The proverb “All that glitters is not gold” was originally written in Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice. The proverb has gone on to be used and applied in several different scenarios. Personally, I think it best applies to the glitz and glam of Hollywood. Hollywood, though home to one of the richest industries in the world, is rampant with issues of extortion and abuse. Child abuse in the film industry has been an issue that simply has not been treated with the severity it should have been. Rather than dealing with their problems, Hollywood elites have created a different storyline within film to diminish the issues of child abuse. By analyzing the child actors, Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood and their roles in the 90s thriller The Good Son (1993), I intend to demonstrate how these two false narratives take form in the horror genre: the unnatural psychopathic child and the unrealistic resilient child.

Macaulay Culkin is a household name. The child actor’s fame boomed from the success of the Home Alone franchise. Culkin’s character, Kevin McCallister, was seen as the problem child that weaponizes his mischievousness to defend his home from robbers. Culkin also played another child during his fame in the 90s. The Good Son is a horror film in which Culkin played Henry Evans, the main antagonist of the story. Henry Evans, though cunning as Kevin McCallister, had a more sinister aura to him. A therapist in the movie tells Mark Evans, Henry’s cousin, that “‘Evil’ is something that is a word people use when they’ve given up trying to understand someone. There’s a reason for everything if we could just find it.”

Culkin’s character carried out murder, animal abuse, and substance abuse during the movie with the only motives of being a psychopath. However, since this is Hollywood, Henry Evan’s psychopathy is not based in fact. In a study conducted by Giuseppe Craparo and Vicenzo Caretti, it was apparent that psychopathic and criminal behavior was linked to varying degrees of childhood trauma. After studying a group of inmates, who were in jail for violent crimes, Craparo and Caretti concluded that it “may be assumed that traumatic memories built upon abuse, material neglect, and lack of emotional care could be responsible for a fragmented self which is dysregulated on a psychobiological level and needs to have power and control over others through manipulation, deception and even violence.” Whenever Hollywood depicts an evil child, the reasons for their malicious actions are due to some sort of supernatural derangement. But in realistic cases, children who act out in some way are doing so because they were abused by someone more powerful than them. In no way am I justifying the actions of criminals, but rather I’m demonstrating how Hollywood has created the narrative of an innately evil child when that’s never really the case. Rarely do we see children in horror whose malevolence is based on their trauma caused by human adults.

Culkin’s costar in The Good Son, Elijah Wood discussed with The Sunday Times about the topic of child abuse behind the scenes in Hollywood. Hollywood is historically notorious for having large parties full of powerful actors, agents, and businessmen. It’s a great way for up and coming actors to meet professionals and build their network, even if they are children. The Good Son was Wood’s second movie, so his presence in the film industry was still incredibly new, so he wanted nothing more but to succeed. Luckily for Wood, his mother refused to let Wood go to the parties he was invited to. In his interview with The Sunday Times, Elijah Woods stated that the Hollywood industry was full of “Vipers” who would “parasitically latch onto newcomers, especially children.” Wood also let the interviewer know that he had heard instances of his fellow peers being victims of abuse from the hands of the powerful in Hollywood.

Though we don’t know if Wood was alluding to Macaulay Culkin, it is very apparent that Culkin was subject of abuse at the hands of adults in the film and entertainment industry. More infamously known is the young actor’s relationship with Michael Jackson. The boy’s relationship with the singer was extremely problematic and highlights how the entertainment industry preys on children who really don’t understand the situation that they are in. The abuse young actors experience is not only due to the actions of celebrities but also the people behind the scenes. Culkin’s father acted as the boy’s agent during Culkin’s rise to fame. Culkin recently went on comedian Marc Maron’s podcast “WTF” and discussed his life as a child actor with his father being his manager. Throughout his childhood acting career, Culkin claims his father mentally and physically abused him out of jealousy and pushed for him to be in roles that would make him appear as a more serious actor than the actor the public had grown to love. Culkin’s father pushed Fox to cast his son in The Good Son with the threat of pulling Macaulay Culkin out of Home Alone 2, the franchise that was making the child actor famous in the first place. At the age of fourteen, Macaulay stepped away from acting, gaining independence from his father.

Stepping away from the fantasy that Hollywood and film creates, we can see one of the largest reasons of the prevalence of child abuse behind the scenes is the difference of power between adult and child. Powerful, older, industrial elites are able to commit heinous acts against children since no one is in a more powerful position to oppose them. Children, who often are not familiar with the darkness of Hollywood and are too innocent to understand the world, fall prey to powerful individuals. Control is also an important factor when it comes to this subject. The façade that Hollywood has created through horror films, either showing how innocent children can fight off corrupt adults or how unnaturally evil children destroy the livelihoods of adults, has arguably made the audience complacent and ignorant of the real horrors that some child actors go through.

References: Thring, Oliver. “Hollywood’s Evil Secret.” The Sunday Times, 25 May 2016, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/past-six-days/2016-05-22/news-review/hollywoods-evil-secret-mxsb5f3zl
Craparo, Caretti, et al. “Traumatic Experiences in Childhood and Psychopathy: A Study on a Sample of Violent Offenders from Italy.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology, vol. 4, 2013.

Arjun Madhavan is a senior at Indiana University.