Mervyn LeRoy’s 1956 film The Bad Seed is one of the most hair-raisingly weird movies from a decade that had no lack of the hair-raising or the weird, and 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark (played to icy perfection by then 11-year-old Patty McCormack) remains one of Hollywood’s signature sociopaths. Rhoda clubs a classmate unconscious (with her tap shoes!) and drowns him in a lake because he refuses to relinquish a school penmanship medal that Rhoda believes is hers by right. She burns a man to death because he guesses her secret. She also, it turns out, once murdered a neighbor, “old Mrs. Post” — evidently because she felt like it — a few years before the atrocious events of the movie begin. The title, meanwhile, refers to the fact that Rhoda’s mom Christine was the daughter of a serial killer, the implication of course being that Rhoda somehow inherited a murderous gene from her maternal grandma. Was she just born that way? A fascinating debate, for sure, but one that leaves Rhoda Penmark cold. After all, she can’t be bothered with such intangibles: she’s too busy with the worldly business of wholesale slaughter.
Mini Miscreants: Top 10 Li’l Screen Villains
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages