With Halloween just around the corner and mini-ghouls wandering around looking for sweet treats, Nina Romain looks at the true Halloween children of the silver screen and how they got to be authentically creepy… in the best festive way.
Leaving aside the true mini-maniacs such as Damien in The Omen and Esther in Orphan, let’s look at who is really a kid bent on true Halloween mischief. Rather than aiming at killing you all year round, which fictitious children are into evil in the true spirit of the last week of October?
Wednesday and Pugsley Addams are perfect examples of Halloween kids – armed with a toy guillotine, their favourite hobby is stealing “Stop” roadsigns, when they’re not attempting to kill each other. These terrifying pre-teens live in a world of their own, armed with deadly toys including crossbows, and have few friends except for each other and a complete lack of social skills. But we love them.
The Addamses don’t dress up for Halloween, as they live their entire existence based around the Gothic event. This is why when quizzed why Wednesday hasn’t got a Halloween costume to join in the festivities, she deadpans: “I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
The Addamses’ female offspring started as a nameless child in a black and white single-strip cartoon by Charles Addams, in 1944 in The New Yorker, and was given her creator’s surname. She’s seen complaining to her mother about Pugsley, leaving Morticia to respond unsympathetically: “Well, don’t come whining to me. Go tell him you’ll poison him right back.”
Wednesday then came to 3D life in the 1964 TV show before two successful ventures on the big screen, The Addams Family in 1991 and Addams Family Values in 1993. This was followed by a 2022 Netflix reboot (Wednesday), showing the pigtailed character is ageless. Despite Wednesday’s macabre one liners and general lack of enthusiasm to be cute and adorable, she still manages to be kawaii.
Named after the nursery rhyme “Wednesday’s child is full of woe”, this young lady is a model child. Smart, curious, sure of herself, she doesn’t rely on others’ approval, and refuses a group hug at summer camp on the grounds she’s “contagious”. She loves her younger brother Pugsley (despite her frequent attempts to kill him with a crossbow and electric chair).
