This editorial features some spoilers for Hanna and Kick-Ass. Consider yourself warned. In preparation for this post I ran a quick Internet search on child assassins and found this video from New York Magazine. While I wasn’t promised a video exclusively on child assassins here, and instead got something that explores the notion of child killers at large, this video conflates two categories of child killers that I think deserve remarkably different types of consideration. The great majority of killings performed by children in this video are from horror movies. From Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen to The Brood to Firestarter to the other Omen and beyond, the child/killer is an exhaustively repeated horror trope to the point of cliche (and is often confused with the simple overlapping category of “scary children,” like in The Shining and The Sixth Sense). But every so often a child-killer horror film comes along that works in line with the formula (The Children, anyone? Bueller? Okay, how about Let Me In?), reminding us why child killers still have the capacity to be engrossing and entertaining even if they’ve lost the ability to be outright horrifying: because they play on our society’s veneration of childhood innocence, replacing the ignorant bliss of childhood with benevolent, malicious intent to do harm to the much taller individuals that surround them. But child assassins are quite different from the overall category of child killers. And while two recent films in two subsequent spring movie seasons that feature child assassins,

We take a look back at the year 2009 in horror and, finding little to celebrate, never the less pull together a list of 10 films that, at the least, didn’t suck total balls.

We get our Holidays crossed and spend Christmas in October with a bunch of Hellish kids you’ll want to see roasting over an open fire.

Rob Hunter loves movies. He also loves working as a TV producer who sets up friends and strangers alike on blind dates with unwitting actresses. These two joys come together in the form of cash money payments that he receives every week and immediately uses to buy more DVDs.

The UK horror flick gives a nice fresh tweak to a tired and all-too-familiar horror trope.

We’ve been training all our lives for this, and it’s finally here. Fantastic Fest 2009 promises to remove our eyeballs, pour blood, sex and ninja moves all over them and then shove them right back in our face. These are the 20 films that have us most excited about that upcoming amateur surgical procedure.

Who doesn’t enjoy watching cinematic mayhem perpetrated by and against bratty, misbehaving children? It may not be as highly ranked on your list of guilty pleasures as it is on mine (above movies based on SNL sketches and below the oeuvre of Kevin Costner), but you’ll agree it’s a sweetly cathartic release watching disrespectful little bastards get put down. No? Just me?

As if you needed another reason to wrap it up or take a pill every morning for three weeks a month, here’s the new trailer for The Children.