The Bad Seed: Difference between revisions

 

Christine Penmark, a housewife, moves into a new town with her husband Kenneth and daughter Rhoda. She has always thought her daughter was very peculiar; while always polite, courteous, and charming in public, there was a cold, apathetic, and calculating quality in her personality that she found very disturbing in a child. As Christine notices the strange, horrible things that happen in the proximity of her daughter, she comes to see that Rhoda is the very definition of [[Enfante Terrible]].

One of the earliest and more notable examples of a child being portrayed as [[Complete Monster|irredeemably evil]], and delves into the issue of nature vs. nurture as Christine discovers the truth of her own origins.

 

 

* [[Adults Are Useless]]: Almost all of the adults buy Rhoda's act; the children in her school know there's something wrong there and usually avoid her.

* [[The Alcoholic]]: Hortense Daigle, mother of Claude Daigle ( {{spoiler|whom Rhoda killed because she wanted his penmanship medal}}), became addicted to alcohol to dull the pain of losing her only child.

* [[Antagonistic Offspring]]: Rhoda

** Also, Christine mentions her husband keeping an actual gun in the house. {{spoiler|She later uses it to shoot herself.}}

* [[Children Are Innocent]]: Mercilessly averted.

** In the book he actually compares his relationship with her to an odd courtship.

* [[Creepy Child]]/[[Enfant Terrible]]: Rhoda could have been the [[Trope Namer]] for these.

* [[Offing the Offspring]]: {{spoiler|Rhoda's mother tries to do this in the book, play and movie. She also finds out that her own biological mother, a famous serial killer, murdered her entire family, including her other children and almost killed Christine herself.}}

* [[Panty Shot]]: About ten minutes into the movie, when Rhoda leaps in front of Leroy and her skirt and slip flip up.

** Leroy's dialogue was more vulgar and both he and Monica made a lot of references to sex that would have been unacceptable to use in a film at that time.

** Rhoda's school is run by the three Fern sisters: Burgess, Claudia, and Octavia. This is still the case in the adaptations, but only Claudia physically appears in the movie [[Adaptation Distillation|to make things simpler]] and most of the plot points involving her sisters are [[Composite Character|transferred to her]].

* [[Recurring Riff]]: Rhoda is frequently seen playing ''Au Clair de la Lune'' in the 1956 film, which she manages to make sound creepy.

* [[Serial Killer]]: By the end of the story: Rhoda has a body count of four: {{spoiler|her pet dog, a neighbor who promised her a snowglobe after her death, Claude Daigle, and [[He Knows Too Much|Leroy]].}} With the exception of the last one, they were all for hedonistic reasons.

* [[Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness]]: Monica. How often do you hear "penurious" and "larvated" in a conversation?

* [[Sound-Only Death]]: We hear {{spoiler|Leroy}} screaming, pounding on the door, being set loose, and screaming some more, before he dies, but all we ''see'' is Christine's reaction. It's still horrible.

* [[Stepford Smiler]]: Rhoda, and as she finally catches on, her mother.

* [[Worthy Opponent]]: A few lines of dialogue suggest this between, of all people, Leroy and Rhoda once they both discover that {{spoiler|the other is also a sociopath.}}

 

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