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YMMV / The Bad Seed (2018)

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  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Chloe really attracted to David, or she is a Gold Digger? Or maybe a little of both, with the side benefit of knowing how much it would irk Emma if she hooked up with him. The fact that she's so temperamentally ill-suited to be a nanny suggests that she chose the job mainly as a way to find a Meal Ticket.
  • Adaptation Displacement: Promotional materials touted this film as a remake of the 1956 original, without mentioning the book, the play, or its first modern remake.
  • Complete Monster: Emma Grossman is worse than any of her previous incarnations. Killing her classmate, Milo, after he won a citizenship award that she felt she deserved, Emma, fearing punishment for her crime, puts a wasp nest in Mrs. Ellis's car, causing her to die in a crash. Threatened by her babysitter, Chloe, Emma locks her in a shed and sets it on fire, watching her burn to death. Revealing how she killed her previous nanny, Emma makes several attempts to kill her father, eventually succeeding by manipulating a police officer into shooting him. She gets worse in the sequel.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: After antagonizing a girl named Emma here, Sarah Dugdale went on to play a character named Emma in Lifetime's The College Admissions Scandal.
  • Moe: Milo can certainly qualify as this, as can pretty much every other kid in Emma's class.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Emma crosses it when she kills Milo, a sweet little boy, in order to obtain his citizenship medal that she wanted to win for herself. And she never goes back from there.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Emma practicing her "basket of kisses" delivery in the mirror in order to get it juuuuuuust right.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Before she moved on to killing people, Emma was a Captain America's intellectual niece. After her murder spree, she went on to become a young Carol Danvers.
  • Squick: At one point, David has nightmares of both Milo and Chloe's dead bodies in the manner in which they both died. Needless to say, it's not pleasant.
  • Tear Jerker: Milo's death, especially because he didn't do anything wrong. He just happened to win a prize that Emma wanted for herself, and as a result, he had to pay for it.
  • The Woobie: David, who seems like a Nice Guy who just happens to find himself as a single dad to a hellion child, and loses his life over it.

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