The Reflecting Skin (1990)

Set in rural America in the 1950s, a disturbed young boy (Jeremy Cooper) believes the English widow (Lindsay Duncan) living across his family farm is a vampire. When his older brother (Viggo Mortensen) returns home from his military service and begins a romantic relationship with the widow, the boy tries to stop it. Written and directed by Philip Ridley, this Canadian surreal horror film on childhood throws in everything but the kitchen sink: vampirism, pedophilia, dead fetuses, radiation poisoning, animal cruelty, child abuse, sadism, suicide, religious fanaticism and serial killings. Hollywood has a tendency to sentimentalize childhood but Ridley's film shows how cruel and disturbed children can be. I found Jeremy Cooper (a terrible child actor) to be a little monster but as the film progressed, to my horror I discovered that we're supposed to be sympathetic to the little shit. Visually, the film is stunning thanks to Dick Pope's glowing cinematography and Ridley creates an unsettling atmosphere of dread and perversion. There's much to like here but in the end, the movie collapses under the weight of its own mythological pretensions. With Sheila Moore and Duncan Fraser.