Manipulative, murderous, or just plain spooky children, often orphans, are a common horror device. What are the roots of this?

by nachoruns

Off the top of my head are The Omen, Orphan, The Good Son, Children of the Corn, The Exorcist, Pet Sematary, and the axe-murdered ghost twins in movie version of The Shining.

grantimatter

In this changeling discussion, /u/itsallfolklore shares a pretty scary changeling story from the Northern Paiute tradition. Similar stories can be found in pre-Christian Europe.

(Personally, and mostly unrelated to that, I think that the specific spooky children in The Omen and to a lesser degree The Exorcist owe something to concepts of the Antichrist/the "Lamblike Beast" from Revelation, which probably go back to the late Medieval period or earlier - a kind of inverse Jesus as Christ Child. See this 13th century illustration or this 15th century woodcut.)