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When Danielle Keaton was seven, her homework was to open her eyes as wide as possible and stare. She had just secured a role in director John Carpenter’s Village of the Damned – a horror film about inhuman psychic children with violent tendencies – and had to perfect her creepy glare. “We had to practise not blinking for a very long time,” says the actor and coach, now 38 and based in LA. “We would have to look in a mirror and hold the stare without laughing.” On set, the children would have staring contests with Superman star Christopher Reeve.
As the spooky season enshrouds us like mist on a mountaintop, many of us are pressing play on classic horrors, eager to be chilled by tropes as old as time. One such trope is the “creepy kid”, arguably first popularised in 1956’s The Bad Seed, in which eight-year-old Rhoda manages to commit several murders while maintaining pristine blond plaits. Ominous infants quickly became a movie mainstay, popping up in The Exorcist, The Omen and The Shining (“Come and play with us”).
My hair was long, dark and black. They cut it really short and bleached it platinum blond – it really did get damaged
Masks and makeup are one thing, but what if your own face is central to a horror film? In 2021, actor and singer Milly Shapiro made a TikTok about playing 13-year-old Charlie in 2018’s Hereditary. She captioned the video: “I just remember when the trailer came out and one of the top three comments was about how ugly I looked.” Perhaps feeling similarly to Shapiro, some young horror stars have since disappeared from public view entirely – but others continue to tour the convention circuit, meeting the fans they frightened.
The original creepy kid … Patty McCormack as Rhoda in The Bad Seed. Photograph: Album/Alamy
The experiences of playing this kind of role are clearly varied. “The family and the dynamics I grew up in didn’t always feel so safe, so I think being on set created a safe place for me. It was like a home,” says Keaton, who played telepath Lily. In one scene, a medical professional puts drops in Lily’s eyes and she screams at great length. “As an actor, there are certain things you feel stronger at – for me, drama, crying and screaming came more naturally. Maybe it was because I wasn’t able to express that at home, so it was just a freedom that I felt.”
Julie Maddalena, the actor who played ritual-loving Rachel in 1984’s Children of the Corn, concurs. “I had been through a lot growing up so I was used to trauma,” says Maddalena, now 61 and living in Idaho. “At that time in my life, I really hadn’t processed it, so I had this wellspring of darkness or rage or pain or fear that I could deeply connect to.” Maddalena says it was cathartic for her to be able to express emotions “that aren’t otherwise culturally acceptable to wear on your sleeve”.
Still, when coaching other actors today, Maddalena doesn’t encourage them to tap into their trauma, “because it can be more traumatic”. While she was playing a child in the film, 4ft 9in Maddalena was actually 20. Even so, she felt affected by the role: “It was dark,” she says. She had to stab the male lead, and having recently become a Christian, she was disturbed by a church that had been “desecrated” for the film. “The wrap party was thrown at a slaughterhouse in town, that was macabre: the stains, the smells, the hooks, the chains.” Though she had fun shooting the movie, she recalls thinking by the end: “Oh, I’m so ready to go home!”
Keaton, for her part, felt shielded from anything too scary on set: “I always knew we were acting, it was playing.” Nothing negative sticks in her head, though something negative did stick out of it. “My hair was long, dark black, and they cut it really short and bleached it platinum blond,” she says. “My hair really did get damaged, it’s so sad.”
‘I’ve had a lot of backlash from religious people’ … Samara Lee in as horror character Annabelle. Photograph: Warner Bros/Everett/Shutterstock
Still, it was fun to look strange. Between takes, Keaton and the other blond children would go and get milkshakes at a local diner. “We had got so accustomed to walking in our formation that we did it while we were walking there,” she recalls with a laugh. “This was a tiny town and we would scare people. There were times we did our stare just to freak people out, because we knew we could.”
When she was six, Rafiella Brooks played Leah in the 2008 horror The Children – her character was infected with a virus that made her homicidal. The film-makers took pains to emphasise to their young actors that they were engaged in playacting. “Pretty much every day on set, you would go to the prosthetics to see how it was made, you’d see the makeup being put on each person.” They were even taught how to make fake blood to show them that it wasn’t real. By the time Leah had to stab another character in the eye, everything felt reassuringly fake. In the end, the only thing that scared Brooks was the hotel the cast were staying in. “It was a little bit creepy!”
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I’m eight years old and I’m scaring grown men
Still, while youngsters can be protected on set, things can change when movies are released. “Horror movies have real fans,” says Brooks, now 23 and a singer-songwriter in London. “People would try and get in contact with my family, that was probably the only downside.” Her family had to block “obsessed” people on social media; Brooks recalls the team behind the film were very supportive but, nevertheless, “it was quite scary”.
An actor with a similar experience is Samara Lee, who starred in 2017’s Annabelle: Creation when she was eight. Even as a tiny tot, Lee was already a fan of horror – “My parents named me after the girl in The Ring.” Lee’s love of the genre helped her embody the character of Bee, a dead girl possessed by a demon.
“You don’t have to act like an ‘Ooh!’ or a ‘Boo’ type of scary,” she says, “It’s a tortured, traumatic creepy – that’s how you really make it believable.” Lee, now 16, feels she “literally transformed” into her character when on set – yet she didn’t find it hard to adjust when the director called cut. “You have to do every scene about 50 to 100 times, so it almost felt like a routine.” At the end of the day, she says, she was “just doing my job”.
‘The hotel was a bit creepy’ … Rafiella Brooks, left, in The Children (2008). Photograph: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
Still, while Lee could tell the difference between what was real and what was fake, the audience couldn’t always. “Social media is a great place and it’s also a very scary place. I’ve had threats put out on me, people leaking my address, people threatening to come to my school and kill me,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of backlash from religious people thinking I’m disrespecting them because I did the character.” Eventually her family had to go to the police. “They did an amazing job and got everything figured out and I’m still here today!”
Despite these alarming experiences, Lee would love to act in a horror film again. Today she attends high school, pursues acting and competes in beauty pageants, which is a far cry from playing Bee. “Whenever I’d go to the bathroom, I looked in the mirror and my teeth looked like they were rotting out of my face,” she recalls of the role. “It’s definitely funny when people see me go from a demon to a pretty pageant princess.”
Maddalena, meanwhile, took a “very intentional” step away from horror, and today she is a voice actor. Brooks is pursuing music but contemplating returning to acting and modelling (her face has featured on book covers). Keaton is an actor, acting coach and producer. Despite some drawbacks, each actor recalls the fun they had on set and the confidence their role gave them. “It was fun for us, because we got to be the ones to scare people,” Keaton concludes.
“I loved being able to scare people,” Lee agrees. “Like, I’m eight years old and I’m scaring grown men. That’s something that not many people can say.”
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