The Family That Slays Together: Ten Domestic Slashers

"The Stepfather" isn't the only family member who's gotten murderous in the movies.

Killer Baby

A woman wakes in the middle of the night, turns to her husband and tells him: “It’s time.” They dress, take their older son to a sitter, crack a few jokes and calmly drive to the hospital. Then the baby is born: a hideous clawed mutant who slaughters the doctors and nurses who deliver him. Larry Cohen’s “It’s Alive” is the ultimate killer baby movie specifically because it turns a potentially schlocky premise into a powerful story about the anxieties of new parents. Any first-time father worried about how the addition of a baby might change their lives can relate to the story of Frank Davies (John Ryan), who goes into the hospital that fateful night a happily married man with a good job in public relations and comes out a public relations nightmare, responsible for the world’s first serial-killing infant.

Though the baby terrorizes the greater Los Angeles area in a series of scary sequences — in the best, it kills a Carnation delivery man, spilling milk and blood out the back of his truck — “It’s Alive” is ultimately an allegory of parental responsibility. As the body count rises (the tot even gets — Spoiler Alert! — the family cat), Frank repeatedly insists that “It’s no relation to me!” When the manhunt — er, babyhunt — is over, Frank finally comes to grip with the fact even his seemingly good genes are capable of producing one severely screwed-up kid.

Killer Pet

It’s been said that a boy’s best friend is his mother and that man’s best friend is his dog. For Willard, the sad-sack hero of both films that bear his name, a man-child’s best friend is his rat. Make that best and only — Willard (Bruce Davison in the 1971 original, Crispin Glover in the 2003 remake) gets shat upon by his ghoulish mother, his pushy boss and basically every single person in every single facet of his miserable life until he forms a bond with a white rat he finds in his basement. Willard feels a kinship with the rat he names Socrates and the rest of his unloved pack, a bond that grows stronger when Willard realizes he can control the rats with his thoughts, a particularly appealing proposition for a guy who doesn’t control anything in his life.

Unfortunately, Willard doesn’t anticipate that an enormous rat named Ben might get jealous of his love for Socrates and turn the rats against him. So let that be a lesson to us all: when you assume telepathic control of a swarm of rats, sometimes one of them gets jealous and tries to kill you. I’d say stick to dogs, but if you’ve seen movies like “Cujo” or “Man’s Best Friend,” you know that that can turn out badly, too.

Killer Daughter

Children are frightening. Creating them is harrowing enough, but then comes the matter of bringing the rascals up, with their neediness and various explosions of bodily fluid. The greatest horror films take everyday annoyances like these and expand them into grotesque reflections of our worst impulses — an exhausted complaint like “My kid is a monster” becomes a granted wish. “Orphan” is the most recent entrant to the canon, and a particularly chilling one. Kate (Vera Farmiga) and John (Peter Sarsgaard) are two contented liberal bougies, with a pair of adorable moppets and a Frank Lloyd Wright-esque abode. After Kate has a miscarriage, they decide to adopt. In comes Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a white-faced kewpie doll with perfect manners and an interest in watercolors.

The good liberal parents can’t resist her outsider art, and usher the anachronistically dressed terror into their home. With a few smartly placed hammer swings, Esther rips the surface off of their richly upholstered existence. Fuhrman is unnervingly poised as the bloodthirsty tween, flattening her voice and dealing death blows with prissy fastidiousness. Kate’s alcoholism and John’s philandering gurgle to the surface amid the slaughter, and when Esther slinks seductively into her new father’s lap, it’s unclear if he’ll recoil or crack a leering smile.

Killer Stepdad

Nothing stirs up resentment and insecurity like shakeups in the family unit, especially when the replacement part is a psychopathic preacher. Robert Mitchum gives one of the great screen performances in 1955’s “The Night of the Hunter,” a uniquely disturbing fable about a stepfather out for blood and treasure. The only film Charles Laughton directed, its combination of dreamlike violence and biblical sincerity is unlike any film ever made. Mitchum is what makes it sing, making Harry Powell a mellifluous demon, sauntering into a broken family and sucking it dry.

Feeding the inferiority complex of Shelley Winters’ mother, he drives her to self-hatred in order to focus his rage on the children, whom he believes know the location of the money their biological father stole on a bank job. With his folksy wisdom tattooed on his knuckles (the famed story of LOVE and HATE), he charms the locals and earns a spot as a local patriarch, while at home he chases the moon-faced children with Frankenstein-like clumsiness and violence. His rumbling bass singing “Leaning…” will send a chill down the spine for the rest of your life.

Killer Maid

Good help is so hard to find these days, as Claude Chabrol wryly points out in “La Cérémonie.” With his pitch-black sense of humor and a ridiculously talented cast (Sandrine Bonnaire, Isabelle Huppert, Jacqueline Bisset, Virginie Ledoyen and Jean-Pierre Cassel), he slowly tightens the noose on an affable upper class family. Bonnaire is the new maid, Sophie, for the Lelievre family, and she has a few problems. First is her illiteracy, which she hides with the help of her postal worker friend, Jeanne (Huppert). Second is her masked disdain for the moneyed classes, which leaks out in her disturbing bull sessions with Jeanne.

The pair, who titter like schoolgirls and eventually wear matching pigtails, have a little in common — specifically a dash of murder in their past. Chabrol stages this revelation with perverse relish, as the two react with curled smiles, ending in a tickle fight before volunteering at the local church. Sophie can’t keep up her neutrality much longer, and she unleashes a bitter snap against the Lelievre daughter (Ledoyen), which leads to the violent unraveling of the entire household. Bonnaire is magnificent, shading her rural simpleton with shades of guilt and self-doubt, unlike the giddy monstrousness of Huppert, who flounces her way into the most shocking scenes with sociopathic glee.

[Additional photos: “The Shining,” Warner Bros., 1980; “To Die For,” Columbia Pictures, 1995; "The Omen," 20th Century Fox, 1976; “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” Hollywood Pictures, 1992; “Willard,” New Line Cinema, 2003; "Orphan," Warner Bros., 2009; “The Night of the Hunter,” United Artists, 1955; “La Ceremonie,” New Yorker Films, 1996]

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