Rhoda Penmark is a remarkable Zero Fucks Given serial killer in The Bad Seed (1956).
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Caution: Spoilers ahead.
Good movies of any kind were hard to watch in the days before cable television, video duplication, and video recording, and that especially included horror or sci-fi films. You had to catch them on the network’s schedule--not yours. If you missed the broadcast of a film you wanted to see, tough toasties. It would be a toss-up as to whether or not you would ever find that film on television again.
There was one light in the tunnel of horror fandom gloom. That light was non-prime-time television, which included the weekday hours between two and six in the afternoon; Saturdays after the morning cartoons were over, and Sundays after the sports programs ended. It also included late night television after 11 p.m., but that wasn't an option for kids with strict parents, like mine. Local broadcasters usually filled those "dead hours" with syndication packages and old movies.
On relatively rare occasions, the weekday afternoon movie programs would show films that were appealing to a young horror fan, such as myself--although not as often as the legendary late-night programs.
My mother didn’t like me to watch such films, but that usually wasn’t a problem. You see, in kids' neighborhoods of the late 60s and early 70s, there was almost always a Cool Mom who didn’t give a shit if her children watched “bad” movies while stuffing their faces with Fritos, Strawberry KITs* and Lemonheads.
When “a bad” movie was scheduled to be shown on the weekday afternoon movie, the word would go out in the neighborhood like African jungle drums or smoke signals. Kids just released from the school day would make a bee line for the Cool Mom’s house and we’d all happily watch Hitchcock’s The Birds or Robert Forley’s The Beast With Five Fingers.
Those films were good, but for we kids, by far the most coveted “bad” afternoon movie was 1956’s The Bad Seed, starring former child actress Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark, a nine-year-old serial killer in blonde pigtails and shiny patent leather Mary Janes with steel taps on the heels.
Rhoda was bad-assed. Rhoda was Zero Fucks Given. Rhoda was awesome, and kids my age adored her, although none of us would admit it (we were old enough to know it was “wrong”.) She was notorious on the playground and at the water fountain.
Some kid would shout, “I hit him with my shoe!” and all the other kids would get this knowing, gleeful gleam in their eyes. “Ah-h-h-h, Rhoda Penmark...” always spoken in tones of childish awe.
We kids didn’t love Rhoda because of the mean things that she did; we loved her because she got away with it for so long. She fooled multiple adults into thinking she was the perfect little girl, offering “a basket of kisses” to unsuspecting, foolish grown-ups, while secretly planning her next gruesome murder.
In the course of the film, Rhoda does the following:
1.) Kills an old lady by pushing her down the stairs and then steals her silver locket.
2.) Beats a little boy senseless (with the steel-tipped heel of one of her precious Mary Janes!) and then watches him drown, just because she wants to steal his penmanship medal.
3.) Burns a mentally handicapped janitor alive.
4.) By the time her clueless mother finally catches on to what Rhoda is doing, she is planning to kill another old lady in hopes of inheriting the woman’s pet birds.
Although most of Rhoda’s murders take place offscreen, this is unbelievably strong stuff for 1956. Even today, IMHO, Patty McCormack as Rhoda Penmark remains the gold standard of evil movie children. Even cute little Harvey Stephens in Richard Donner’s The Omen (1976), a kid who plays the literal spawn of Satan, is not as evil as Rhoda. Murderous Faux-Amish mutant child Brother Isaac (John Franklin) in 1984's Children of the Corn? Nope. Martin Stephens (no relation to Harvey) as the creepy leader of the alien brats in the original Village of the Damned (1960)? Not happening. Macaulay Culkin as crazy-ass killer child Henry in The Good Son (1993)? Rhoda would have eaten him alive.
What makes Rhoda scarier than your average child serial killer is her prissy blonde manner and puffy, 1950s girlie dresses. She bumps her victims off without messing up a single blonde hair, dirtying her white lace-trimmed ankle-socks, or wrinkling her frilly, perfectly starched pinafores. When her pathetically dumb mom (Nancy Kelly) interrogates her about why she’s trying to burn her incriminating shoe, she first smooths out her swishy skirt, and then nastily blames her classmate for his own murder. As I said, she’s the gold standard of evil movie children.
I'm pretty sure The Bad Seed was condemned by The Vatican when it first came out. The screenplay was adapted from a hit Broadway play by Maxwell Anderson, which itself was sourced from a best-selling novel by William March. The Broadway production also starred McCormack, who got an Academy Award nomination for reprising her role in the film.
In the play and novel, Rhoda survives her mother’s attempt to poison her by switching cups and getting Mom to drink the poison instead**. Movie codes of the era didn’t allow for that kind of ending, so in the film, evil Rhoda gets struck by lightening and fried to death, while trying to retrieve the all-important penmanship medal from a lake.
The Bad Seed has since been remade twice. First up was a television movie from 1985, which I saw years ago, but don't remember much about, except that it kept the original ending that allowed Rhoda (renamed Rachel) to survive.
Last year, Lifetime broadcast another version, starring Rob Lowe and McKenna Grace, who starred as the child version of Theo in Netflix's hit series, The Haunting of Hill House. Patty McCormack, now in her 70s, has a cameo role as a psychiatrist in the new film, which I haven't seen. Clips from both the new film and the 1985 version can be found on YouTube.
I'm sure McKenna Grace does a fine job with her role, but I can't see her ever topping McCormack's Rhoda. For one thing, taking Rhoda out of the 1950s, and putting her into jeans and a tie-dye tee shirt, removes a lot of the delicious contrast of her pigtails and sugar-and-spice pinafores with her ruthless, murderous nature. Without that contrast, Rhoda is just another run-of-the-mill evil movie child.
*KITs were square candy "chews" like Starbursts, but they were sweet instead of sweet-and-sour.
**I misremembered the original ending slightly. Rhoda does survive the poison in the original story, but Mom shoots herself dead instead of drinking poison herself.