In 1956, Mervyn LeRoy took on the onerous task of adapting William March’s controversial 1954 killer child novel The Bad Seed for the big screen. The novel depicts a young mother and her flaxen-haired daughter Rhoda, a purportedly good little girl who may have murdered one of her classmates. The novel drew ire for its usurpation of the nature-versus-nurture argument at a time when psychiatry was still stigmatized and “juvenile delinquency” was on the rise: The precocious Rhoda is bad because of inborn factors, having inherited her murderous tendencies from her grandmother rather than any outside influences. LeRoy’s film, while mostly good (if really campy), faced one insurmountable obstacle that would inevitably derail the ending: The nefarious Hays Code, which dictated that bad deeds couldn’t go unpunished. In the novel, Rhoda’s mother gives the girl a bottle of sleeping pills and then puts a bullet through her own head. Rhoda (played by the terrifying Patty McCormack in an Oscar-nominated performance) survives, however, and lives to kill again. In the film, the mother survives while Rhoda gets struck by lightning and explodes. “The End.”
More than five decades later, The Bad Seed will now become a Lifetime movie, because why not? According to The Hollywood Reporter, March’s novel will be adapted into a made-for-TV film to be penned by Barbara Marshall (The Black List) for Mark Wolper (Bates Motel). The new version concerns Kate, one of those so-called “modern women” who can be a breadwinner, wife, and mother all at once. Everything else will assumedly be the same, with the young girl killing people and Kate trying to come to terms with the monster she birthed.
After Kristen Wiig and Will Ferrell’s A Deadly Adoption tricked 6 million viewers into thinking they were getting a Will Ferrell movie instead of a Lifetime movie starring Will Ferrell, the soap-centric channel, which reaches over 84 percent of TV-owning households, is in a good position to tackle bigger, more lustrous material. I don’t know if The Bad Seed is that kind of material, but a movie about a cherubic-faced killer kid sounds fun to me.