17 Kids Who Scared the Everliving Crap Out of You in Horror Movies

Each Halloween, you'll inevitably bump into a pair of friends dressed up as the Grady sisters from Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. In the film, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) suffers from writer's block. He applies to become a winter caretaker for an isolated hotel. The hotel manager tells him that the previous caretaker developed cabin fever and killed his family, including his two girls, aka the Grady sisters. Jack gets the job and brings his family up. His son Danny, gifted with "the shining," is the only person who can see the twins, who chillingly asks him to play with them.

This film that launched a decades-long franchise starts with 12-year-old Regan, the daughter a Hollywood starlet who gets her hands on a Ouija board and becomes a victim of demonic possession. While overtaken by the spirit, Regan swears, steals, and even pees on the floor. In her most iconic line, she tells an astronaut, "You're gonna die up there." And so, she undergoes a very trying exorcism.

Remember when Duchess Kate Middleton accidentally twinned with Rosemary (Mia Farrow) from Rosemary's Baby and everyone made a huge hullabaloo out of it? Well, the coincidence especially felt unnerving given that she was cradling her baby, Prince Louis. Anyone familiar with the infamous movie knows that Rosemary doesn't give birth to an ordinary baby — she brings the son of the Devil into the world. In the horror movie's most memorable scene, Rosemary glances at her baby and asks a crowd of people, "What have you done to its eyes?" We don't see the baby itself, but this moment bestows the bundle of evil a stamp of approval for being one of the creepiest infants in horror movies.

A prequel to Annabelle, Annabelle: Creation starts off innocently enough. A bus of orphan girls meets a dollmaker, who opens his house to them after losing his own daughter years ago. But given that the premise of this movie involves a dead child and a dollmaker, things get creepy fast. One of the little girls, Janice, becomes possessed by the demon inside of a (mortifying) doll that once belonged to the dollmaker's daughter. Suffice to say, Janice fails to reciprocate the dollmaker's generosity following her possession.

In this Swedish horror film, a young boy named Oskar meets his mysterious neighbour Eli, who turns out to be a centuries-old vampire who kills people in order to exist. They develop a twisted romance, and Eli's means of helping Oskar confront his problems are anything but innocent. In fact, it's implied throughout Let the Right One In that Eli is grooming Oskar to be a familiar, that is, a mortal vampire servant.

In the Australian film The Babadook, a worn-out widow and her son Samuel live alone in peace. As the movie progresses, Samuel becomes fixated with a storybook character named Mister Babadook, throwing tantrums and developing seizures in response to the bedtime story. He builds weapons to fight the monster, much to his mother's distress. Samuel's behaviour does not come from mere growing pains. It turns out, in fact, that the Babadook is after the family.

Paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren are back at it in this second installation of The Conjuring. This time, they're helping a poor London mother whose second child Janet is possessed by a curmudgeonly old man named Billy Wilkins — or so we think. Janet begins wrecking her home, overtaken by the presence. However, much of the public merely believes that she is playing a hoax on the town. Not creeped out yet? Here's a fact that might give you the heebie-jeebies: this movie is based on a real case.

Unlike many of the children on this list, Cole isn't a serial killer or a sociopath. But he is known for his creepy line, "I see dead people." And in fact, he does. Cole reveals to his psychologist, Crowe (Bruce Willis), that he sees ghosts walking around the living. Fun fact: Toni Collette, who stars in Hereditary, also plays a mother in this iconic M. Night Shyamalan film.

As far as PG movies go, Poltergeist is one of the creepiest ones out there. The Freeling family lives in an idyllic Orange County home. One day, however, they experience a poltergeist intrusion. The spirits take their daughter Carol Anne. Before entering the other world, Carol Anne starts talking to the TV. A hand reaches out to her from the TV set, and the little girl announces, "They're here!" You may or may not experience nightmares from this haunting exclamation.

Like many children on this list, Samara Morgan is an evil spirit. As a living child, Samara used her psychic abilities to torture and kill people, so her parents threw her down a well. Returning as a ghost, she made a videotape, in which she promises to kill anyone who watches it within seven days.

After giving birth to a stillborn, a couple adopts a little Russian girl named Esther. Their new daughter is violent, murderous, and manipulative. The audience later learns in a major reveal that Esther is not a little girl, but a woman with a disturbing past. If you're not convinced about how creepy the main character is, Isabelle Fuhrman's performance as Esther has been compared to Linda Blair's in The Exorcist and Patty McCormack's in The Bad Seed.

In The Grudge, a happy couple in a Japanese suburb falls apart when a husband murders his wife Kayako out of jealousy, then his son Toshio and their cat Mar, who witness the killing. Toshio and Mar's spirits merge upon their deaths. The cat-boy, along with his mother, haunts anyone who enters their house.

As the film's title suggests, the main subject of the movie is a bad seed. In fact, she's an evil seed. The seemingly sweet and obedient 8-year-old girl named Rhoda turns out to be a sociopath who remorselessly kills a boy and an elderly lady in order to get what she wants. Her heinous actions prompt her disturbed mother to uncover unsettling secrets about their family history.

Based on a Stephen King short story of the same name, the film Children of the Corn features one of the most disturbing little boys in the entirety of cinema. When the corn crops fail one year in the town of Gatlin, Nebraska, Isaac rounds up the resident children and convinces them to join a cult that follows a being called "He Who Walks Behind the Rows." If that didn't give you the goosebumps yet, Isaac persuades the children to kill the adults in town and use them as human sacrifices.

In The Boy, an American woman becomes a nanny for an elderly English couple's young boy. She learns that their "boy" is a porcelain doll that they treat like their late son Brahms, who died in a fire 20 years before on his eighth birthday. Brahms' supposed death is no tragedy. He actually orchestrates his death to cover up the fact that he murdered his friend.

Ah yes, A24's horror film takes inspiration from the creepy children of yore and creates the character of Charlie. Like her artistic mother, Charlie has a knack for fashioning dolls, except she uses materials like dead pigeons and trash. The young girl meets a tragic, chocolate cake-induced fate that quickly turns into horror, which then unfolds into an insane spirit-driven family drama.