For some adopted people, seeing an adopted child portrayed as dangerous or troubled on screen brings up painful memories or stereotypes they’ve faced in real life. For others, those characters are entertaining, relatable, or even favorites. There’s no single way adopted people read these stories, because our experiences with adoption can be so different.
In this personal essay, Jonathan Wittmaier, a Korean American writer, educator, and transracial adoptee, reflects on growing up alongside horror’s “evil orphan” trope, how films like Orphan shaped the way other kids saw adopted people, and what inspired his poem, The Midnight Gardener.
Sometimes my wife and I play a game of would you rather. Would you rather save me or the dog? Me or your mom? Me or a trolley full of people? So on and so forth. Sometimes I think, if I saw my childhood bullies hanging from a cliff, would I try to save them?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Depends on how far away they were and if I had my morning cup of coffee yet.
Sometimes I wonder, would saving them be vindicating, would it prove how wrong they were about me? And if I didn’t try to save them, would it just confirm that I was the very thing they all thought I was after all…
The evil orphan.
The kid who poured salt on snails to see if they’d melt.
The kid who threw logs in the fire just to watch the termites dancing in the flames.
The kid with an overactive imagination, who grew up to be a writer—someone who dramatizes and jests (obviously I’d try to save them) and sometimes embellishes for the sake of storytelling.
When I was a child, all I had were movies and TV shows to help me understand who I was and what it meant to be an adoptee. And as many adoptees know all too well, there aren’t many accurate or nuanced portrayals in said media. Fortunately, back then, I was too afraid to watch most horror films. So, I was spared from being exposed to what might be the worst adoption narrative trope of them all, the aforementioned “evil orphan”.
“When I was a child, all I had were movies and TV shows to help me understand who I was and what it meant to be an adoptee.”
However, that didn’t mean the other kids at school didn’t grow up watching them, movies like The Ring (2002), The Omen (2006), and, of course, Orphan (2009). To the average adult viewer, these were just run-of-the-mill horror films. But to impressionable kids or teenagers, these movies helped perpetuate the notion that adoptees and orphans were “the other”, or worse even—that any kid being raised by someone other than a biological parent might instead be some kind of evil entity.
“These movies helped perpetuate the notion that adoptees and orphans were ‘the other.’”
And so, when those impressionable kids went back to school and encountered an adopted kid in real life, you can imagine how that might have played out.
The idea behind my poem, “The Midnight Gardener", was to subvert the notion of the evil orphan/adoptee. I wanted to embrace it as a persona in this poem and lean into this sensationalized, one might even call baroque, idea of orphans as these disturbed and dangerous creatures with mysterious pasts and origins—i.e. the perfect movie monsters.
“The idea behind my poem was to subvert the notion of the evil orphan.”
I usually prefer to let the work speak for itself. But for this piece, I felt it was important to unpack some of what was intended.
This poem isn’t about vengeance or retribution for any sort of deep-seated childhood trauma. It’s not about armchair diagnoses of psychopaths or the correlation between serial killers and animal cruelty.
It’s about how adoptees have historically been and continue to be misrepresented in popular culture and media, how we’ve only just scratched the surface when it comes to unveiling the truth about adoption narratives, and the horror of all of the terrible misconceptions about adoption.
Read the Poem: The Midnight Gardener
Jonathan’s poem steps into the “evil orphan” persona on purpose, leaning into the version of adopted people that horror movies have sold for decades so he can turn it on its head. Read it with his reflection in mind.
