Response 1

Claire Middlekamp

The Bad Seed is a less modern take on a horror film. Instead of manipulating the viewer’s

heart rate and stress hormones with jump scares and graphic depictions of violence, the film was

more creative with its use of background music and putting together clues from the characters to

incite horror. In the plot, Rhoda Penmark is a seemingly innocent girl that turns out to be a secret

murderer. She kills to get things she wants and compulsively lies her way out of being caught.

For instance, at her school picnic, Rhoda secretly hits Claude Daigle with her shoe

multiple times until he falls in the water and she causes him to drown by hitting him some more

because he won the penmanship medal she coveted. In order to get the medal as she desired, she

ended up murdering him. The gardener Leroy teased her about killing the boy enough to find out

a key detail of the murder—that she used her shoes—and had Rhoda convinced that he had the

shoes as evidence against her. Because again, Leroy had something she wanted, she lit his

mattress on fire and locked him in the cellar to die. Putting together another story from the past,

it’s clear to see that Rhoda is calculated and unfeeling about the killings. When her family lived

in Wichita, Rhoda visited with a neighbor named Clara Post who willed a glass ball to Rhoda for

when she died. While everyone thought it was an accident that Clara fell down five flights of

stairs with Rhoda there, it turned out that Rhoda fell accidentally with the intention to knock the

woman down the stairs. Once her mother realizes everyone’s hunches are true about her

daughter, she decides Rhoda would be better off dead than alive and gives her a lethal dose of

sleeping pills while sending a bullet through her own head.

The whole story is tragically written and aims to portray a genre of psychological illness

that wasn’t thought to be possible. There is nothing graphic about the movie, only that your mind
can put together what has happened and construe its own version of the calamities. Even when

Leroy is dying and Mrs. Penmark says she can’t stand his screams, there are no audible screams

for the audience to hear. While the plot is disturbing and not meant for every audience, the visual

depiction of it is not that disturbing to watch. Until you start to see Rhoda get a little angry with

Claude and Leroy, the child doesn’t seem threatening at all. This is not the case for the 2018

remake of The Bad Seed. The trailer alone has every effect possible to incite horror for the

viewer—the little girl looks sinister, there are loud effects and harsh screaming in the

background, and there is even a scene of a person completely on fire. There are guns and

gasoline and so many more violent effects and weapons than in the 1956 version. It’s clear that

the depiction of violence in media has greatly increased. While it could be argued that

cinematography has improved and changed since 1956 to allow for better effects, the film would

not have been remade to be more violent if that’s not what producers thought would sell.

Technologies like surround sound, CGI, and the like enable films to “come to life” and

viewers seem to appreciate techniques like these as can be seen by the type of awards given to

movies today such as the best visual effects and the best sound effects. The increased realism

may make it seem like viewers experience scenes more realistically, but this is partially an

illusion. While they can hear and see what’s going on more clearly, they cannot feel what’s

happening any more than they could have if they were watching the 1956 version of the film.

This is a problem with computer depictions of violence. No pain will be transmitted through the

screen and there will be no way to reproduce the emotions felt by the characters unless the

viewer has lived through a similar situation.

Kids are typically scared by violence and horror. Like adults, they most likely stop being

scared by it when they’ve become immune to it. Theoretically, once they’ve seen it enough that
they aren’t phased by it anymore, they can watch it without having to leave the room. While

people may not be watching violent media in order to learn how to be violent themselves, it starts

to allow them to be able to see violence while being emotionally unphased because it’s not

connected to them. They don’t feel the pain being caused, they don’t have a relational connection

to an actor or computer-generated image, and they’ve seen it enough that it seems normal.

Violent media may not directly motivate a child to commit an act of violence, but it sure would

give them ideas and an increased tolerance for the idea of violence if they were motivated by

other means.