InkBlog

Eerie kids have been a staple of horror films for decades. But what is it like to be forever known for playing a tiny werewolf, misfit or murderer?

When you have been a spooky child on film or TV, where do you go? For the former child star Butch Patrick, best known for playing the baby-faced werewolf Eddie Munster in the 60s sitcom The Munsters, it is cross-country. Patrick has converted a trailer into a Munsters-themed escape room. Inside, it is rigged up to look like the inside of the family’s home, as well as Grandpa Munster’s laboratory. Pay $13 for entry and audio recordings of Grandpa and Herman (the family’s Frankenstein’s monster patriarch) will guide you through the experience.

“I’ve found an interesting niche!” exclaims Patrick, 67, defanged and, to my great disappointment, no longer wearing a purple Little Lord Fauntleroy-style suit. One of Patrick’s costumes sold for $1,880 (£1,300) in 2001, thus demonstrating the enduring appeal of the show. When we speak, Patrick is driving to collect the trailer, which he affectionately calls the Munster Coach, before taking it to a meet-and-greet in St Clair Shores, Michigan. This is how Patrick makes a living: hawking autographs and gamely answering questions from the show’s army of ageing fans. “They always ask me where Woof Woof is,” says Patrick. “I can’t believe how well that little werewolf teddy bear is remembered! I say he’s at home and well, but doesn’t like to travel, so I don’t bring him along.”

It is an unusual life, but one he is glad of. “It’s actually very nice,” Patrick says. “I get to be part of so many people’s lives, in a good way. They have fond memories of watching TV with their loved ones. And then they come and meet you and you get to share that memory with them. And it makes them so happy. Like, of all the thousands of TV shows on the airwaves, this show meant so much to so many people – and you get to be the recipient of their fondness and happiness on a daily basis.” Over the phone, Patrick’s practised answers to my questions are clipped and concise: after all, wouldn’t you tire of still being associated with a fictional child-werewolf you played 60 years ago? But Patrick doesn’t mind. “I am proud of how it worked out. I am absolutely OK with always being him.”

You will hear a similar story from Miko Hughes, who was just two when he played the knife-wielding undead toddler Gage Creed in the 1989 horror movie Pet Sematary. He has since watched and discussed the film many times – to the point where he is not sure what he remembers and what he just thinks he remembers. “It’s funny that my most memorable role is one I can’t remember,” says Hughes, who is 35 and works as a digital imaging technician in the film industry in Los Angeles. “But, because it’s been such a big part of my life, from the stories that have been told so many times, I do feel that I’ve held on to memories from that age more than others might. Or maybe they’re memories of memories. Who’s to say?”

That kind of contentment comes in handy for a former spooky kid. With a few exceptions, such as Kirsten Dunst (Interview with the Vampire) and Dakota Fanning (Hide and Seek), the children of our favourite horror films and TV shows rarely go on to achieve lasting stardom. We gasp in shock at these murderers and misfits, but seldom want to see more of them.

Hollywood discovered the power of the sinister child with the 1956 thriller The Bad Seed, in which a schoolgirl, Rhoda, played by Patty McCormack, murders her classmate and a neighbour. It was one of the US’s Top 20 movies that year, earning Warner Bros more than $4m on its $1m investment, and showed the potential of this new genre. “Children are the perfect slate of innocence,” says Anna Bogutskaya of the feminist horror collective and podcast The Final Girls. “You don’t expect them to become a source of evil or fear, or that you will be afraid of them. So when it’s a child that’s demonic in a horror film, it’s intensely creepy.”

And, of course, it reminds us of mercifully rare real-world horrors – the children who delight in others’ suffering or even kill.

“Horror films are not about fear, but about guilt,” says Susanne Kord of University College London, the author of Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt. “When you have an evil child in a film, there’s a social investment in denial, because children are raised and socialised by us … these films implicate us in the creation of these little monsters.”

Within the genre, characters such as Rhoda walked so that Karen Cooper could run: the trowel-wielding zombie daughter stabbed her mother to death in the gory climax of George A Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead. Cooper was played by Kyra Schon, then nine; she got the part because her father, Karl Hardman, was an actor and producer on the low-budget film. (He played Harry Cooper, the film’s loathsome antagonist.) “My mother shook me awake one morning and said: ‘Honey, you’re going to be in a movie!’” says Schon, 63, who lives in Pennsylvania.

When it came to the murder scene, Schon remembers asking her father, who was directing (to her chagrin, as he was more exacting than Romero), how many times he wanted her to stab the pillow standing in place of her on-screen mother. “He said: ‘Keep going!’ So I kept stabbing.”

Karen Cooper does not have any dialogue in Night of the Living Dead: she dies, she rises, she disembowels her mother with the closest implement to hand. Practically no acting was required of Schon for the role. But for Martin Stephens, who played David Zellaby in 1960’s Village of the Damned, about a troupe of malevolent children terrorising a quaint English village, the part was heavy lifting. “I was the most experienced British juvenile actor at the time, so I was the obvious choice,” he says. “They needed someone experienced to be able to do the film.”

His mother got him into acting. “She loved the theatre,” he says. “Being a mother, she didn’t have time to do it herself, so vicariously she got her kids into it.” His father died three weeks before filming commenced; Stephens was only 10. “That played very deeply into the way I played the part,” he says. “I think you can see the sadness in David. Although he’s so self-assured and masterly, there’s a kind of wistfulness as well.”

What makes a good child actor, explains Patrick, who was as prolific in the US as Stephens was in the UK, “is knowing your dialogue and being able to take direction. That’s where good actors and not-so-good actors part ways. If you are good, you can take direction and give the director what they are asking for.” What makes a truly great spooky child, says Bogutskaya, is the ability to be still. “When a child is really quiet and still, it instantly freaks me out,” she says. “Because children are usually rowdy: they move around and make noise and fret. If I see a quiet child in a movie, I usually think they’re evil. Especially in a horror film. That’s a big warning.”

Another helpful way to spot an evil child, says Kord, is “when the child appears much older than they really are, whether it’s through a look or an action. The child breaks your expectations in very small ways by not doing what a child would be expected to do.” Kord gives the example of a small child sitting in a chair – in usual circumstances, you would expect them to fidget uncomfortably in their seat. “But if that child turns around very slowly, looks at you very earnestly and says nothing, you would be creeped out.”

One central thesis of Kord’s book is that, on the whole, adults tend to be much more traumatised by the experience of filming horror than children. She writes about the 1974 slasher firm People Toys, in which four children murder a group of adults holidaying in a lakeside cabin. Kord quotes from interviews with the cast’s children, now grown up. “I was the one who made everyone else whack everyone else, and I did this with great pleasure,” says one former child actor.

Another reminisced, eyes shining with pleasure, about what it was like to pour dead piranhas into a bathtub containing an adult actor. (Regrettably, one of the piranhas was only half-dead and bit her leg.) In another film Kord references in her book – 2008’s horror-thriller The Children – the actor Eva Birthistle remembers the barely contained glee of the obstreperous child actors assigned to murder her on set. “Their confidence just grew, like, in the first week, then they were sort of … delighted they were going to kill us all,” said Birthistle.

None of the former child actors I speak with remember the experience of filming as even remotely traumatic. “The director was very mindful of what I was exposed to and took great care,” says Hughes. “Everything was rehearsed beforehand, without any fake blood, so by the time it got to adding set decoration or special effects, it felt normal.”

What the former child stars were less enthusiastic about, on the whole, were the hours. “It was equal parts boring and fascinating,” says Schon. “There’s a lot of waiting around. During one scene, where I’m dying on the table, I remember lying there, thinking: can you actually die of boredom?” Because Patrick’s mother and stepfather lived on the east coast, he had to move in with his uncle in north Hollywood and hire a chaperone to accompany him to the set. “Even if you’re only 11, it’s still a business,” he says. “You have to be professional and do whatever it takes.”

Being a child star also has the effect of alienating you from your peers. “I didn’t have a normal childhood at all,” says Stephens. “It was difficult to form friendships. Most of the people I associated with were adults. On one hand, it was an amazing experience. But I never played. I was always working. In terms of a childhood, it’s not great.” Schon was bullied by other children at school – one boy would stand outside her house, shouting: “Zombie!” “It made me feel kind of yucky,” Schon says. “I didn’t want them to pay attention to me – I wanted them to leave me alone.”

For a long time, for this reason, Schon didn’t like to talk about the film. “There was a long period when I didn’t tell anyone about it or discuss it,” she says. She never acted again, instead becoming a ceramics teacher. Patrick also quit acting in his 20s, getting into the car industry instead. He has since dressed up as Eddie Munster only once, for a Little Caesars commercial. “I tried to talk them out of it, but Evel Knievel was in his leathers on a motorcycle, so it felt appropriate,” he says. “And there was a big payday.”

Over time, Schon’s aversion to discussing the film has changed. A big reason for this, she says, was meeting the film’s fans over the years. “The conventions turned it all around for me,” she says. “The fans were so warm and kind, and they really loved the movie, and they didn’t tease me about it. So I thought: ‘This isn’t a negative thing. This is cool.’”

Schon has made peace with the fact that she will always be an undead schoolgirl, hacking her mother to death. It is an honour few people will achieve in their lives – and certainly one you can’t plan for. “I recognise how lucky I am to have worked on the film,” she says. “It was pure luck, and I am very grateful.”

This article was amended on 17 June 2021. In the main picture, the actor Debbie Watson was originally misidentified as Beverley Owen. Both actors played the role of Marilyn Munster at different times.

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