Bushel presents its March Community Film Pick The Bad Seed

Moore describes the film as “an allegedly proto-feminist, truly shocking horror film that somehow contains no gore or even on-screen death. The Bad Seed—the 1956 original—famously relays the story of an eight-year-old psychopath whose mother, over the course of the film, comes to understand her own complicity in her daughter’s increasingly violent crimes. Mervyn LeRoy’s translation of a popular stage play by Maxwell Anderson itself adapted from a bestselling novel by William March, The Bad Seed is a film forged by Hollywood censorship and the ravages of World War II that sought to shift public debate about who is to blame for violence and wrong-doing. While the film’s you-go-girl veneer disguises a psychological argument against all women, The Bad Seed is nonetheless charming and hilarious, with an ending you will never forget.” 

The Bad Seed was nominated for several Academy and Golden Globe Awards, and winning one of the latter, the film was remade for television in 1985, inspired the Off-Broadway show Ruthless! in 1992, was the basis for the 1993 film The Good Son, and was remade for television again by Rob Lowe in 2017, now for Lifetime. A sequel is in post-production now. 

This film is picked by Catskills–based Anne Elizabeth Moore whose recent book Gentrifier: A Memoir was an NPR Best Book of 2021. She teaches at SVA and is currently on assignment for The Guardian. Her 2017 book Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes will be updated for the pandemic and rereleased by Feminist Press in April 2023.