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''The Bad Seed'' is an American PsychologicalHorror novel by William March, published in 1954.

Christine Penmark, a housewife, moves into a new town with her husband Kenneth and daughter Rhoda. Christine has always thought her daughter was very peculiar; while always polite, courteous, and charming in public, Rhoda has a cold, apathetic, and calculating quality to her personality which her mother finds very disturbing in a child. As Christine notices the strange and horrible things that happen in the proximity of her daughter, she comes to realize that Rhoda is the very definition of an EnfanteTerrible.

One of the earliest and more notable examples of a child being portrayed as irredeemably evil, and delves into the issue of nature vs. nurture as Christine discovers the truth of her own origins.

Thus far, there have been four adaptations of the novel:
* [[Theatre/TheBadSeed A stage play]] by Maxwell Anderson, which came out the same year as the novel.
* [[Film/TheBadSeed1956 A 1956 feature film adaptation]] drawing from both of the above.
* [[Film/TheBadSeed1985 A 1985 made-for-TV-movie remake]] for Creator/{{ABC}}.
* [[Film/TheBadSeed2018 A 2018 made-for-TV-movie remake]] directed by (and starring) Creator/RobLowe for Creator/{{Lifetime}}. Followed by a 2022 sequel, ''Film/TheBadSeedReturns''.

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!!The novel contains examples of:

* AdultsAreUseless: Almost all of the adults buy Rhoda's act, while the children in her school know there's something wrong there and usually avoid her.
* TheAlcoholic: Hortense Daigle, mother of Claude Daigle ([[spoiler:whom Rhoda killed because she wanted his penmanship medal]]), became addicted to alcohol to dull the pain of losing her only child.
* AntagonisticOffspring: Rhoda
* ArcWords: "What'll you give me for a basket of kisses?" "I'll give you a basket of hugs."
* AssholeVictim: [[spoiler: Leroy]] could be said to have had it coming. Even so...
* TheBadGuyWins: [[spoiler: Rhoda gets away with everything.]]
* BerserkButton: Rhoda ''really'' wanted to win that penmanship medal, and doesn't react well when it's brought up.
* BitchInSheepsClothing: Rhoda, full stop.
* BlackAndGreyMorality: Rhoda is a manipulative psychopath; Leroy, who is wise to her evil, is a [[TheBully bully]] who [[ObfuscatingStupidity plays stupid]] to get away with what he does; then we have [[KnowNothingKnowItAll Monica]], who willfully ignores Rhoda's [[TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior behavior]]; and the most heroic character, Rhoda's mother Christine, is morally conflicted.
* BreakTheCutie: Rhoda's poor mother!
* TheCassandra: Leroy's [[WomenAreWiser more intelligent wife]], who repeatedly warns him that no good will come of his [[BullyingADragon constantly teasing Rhoda]].
* ChangelingFantasy: Since childhood, Christine has had this thought in the back of her mind that she was adopted, though unlike most examples of this trope, the idea fills her with horror. Her parents (mother in the book) profusely deny this, and her friends assure her that this is a common childhood fantasy. Unfortunately for her, the truth is far worse than she could imagine.
* ChekhovsGun: Rhoda's tap shoes and the wood wool Leroy uses to sleep on.
** The special vitamins and sleeping pills Monica gives to Christine
** Also, Christine mentions her husband keeping an actual gun in the house. [[spoiler: She later uses it to shoot herself.]]
* ChildrenAreInnocent: Mercilessly averted.
* CorruptionByAMinor: Rhoda and Leroy have a relationship that is disturbingly sexual, although they never touch each other. In the book he actually compares his relationship with her to an odd courtship.
* CreepyChild[=/=]EnfantTerrible: Rhoda could have been the TropeNamer for these.
* CrustyCaretaker: Leroy.
* DevilInPlainSight: Rhoda, ''definitely!''
* DissonantSerenity: Rhoda. She never shows much excitement, no matter what she's been up to.
* DespairEventHorizon: For Christine this is [[spoiler: Rhoda's murder of Leroy. She is forced to give up any lingering denial she may have had about Rhoda's evil nature or her, Christine's, inability to control her.]]
* DownerEnding: Not just a downer – it's basically ''as bad as it gets''. [[spoiler: Christine commits suicide, whereas murderous Rhoda survives and gets away scot-free, nobody even suspecting her of any foul.]]
* DrivenToSuicide: [[spoiler: Christine shoots herself after thinking she had killed Rhoda.]]
* EnfantTerrible: No FreudianExcuse needed. Rhoda was ''born'' evil. Hence the name of the story.
* EveryProperLadyShouldCurtsy: Rhoda does these as a part of her good showing of manners.
* EvilVersusEvil: Rhoda and Leroy's confrontations.
* EvilIsPetty: Rhoda's motivation for murder is simple acquisitiveness--and since she's eight years old, what she wants can be extremely trivial: a penmanship medal or an ornamental snowglobe.
* EvenEvilHasLovedOnes: Leroy in the novel has three children and a wife he cares for in his ornery way. Leroy's family is the only reason Monica keeps him on as a caretaker.
* EvenEvilHasStandards: In spite of readily admitting he is a mean and uncaring man who likes to get under a little girl's skin just for kicks, Leroy is genuinely disturbed when he realizes what kind of person Rhoda really is. He's a sociopath too, but even he recoils at murder.
* FaceOfAnAngelMindOfADemon: Rhoda, a sweet looking eight-year-old girl, with the dangerous mind of a psychopathic killer.
* FauxAffablyEvil: Rhoda. She acts sweet, but when she doesn't get her way or someone gets in between her and her goals, she shows what a murderous brat she is.
* {{Foil}}: Leroy, the gardener, is the only adult who can see through Rhoda's perfect child act, and enjoys teasing her to get under her skin.
* ForTheEvulz: Leroy's motivation for tormenting Rhoda.
* GutFeeling: Rhoda is avoided by most children her age, because they can tell there's something not quite right about her. They're absolutely correct.
* HappilyMarried: Christine and Kenneth, despite Kenneth's job-related absences.
** Believe it or not, Leroy and Thelma.
* JerkassHasAPoint: Leroy is correct about a number of the characters: Monica ''is'' an arrogant know-it-all, Christine's kindness ''is'' a bit condescending, and he '''underestimates''' the degree of Rhoda's selfishness and ruthlessness.
* KarmaHoudini: [[spoiler: Rhoda gets away with everything she's done in the book.]]
* KickTheDog: In the novel Rhoda pushes her pet terrier out of a window when she gets tired of taking care of it.
* KnowNothingKnowItAll: Monica Breedlove, Christine's landlady and a prominent figure in the community. Monica is described as an "amateur psychologist" but clearly doesn't have any ''actual'' expertise in the field. She randomly diagnoses Leroy as a paranoid schizophrenic, her brother Emory as a closeted homosexual, and herself as having [[BrotherSisterIncest incestuous feelings towards him.]] Her advice only serves to distress and upset Christine more and more, but she's totally blind to the fact that Rhoda is a serial killer. Nicely contrasts her employee Leroy who's a case of ObfuscatingStupidity.
* LackOfEmpathy: When Christine asks Rhoda if she understands the pain Mrs. Daigle must be going through after [[spoiler: discovering his medal that she stole from Claude's body]], she responds, "I guess." Later, she says, "If Mrs. Daigle wants a son so bad, why doesn't she get one from the orphanage?"
* LoveMartyr: A familial example: Christine sacrifices her sanity, integrity, and [[spoiler: in the original story, her life]] out of the love she has for her daughter, who when asked if she truly loves her, only replies "You're silly!".
* MistakenForInsane: At the novel's end, it's assumed that [[spoiler:the stress of being separated from her husband, combined with all the tragic "accidents" in his absence, caused Christine to suffer a psychotic break that drove her to kill herself and her daughter.]] No one suspects her real motivation.
* {{Motormouth}}: Monica spends so much time talking that she never actually observes what's going on around her, and thus can never apply what knowledge she does have to a real situation. Rhoda has her wrapped around her little finger and she doesn't even realize it.
* MuggingTheMonster: Leroy thinks it's fun to tease [[CreepyChild Rhoda]]. He [[OhCrap learns better]]...[[KillItWithFire too late]].
* MyBelovedSmother: Mrs. Daigle is shown to be very overprotective and anxious about her only child Claude, [[spoiler: which is why his death emotionally destroys her.]]
* NatureVersusNurture: Despite growing up with loving parents, Rhoda's sociopathic nature was apparently passed down from her maternal grandmother, a serial killer.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: [[spoiler:In a misguided effort to protect her husband from the repercussions of Rhoda's crimes, Christine tells no one what she's learned, destroys all the evidence, chooses an uncertain method to kill Rhoda, then kills herself, leaving no one the wiser when Rhoda survives to kill again.]]
* ObfuscatingStupidity: Leroy pretends to be a humble simpleton in front of Monica and other adults, while revealing his true mean nature to children. He believes himself to be BrilliantButLazy, but based on his wife's comments and his own actions in the story, this is debatable.
* ObnoxiousInLaws: Christine has one in the book's backstory. Kenneth's mother always thought there was something not right about Christine, and warned her son about marrying and having children with her. Worth mentioning, her name is '''Rhoda''' --Christine named her daughter after her mother-in-law in an attempt to appease her, but it failed to improve their relationship.
** Even worse for Christine, it seems the elder Mrs. Penmark may have been on to something after all.
* OffingTheOffspring: [[spoiler: Rhoda's mother tries to do this in the book. She also finds out that her own biological mother, a famous serial killer, murdered her entire family, including her other children and almost killed Christine herself.]]
* PsychopathicManChild: Leroy, especially in the book where he gives Rhoda a dead rat in a gift box just ForTheEvulz.
* RedemptionEqualsDeath: [[spoiler:Christina kills herself in part as punishment for unleashing Rhoda on the world. By killing both Rhoda and herself, she feels she's stopping "the bad seed" before it can reproduce again.]]
* SerialKiller: By the end of the story, Rhoda has a body count of four: [[spoiler: her pet dog, a neighbor who promised her a snowglobe after her death, Claude Daigle, and [[HeKnowsTooMuch Leroy]].]] With the exception of the last one, they were all for short-sighted and selfish reasons.
* SesquipedalianLoquaciousness: Monica. How often do you hear "penurious" and "larvated" in a conversation?
* SmugSnake / SmallNameBigEgo: Leroy, who as mentioned before overestimates his own intelligence.
* TheSociopath: Rhoda has neither conscience nor empathy and has no issues with killing to get what she wants. Rhoda's personality is encapsulated in this exchange between her and Leroy:
-->'''Leroy''': You ask me and I say you don't even feel sorry about what happen to that poor little boy.\\
'''Rhoda''': Why should I feel sorry? It was Claude Daigle who got drowned, not me.
* StepfordSmiler: Rhoda, and as she finally catches on, her mother.
** Even before then, Christine has hidden the traumatic memories she has of [[spoiler: her psychopathic mother]] from her family.
* TitleDrop: Comes in a passage where Christine is musing about the nature of violence.
-->It seemed to her suddenly that violence was an inescapable factor of the heart, perhaps the most important factor of all – an ineradicable thing that lay, like a bad seed, behind kindness, behind compassion, behind the embrace of love itself. Sometimes it lay deeply hidden, sometimes it lay close to the surface; but always it was there, ready to appear, under the right conditions, in all its irrational dreadfulness.
* TroublingUnchildlikeBehavior: Rhoda!
* VillainousLineage: Christine discovers that [[spoiler: her biological mother was a serial killer and believes that she passed her murderous nature to Rhoda.]]
* WhamLine: The book's final two sentences.
-->'''Monica:''' [[spoiler:At least Rhoda was spared. You still have Rhoda to be thankful for.]]
* WhereTheHellIsSpringfield: While the setting of the novel isn't directly stated, there are several clues that it's in Maryland. The Penmarks previously lived in Baltimore; the Fern sisters mention a town called Benedict (there is a Benedict, Maryland) and also use the term "bay-side" (a common Maryland description for towns located on the Chesapeake Bay).
* WorthyOpponent: A few lines of dialogue suggest this between, of all people, Leroy and Rhoda once they both discover that [[spoiler: the other is also a sociopath.]]

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