Horror stories involving children are a risky route to take these days. Even where the story is entirely fictional, contains characters that have no existence in the real world and are not based on any real-world event.  In these litigious times, there are so many willing to cry ‘I’m offended!’ and proceed to sue the writer because of some terrible imaginary thing they’ve just thought up and saw a profit in pursuing.

If you plan to have a child anywhere in your tale of gore and mayhem, watch out for those who make a living by being professionally offended. Then again, some people are offended when they wake up in the morning and spend the whole day looking for new things to be offended at—which is a storyline in itself but not the subject of this article. Another time.

I have never included a child character in a story because, well, I don’t like them very much and also because I had no idea how to do it.  Half of that has changed with the arrival of my son, heir and house demolition unit, Caligula Dume.  I now have experience to draw on and I know just how horrific a child can be.

There are three ways to portray the child character in horror.  The well known book, The Lovely Bones isn’t a horror story, but it makes the child a victim of a horrific attack.  Very difficult to do well, and very risky in the current world.  Personally I would avoid the child-as-victim angle but then Stephen King played it very well in his novel, It,  so it can be done. Carefully.

The second option would be to make the child a hero who destroys the demon.  Easier to do, but hard to make believable.  You might need to give the child special powers and that always risks the dreaded Deus Ex Machina accusation.  Children with special powers are not unknown in fiction.  Look at the wonderful Firestarter for inspiration there.  However —and I am sure the elves and goblins who write fantasy will agree—power cannot be free.  It must come at a cost.  Physical or psychological, you choose, just don’t make it too easy for your magical infant.  Free power is too easy and is of the old ‘With a bound, he escaped’ school of writing.  Which is no longer considered a reasonable story feature, I’m afraid.

One thing to watch out for if you have a magic-powered child as the hero is that it’s very easy to slip into a messianic-type story, where the child heralds a new dawn and changes the world.  Remember you’re writing horror, not fantasy.  No dancing elves or bad guys killed by melting their rings.  It’s supposed to be scary.  Your characters are not supposed to live happily ever after in Utopia, ruled by the child-king who dismisses demons with a sneer.  The child-hero might win but there must be the possibility that the monsters will return.  Otherwise the story leaves nothing to be scared of and that’s not horror.

The third and to my mind preferable option is to make the child the monster.  This was well done recently in a Dr. Who episode.  A child in a gas mask stalked the streets of wartime London, plaintively calling for his mummy.  Anyone who touched the child was transformed.  He wasn’t wearing a mask.  That was his face.  It was the face that grew on all who touched him, and they also wandered lost, looking for ‘mummy’.  You might think the Daleks were scary but they had nothing on this child.  He was very scary indeed.  A marvelously chilling storyline, better even than the lonely assassins of the excellent Blink episode.

There’s also the child in Pet Cemetery who was very, very nasty.  It wasn’t his fault.  His father did that to him with the best of intentions, the sort of good intention that adds another paving slab to Hell’s approach road.  Nevertheless, he was almost as nasty as little Caligula even without the multiple rows of teeth.

Then again, it doesn’t have to be an actual, real child.  Sometimes it just has to sound like one.  The original Hellraiser film, still the best of that series, enticed the heroine into the Halls of Damnation with a plaintive child’s cry.  It wasn’t a child.  I won’t say what it was in case you haven’t seen the film because I don’t want to spoil your fun.  Suffice to say, if you found that thing in your local play-park you wouldn’t go near the place after dark.

In Terry Gilliam’s film, Brazil, the excellent use of baby-faced masks, especially on the torturer, produced a wonderfully uncomfortable atmosphere.  It’s been years since I saw that film but I can still picture the masks perfectly.  No children were harmed in the making of that movie—in fact, as far as I recall, only a few children appeared in the film and then only briefly, when they set fire to a government vehicle.  Kids, eh?  Always messing around.

No discussion of children in horror could be complete without at least one mention of The Midwich Cuckoos and of course, Children of the Corn.  In both of these, the children are the horror but for different reasons.  The Cuckoos were placed in the wombs of local women by aliens and managed to combine perfect manners and exceptionally neat dress sense with a chilling presence.  The Children of the Corn are human, but worship a monster called 'He Who Walks Behind the Rows', who has enticed them into killing every adult in town and now into killing each other.  Making them alien means they are not real children.  I find the real children much more plausible, and therefore much more scary.

There are lines to cross in this aspect of horror, lines you cross with care and only if confident you can do it without causing legal problems for yourself.  A lot will depend on local laws but mostly it depends on the way you approach the subject.  In general, only the child-as-victim approach will cause you problems and then, really, only if you make it sexual or gratuitous or just that little bit too close to reality.

Remember, you’re trying to scare your reader, not sicken them.  You want them to reach for the bed-sheets and pull them over their heads. You don’t want them reaching for the phone and dialing 911.

So write. Carefully.