Enfant Terrible / Live-Action TV

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• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: One "gifted" turns out to be a young girl who "leeches" emotions (essentially she can Mind Rape anyone she touches, turning them into thralls). She is also completely insane. Her control also extends to her being able to kill any thrall just by willing it. May is traumatized by being forced to kill the girl.
• Angel had an episode where a little boy was possessed by a demon and doing horrible things. They exorcise the demon but find out from the demon (who begged to be killed) that it was the boy himself who didn't have a soul to begin with, and that the demon had been trapped.
• Breaking Bad has Tomas Cantillo, an 11-year-old boy who shot and killed Jesse's friend Combo as part of his initiation into a street gang.
  • Tuco Salamanca when he was a child, judging by a family photograph in the episode "Face Off". Though given the way he was raised, it's not surprising.
• The Brittas Empire: Carole's young son Ben becomes this in Series 6, to the point that it's a minor Running Gag in the latter half that he is unable to participate in the parties or special days of an episode because he's done something violent off-screen, up to and including cutting off the hand of a children's entertainer with a Flymo.
  Mr. Brittas: No, Carole.
  Carole: Please, Mr. Brittas! Ben's been so looking forward to swimming with the dolphin all week!
  Mr. Brittas: Carole, I can't let Ben anywhere near the general public, not with his record.
  Carole: But he's calmed down now, Mr. Brittas!
  Mr. Brittas: Carole, I'd hardly call dangling his Montessori teacher out of a second floor window calming down.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Hansel and Gretel, a single demon that takes the form of two dead (and later living) children apparently murdered by occult forces to cause the mothers of Sunnydale to try to kill all the other supernatural elements. Under their influence, Buffy's mom, Willow's mom, and several others attempt to burn Buffy, Willow, and Amy at the stake. It doesn't work so well when Hansel and Gretel are turned back into a big ugly demon, though. Apparently, the original story of Hansel and Gretel was based upon an earlier more successful attempt by the same demon in Germany.
  • The Anointed One, the boy who was turned into a vampire and was supposed to help the Master scape his prison.
• Criminal Minds
  • In the episode "The Boogeyman" it's revealed the killer was a 12-year-old boy who would lure other children into the woods, then beat them to death with an aluminum baseball bat.
  • "A Shade of Gray" reveals the (main) killer was a child sociopath who had murdered his younger brother by cramming model plane parts down his throat after his younger brother broke the model plane by accident. He also killed the family's puppy.
  • The episode "Safe Haven" had a 13-year-old sociopath on a cross-country killing spree, slaughtering entire families by gaining their trust with his seeming innocence in order to get access to their homes.
• CSI:
  • Hannah West is a 12-year-old child prodigy who successfully got her brother released by planting evidence to implicate herself and then turned into a Yandere when her brother paid more attention to his girlfriend than to her. The case she first appeared in was actually the one that pushed Sara Sidle over the edge and made her leave. After she came back, she was very visibly shaken when she had to deal with Hannah again.
    • In that episode, Sara tries to convince Hannah her brother turned on her to trick a confession but Hannah sees through it. Later in the second episode, Sara breaks it to Hannah that her brother killed himself out of grief for his second girlfriend being killed by Hannah. Hannah scoffed "this is just a sad and desperate ploy, Sara" until the photos of the body made her realize the only person she ever cared about was dead and broke down crying.
  • Then there were the little bundles of horror that were the killers in "Bad Words" and "Cats in the Cradle." The killer in "Go To Hell" also had an early-teens accomplice who was arguably an even worse person than he was^note He was a pedophile preying on her, but she used that to her advantage by promising to be with him if he killed her family; still, she's young enough that we can still feel for her when she herself is murdered by The Fundamentalist. Oddly enough, subverted with the killer in "Gentle Gentle," the actual youngest perp seen on the show... who was too young to know what he was doing.
  • The role played by Justin Bieber as Jason McCann. This may be one of the worst ones on this list because instead of sadistic sadism, he cunningly plans, kills three police officers, and does this all by trying to bomb the living shit out of them! It is, however, worth it in the end when he gets shot to death by the authorities after shooting one of the officers.
• In Desperate Housewives, Kayla, Tom Scavo's illegitimate daughter, became this. At first, she was just cold to Lynette, who her conniving mother Nora had told her wanted to take her (Kayla) away from her (Nora), which was true, but only to get her away from Nora's crazy. But then the next season, Kayla does increasingly outrageous things, from convincing her half-brothers to jump off the roof to claiming Lynette abuses her, all in the name of getting Lynette out of the picture so she could stay with her father.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Celestial Toymaker", Cyril is what Billy Bunter of Greyfriars would be if he were a Psychopathic Manchild's slave. He crosses the Moral Event Horizon in episode 4 when he attempts to trip Steven and Dodo up so they get a lethal shock from the hopscotch floor. However, he gets Hoist by His Own Petard.
  • In "Remembrance of the Daleks", a girl is possessed by the Dalek battle computer.
  • In "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood", another girl is overwhelmed by the gaseous entity "Sister of Mine", taking over her lifespan. The same musical theme is used in both cases.
  • The trope is also toyed with in "Closing Time". The Doctor, who claims to be able to speak baby, tells Craig that his infant son Alfie prefers to be called "Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All". There's no indication that he's an actual evil baby, though.
• Little sister Megan on Drake & Josh is an evil, conniving brat to the titular characters, but acts sweet and adorable to everyone else.
• The first episode of Eleventh Hour features an 11-year-old Nietzsche Wannabe who kills off classmates to raise test scores.
• In the Evil (2019) episode "Rose390," the team is asked by a couple to help their young son, Eric, who they believe is possesed. While interviewing him, Eric, who speaks in a very creepy monotone voice, talks about all the terrible things he has done, including trying to poison his parents and biting his baby sister just because she wouldn't stop laughing. Later on, Eric actually tries to drown his sister in his family's pool and almost succeeds if David hadn't saved her. At the end of the episode, the team is ready to perform an exorcism, only to find a cop car in front of the house and they are soon informed that Eric is missing. The mother claims that Eric ran away, but it's heaviley implied that she killed him in order to protect the family.
• Forever Knight Lacroix's daughter-turned-sire, Divia, whom he staked after she tried to seduce him but who came back and started killing his friends in the modern day.
• In Season 5 of Grimm, Adalind and Renard's daughter Diana returns as a powerful and creepy preteen Hexenbiest (well, technically, she's 3/4 Hexenbiest and 1/4 Royal), who kills Renard's girlfriend for standing in the way of her parents getting back together, and Boneparte, the leader of Black Claw, for hurting Adalind. Then someone decides it's a good idea to kidnap her. Renard, for his part, almost immediately realizes that it's the kidnapper who should be sorry, and doesn't even worry.
• The apparent physical age of immortals from Highlander is fixed at the age of their first death; two episodes featured a centuries old Immortal in the body of a 12 year old. Kenny has survived for hundreds of years by playing on his youthful appearance and the sympathies of older kind-hearted Immortals for protection since he's at a severe physical disadvantage. Then he takes their heads when their back is turned. Amanda especially grabs the Idiot Ball where Kenny is concerned, since she was the Immortal who originally discovered him (prior to his Face–Heel Turn when he really was an innocent boy) and refuses to believe Duncan's warnings, even though MacLeod already had several prior encounters with him.
• In the I Love Lucy episode "The Amateur Hour", Lucy babysits twin boys. While playing Cowboys and Indians, they tie her up, intending to burn her at the stake (and though it's Played for Laughs, they are serious about it!). A phone call from their mother interrupts them, but even when told what they've been up to she is oddly calm about the whole thing. All they get is a mild warning that their father would spank them both if they burned one more sitter at the stake. So, frighteningly enough, they've apparently done it before...
  Mrs. Hudson: Boys, is Mrs. Ricardo on fire?
• Kamen Rider Zi-O: Heure enjoys causing chaos and toying with his victims unlike his older and more pragmatic fellow Time Jackers, a loose group of time travelers trying to bring about a reign of evil overlord under their command. He is also consistently the most active and crafty one, resulting in stuff like invicible mirrors monster or zombie apocalypse.
• The various Law & Order series like to play with these, and especially emphasizes the handwringing "what can we do, the legal system can't handle such a monster without exploiting innocent kids!" response.
  • The Law & Order episode "Killerz" featured a ten-year-old girl named Jenny Brandt who has serious ISSUES with the male gender: she would rip out the eyes out of males in pictures, poisoned a cat just to watch it die (and doesn't flinch when the psychiatrist yells at her for it), scared her nanny into doing her bidding... and murdered a younger boy and stuffed a battery in his mouth. And is apparently completely incapable of feeling a shred of remorse. She gets off, based in part on the argument that she's too young to fully understand death, and the last shot has her coolly regarding another young boy, with the implication that more death is in her future.
    Emil Skota: Emotional abuse, the snuffed cat, the blacked-out photographs. Her lack of response when I went after her.
    Jack McCoy: Her fantasies about hurting little boys."
    Emil Skoda: Yeah. Previews of coming attractions. She's graduated to murder. She's not gonna stop.
    Abbie Carmichael: You sound pretty sure.
    Emil Skoda: Kid's a done deal. She's a textbook serial killer. We just got her early.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • There was an episode with a set of Creepy Twins, one male and one female. It was revealed that the girl was actually born male but trussed up in long hair and skirts as part of a cold-blooded psych study. One twin murders the doctor who is responsible, but as the two suspects are impossible to differentiate from each other, it leaves the detectives at an impasse.
    • And yet another episode featured a sicko kid who murdered a "friend" at his own birthday party, and liked to mutilate himself to scare other kids. When it was realized he wouldn't get charged as an adult, the murdered boy's father shot him.
    • There's also another episode which revolved around a harassed boy who gunned down members of the school's basketball team, then tried to commit suicide and missed then blamed an alter ego named "Zoltar" for it. He gets better though, as the unit gives him the opportunity to go to a mental hospital to cure his disorder.
    • Another episode looks like it is playing this trope straight (kid comes to school and shoots another kid on the playground) but it is actually subverted (he was shooting at the gangsters behind the fence that have been threatening him).
    • The episode "Born Psychopath" revolves around Henry, a manipulative ten-year-old boy who has homicidal tendencies whenever he doesn't get what he wants, to the point where he locks his mother in the laundry room, ties his sister to a bed while nearly lighting his family's apartment on fire, ties a neighbor's kid to a chair in a closet, drowns his neighbor's dog, takes another child hostage inside a playroom, and shoots Amaro in the abdomen. Fortunately, Amaro was wearing a bulletproof vest.
• Malcolm in the Middle has a few: Francis, the eldest, did several horrible things as a toddler, and ended up lighting his teddy bear on fire (and the fact that he poured lighter fluid on it implies that it was deliberate), and it is heavily implied that Francis' final action was the reason why Lois ended up having to become such a strict mother. Reese kicked his mother hard enough to force her to go into labor several hours before the scheduled time for labor and then kicked the doctor as he was born. Probably the worst offender was Jamie often frames his brothers for things he did, and when under the influence of soda, actually attempts to murder Lois by shoving a shelf onto her. Suffice to say, Francis and Reese really don't grow to become any saner into adulthood.
  • Dewey of later seasons is a Manipulative Bastard who uses his skills either when someone has wronged him (usually disproportionate) or when he's just bored.
• Merlin (1998): The first thing we see of Mordred is him, as a young toddler, picking up a knife and throwing it across the room at a guest. According to his mother, it's just his way of demanding attention.
• Midsomer Murders:
  • One episode memorably featured three of these, the two girls distracting the victim before their older brother strangled him. At the end of the episode, Barnaby remembers their father died in a climbing accident, and only needs to look at the kids' expressions to see they started killing a lot earlier. Oh, and their mother is a psychiatrist.
  • Peter Craxton in "Bantling Boy" grew up obsessed with everything medieval. Thus upon discovering the truth of his parentage, he was overcome both with a belief in his own genetic supremacy and with shame at what his medieval codes told him was the ultimate disgrace. Together with his unusually high intelligence led to him manipulating his mentally disabled uncle into killing everyone who knew his secret.
  • Two separate episodes have young children killing other children (deliberately or by accident). Years later, the kid (who'd survived and been taken in by a couple grieving over their own child) or the kid's father (in the latter case, he was also the village priest) find out about it and wreak vengeance.
• The Millennium (1996) episode "Monster" concerns a demonic lil' tyke who frames her daycare provider for abuse, then does the same to Frank when he investigates.
• NCIS: In "Parental Guidance Suggested", a 12-year-old girl kills her mother, partially so her Navy SEAL father will stay home permanently (she had been injuring herself and her mother so he would come home due to family emergencies), and partially because her mother had figured out that she's The Sociopath and wanted to send her to a psychiatric hospital in Montana to help curb her violent tendencies. This nearly backfires when the father figures it out and is about to kill her when the team arrives, ironically because at the time they believed he's the killer. Further irony: her mother specializes in psychopathy and even consulted with a cannibalistic serial killer she helped put away (or analyze after the fact) in order to confirm her suspicions.
• In the New Amsterdam (2018) episode "The Karman Line," Iggy has to deal with a young girl who tried to strangle her little brother to death all because he wouldn't let her play with his phone. It then turns out that the girl is a sociopath who is incapable of showing remorse.
• The Big Bads seen in Odd Squad are all children who are or were somehow affiliated with the eponymous organization.
  • Season 1 has Odd Todd. He is Olive's old partner and an Evil Genius in the realm of mathematics, who was fired from Odd Squad for creating oddness instead of eradicating it. In revenge, he launched a pienado attack on Precinct 13579's agents, including Olive, which she, as the Sole Survivor, managed to stop. As a result of the attack, she developed a phobia of pies and screams whenever one is near her, although by Season 2, she is making strides in overcoming her fear.
  • Season 2 has Ohlm, another Evil Genius who graduated from the Odd Squad Academy and immediately wanted to be promoted to the position of the Big O. After being told that he can't become the Big O and being made a simple Investigation agent instead, he decides to use his smarts for evil rather than good, and does a Villain Team-Up with various villains to help them break into Precinct 13579. Once he becomes the Director of the precinct in the season finale, he decides to enact his ultimate Evil Plan of gathering all 9,999 gadgets together to make the Black-Hole-inator and suck every agent into it. Otis, Olympia, Oona and Ms. O — the latter whom is at this point fired from Odd Squad and is referred to as just Oprah — all eventually manage to stop him and he becomes grounded by his parents as punishment.
  • Season 3 has The Shadow, Opal's younger sister who turned to a life of villainy after realizing that she would never become The Ace like her sister. When her first plan to get rid of the Mobile Unit and their van by drowning them in the Lake of Goo fails, she decides to move on to her ultimate plan of creating a Legion of Doom with every villain in the world, known as the Villain Network, in order to take not just the Mobile Unit down, but also Odd Squad as an organization. Unlike most kid villains in the series, she manages to pull a Heel–Face Turn in the season finale, reforming and making up with Opal while also becoming The Atoner and taking the first steps towards redemption by helping out in trapping the tornado containing all of the villains' powers back into its box and handing it to the Big O personally.
• Parodied in Only Fools and Horses — Rodney is convinced that his nephew Damien (the name is not coincidental) is one of these, and acts as if he's with the Anti-Christ anytime he's in the same room as him. The boy's just a normal child, but try telling Rodney that.
  • One particular scene highlights this; Damien wants to show off a conjuring trick he's learnt and chooses Rodney to show it to. From Damien's point of view, he's just happily playing with his uncle. Rodney, however, looks as if he's being forced to participate in some kind of satanic ritual.
• In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive (made and taking place in 2007), Thrax, son of Rita and Zedd, spent a few days as The Man Behind the Man in charge of that season's warring factions, and proved a villain powerful and skilled enough to disable the entire incumbent Ranger team. It was long assumed that he could only be in his teens, as he must have been born around the time a Love Potion-influenced Lord Zedd started talking about wanting kids, but no - Word of God says he was born between Zeo and Turbo (that's the reason Zedd and Rita didn't take Big Badhood back like the Zeo finale implied they would, they were raising him), making him just ten years old at the time.
• Powerpuff: Henrietta is a little Gadgeteer Genius working for Jojo. Her "babies" are small caterpillar robots that can mind control anyone by crawling into their ear. Drake even mentions that she killed her own parents.
• A scene from Reno 911! had Dangle come across the other officers shouting at a little boy in custody. Taking pity on the boy, Dangle lets him go, only for the other officers to return and tell him that the boy had killed his whole family and raped his little sister to death.
• Smallville:
  • A side-effect to cloning a little girl happens to be the negation of any sense of right and wrong. Another side effect is Super-Speed which makes Lana think she's a ghost.
  • In Season 6, Bizarro when he is in a young boy's body. You don't even get the luxury of a Gory Discretion Shot. Don't say we haven't warned you.
  • In Season 10: "My name is Lex."
  • Alexander. Given that he's a clone of Lex Luthor, this shouldn't be surprising. Luckily, he later makes a Heel–Face Turn and turns out to be Smallville Superboy.
• Stargate SG-1: Vala is impregnated with the Dark Messiah of the Scary Dogmatic Aliens in Season 9. While she does grow to maturity in a matter of days, she is an extremely creepy (and, you know, evil) child in her first episode.
• Supernatural
  • Loves this trope, especially in early seasons. Enfant Terribles, usually ghosts, monsters posing as kids, or human kids who're just plain crazy, turn up in Dead in the Water, The Benders, Playthings, All Hell Breaks Loose, The Kids Are Alright, Bedtime Stories, and Family Remains.
  • Used as the twist of Season 1 and Season 5 episodes Provenance and The Real Ghostbusters, playing out pretty similarly. In the former, a haunted family portrait killed anyone who owned it. The killer appeared to be the father, but he turned out to be trying to warn people of the real culprit: the spirit of the psychotic little girl who had killed the family in the portrait who'd adopted her, as well as her own biological family before that. The girl also died, but her spirit haunted the painting. In the latter episode, where the ghost killing people appeared to be an orphanage caretaker who'd killed her young charges. After the Winchesters burn her bones and destroy her spirit, it's revealed that she had killed the kids because they had murdered her son and that in death, she'd been keeping the kids' spirits in check. With her gone, they're free to start killing again.
  • Also used as the twist of Season 2 episode Playthings. In an homage to The Shining, the audience sees two young girls who appear to be sisters playing together at the hotel their mom works at. The Winchesters suspect the recent deaths are caused by the grandmother, an infirm old woman who seems to be using magic. It turns out one of the little girls is actually the ghost of the grandmother's sister who died young, returned as the other little girl's Not-So-Imaginary Friend when the grandmother became too feeble to keep up the magic keeping her dead sister away. The ghost is lonely and plans to kill her great-niece to keep as an eternal playmate.
  • Season 3 introduced a recurring Enfant Terrible in the new Big Bad, Lilith, the only demon in fourteen seasons and counting to be seen possessing little kids. Memorably, she possesses one little girl to spend the third season finale taking the girl's family hostage and making them spoil her like their beloved daughter as she terrorizes them, killing them if they don't play along; the terrified family doesn't know exactly what's happening, but do realize it's not really their daughter and almost kill their daughter when she's no longer possessed, out of desperation. Lilith also plays up her hosts' youth to mess with people by acting sugary sweet and innocent while torturing a dozen unlucky folks to death offscreen and snapping grandpa necks. In this case, the Enfant Terrible portrayal is both justified and subverted, as the actual little girls doing the butchering are innocent and forced to do it against their will thanks to Demonic Possession, and the demon herself is not a child at all, later revealed to be the first and oldest demon created thousands of years ago. Unfortunately for fans who liked the creep factor in this, Lilith does switch to an adult host in Season 4 in a probable case of Real Life Writes the Plot to avoid having the grown-ass adult Winchester men attack and painfully kill a cute little girl on the CW (since unless Lilith spontaneously grew a conscience and picked an unoccupied host body, the child she would be occupying would be forced to experience the death with her).
  • Surprisingly subverted with Jack, Lucifer's Half-Human Hybrid son born in the twelfth season finale. He was regarded as a Fetus Terrible by most characters before his birth and flashed what seemed like a Slasher Smile at Sam, but grows to an adult appearance immediately after birth to subvert the "child" part of the trope (physically, anyway) and turns out to be a genuinely well-meaning and sweet kid to subvert the "evil" part.
• Lily from "A Child Is Crying", an episode of the early Genre Anthology Tales of Tomorrow, is a young girl born so brilliant that she can anticipate future events and influence others' behavior. When she foresees a nuclear attack, she refuses to tell the military think-tank that's been exploiting her genius which country will be responsible, because revealing that information will only kick World War III off sooner.
• The Twilight Zone (1959):
  • From the episode "It's a Good Life": "No comment here, no comment at all. We only wanted to introduce you to one of our very special citizens, little Anthony Fremont, age 6, who lives in a village called Peaksville in a place that used to be Ohio. And if by some strange chance you should run across him, you had best think only good thoughts. Anything less than that is handled at your own risk because if you do meet Anthony you can be sure of one thing: you have entered The Twilight Zone."
  • In the original short story, he's only three, which means he's not so much evil as incapable of understanding that it's wrong to hurt others, the more so as nobody's ever had the nerve to tell him "no".
  • The sequel episode gives us Anthony's daughter Audrey, who seems better than he is (she openly admits to hating him when she sends her friend's father to the cornfield), but towards the end of the episode quickly and remorselessly sends the entire rest of the population of the town, even Anthony's mother, to the cornfield. Because they all thought bad thoughts about her and her father. "We don't need them, daddy! We don't need anyone!" But then she does bring everything back when he says he's lonely, so yeah. The episode ends with Anthony cowed by the knowledge that Audrey is even more powerful than him since she can wish things to the cornfield and bring them back while he can only send them away.
  • In "A Nice Place to Visit", Rocky had led a street gang while in grade school.
  • In "Caesar and Me", Susan is an evil little girl who takes delight in tormenting and insulting Jonathan West at every opportunity. After she overhears him arguing with Caesar about robbing the nightclub, she reports him to the police. Susan does so out of sheer vindictiveness as opposed to it being the right thing to do. When Caesar speaks in front of her, she plans to keep it to herself even though it could prove that Jonathan is perfectly sane. It takes very little effort on Caesar's part to convince Susan to run away with him. It is even implied that she will kill her aunt Agnes Cudahy in order to escape her.
• Lizzie from Season 4 of The Walking Dead (2010). She actually believed that the walkers are people just like us and had a sick fantasy of being friends with them. She tries to prove this by murdering her little sister, believing that she'll be the same when she reanimates. She was also very close to killing baby Judith as well. Luckily, Carol and Tyreese stopped her before she could do it. Carol then believes that they were not safe around Lizzie and she had no choice but to kill her.
  Carol: Just look at the flowers, Lizzie. *BANG!*
• In The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, 9 year old Emma turns out to be a mass murderer who killed her pregnant mother, her teacher, her father's girlfriend, and her father - and while the third is never given a reason why, the other three are for petty reasons (not wanting a sibling, retaliation for not buying chocolate from Emma, and disliking his ventriloquist act). She also turns out to be cruel in general.
• The X-Files:
  • The clone twins Teena and Cindy, in the episode "Eve".
  • The show also gave us Charlie and Michael from "The Calusari". Michael is the ghost Charlie's twin brother, who died at birth, and is killing many of the people Charlie is close to since the mother never performed an exorcism.

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