Kindergaaarghten: The scariest children in film

Meet the children from The Children. One minute they're settling down for a festive family Christmas; the next they've blossomed into a bunch of pint-sized psycho-killers. Is this a sly parable of adolescence, or a case of too much sugar in the figgy pudding? Photograph: PR

Be warned: students do not simply lounge about in bed, making hilarious postmodern jokes about daytime TV. Sometimes they are also carted to an abandoned island, fitted with surveillance collars and made to kill each other for kicks. Or at least they are in Battle Royale Photograph: Kobal

Steer clear of the genteel British hamlet of Midwich, for it is a veritable Village of the Damned. Its offspring are a group of well-dressed, well-spoken, cold-hearted little clones who speak in their own private language and positively despise interlopers. In other words they are not so very different from children in any other affluent, home counties village Photograph: Kobal

If Midwich is not to your liking, why not try the American midwest, home of the fanatical Children of the Corn? Turns out they don't like strangers either Photograph: Kobal

Enter Dakota Fanning, blank-eyed star of Hide and Seek. She has an imaginary chum, Charlie, who is forever killing cats in bathtubs and pushing women out of windows. But surely you can't blame Charlie for everything ... Photograph: Kobal

Make way for yet another spooky, possibly delusional kiddywink. It is Haley Joel Osment from out of The Sixth Sense. He sees dead people Photograph: Kobal

Kubrick's The Shining gives us two scary kids for the price of one (three if you count little Danny). Here are the Grady twins, the ghostly offspring of the former caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. They want you to know that their dear daddy killed them ... to death Photograph: Kobal

Haunted hotels are bad enough, but they have nothing on that relatively recent arrival - the haunted orphanage. Fortunately these institutions are largely confined to Spain. Here is one ghostly inmate from Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone Photograph: PR

... and here is another from Juan Antonio Bayana's 2007 chiller The Orphanage. The message of both these films: avoid Spanish orphanages, particularly if you are an adult and Haunted By the Ghosts of Your Past Photograph: PR

But just who is the creepiest, most purely evil screen child of them all? Some might plump for Damien in The Omen, who delights in driving his nannies to suicide and has the added bonus of being the son of Satan Photograph: Kobal

Others might argue the case for Regan MacNeil out of The Exorcist, who is possibly Satan incarnate. See her head spin round! Listen to those profanities! Surely there can be no scarier film child than this Photograph: Kobal

Unless, of course, that child is Annie. Her hair flames like the devil's inferno, her teeth are sharp and white and she will sing you to death as soon as look at you. Here she is throttling a dog Photograph: Kobal