From slate, Murderous little children—we never have to wait long for a new one to tricycle into the multiplex, butcher's knife in hand. The latest pint-size sociopath arrives in this summer's Orphan, in which Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga adopt Esther, a little girl whose dainty smile and perfect posture soon give way to malicious car-brake-meddling and playground homicide. Orphan belongs to a cinematic tradition as long as its villains are wee. In 1956, The Bad Seed's Rhoda Penmark turned her tap shoes into deadly weapons, and ever since, the appeal of the evil-kiddie movie has proven inexhaustible. The biggest reason for this is the most obvious: What's creepier than a 4-foot-tall killer in Spongebob pajamas? But the genre's resilience runs deeper, expertly mining deep-seated fears and anxieties: In evil-kiddie movies, we get wild explorations—sometimes unsettling, sometimes hokey, often both—of what it means to raise a child and build a family.
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