What is it about childlike villains, or as TV Tropes so eloquently puts it, the “Psychopathic Manchild,” that creeps us out a little?

When I say childlike villain, I’m not referring to the killer kid trope. I’m talking about adult villains or antagonists who behave and/or think like children. These two tropes are related, which I will discuss, but they’re also very different.

Animaniacs

The childlike villain is pretty common in a lot of genres. It is particularly popular in kid’s cartoons. It’s a favorite of Disney movies. Still, Looney Tunes, Tiny Toons, and, perhaps especially, Animaniacs used this trope a lot. Animaniacs’ best-known sketches involve the main characters driving adult buzzkills crazy to the point where they throw toddler-Esque temper tantrums. Rugrats also did this many times. The popularity of this in kids’ shows, especially cartoons, makes sense: adults acting like kids are funny.

In horror, on the other hand, the childlike villain takes on its own strange life. There are several childlike villain characters, and I’ve chosen to look at Bing Partridge of Joe Hill’s novel N0S4A2, a novel I adore. For purposes of clarity, I’m going to be referencing the novel alone and not the TV adaptation, as there are some differences in Bing’s story arc between the two versions.

Bing Partridge is functionally a henchman of Charlie Manx, and this is, of course, not an uncommon role in placing the childlike villain in. It’s not as difficult for the reader to suspend one’s disbelief when the young villain is a secondary antagonist. They are often not the people coming up with the primary plan. In the context of the story, one can justify why he is valuable to Manx- he’s easy to manipulate.

Bing Partridge

What makes this particularly interesting is that Manx takes his adult persona from a child’s fantasies. He’s the charismatic, fun-loving guy who takes children to a magical land where “unhappiness is against the law and every day is Christmas,” after all. A man like Bing is the only sort of henchman that can work for Manx and stay loyal to him for as long as he does with only the promise of an eventual reward. This is especially true when you remember that N0S4A2 takes place for decades.

So that’s why it works in the story Hill is telling. But why is it disturbing?

TV Tropes argues that, much like killer kids, the childlike villain is creepy because of the juxtaposition of behavior we associate with childhood against violent maliciousness. Indeed, that’s part of it. As a culture, having apparently forgotten what being a child is actually like, we tend to associate childhood with innocence. 

We generally think of childhood maliciousness as unintentional or in some way beyond the child’s control. Because of this, the idea of a child being malicious enough to kill people is in direct contrast to that. While there have been elementary-school-aged children who have killed others in real life, such as Mary Bell, it is very rare.

When we consider an adult childlike, we typically use that phrasing to refer to an adult who has maintained such innocence. A childlike adult is an adult who has managed to maintain naivety into the adult world, a world that we tend to look at with a lot of pessimism. 

There’s something likable about an adult with a childlike side, to a degree. We’re aware that it can become irritating in excess- we all know “that guy”- but we see parents play with their kids, and it is endearing. We see grown men get excited over puppies and kittens, and it’s usually adorable. An adult allowing oneself to express goofy youthfulness now and again can be adorable.