The Devilish Children (and the civilizing process)

Jeremy Menekseoglu’s 2010 macabre comedy, drawn from German author Heinrich Hoffmann’s tongue-in-cheek 1845 book of cautionary tales for children, frames its tales of rotten kids getting audaciously bloody comeuppances with the shrill screams of a genuinely terrified three-year-old boy (played by an adult actor) who’s dropped off, sporting a black eye, by his uncaring father at a kind of asylum for impolite children.