the Corn.
  • B.B from Kill Bill. Fits, since she is the daughter of The Bride and Bill, taken out of her mom's womb when she was in a coma and then raised by her Big Bad dad. In a subversion, B.B's not as creepy as she could've been: she's mostly a Cheerful Child, but one with rather... off-kilter thoughts. (I.e., she meets her mom via mock-pointing at her as if she had a gun and saying "Freeze, Mommy!", later happily tells her about a certain dead pet named Emilio...)
  • The three children from the Korean film Hansel and Gretel.

Literature

  • Cornelia Vermeer in Girl With A Pearl Earring is six years old and a member of the family who Griet goes to work for. She has red curly hair which seems to highlight her fiery and rebellious personality. Indeed, out of all the Vermeer children, Cornelia is the most mischievous and doesn't always respect her elders. In fact, she is downright cruel to Griet and causes all sorts of trouble for her, including stealing her possessions, breaking a treasured family heirloom that Griet's father gave to her, spying on Griet's interactions with Johannes (Cornelia's father and Griet's employer), and tattling on Griet to her mother Catharina (lying by saying that Griet stole Catharina's comb, Griet's been getting too friendly with Johannes) and all the while she puts up a sweet appearance, pretending like she's a innocent little girl in order to deceive everybody. Griet rightfully calls her out on this a few times, and slaps her twice for her maliciousness.
  • The Midwich Cuckoos, adapted into the film Village of the Damned.
  • Acheri, from Hell’s Children, by Andrew Boland, is a creepy child who, despite having no eyes in her eye sockets, can still see you. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
  • Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, in which the title character has a son so weird they don't seem to bother naming him, calling him "Little Father Time", due to being old beyond his years. He goes on to murder his step-siblings and then commit suicide because he believes that they and he are dragging Jude and Sue (first cousins, if the family wasn't odd enough) into even direr poverty, making him a damn sight less self-centered than most kids.
  • Alia in Dune, born with the knowledge and cunning of generations of Bene Gesserit ancestors. She was extremely creepy in David Lynch's film, very creepy in the Sci-Fi Channel adaptation, and only slightly less eerie in the original book.
    • Alia is also notable for being one of the few instances where we get to see what happens when the Creepy Child goes through puberty and then grows up. Needless to say, it turns out quite tragic.
    • In the David Lynch film, she was played by Alicia Roanne Witt, who had received a considerable amount of media attention at the age of three for her 200+ IQ.
  • In a Flash Back in Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince, Tom Riddle is shown to have been a Creepy Child. At the age of eleven he says to Dumbledore: "I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to."
    • Apparently he also killed a fellow orphan's pet rabbit and hung it up where the boy would find it. The orphanage was not presumably a nice place to be—tight budget, overcrowding, lack of emotional nourishment or adult support of any kind—but doesn't seem to have been an Orphanage of Fear except for persons Riddle selected for his retribution.
    • In addition to some interesting scheming as a later teenager—beyond, well, the Chamber of Secrets and all (and getting a more or less innocent classmate punished for it, knowing he'd be an easy suspect due to his half-giant heritage) we also see him charming his way into a teacher's favour and exploiting him for secrets in a way that is creepier than usual for a budding Dark Lord. And the movie cranked it up to eleven. Lil' Tom was all the time leaning on the Uncanny Valley.
    • Severus Snape had some decidedly creepy tendencies as a child: Watching other kids play from behind bushes (whether or not it was the beginning of a friendship, it's still Paranoia Fuel), and reportedly knowing more Dark curses at eleven years old than most of the seventh-years at Hogwarts. His personality as an adult is kind of like the grown-up version of this trope.
      • That's really not fair—hiding in bushes and watching other kids play is what kids with low self-esteem generally do when they're terribly lonely and know no one would ever want to be their friend.
      • He still creeped out Petunia when he came out, though.
  • The classic representative of this trope: Rhoda Penmark of The Bad Seed.
  • Jonathan Lethem's novel Gun, with Occasional Music, features "babyheads", toddlers who have been genetically modified to possess adult-level intelligence. Unfortunately, they also have adult-level cynicism and bad habits.
  • Pet Sematary. Ye gods. Because normal creepy kids aren't enough for Stephen King, they have to be psycho zombie creepy kids.
  • H.P. Lovecraft's novella The Dunwich Horror involves a creepy child who appears to grow supernaturally quickly. By twelve, he is approximately seven feet tall, is badly in need of a shave, and has completely adult proportions. Of course, this is nothing compared to his brother.
  • Not literally a child, but certainly childlike, is Psycho for Hire Jonathan Teatime from Hogfather. In the TV adaptation, he's very Wonka-ish, which only makes it worse. He's been like that since childhood, with the suggestion that as a child he may have murdered his parents, or at least watched them die. Even at the Assassin's Guild, kids know to keep the hell away from people that freaky, a remark that becomes important in the climax.
    • Lord Downey is quoted as saying that when Teatime was taken in, "We took pity on him because he was an orphan. I think, in retrospect, we should have wondered a bit more about that."
    • Overlapping with Tyke Bomb is Coin from Sourcery, who quite calmly converts people into piles of ash or clouds of smoke without seeming to grasp that they're even dead. Is anything bad happening to him? Although Coin is spurred on and encouraged in this behavior by his Wizard's staff, which contains the soul of his insane father. Once freed from the staff's influence, he's a normal boy. (Or as normal as someone who can remake his local reality on a whim can be).
      • Not all of it was his father influence too. At the beginning of the book he creeped out the Grim Reaper
    • Also, in Soul Music, we see that Susan very seriously freaked out her principal. Which is very understandable.
      • She's still at it later in life, although she's mostly learned to control it for her own ends.
  • Starting in Eldest, The Inheritance Cycle has Elva. As a result of his "blessing", Eragon causes a one-year-old infant to mutate into a six-year-old who speaks with the voice of a world-weary adult and has Purple Eyes, becoming the empathic Elva. The other characters get really, really creeped out just hearing her speak.
  • Artemis Fowl, from the series of the same name, is the world's greatest criminal mastermind and 12 years old.
    • Also one of the few examples of a Creepy Child protagonist.
  • Literary/film example: the Stephen King short story Children of the Corn is based around a Town with a Dark Secret in which a bunch of creepy children have killed all of the adults, and sacrifice everyone to a vaguely Jesus-like entity called "He Who Walks Behind The Rows" when they turn nineteen.
  • In the postmodern novel House of Leaves, the character Will Navidson has two children named Chad and Daisy. As events in the book become more and more surreal, the children begin to act quite differently from their normal behavior, at several points becoming the Creepy Child.
  • A. N. Wilson's A Jealous Ghost contains two children, brother and sister, who are strangely shifty and reserved with the nanny. They like to sit quietly in their room after dinner. Said nanny begins to believe they are being corrupted by their mother's ghost: however, she is very much alive. Oh, and the nanny goes completely bonkers.
  • Ivy (aka The Archive) from The Dresden Files is a seven-year-old girl containing the entirety of human knowledge and understanding. She talks very calmly about matters of magic and vampires and stuff, and then completely upends the trope and reverts to normalcy somewhat when Dresden's cat Mister walks in. "Kitty!" As Kincaid, the hardened mercenary and a hundreds-of-years-old half-demon known as the Hound of Hell, who used to work for Dracula's father (who is described as the scion of a demon) of doom put it, "Okay, that's just creepy.
  • The Age of Misrule features the Big Bad, Balor, at the end of book 3. He destroys whole pantheons... and he appears in the form of a Victorian private school boy. And then his face folds back so he can fire lasers at the heroes.
  • As of the latest novel in the Dexter series, Dexter in the Dark, his soon-to-be stepchildren Astor and Cody are definite examples, heading into Psychopathic Manchild territory (Astor being female doesn't seem to rule it out in her case.) No indication that Astor and Cody have been sent into creepy territory by their abusive dad has shown up in the TV series, though, and since the show diverted from the books starting with Season 2, it's no guarantee that the plot will show up there.
  • According to The Areas of My Expertise, The Virtuous Child is a creepy one parodying Puritanical values. See the page on Glurge. There's also the child prodigies.

Basically, it comes down to this: Child prodigies are fine, but you could do without the violins. If you have ever been alone at night in Penn Station, barefoot, with only a sword cane and a half-empty bottle of brandy, and suddenly, swiftly, with ninja-like stealth, a group of child prodigies surrounds you, rattling their violin cases, you will know what we're talking about.

  • Angel of Maximum Ride is an angelic-looking child...except that she possesses psychic powers that she can and will use on anybody. A slightly less creepy example is in book 1 when she "asks" a woman to buy an overpriced stuffed bear for her, but by the third book she has taken a level in badass and mentally commands all the mutants at Itec to kill the evil doctors. Scary stuff indeed. It Gets Worse
  • There's also the original Jerome Bixby short story "It's a Good Life", basis of the Twilight Zone episode described above. If anything, this version of Anthony is even creepier.
  • Pearl in The Scarlet Letter.
  • Pater Sin's runt-psykers in Warhammer 40,000: Gaunt's Ghosts: Sabbat Martyr.
  • The Malazan Book of the Fallen series is full of unnerving Oracular Urchin types. But Kettle takes the cake. From the constant hints that she's Not Quite Human to her matter-of-fact revelations of things "the dead told her" to the vaguely annoyed way she tells Fear Sengar that she'd been raped by the slavers they'd just rescued her from... She unnerves the guy who can turn into a giant dragon.
  • Twins Jane and Alec from the Twilight series. Jane can make people writhe from extreme agony, and Alec can make people feel absolutely nothing. Every other vampire that knows about them is at least slightly scared by them (except Aro). Not to mention that despite their childish appearance, they're both several hundred years old.
    • Jane is played by Dakota Fanning (who is decidedly less creepy now that she's mini-Gwyneth Paltrow)
    • One word: Renesmee. The human-vampire hybrid beats up her mother Bella in the uterus, is so genetically advanced as to be reading in her first MONTHS, and will be physically mature at seven (which is convenient, because she's been imprinted on by her mother's ex-boyfriend Jacob). Oh, and there's the whole thing with her ability to read minds and show others her thoughts through touch.
  • The main character, Will Stanton, from The Dark Is Rising.
  • Spider Robinson probably did not intend Jake Stonebender's supersupergenius daughter Erin to be a Creepy Child. But I defy you not to be creeped out, or at least Squicked, when at the age of fourteen MONTHS she responds to a compliment with "Why, Uncle Nicky, what a sweet thing to say! I'm going to start fucking when I'm sixteen, would you like to take a number? I can work you into the single digits if you hurry."
  • The "nudnik" (human, in mouse slang) child in House of Tribes captures mice and other small animals to dissect, and feeds the remains to his pet mouse. Even from the point of view of a human, this is Squicky, and from the point of view of the mouse main character it's positively horrifying.
  • The title character of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin certainly qualifies.
  • The title character of Ray Bradbury's short story The Small Assassin—who is a baby.
  • Avoided in Good Omens: Adam Young, despite being the Antichrist, is a thoroughly normal child due to the lack of any angelic or demonic influence in his upbringing.
  • Miles and Flora in Henry James' Turn of the Screw. First, they look very cute and innocent... later, not so much.
  • Henry/Emperor Kirwan of Draco, the wonderfully creepy hero of an all-but-forgotten short story called Child's Play, by Mary-Alice Schnirring. Twenty years before D&D existed, Schnirring came up with the idea of kids organizing and playing about an ancient empire and its adventures and vicissitudes entirely on paper. Of course, turns out the kingdom really exists, as does the horrifyingly undescribed monster in the swamp. Bye-bye, obnoxious cousin Charlie! Glug, glug....
  • While we're at it, Jane Rice's Idol of the Flies, a classic about a sweet-faced kid who, let's see... killed his parents, making it look like an accident, nearly does the same to his aunt, and tortures animals, among other things, many of which involve lots and lots of flies. I admit to muttering "hell, yeah" at the end -- that's all I'll say.
  • The title character in A Prayer for Owen Meany is more properly an Innocent Prodigy, but he can switch between pretending to be an Adorably Precocious Child and pretending (probably) to be one of these. In-story, it's quite effective.
  • Rosamond from the Nate The Great series—she is not malevolent, but with her gothy appearance and her six black cats, she is extremely strange. Also her spiritual successor, product mascot Emily The Strange.
  • Colonel Aureliano Buendia from One Hundred Years of Solitude was one of these as a kid. When his mom Ursula was pregnant with him, he cried in her womb. When he was born, he didn't cry and only stared at the ceiling. As a three year old, he told Ursula that a jar placed in the middle of a table would fall, and it moved to a side until it fell. . .
    • The childhood antics of Jose Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo make them border on Creepy Twins. Who may or may have not performed a permanent Twin Switch as kids.
  • Although Fiona McDonald in The Highland Twins at the Chalet School is a nice enough girl and not physically frail enough to be a true Waif Prophet, she has visions which unnerve her family - for instance, when she 'sees' her father die, and later, when she 'sees' her brother's plane crashing and he is later confirmed dead. However, she also uses her ability to prove to Joey that Jack, who has been reported drowned, is actually alive.
  • Interview with the Vampire's Claudia. She lures her victims, she's a vampire by the way, to her by ways of sympathy. She's a 50-70 year old women in the body of a five-year-old girl (and plays up the innocent girl look a lot.) She then 'kills' Lestat by stabbing him repeatedly after she poisons him. Then proceeds to nearly burn their house down.
  • Roger from Lord of the Flies starts out as a very creepy loner kid. At first, his antics are merely pranks such as taunting, throwing rocks at the smallest kids and kicking down their sand castles. Near the middle, he has become more sadistic and violent and soon becomes the torturer of the group. By the end, he becomes a complete psychopath when he kills Piggy by dropping a boulder on his head. Later, we find out he intends to kill Ralph and mount his head on a pike like he and Jack had done to a pig earlier.
  • Subverted in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Blue Angel: its alternate reality, theoretically human version of the Doctor "could talk from birth." You know you're scared of the talking newborn, but there's no indication he did anything else that was creepy, and his mother just saw him as unusual and precocious. And played to the hilt in Timeless, in which a little blond girl, possibly older than she looks, and who has crooked eyes and a little dolly, appears where she shouldn't, plays around with the Multiverse, gets people killed, knows things she shouldn't, and just acts creepy.
  • Before The Exorcist, but (mostly) after Rosemary's Baby, some of the best of these stories were anthologized into books: Little Monsters, More Little Monsters, Demonkind and Young Demons. An even earlier collection is called Outsiders, Children of Wonder.
  • Though the antagonist in Bentley Little's The House is said to be some sort of demonic entity, she appears as a 10-year-old Depraved Bisexual.
  • The primary Vord Queen in the Codex Alera series looks like an adult, but she is noted to have a number of disturbingly childlike tendencies, such as collecting a group of Alerans into a "dollhouse" where she watches them live and work - and when Tavi rescues them, the Queen goes absolutely berserk. Later on there are a few other scenes that cement the childlike nature of the Queen, including asking innocent questions about simple things she doesn't understand, i.e. expressions of love and affection, and one poignant scene where she cpnfesses to Isana that she only wants her Vord children to survive, like any mother should. Keep in mind, this is also a creature that is incredibly fast and powerful and durable, and is trying to wipe humanity off the face of the planet.
  • Baby Veil in Outcast of Redwall was pretty unnerving. When anyone tried to pick him up, he bit them and happily licked up their blood. He grew up into a common-or-garden delinquent, which was actually something of a relief. Until the poisoning incident, anyway.
  • Arya Stark in A Song of Ice and Fire starts out as a standard-issue 9-year-old Tomboy. By the time she's 10, she's committing premeditated murder and reciting a nightly list of the people she plans on killing.
    • She also copes with being deliberately blinded albeit temporarily with disturbing calmness—and even refuses to ask to have her eyesight restored because that would be the end of her training to be an assassin.
  • In the Chronicles of the Emerged World, Big Bad Aster is one because of a curse placed on him.
  • Jodi Picoult's novel Salem Falls has Gillain Duncan. Although technically a teenager at the time of the novel, she still fits this trope to a T, and it's stated from a former therapist of hers that she was just as disturbed when she actually was a child. Picoult herself has described Gillain as one of the creepiest teenage girls she's ever come across in fiction.
  • In The Pale King, Mr. Manshardt's infant has a terrifying expression on its face and body language of an adult. It can also talk, though the person who heard it may be insane.
  • The Baby from Remnants. It looks like a somewhat creepy two-year-old child, but seems to have some bizarre intelligence and psychic control over its mother, who gave birth to it while in suspending animation for 500 years. It turns out in reality, the Baby is a Shipwright in disguise.
  • Christie's younger twin cousins, Richard and Melanie, in Midnight Whispers border on this. They not only bathe together (at age twelve) and share the same toothbrush, but Richard does everything he can to get nine-year-old Jefferson in trouble, destroys Christie's piano, they both play up their being sick in one scene to get their cousins and nanny in as much trouble as possible, and after Christie and Jefferson are returned to the house after running away, Christie sees the twins have ripped her clothes to ribbons, mixed all her cosmetics and perfumes together, destroyed her belongings, Richard laughs at her through the keyhole and tells her to jump out the window...and in their last scene, Richard calmly tells Christie that their mother said the hospitalized Jefferson will die. His sister just stares at Christie, "like some coldly analytical scientist" to see what her reaction will be. It's kinda satisfying when Christie responds by throwing their hot soup in their laps...
  • Lucas and Claus the twin main characters of The Notebook, The Proof, And The Third Lie are like this with a case of Troubling Unchildlike Behavior.
    • Then there is Harelip, the twin's neighbor who is only sightly older then them and well.. let's just say she has a lot more sexual issues then a young girl should.
  • Willie Connolly in J.R. Lowell's Daughter of Darkness. She's such a perfect, perfect little girl... and such a nice high IQ too! Her dad must be awful proud... gee, isn't it too bad her mommy killed herself? Aw, isn't that cute, she collects dolls....


Live Action TV

  • Two of the creepiest girls ever seen on TV were in the Law and Order episode "Killerz," which was Green's second case. The older one had a strange look and behaved in a way that just seemed off, however she was innocent and the way she acted made sense after you found out what her little friend had done. The younger girl at first seemed like a Cheerful Child that was better adjusted then the older one, however it turned out she Does Not Like Men and was a sociopathic Serial Killer of little boys. What makes her especially scary is that despite Dr. Skoda's diagnosis Dr. Olivet actually defended the Enfant Terrible and was able to get her off. As she was leaving we see the murderess eyeing her next victim: a very scared little boy.
    • In the first episode of the series's ninth season (and the debut one of Angie Harmon as Abby Carmichael), a rich couple's 7-year-old very disturbed adoptive kid was accused of killing his also adoptive baby sister. He didn't.
  • A 13-year-old sociopath kills his younger neighbor in the Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode "Conscience".
    • Elle Fanning played a creepy/disturbed kid in the Law and Order Special Victims Unit episode "Cage". Detective Dani Beck takes home the little girl who was from an abusive foster home. That night the girl wakes her up because she can't sleep, and Beck finds the girl has set fire to the curtains in an attempt to kill them both so they can be together.
  • In the mid-2000s a creepy little girl appeared on several shows including CSI Law and Order Special Victims Unit, Close to Home and The Inside. Despite going by different names and having different mothers on each of them, she always acted the same and was always played by the same actress Jeanette McCurdy, (who later went to iCarly). She would always pretend to be a Cheerful Child that just happened to have overheard of seen damming evidence against a person that implicates them as a murderer; however it always turns out that the little bitch was lying to them and the person she claims did it was completely innocent, just convenient patsies which were easy to frame. After proving her story was bull the police would confront he about it and she would try to blame somebody else. About half the time it wouldn’t work, and they exposed her as the Enfant Terrible she really was. The other half they went after the second person she blamed for the crime and arrested them not even suspecting that the little girl was actually a murderess.
    • Jennette McCurdy got roles in several Nickelodeon kids' shows playing pretty much the same character, except that around other kids she seemed less creepy and more simply violent. She once said in an interview that the reason she liked playing this type of character was because it was so different then who she actually was in real life.
    • Ari Graynor was on an episode where her younger sister was shot in a video store robbery. Then we learned she arranged for the sister to be molested and then killed to prevent her talking. The explanation was that she was an abused child and a total sociopath. When they got her she said "You think I'm scared of the death penalty? You can't kill me - I'm already dead." Brrr.
  • The Test Card F girl from the British Life On Mars.Watch her and be afraid.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer had The Anointed One. In a typical Joss Whedon moment, however, when Spike shows up he takes "The Annoying One" down within an episode. (According to rumour, he was killed off because the actor was growing too rapidly for a dead kid.)
    • "Gingerbread" features a demon who poses as the ghosts(?) of two murdered children.
    • "Hush" opens with Buffy dreaming of a spooky little girl, complete with the nursery tune. What makes the girl spookier, is that she looks like a kid-version of Buffy.
  • Wolfram & Hart's conduit to the Senior Partners in Angel was a little girl. And she was also the dark reincarnation of Ra, representing the sun at sunset and the evil of humanity.
    • There is also an episode revolving around a creepy child possessed by a demon that corrupted the souls of those it possessed. When they exorcised the demon they learned that it hadn't been controlling him, but had possessed him and been trapped inside by the soulless child.
  • The unnamed schoolgirl in the Doctor Who serial "Remembrance of the Daleks" who is eventually revealed to be the Renegade Daleks' living battle computer and is able to shoot lightning from her hands
    • The more recent series two-parter "Human Nature/The Family of Blood" involved one of these as well, who always carried a bright red balloon. It never popped. Odd. Most likely a reference to the original book, in which the little girl's balloon behaved like Rover. When either girl appeared on screen, they also had the same Ironic Nursery Tune.
      • And what happens to her in the end will make you afraid to look in mirrors.
    • Jamie, "The Empty Child" in the Doctor Who episode of the same name, although this was the result of being infected by The Virus. In fact, to hell with infected—he was The Virus. Also, the girl in "Silence in the Library."
    • Chloe Webber of "Fear Her" is a rare example of a black Creepy Child.
    • Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "Ghosts of the Northern Line" has Monster of the Week Mnemosyne take on the form of a little girl ghost, who at one point stands on the tracks in front of a tube train, prompting the driver to slam the brakes on - giving the other ghosts time to feed on the living.
    • Baby Master. Russell T. Davies noted in the script that the child should be "Damien-like".
  • Jasmine in the Torchwood episode "Small Worlds".
    • The tarot reading girl in series 2.
    • And in Children of Earth, every child on the planet becomes this when when they freeze and speak in unison.
      • In a deliberately creepy moment, the two daughters of the minister turn to him and start saying, in unison, "We want a pony. We want a pony."
  • Yandere Rhonda Vollmer on Big Love is a non-supernatural variant: behind her artless demeanor and expressionless blue eyes lurks the brain of a baby sociopath and master-manipulator-in-training (not to mention a disturbing fondness for rhinestones). She's got something of an excuse, having been raised in an abusive cult and married off at the age of fourteen to a man in his seventies, but it doesn't do much to make her less terrifying. (Amusingly, she's played by Daveigh Chase, who portrayed the ultimate Creepy Child in the American version of The Ring.)
  • Anthony Fremont from The Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life" is literally omnipotent. He's no more evil than any other three-year-old who's never been told "No" in his life, but his ignorance, capriciousness, and lack of empathy holds Peakville, Ohio in complete terror.
    • The sequel in the 2000 remake features Anthony's daughter, who is able to bring back everything her father "sent away".
  • Supernatural is in love with the Creepy Child. The very first episode has a creepy brother and sister, "The Benders" has a thirteen year old cannibal named Missy, "Playthings" has a creepy girl ghost manipulating the daughter of the owner of an inn, "All Hell Breaks Loose Part 1" has an Acheri demon appear as a little girl, "The Kids are All Right" has changeling children feeding off mothers' synovial fluid, "Are You There, God? It's Me, Dean Winchester" has two little girls terrorizing Bobby and "Jus in Bello" has the new Big Bad Lilith in the form of a small child, who is pure Nightmare Fuel and decided that the Creepy Child was so nice, she did it twice. Season Four's "The Rapture" has Claire Novak possessed by the angel Castiel informing Castiel's previous host (Claire's father Jimmy) that his (Jimmy's) work on Earth is done while poor Jimmy begs to be possessed instead.
    • Though it's played straight then that same child returns several years later in "Season's Beatings" and that time he really IS the anti-christ.
    • Lampshaded in the season five episode "The Real Ghostbusters: "Oh look, more creepy children brought to you by Supernatural."
  • While not creepy in a supernatural sense, Hannibal Lecture-ing Insufferable Genius Hannah from a two episode "arc" of CSI definitely qualifies. In her first episode she helps get her brother out of a murder conviction by convincing the jury that she did it, while gaining CSI Sara Sidle's sympathy (she was also a gifted child), only to smugly reveal to her that her brother did indeed set up the prank and that she's going to get a lot of book deals once she's out of juvie. In her second episode the two siblings are in college (their parents are mysteriously dead), with the brother as a student and Hannah as his professor. Several plot twists and one Hannibal Lecture at Sara later, it is revealed that Hannah had begun to envy of her brother's growing independence and framed him for murder in order to put him in jail, under her control and at her side forever. Her brother could no longer stand his sister's truth-destroying Xanatos Gambits and killed himself and "arresting officer" Sara was simply disgusted, which probably contributed to her eventual permanant leave of absence.
  • La Femme Nikita: In the episode "He Came From Four," a creepy child with telepathic and telekinetic abilities is sent to Section One to assist in a mission.
  • The Littlest Cancer Patient on House.
  • Megan from Drake and Josh.
  • Not as scary as Megan but Rico from Hannah Montana. Same with Sophie from Corey In The House.
  • Tina from Still Standing is pretty creepy with her unblinking stare and vindictive nature. Her aunt Linda and older sister Lauren are particularly wary of her.
  • By the end of American Gothic, Caleb has come to resemble this.
  • The X-Files had a bunch of these.
    • The most iconic are Eves 9 and 10 in "Eve."
    • Billy Underwood in "Invocation."
    • The girl with the doll in "Chinga" (written by Stephen King).
    • The children in "Herrenvolk."
    • Gibson Praise ("The End," "The Beginning," "Within," "Without"). He can read peoples' minds and avoided death by ducking. The man who died was shot right in front of him, but does he show the slightest bit of worry or fear, not just that someone was killed right in front of him, but that he was the intended target? Nuh-uh. He is also completely deviod of emotion at all other times and has no issue with pointing out how cruel and heartless people are.
    • William could qualify as this too, if he wasn't intimately connected with Mulder and Scully. After all, he is/was genetically alien and had a habit of moving things with his mind. But he's just so darn cute.
  • Hera in Battlestar Galactica is somewhat creepy.
  • The Denton twins, Chloe and Radcliffe, from The League of Gentlemen definitely meet this trope.
  • Wednesday and Pugsley Addams from The Addams Family, although it's played for laughs here.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Susperia in "Cold Fire", the Borg children on their first appearance, Naomi Wildman in a nightmare scene in "Dark Frontier", and (it was hinted on a couple of occasions) Kes.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: A little girl's Imaginary Friend came to life on the Enterprise in an episode titled... "Imaginary Friend". But she (it?) wasn't really her imaginary friend, oh no. "Isabella" was an energy being who hardly smiled and was perfectly capable of screwing over the whole ship on a whim, or a misunderstanding! And, of course, it took a while for the crew to catch on instead of thinking she was still imaginary.
  • Oscar from The Sarah Jane Adventures episode "The Temptation Of Sarah Jane Smith". At the end of Part One he turns out to be a Graske in disguise.
  • Ally from episode two of Demons who kidnaps children for Gilgamel.
  • Walt on Lost generally seems like a normal kid, but also has the habits of appearing in places he shouldn't be, knowing the future, and smacking birds into nearby windows. He manages to creep out his stepfather to the point of relinquishing custody. Then in season 2, he scares the Others enough that they give him back to his father.
    • Ben Linus was not only creepy as an adult...
  • Madison from Harper's Island. She tends to creep out her mother late at night by waking her up and telling her everyone is going to die.
    • During the first episodes, she almost crosses the Narm-line. In the last episodes, however, despite doing creepy things offscreen, her ghost-like aura is not the same again.
  • Dotty/Kirsty Cotton from Eastenders. She was a little girl of no older than nine or so, seemingly dumped on her grandmother Dot by her criminal father Nick. At first she seemed saccharine sweet, but it soon became clear that something was wrong. Her hymn-singing, baking, little 1930's cardies and general innocence took her beyond the realms of 'normal but goody-two-shoes kid' and into the realms of creepy. You could tell she had to be hiding something - and she was. Turned out she had a pact with her Father Nick to kill Dot for her money, and it didn't seem like she was being threatened by him or otherwise coerced into it; she appeared to be doing it willingly, off her own back. She pressed on with this plan until the last minute, when she got cold feet and attempted to drug Nick instead. Nick survived, but as he left he shouted not to be fooled by Dotty's traumatised tears: she was rotten to the core and the plan to kill Dot had been all her idea. It sounded like a bitter rant, but this is Eastenders we're talking about, so there will almost definitely turn out to be some truth to his words.
  • Dollhouse has Iris.
  • Flash Forward has Charlie, who has an unspecified vision that she simply (and in monotone) describes as "dreaming that there were no more good days".
  • Mordred in Merlin.
  • Caligua is portrayed this way in the TV version of I, Claudius. He becomes partially responsibly for the murder of his father when he was just hitting puberty.
  • Are You Afraid of the Dark? loved this. We've got "The Lonely Ghost," "The Frozen Ghost," the girl from "The Tale of the Unfinished Painting" and that scary boy from "The Tale of the Silver Sight."
  • Karen from Outnumbered
  • The entire X 7 series from Dark Angel. Scary mute child soldiers, with a unit hive-mind, the ability to communicate with each other ultra-sonically and freaky goddamn black eyes. The X8 series however seems to be identical to the X5 and X6 series, bizarrely.
    • It was mentioned in the novels that finish the film that after the experiments became stable (X5) each series was designed for specific goals in mind. The X5's are boosted with feline DNA and were used as commandos. The X6 are similar but either due to genetics or training are much less independent. The X7 seemed to have been designed to work as squads, given their abilities they were most likely meant for a more straight forward attack style. The X8 were never shown in combat (only one was seen on the show), maybe the X7's scared the military or they only needed one group with those specific abilities? There's also the anomalies, failures that were occasionally used for very specific goals (lizard man Mole apparently helped kill Saddam while a blue guy he argued with was involved in some mission in the arctic)
  • River in Firefly can approach this at times, though usually her Woobie-ness overrides the creepy elements. She's also somewhat older than the typical Creepy Child, though her behaviour tends to be very childlike.
  • Both lampshaded and played straight in Stephen King's four part movie Rose Red: There's the classic and indeed creepy ghost girl April and then there's Annie Wheaton, one of the team of explorers in the haunted house. She's mostly a sympathetic character but slightly creepy due to being autistic screen as well as, among other things, telekinetic. At one point another (much less sympathetic) explorer calls her "that creepy child with that creepy doll". By the way, both Annie and April have their own theme music, but Annie (whose theme is a rather nice big band song) soon picks up April's creepy nursery rhyme theme.
  • Dexter was one of these as a child, killing animals and getting though a psych test only by answering the opposite to what was true.
  • Shane Botwin in Weeds is an interesting case—viewers get to observe the evolution of a Creepy Child, from "slightly affected by seeing his father die" to "13-year-old violent drug dealer and murderer", over the course of five seasons. It's anyone's guess where he'll go in season six...
  • Millennium has Jordan Black, Frank's younger daughter. She has power's similar to Frank's except the manifest themselves as metaphorical dreams.
  • The Closer has Skander Marku from the Season 6 Christmas two-parter, who acts unnaturally calm and almost smug amidst his whole family ending up dead. He appears to care more about his dog than the fact that his home is a crime scene, smirks at the cops when his (newly-met) aunt and uncle take him home, and when arrested, makes up a patently false story of how the arresting officer tied him up and threatened him. Brutally subverted in the second half; when he's told that all the family he knew about had been killed, he breaks down crying. His odd behavior at the police station was most likely due to his family's mistrust of the police; he acts more like a normal child after he realizes that the police are trying to protect him.
  • Alicia, from the Spanish series Los Protegidos. If you know Spanish you should shit bricks
  • Sunny Capaduca from Fifteen Love was a scary little girl with a heavy—nearly untraceable—accent, Jerk Jock and Manipulative Bitch tendencies, and a liking for frightening the other (much older) kids at the school. She stopped just short of being an Enfante Terrible.
  • Robin Arryn, from Game of Thrones. "Mummy, I want to see the bad man fly." The fact that his crazypants mother is still breastfeeding him at age EIGHT or so doesn't help.
  • On Cougar Town Ellie, Grayson and Tom have a brush in with three creepy Homeschooled Kids. They deal with them by acting creepier still.
  • Criminal Minds has the episodes "The Boogeyman" and "A Shade of Gray" where it turned out a child was the UnSub and neither of them felt guilt for their actions.


Music

  • The video to Portishead's "All Mine" features an extremely unnerving little girl lipsyncing the song.
  • Alice Cooper's song "Years Ago" is supposedly narrated by Steven, a lost child who only does monotone. the song is set to a species of Creepy Circus Music.
  • Turn around, Briiight eyes!
  • The music video to Avenged Sevenfold's "Nightmare" has a little blonde girl covered in blood and smiling while tossing a ball around which is also covered in blood.
  • The video to The Prodigy's "Omen" features a creepy little girl playing a Xylophone to bookend the piece.
  • The video to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Y Control features a small army of them. And they're armed.
  • The album cover for They Might Be Giants' John Henry... You try looking at a girl staring blankly with a pickaxe in her hands and not have the jibblies...
  • The music video by OOMPH! - "Augen Auf" features a birthday party where the Adults are innocent, but the Children are the ones with more devious intent.
  • All of the children in the Vocaloid song "Circle You, Circle You". It comes off as more sad than anything when you realize that they are living in an Orphanage of Fear and have been horrifically experimented on in order for some Mad Scientists to (successfully) discover the secret to immortality. Said scientists would force the children to play the Japanese children's game "Kagome, Kagome" and then cut off a limb whenever they lost. The children play this game with wayward visitors even after the scientists are long dead, making the song a good case of Nightmare Fuel all the same.


Tabletop Games

  • The Old World of Darkness game Wraith: The Oblivion has "Striplings", a title given to Spectres (evil ghosts of Oblivion) who died before the age of ten and have corpuses (ghost bodies) resembling children. They exist among all of the Spectral castes (including at least one Malfean, the God-Kings of Oblivion) and form a society unto themselves. Other Spectres (even Malfeans) find them to be completely ungovernable and "creepy".
  • The short-lived Immortal RPG featured the Peri, youngsters rescued from the Children's Crusade and made into immortals whose talent is to transform their bodies into weapons. The game's soundtrack had a bit with the sound of someone being stabbed, followed by a childish voice saying, "G'night!" and giggling. Worth noting is that Immortal has been revived as a free RPG, available here, although the Creepy Children described have been retconned into being just part of the Peri as of the current edition; many of the others are still Creepy Children, though, just from different origins.
  • The card game Lunch Money features monochrome pictures of a young girl with nursery rhymes and other sayings having vaguely to do with the cards intended effect. The artwork is fairly sureal, but becomes truly creepy when one considers that the cards represent the characters actions in a brutal street fight (i.e. Punches, Kicks, hitting a guy with a chain, etc.).
  • In the French game In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas (the English version isn't a straight adaptation, more a remake) children of a demon and a human can be either normal kids, demons, or official creepy children. I love the illustration on that chapter in the rulebook.
  • Voice of Demnogonis in Mutant Chronicles. Looks like a child, but in fact is a Mind-Raping Complete Monster who feeds on Life Energy.
  • The predilections of the Deathlord known as the Dowager in Exalted...well...we'll let Things One Is Not Allowed To Do In Exalted spell it out.

Not all Abyssals are creepy little girls.
1. Except when the focus of the game is on the Dowager, that is.
2. And even then she Exalts creepy little boys too.


Theater

  • In some productions, the demons/witches that deliver the misleading prophecies to Macbeth take this form.


Video Games

  • Alma Wade isn't the villain of a video game named FEAR for nothing. Every... single... time she appears... is so creepy it'll make you scream and jump. And you can't shoot her, since she's a freaking ghost!! And it gets worse when she grows up...
  • Pink Queen from Advance Wars: Eternal War, though she's more around 16-ish. Flash, too. he has a ship made out of guns.
  • In Arx Fatalis, there is only one child in the only city explored in the game. There's nothing special about her appearance or clothes, but she has this soft-spoken voice, which when combined with outdated graphics(expressionless, pixelated facial features), simply makes your skin crawl.
  • The Little Sisters from BioShock (series) are little girls of about five to six years' age who have been turned into living depositories for ADAM, the game's genetic Applied Phlebotinum. Their bodyguards, the hulking and homicidally protective Big Daddies, are scary enough, but a pallid little girl with a syringe on her arm who takes a childishly cavalier approach to sucking vital fluids out of dead bodies is on a whole 'nother level of horrifying.
    • The worst part, though, is how lifelike they are if you stop to watch. Considering that you're expected to kill their bodyguards for powerups and have the option to kill them for more.
    • The creep factor is being significantly reduced for Bioshock 2... because you're one of their bodyguards. Through his eyes, they're adorable.
    • "Look, Mr. Bubbles, an angel! - Wait - he's still breathing. It's all right. I know he'll be an angel soon..."
  • Sally, from the "Mothership Zeta" add-on to Fallout 3. She's a young alien captive who has been held in since before the nuclear war. She crawls around the air vents giving you information and opening doors for you. She knows way too much, you can see her One-Winged Angel form coming from a mile away...Except it never comes! She dosn't even try to backstab you, she is a fullly dedicated ally. Not actually that bad if you take this as a relief, but she also seems very nonchalant about the very evident death of her family and most of the world.
    • Betty, from the "Tranquility Lane" quest. The avatar of the sinister Stanislaus Braun in a twisted simulation of the 50s-esque world of pre-war 2077 who has spent decades torturing, tormenting, and toying with the other inhabitants.
  • Silent Hill has practically an orphanage full of creepy children (not to mention an actual orphanage is mentioned/visited in the 3rd and 4th games): Cheryl (renamed "Sharon" in the movie), Alessa, the demon children "Mumblers" in the school level, "Lil' Walter" from the 4th game, to some extent Heather in the 3rd (she might be too old, however), and Laura in the 2nd (though she was more bratty than creepy, and her creepyness was born more out of obliviousness than genuine hostility. Which isn't to say she wasn't, she just wasn't able to perceive the monsters).
  • A unique example would be Ridley from Metroid: Other M, who first appears as an adorable, fluffy chicken-rabbit-thing. He is seen again, simply staring at Samus with the most frightenting look ever. He is then seen again growling and consuming a corpse, only stopping to hiss at Samus
  • Pharos from Persona 3. And the fact that he just wants to be best friends forever... Isn't. Helping.
    • In addition comes the fact that his Social Link is the Death Arcana, in a game in which Tarot Motifs are good clues to a character's nature.
    • Did we mention that he likes suddenly showing up in your room in the middle of the night? Because he does that. A lot.
    • Oh, poor, poor forgotten Alice... Oh, and she's one of the strongest of the Death Arcana...
    • The original game had Aki, a girl in black who causes trouble everywhere she goes. She's the personification of every negative emotion Maki has.
  • Manah swings between this and Enfante Terrible in Drakengard.
  • Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne has the hero routinely followed by a silent young boy and his apparent nanny. The boy stands silent with his creepy pallid skin, piercing gaze, and blonde locks, while his caregiver speaks for him. Of course, that ain't no child, but a powerful fallen angel trying to groom the hero to be a Messiah for all demonkind to lead them in their battle against God. Nothing too complicated, really.
  • Clock Tower: The First Fear has Bobby, a ten year old with giant scissors who chases the main character around trying to kill her. His face is grey and badly deformed. And there's also his giant, purple, severely deformed brother Dan.
  • "Princess" Agitha from The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess is a girl aged about 10, who lives alone in a "castle" that is more like a giant terrarium, dresses like a Elegant Gothic Lolita, and is obsessed with bugs. She tasks Link with catching golden bugs so she can put on a Bug Ball, and while she is very sweet and polite about it all, she expresses wishes concerning said bugs that range from the perfectly innocent ("I want to tie ribbons on your antennae!") to the utterly squicky ("I want to bathe in your slime!"). All this combined with the lack of any parental figures has led to some speculation [dead link] about their fate.
    • The fact that she lives alone may actually imply that she's older than she looks. Of course, this makes her even creepier.
      • To make this even creepier, if you try and leave without selling any bugs to her, on your way out she says, "I know you have bugs..."
        • She... she growls...
    • Twilight Princess also has Malo. Perhaps the reason he becomes an insanely successful business entrepreneur (before the age of 8, I might add) is because everyone does what he tells them to just to get away from his blank, soulless expression, and the fact that his voice almost sounds like that of a grown man really doesn't help.
    • The Skull Kids from The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time.
    • The little Kokiri girl you meet in The Lost Woods as an adult, right after the depressed man disappears. It's her utter deadpan and the fact that we never do get any further explanation.

"That guy isn't here anymore. Anybody who comes into the forest will be lost. Everybody will become a Stalfos. Everybody, Stalfos. So, he's not here anymore. Only his saw is left. Hee hee." The conversation finishes with: "Heh heh heh. Are you going to be... too? Heh heh!"

Twinmold Child: "Heh, heh... Thanks... You're nice. Umm... Can I ask... a question? Your true face... What kind of... face is it? I wonder... The face under the mask... Is that... your true face?"
Majora Child (right before you fight it): "Do you want to play with me? OK, let's play good guys and bad guys... I'll be the good guy, and you be the bad guy..."

      • The Moon Children all share a distinct semblance to a man who is easily the most terrifying and intimidating character in the whole series. Yes, that's right, it's The Happy Mask Salesman. Capable of changing position without ever moving, scary as Hell when he finds out you didn't get his mask, oh, and when you fail and the moon destroys all of Termina? HE STILL COMES AFTER YOU.
      • If you look closely while you're forking over your masks to them, you'll see that Link is backing away slightly each time...
      • The questions they ask (recalling the story of the Skull Kid and the Four Giants) suggest that they're all part of the Skull Kid.
    • Link, himself, is a bit of a subversion. Despite the fact that he's no older than ten in some of the games, nobody in Hyrule or otherwise seems to think twice of a little boy going around and saving the world. With violence.
  • Annie from 'League of Legends', in addition to looking rather creepy, she can cast advanced magic and animate her toy bear to ravage enemies.
  • One of these follows you around in Jade Empire, going by the name of Wild Flower. Although her actions and attitudes aren't creepy per se, one has to wonder what the design team was smoking when they designed her. The fact that she's the already-dead host of Spirit Guardian Chai Ka and his 'Other' certainly doesn't help matters any either.
  • The Indigo Child in Fahrenheit (2005 video game) / Fahrenheit (2005 video game).
  • Lieselotte Achenbach from Arcana Heart. Wanted criminal in another dimension, and carries around a legless puppet with her sister's spirit trapped inside. And she's only ten years old. Nope... nothing creepy about that at all.
  • Then there are the notorious Children of Goldshire in World of Warcraft: a group of six children who live in an upstairs room in one of the houses in Goldshire (an otherwise peaceful, low-level human settlement). They sometimes make trips to nearby Stormwind, except that they always form a group shaped like a pentagram and if you go upstairs to their room, the mellow tune suddenly gives way to ominous ambience. People have reported hearing strange voices in that room and some players end up spooked to such a degree that they swear to never enter that room again.
    • There's Pamela Redpath, a ghostly girl in Eastern Plaguelands, although she's a lot more depressing than creepy.
  • The Keepers in the Thief are a secret order of mysterious men and women who gather in dark places wearing black cloaks with hoods, so it is no suprise that the girl who translates the mystic words of the seer is also creepy as hell. In the ending of Thief 3, she is revealed to be a monster that wears the skin of a girl it killed decades ago, and infiltrated the organization that worked to stop her.
    • Lauryl from Thief 3. Incredibly creepy voice (being voiced by frickin' SHODAN helps) and prone to send you jumping by butting in while you're almost cornered by the Body Horrors in her asylum 'home'. There's a also bottle of her still-warm blood in the cellar, despite the fact she's been dead for years. Yet another reason why the Shalebridge Cradle is still probably the scariest level of all time. Oh, and she's on your side.
  • Overlord 2's protagonist is the son of the Overlord of the previous game. The beginning of the game will have you playing as the Overlord's son as a child. Naturally, he is mostly faceless and is quite malicious, particularly towards the kids that bully him in the beginning. Contrary to other examples of this trope, he looks quite scary and is given the all-too appropriate nickname of Witch-Boy.
    • Considering Overlord tends to parody fantasy tropes and etc, the rather Obviously Evil look the Overlad has is deliberate.
  • The banshee from Fable II attacks by sending "ankle-biters", shadow monsters that look like creepy children with swords and knives, after you.
  • From Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, we would like to introduce Penny, whose interests include explosions, and... actually, mostly just explosions. Don't worry, Penny likes you. Unfortunately, Penny has a tendency to do what Mr. Bear says, and Mr. Bear HATES YOU!
  • In Chrono Trigger, the young boy Janus and his cat Alfador are randomly encountered by the party in Enhasa. Upon meeting him as a stranger, Janus abruptly and unsettlingly prophesies, "The black wind howls. One of you will shortly perish." Later, Crono dies trying to protect his friends and Schala from Lavos, fulfilling Janus's prophecy.
    • The creepy effect gets kicked up a notch if you realize that the black wind he mentions is actually the sound heard when traveling through time, and he grows up to be Magus, the primary antagonist until this point.
  • The Child Crusaders from Clive Barker's Jericho. These creatures are the malevolent spirits of young children forced to march in a crusade, only to be horribly slaughtered. After the Breach is opened in that timeline, the evil of the Firstborn transforms the children's souls into vicious, hateful ghouls, harbouring great anger towards the adults who let them die. They appear as floating, sharp-toothed, pale-skinned creatures with their lower torso missing and their intestines hanging out. They also have no hands, and use the shredded tendons of their arms to attack. They also make very creepy moaning and shrieking sounds, and their disembodied crying can be heard before the Jericho Squad encounters them.
    • The form of the Firstborn could also qualify. Here you have an evil, all-powerful, godlike creature who despises humanity, and it takes the form of a small, naked child with glowing white eyes and a distorted voice made up of several male and female voices speaking at once.
  • If the game didn't make her seem creepy enough, the fandom certainly made Touhou's Flandre Scarlet incredibly creepy. She's a 495 year old vampire with the mind of a child, and mental and emotional insecurities (read as 'insane') to boot, who has the ability to destroy whatever she wants by clenching her right hand into a fist...
  • Alma, of First Encounter Assault Recon. She starts out liquefying your squadmates right in front of you, blowing up buildings, and generally popping out to scare the bejeezus out of you, and that's before she starts dragging you into her hellscape dream worlds to Mind Rape you with demon ghosts. By Project Origin, she's even worse, as she's no longer trying to rape your brain. She's just trying to rape your body.
  • The Xenoas from Requiem: Bloodymare are essentially an entire race of Creepy Children... who have recently been made playable. Childlike bodies, with some creepy physical traits, adult-like intelligence, and a usually-hidden disdain and hatred for all other races.
  • Eresh of Suikoden V. Being a frail mage who is apparently old enough to have known Jeane (way, way, way) back in the day just isn't enough; she also has to talk about her body as "this shell," too.
  • The Infernas in The Suffering. In human form, they're an immortal trio of eerie, smiling children that talk quite candidly about how they play with the souls of your dead children for all eternity. In monster form, they're charred corpses that giggle constantly as they soar towards you on a jetstream of fire.
  • Ashley from Wario Ware seems to be a parody of this trope... though there is the whole "I have granted kids to hell" thing.
  • The Narrator from the Starsiege cutscenes. The major cutscenes in the game are narrated by a young girl with a British accent and an oddly extensive vocabulary. The opening of the game introduces her by an oddly echoing humming, the beginning of a schoolyard chant, followed by her singing: "Little Lord Peter, missing his liter while Hercy plays in the red. Down came the Glitches and burned us in ditches and we slept after eating our dead." Also, in one of the possible endings, she further narrates "It was only a question of time before the Cybrids captured the last human survivors. Now, we're all being systematically elminated."
  • Castlevania 64 tried this with Malus but they weren't subtle enough to fit into the trope.
  • Soon after you finish the second mission in Survival Crisis Z, you have a vision of a greenskinned girl wandering down a bloodstained hallway. This is probably meant to be the first clue that this isn't your typical Zombie Apocalypse.
    • They appear for real in episode 3. And they have knives.
  • Kid Albedo from Xenosaga. Dear God. Especially at the end of Episode II when he taunts Rubedo.
  • PARIAH from Prototype. And if the Web Of Intrigue is anything to go by he's eternally a child, and can kill anything by touching them.
  • Dantes Inferno has the Unbaptized Babies who also qualify as undead children. They move like real toddlers as a toddler was brought in specifically to do motion capture for them.
  • Sally from Dragon Fable. She's a cute little six-year-old with blond pigtails...and she plays with the ears, eyes and hearts of zombies. For fun. After the boss is destroyed in the Necropolis Quest, Sally finds the now-abandoned subterranean university-city of necromancers, death knights and the undead, and claims it as her playhouse.
    • She even creates a cross between a Skeleton and a gingerbread man for the main chracter to try out for fun. Meet the Gingerdead Man
  • Jojora from Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, a magical, levitating girl. She appears when you first enter Joke's End amidst some extremely creepy music and starts to taunt you. After a couple of more sightings, she says she's bringing a friend over to play...who turns out to be a hulk many times larger than she is, and the two attack you.
  • Sue Pea and Chauncey from Luigis Mansion.
  • Tales of Symphonia: Presea from when you first meet her up until you make her a new Key Crest and free her from her Cruxis Crystal.
  • Bahamut's Fayth from Final Fantasy X. It's just... the mysterious way he speaks to Tidus, the fact that his eyes are always covered, the fact that he's one of the few characters in the game who actually understand everything, the fact how incredibly creepy his version of the praying song sounds, due to him being such a small child, the fact that his battle-form is a giant, Civilization obliterating Dragon-Something-Hybrid-Beast... This child surely gave some people serious nightmares.
  • The arcade sleeper hit The Outfoxies features the playable Ice Climbers-esque siblings Danny and Demi. They giggle like small kids typically do when they run, even if they happen to be packing a machine gun or RPG at the time, and after they've murdered one of their fellow assassins the same giggling sample is played while one of them draws an indiscriminate green squiggly mark on the television set that displays their recently expired target. It's much creepier in context.
  • Kingdom Hearts has its share of creepy kids. Roxas and Naminé don't look much more than fourteen, but they have this funny look about them - possibly related to the fact that they're Nobodies, beings without true emotions. However, this doesn't justify Birth By Sleep exclusive Ienzo, who never says a word but just keeps staring... and staring... and staring...
  • Special mention goes out to the child version of Kirie in Fatal Frame despite not being a hostile ghost, the Kiryu Twins in II, the Handmaidens in III, and Ayako in IV.
    • Especially Ayako. She's as cute as a button, but there's a very good reason she was in that mental institution.
  • We're about 20 years too late to see it, but Cyrus from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl is implied by people who knew him then to have been basically the same as he is as an adult.
  • About half of the cast from Psychonauts probably counts, since we're talking about a game that's set in a summer camp for psychics. Dogan seems like the most notable ...but he's just so adorable. This trope also comes into play when you talk to any camper who doesn't have his or her brain.
    • Special mention to the Stepford Smiler pair, who are incredibly enthusiastic about their suicide pact.
  • Kamilla in Ghost Trick acts like a wholesome, happy little girl until she's possessed by Yomiel and smacks Lynne around with an uzi. Even her character sprite is different, with her hair down to hide her eyes in shadow.
  • Nearly every child in Dragon Age is creepy, though in a couple of cases one suspects the creepiness was unintentional. There's a creepy child standing around reciting a creepy poem in a Creepy Monotone in the Haven graveyard. There's a villager's daughter in danger of possession in a basement in Honnleath. And Arl Eamon's son Connor, who is possessed, is as creepy as they come. And then there are the singing ghost children in the Alienage orphanage ("But I'm dying, Ser Willem, Ser Willem, in pain.")
  • In Alice: Madness Returns, the Queen of Hearts now looks like a creepy little girl with tentacles for legs. She also looks a bit like Alice's dead older sister.
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has Babette, a member of the Dark Brotherhood who is actually a 300 year old vampire who uses her looks to lull targets into a false sense of security.
  • Samantha Maxis from Nazi Zombies. There's a reason she's called the Demonic Announcer, or according to Tank, "Devil-Voice!" Then there's her laugh when you get the Teddy Bear from the Mystery Box.
  • Gary from Bully is a tad old, but he fits pretty well in a more comedic sense. I mean, yeah, he's a sociopath, but he just loves being a sociopath so much that you can't help but laugh with him. Well, until he's caused the entire school to become a warzone and strips you of all your allies. Because A) He's crazy and B) He knows your a threat. But still, he's so fun when off his medication.


Visual Novels

  • Ilya from Fate/stay night. Even when she's calling the hero 'Oniichan'. Especially when she's calling the hero 'Oniichan'.
  • Higurashi no Naku Koro ni provides the example of Rika Furude, the little miko girl who usually serves as a Deliberately Cute Child but knows way too much about what has happened and what will happen, and who also possesses a rather disturbing fixation with torture and mutilation.
    • This is mostly due to the fact that she's Really Seven Hundred Years Old and often on the receiving end of the aforementioned torture and mutilation.
    • All the members of that club are creepy at times, but the only other one in the right age category is Satako, whose crazy moments tend to inspire more sympathy than fear.
  • The sequel to Higurashi, Umineko no Naku Koro ni, features Maria, the protagonist's nine year old cousin who has a creepy fixation with the occult. Not to mention a penchant to start laughing whenever someone's murdered. That's a little creepy too.
  • Inubushi Keiko, the mentally unstable serial killer from Remember 11.
    • Yuni also has his moments.


Web Animation

  • The unnamed girl in the notorious Quicktime animation Play With Me goes beyond merely creepy and right into Nightmare Fuel.
  • On a similar note the kids from the Nick.com clickamajig Black Licorice also suit this trope. In the game you're supposed to give them candy but you CAN'T give them black licorice because it causes them to transform into horrible grotesque monsters.
  • Vendetta from Making Fiends is an elementary school kid who isolates herself from the rest of the class and literally makes fiends to sic on anyone who makes her mad...which is everyone. Her name should give you a clue. She also speaks in a weird, gravelly voice that has some sort of sinister accent.
  • Kari from Mari Kari Mari's undead twin sister who murders anyone who makes her upset.
    • Mari is unnaturally cheerful, not letting the mysterious horrible deaths of everyone who's even slightly mean to her or the general hatred and contempt seemingly everyone holds for her ever get her down.


Web Comic

  • Scary Go Round had a story arc based around such a character, known simply as "The Child", who is a harbinger of change and cause of discord. It turns out that The Child is being raised by someone who looks like Michael Jackson, turning it into a Funny Aneurysm Moment that meant the end of the comic had to be rewritten.
  • Pandora is introduced in this form in El Goonish Shive. She's notably somewhat an aversion since her form changes to fit her mood, so she only looks like a child when she's being playful and mischevious. She's a lot creepier when she's pissed.
  • Zimmy from Gunnerkrigg Court starts off as an over-the-top creep: she's verbally combative towards the protagonists, her science fair entry is "an abomination", she seems to have no eyes, and a body-snatching demon is afraid of her. This gets thrown on its head in a later chapter, when the revelation that she's been Blessed with Suck turns her into a sympathetic character. Which gets flipped on its head again, with the revelation of how Zimmy treats her best friend and why.
    • The main character, Antimony Carver, is an interesting example. The audience sees her when she's alone with her best friends, and thus sees that she's pretty well-adjusted for someone with such an unusual childhood. Eventually, however, it's revealed that most of her classmates see her as a creep—because all they see of Annie is her impassive public facade and the fact that she never socializes with anyone besides Kat.
    • Annie's father, Anthony, may have been one as well, if his sole appearance in-comic (in a Flash Back) is any indication.
      • Apparently Annie looks like her mother and acts like her father. Must be torture for poor Eglamore.
    • Assuming Jones ever was a child, one can only imagine how creepy she was.
    • Also Jack, when he's under Demonic Possession.
  • Chelsie Warner of Concession appears to be a cuddly anthropomorphic lamb-girl in a pink dress. On her first appearance, she stabs Artie Crowley in the eye with a crayon. Shortly thereafter, she has sex with him when he's too delirious to realise what he's doing. When he wakes up, he is horrified not only because of what he's done, but because "Chelsie is actually a boy." It's recently been revealed that Chelsie's hypersexual behaviour is related to a form of childhood bipolar disorder. She became significantly less creepy with proper medication and hormone treatment, after being adopted by the local (quite definitely non-paedophile) preacher. The Where Are They Now epilogue shows her in her late teens, fully transitioned, apparently recovered from her unfortunate past, and calling Father Tim "Dad".
  • The titular character from Charby the Vampirate is a perfect example of this.
    • Mye, Hex, Tony, Claire and a large number of other characters qualify too.
  • The Cyantian Chronicles: Quinn and Collin.
    • Collin is a telepath who can walk through walls. He's experienced fear from come people due to this fact.
    • Quinn is also a telepath. She can also walk through walls, teleport through another dimension that only she can reach. Quinn also has "Oulies" as friends, who are beings who are trapped between life and death in a realm that only Quinn can see. Quinn's invisible friends are real. And to top it all off, Quinn has been known to surprise/creep out Collin and the other members of her family.
  • Erfworld: Parson Gotti suspects that Wanda was one of these. Before he learns that Erfworld has no children.
  • In Sire, Susan causes Anna to appear to be one of these, hijacking her body, sitting quietly on her bed, and pulling all the hair out of its head, slowly counting each one off. Her parents promptly send the innocent Anna off for help.
  • Shelly's conscience from Wapsi Square looks like one and she knows it.
  • Memoria: "Harriet, I've never been afraid of a little girl before."
  • In Underling, Lazarus, despite his horns and the company he has kept thus far, meets up with a truly creepy girl.
  • In Sinfest, the agents of the secret sisterhood.


Web Original

  • Ben Drowned: Ben thinks you shouldn't have put him here...
  • SCP-053 is a seemingly normal three-year-old girl. But there's a reason she's detained by the SCP Foundation. Something about her is deeply unsettling to adults and older children. Unsettling to the point that it induces violent rages, usually directed at her. Then, the moment they inflict any harm upon her, they die almost instantly and she regenerates rapidly from any injury they managed to inflict. Omnicidal Maniac SCP-682 seems to like her, though—and, as the label suggests, he holds a murderous hatred for all other living things.
    • SCP-899 is a spatial phenomenon that kidnaps regular children and turns them into this. And they will kill you.
  • Katy Towell's Children R Skary IS this trope. One of the reasons she drew the art and made the animations was because she thought children were creepy.
  • There Will Be Brawl: Ness and Lucas. And How!
  • Survival of the Fittest v2 has Brandon Cuthbert, a 12 year old genius who skipped a few grades and is in highschool. Before getting sent to the island, he had a fascination with dissecting woodland creatures. And while on the island, he killed at least 3 different characters, including slicing one open after suffocating him to unconsciousness with an X-Box controller. It also happens in quite a few backstories for some characters.
  • Asdfmovie. "I like trains."
  • The Fear Mythos gives us the Cold Boy, who sits around, singing nursery rhymes. He'll cut you off from those you love, or he could just freeze you to death. Yet he never seems evil. Just creepy.
  • This little darling. Even if you don't read her (or should that be their?) backstory.
  • MistBunny of Dark Dream Chronicle is a cute little girl who has tea parties and everything. She also just so happens to work for a certain tall, faceless gentleman. KarmA has stated that she really creeps him out.
  • In LIS_DEAD He appears to be one


Western Animation

  • Codename: Kids Next Door: Numbuh 3 little sister Mushi at first comes across as being just as childish and ditzy as her older sister. However when she is stuck alone on the spaceship with Cree and Numbuh 5 she gives a speech about how they should stop fighting, because sisters are supposed to care about each other and be friends. As the teenage villain stops to think about this, the little girl pushes her out the airlock, turns to Abby and says older sisters always fall for that mushy stuff. In her next appearance, her true colors are revealed as she stabs her sister's stuffed animal and is sent to her room forever. After that, she becomes a full-fledged villain and creates a spanking monster to attack kids.
    • The Delightful Children From Down The Lane are a more blatant example. They carry out the adults' evil orders, they don't have individual names, except the one with the helmet (Lenny). And they're always speaking in unison. However, they were brainwashed into being the way they are.
      • Actually, they have been confirmed to have individual names, and Lenny was only referred to by name because he split up from the others in one episode, but he joined back with them later. Which brings us to the next thing: They are always bunched up in the exact same position. And in the previously mentioned episode, when Lenny joined back with the others, he just slides into his spot while a creepy, morphing sound plays. Ugh.
  • Darla from Cats Don't Dance who hides a psychopathic personality behind a sickeningly sweet child-like facade.
  • Three year old Angelica from Rugrats, while seemingly polite and sweet to adults is actually a Spoiled Brat and a Control Freak who more often than not abuses her baby cousin and his friends. Though there are rare moments where she is nice to them.
    • She also has a tendency to root and sympathize with clear villains...
    • Even worse is Angelica's baby brother from her nightmare in the episode "Angelica's Worst Nightmare".
  • An 8-year-old Azula in a flashback episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender displays these traits, doing such things as burning a doll (a gift from her uncle), mocking her uncle's sorrow about his son's death, and hoping for his death as well as her grandfather's so her father can get on the throne. Her mother speaks for everyone when she wonders "What is wrong with that child?"
    • Creepier than all of that together is her display of love for her brother:

Azula: (singsong voice) Daddy's gonna kill you! (normal voice) Really, he is.

      • (He was. It's clear where Azula got her psychopathic streak from.)
    • Whenever a young Avatar—like, say, Aang—goes into the Avatar State, the results can be extremely unsettling.
  • One episode of Dexter's Laboratory, "Aye-Aye Eyes", features Dexter returning a creepy looking rag-doll bunny to an even creepier looking doe-eyed little girl who then follows him around everywhere. He eventually gets rid of her by hooking her up with a creepy doe-eyed boy.
  • Gaz of Invader Zim is a morbid, vindictive little girl with supernatural powers and prowess who plunges people into nightmare worlds from which there is no waking if they dare interfere with her pizza or her videogames. Not even her brother is immune. Her father is, though.
  • The eponymous Mandy of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy tricked The Grim Reaper into eternal servitude, using him as her maid and his powers for personal gain, and faces down everything from the Boogeyman to Cthulhu with nothing more than a wry comment. She also never smiles, ever, because doing so would cause the universe to implode.
    • She was also able to take over a large evil brain/alien when it ate her brain.
    • Then there's Nergal Jr. Nergal Jr is able to turn into almost anything and is extremely creepy. His true form (although it's rarely seen) is very horrid to see.
  • South Park has a few, including Kenny. Then there's Damien from the episode Damien - after all he's Satan's kid.
    • Cartman; ever since the Scott Tenorman incident he's become increasingly psychotic throughout the years, going as far as attempting to kill his mother when he feels she doesn't love him anymore. Even Damien McSatan thinks there's something wrong with Cartman.
  • Raven from Teen Titans at times.
  • WITCH has Miranda, a shape-shifting spider demon who takes the form of a little girl. Often uses her human child form to trap and trick her prey and enemies, but still manages to keep her creepy spider attitude.
  • In The Simpsons episode "Wild Barts Can't Be Broken," the kids all break curfew to see The Bloodening—a parody of the 1960 horror film Village of the Damned—featuring sinister telepathic and telekinetic children terrorizing an English village. When the kids of Springfield are punished for sneaking out, they get revenge by hijacking the radio airwaves and, speaking like the Creepy Children of the film, broadcast their parents' embarrassing secrets.
    • "We've got to do something about these blabbermouth kids and their creepy English accents!"
    • "Doctor, we know you and the bootblack have been rogering the fishwife in the crumpet shop!"
    • Another episode featured a horror film starring Lenny Leonards as a gardener called The Redeadening, which not only draws elements from Village of the Damned, but also Child's Play (a demon-possessed doll) and Coraline (victims having their eyes replaced with buttons) as well.

Lenny: It looks like if the buttons are sewn onto my eyes, but they're actually held up by hot wax.

  • Some say that Suzy Johnson, Jeremy's little sister on Phineas and Ferb, is the true villain of the show. And who can blame them? As Jeremy's self-proclaimed "favorite girl", Suzy resents her brother's relationship with Candace and constantly puts the hurt on Candace when no one else is looking... and thus, no one believes Candace when she says that Suzy is evil. Buford Von Stom is the only other character on the show who knows what Suzy is really like (no one believes him either).
  • Robin. The Boy Wonder of Batman. After you see what the Joker's turned him into, courtesy of Mind Rape in Batman Beyond, it definitely ends up as this. A manic grin, just like the Joker's, plastered over his face, and his high-pitched giggling make it downright Nightmare Fuel.
  • In The Weekenders, Frances is a middle school girl who does nothing but say "I like pointy things" while her eye twitches. According to a flashback, she used to be a kid genius who was friends with Tish, before her sudden decline into... whatever it is she's suffering from.
    • The final episode of The Weekenders shows how frightening Todd and Quintie can really be. Apparently, they're threatening enough for the S.W.A.T. team.
  • Creepie Creecher, the protagonist of Growing Up Creepie, is a young girl raised by insects. She is a junior Goth in style, and her creative efforts regularly terrify her teachers and schoolmates. Things like ghost stories and urban legends merely arouse her curiosity, usually leading to her debunking them (usually followed by an Real After All twist that only the audience sees).
  • The three Fates of Gargoyles can appear as three creepy little girls (among other things), and make this creepier by turning into talking little-girl statues and then crumbling.
    • Well, they ARE the "Weird Sisters" of Macbeth, after all.
  • Lizzie, a girl at the science fair in Meet the Robinsons:

Teacher: N-now, what did we say about the fire ants? They have a tendency to bite people
Lizzie: Only my enemies.

  • Ace from the first-generation Royal Flush Gang in Justice League ("Wild Cards" arc). Just looking at her can make you go insane. Even if you already are; ask the Joker.
  • Stewie from Family Guy.
  • Hey Arnold!: Curly and his Troubling Unchildlike Behavior sometimes comes to the point of high-potential Ax Crazy. For example, upon finding that he wasn't assigned the Ball Monitor privileges that he anticipated for that week, he holed himself up in the principal's office with the balls, throwing them at anyone who tried to reason with him. There was also the episode "False Alarm" where he tried to get Eugene expelled simply because he ruined his favorite pencil. And one episode mentions that he once bit off the head of a live chicken, though he insists it was only that one time.
  • Parodied in American Dad. In Rapture's Delight, After the End Stan goes to the headquarters of the Anti Christ (which is the destroyed UN headquarters in New York), he sees a Creepy Child and immediately shoots it under the assumption it's the Anti Christ. As Jesus tells him, that was just a normal kid who sometimes comes there to play. Oops.
  • Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy: Sarah. She is Ed's psychotic spoiled brat of a little sister, who acts cute and charming only when it serves her. Sarah has Ed's unending loyalty and obedience, mostly from her threats of snitching on him and her constant acts of physical violence against him. She has a short temper and is easily agitated by others, especially her brother and his friends and will often go on a violent rampage against anyone who annoys her or who bothers her best friend Jimmy. It's also implied that Ed's parents treat him with emotional abuse, while Sarah is treated like a princess.
  • The titular Flapjack of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack falls into this at times.
  • Heloise from Jimmy Two-Shoes.
  • Edgar and Ellen: Edgar, and indeed, Ellen.
  • In one episode of The Boondocks, A six-year-old boy named Lamilton Taeshawn in a taped therapy session describes, with a blank face, how he hurts people and states how he doesn't care if he killed any of them. When the therapist asks why does he do bad things, in a chilling confession he states "cause it's fun to do bad things." Things only got worse from there.
  • The Sam and Max Freelance Police episode "The Trouble With Gary" features the duo looking after a child with demonic powers, and whenever he got angry he would transform people into things or smash stuff with his mind. Eventually the two are able to get him to control his anger.
    • By which we mean, "reduce his attention span to rubble", preventing him from focusing on people that annoy him long enough to use his powers.[1]
  • The episode of The Little Mermaid the animated series "Island of Fear" featured a mad scientist with a lab assistant a very creepy young boy named Daniel, Sebastian even screams the first time he meets him, as it turns out he's not really evil just misunderstood, he doesn't have many friends and he took the job because his parents were poor.
  • Youngblood from Danny Phantom. This is most prominent in his second appearance when he tries to behead Jazz with an axe, and later pushes Danny's parents down a waterfall.
  • The baby from Tin Toy.
  • Brittany Taylor the cheerleader's little brother Brian from Daria he's a mean hyperactive brat who throws temper tantrums when he doesn't get what he wants, the creepy thing about him is in the episode with the lab rats Brittany steals Daria's and gives the rat to him he rubs his hands together and laughs wickedly the next time we see the rat it's huddled in a corner and trembling, the guide book states that he's killed every pet that the family ever owned to the point where they stop bothering to name them.
  • Steven Universe gives us Onion, an unnerving, silent little youngster who tends to cause a lot of trouble around Beach City. In one episode he went on a rampage around the city with Pearl's replicator, and made several attempts on both the Crystal Gems and Greg's lives all with an eerily calm look on his face. The fact that he doesn't look quite human certainly ramps up the creepy factor for some.

Real Life

  • Dakota Fanning when she was still a child, both in some of the characters she plays and as a person. This didn't prevent her from developing a very squicktastic following.
    • Similarly, her little sister Elle Fanning had her share of creepy roles when younger. For example, she was featured as a disturbed foster child in Connie Nielsen's last episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit. Attempting to bond with this littlest victim, Det. Dani Beck let her spend the night in her apartment. Elle's character repaid the kindness by setting it on fire so that the two could die together. While both survived, the already emotionally fragile Dani was completely broken and left the SVU (and Det. Stabler) for good.
      • What was odd about that episode was they vilified the foster parents for caging the children. I thought after the kid set the place on fire they would apologize to the foster parents and let them go. Or at least acknowledge they weren't just deliberately cruel.
    • That Guy With The Glasses: "I ALWAYS KNEW THAT SHE WAS A VAMPIRE! SHE ACTED LIKE SHE WAS THIRTY YEARS OLD WHEN SHE WAS FIVE!"
  • The "if you hit me at 30mph" spiel from the ubiquitous UK Public Service Announcement would make you think regardless of who said it, but one suspects the young voice-over artist they used (more than a bit reminiscent of "Are you my mummy?") could probably give people nightmares by singing "Old McDonald had a Farm".
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was often considered one. He was unusually small, thin, deathly pale, and behaved in a very serious and adult manner, intimidating many adults.
  • Josh Peck started off as the complete opposite of this, but now he looks somewhat similar to this.
  • Seamus [dead link] -Davey- Fitzpatrick, the kid who played The Antichrist in the new version of The Omen.
  • Mary Bell, an eleven-year-old serial killer. Now she has a daughter of her own, who is apparently normal.
  • Nevada-tan, a.k.a. "Girl A", a Japanese schoolgirl who murdered a classmate with a boxcutter. Her nickname comes from the famous photo of her wearing a University of Nevada hoodie. She inspired a surprising amount of fanart and a song called "Boxcutter, Baby".
  • This kid. [dead link] Admittedly, a very appropriate mascot given the product. [shudder] Smile with your mouth closed, kid.
  • Actor Whit Hertford was very creepy looking as a child (and hasn't changed with age). He could have easily played Mikey the title character of one of the films he was in, but they chose Brian Bonsall because he was more innocent looking.
  • Gudrun Himmler-Burwitz, Heinrich Himmler's daughter. She seems like a happy child visiting her dad; thing is they're doing an inspection of Dachau. She still runs neo-nazi organizations and has a network dedicated to helping former SS Officers
  • Children with Callous-Unemotional traits, which is basically code for "psychopathic kids". Most of them show up as badly behaved troublemakers, but unlike most troublemaking kids, these kids never feel guilty and shrug off punishment as no big deal. And every so often they might get the idea to do something really horrifying. Plus, at younger ages they haven't figured out the charming act yet, which may ironically make them come across as more creepy than an older psychopath.
  1. ↑ And also rendering him indistinguishable from an ordinary little boy, to the joy of his parents
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