Evil Seeds, edited by Vanessa Morgan, is a different sort of book than I normally read, but I’m not new to its genre. True, the only other movie-overview book I’ve read was Strange Blood: 71 Essays on Offbeat and Underrated Vampire Movies, also edited by Vanessa Morgan and recommended back in 2019. That one experience, however, helped me know what to expect from Evil Seeds, which is part of why I decided to go ahead and read it.
I don’t regret the decision. I even enjoyed Evil Seeds a little more than Strange Blood, though I can’t put my finger on why. It may be the theme itself—as the book often says, after all, there’s something intriguing about movies featuring evil children.
Evil Seeds: The Ultimate Movie Guide to Villainous Children is a collection of short essays discussing the world’s wide selection of movies featuring evil children. Featuring any movie you can think of from the start of the genre to today, and from nearly every continent, Evil Seeds covers its topic well—and leaves you wanting to watch these evil children for yourself.
To start, you’ll definitely want to make sure to read this book’s introduction. It easily pulls you in, while providing a good base of information to work with while reading the essays throughout.
Things just get better from there. While the individual essays are short, they’re also interesting and well written. I was surprised by how many of them tempted me to watch their movies, despite my habit of not doing well with horror movies. This may have been helped by how many of them I recognized, bringing about an odd sense of nostalgia that seemed almost out of place, considering I hadn’t watched most of them.
All of that said, I do want to end this with a warning: There are some tough bits to read in the book. It brings up topics that could be triggering to some readers, though those topics are relevant to the movies being discussed.
Miranda Burski 
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