Parents' Guide to The Bad Seed Returns

Like a number of other horror movies about deeply evil children, The Bad Seed Returns is maddeningly simplistic. It's impossible to believe that so many grown-ups -- parents, teachers, relatives, friends, therapists, social workers, cops -- can't put it together that people keep accidentally dying around this girl. It's not that she's some genius of murder. It's that everyone in her life repeatedly, stupidly, ignores the obvious danger. It can be argued that a murderous teen is a lot less scary than the inexplicably murderous 8-year-old of the original stage play and movie, and Emma's advanced age here saps the plot of the story's most terrifying aspect.

This version also feels insipid because The Bad Seed was a mid-century response to post-World War II trauma, when the world was seized by startling and incomprehensible murderous evil on a scale that could not be explained. That context is absent now. The source material is a 1954 William March novel, adapted that same year into a long-running Maxwell Anderson play. In the play, as the little girl got away with murder every night, theater audiences were so frustrated that the producers instituted a post-ending ending. An adult actor would come on stage after the curtain calls and give 9-year-old actress Patty McCormack a satisfying mock spanking. Note that McCormack, who later starred in the 1956 movie, plays Emma's therapist here.