Wicked Little Things 2006

In 1913, in Carlton, Pennsylvania, the powerful owner of the Carlton Mine relies on immigrant child labor to extend his reach. A girl named Mary is sent into a tunnel to plant dynamite in a new shaft, and the blast traps her and several other children deep underground, setting a grim secret in motion that will echo through decades.

Eight decades later, Karen Tunny, Lori Heuring, moves with her two daughters, Sarah and Emma, into her husband’s childhood home near the now-deserted Carlton mine. They are warned by a wary local to steer clear of the woods after dark. On the road they almost collide with a man crossing, and what seems like a broken jar of blood lies nearby. When they reach the house, Sarah notices fresh blood on the door, and Karen digs through old photos and newspaper clippings about the mine tragedy, trying to piece together what happened to the child miners.

That first night, Karen dreams of a child with a pickaxe entering the house and attacking her; she wakes to a door left ajar and more blood on the threshold, and she even glimpses a man wandering the property. The next day, a plumber arrives to fix the failing pipes and coldly explains that the children came from the mine, admitting he intends to leave before nightfall. Emma, meanwhile, hears distant giggles and slips out to follow the sounds, disappearing briefly in the increasingly tangled mystery. When Karen and Emma reunite, they find themselves lost inside a house that seems almost to breathe with history.

The plumber’s warning resurfaces in a sharper light when Karen discovers that William Carlton, the last surviving member of the Carlton line, is buying up nearby property. On the road back from the mine, he warns them, too, that they do not truly own the house, only a miner’s lease that belongs to him. As if to confirm the danger, the plumber is later killed by the child miners in a deadly echo of the past.

Emma’s insistence that she has a new friend named Mary—who supposedly lives in the mine—deepens Karen’s fear that the mine’s haunted legacy has a way of infiltrating their family life. A chilling sign arrives when Emma appears outside one day with an old, coal-blackened doll that she insists Mary gave her. Karen’s search leads her to the Carlton mansion again, where a confrontation with William Carlton reveals a bitter truth: the Carlton name is a ledger of power and a history that seems to condemn those who hold it. William insists that Karen does not own the house and presses that the lease belongs to him, a claim that unsettles Karen and stirs old memories.

Sarah—now a teenager—finds herself drawn into a small group of three friends, and one night they go into the woods and are suddenly confronted by the children. The friends are killed one by one, and only Sarah escapes with her life, returning to a frightened Karen and an anxious Emma, who is also missing. The trio races toward the mine and encounters William Carlton again, pleading for a ride to safety, but the children descend upon the group, killing the driver and forcing the survivors to flee to Hanks’ house for shelter.

Inside, Aaron Hanks, Ben Cross, explains that the children spare blood relatives—Mary Tunny and her brother, plus Hanks’ own ancestors who were among the miners—while they seek revenge on the Carlton bloodline. William attempts to shoot the apparitions and end the threat, but the bullets go astray as the children close in. The group scrambles to escape in a truck that won’t start, and they hide in a barn as the children close in from every angle. William hides in the loft, but the children infiltrate the space and sweep him up, sealing his fate in a grim, inevitable act.

Emma finally steps forward from the crowd of children and, in a moment that shifts the balance, allows Hanks and the Tunny family to slip away. In the aftermath, the Tunnys choose to relocate, but they do not sell the house, which somehow transfers to them after William’s death. The haunting conclusion suggests that the children have found a new place to reside within the Tunny home, with Mary and her brother lingering in the background, seen at last in the house that has become theirs by both vengeance and memory.

This story intertwines past and present with a steady, somber cadence, tracing a family’s struggle to claim a sense of safety amid a lineage of violence and unfinished business. The atmosphere is thick with wind-swept corridors, the echo of children’s laughter that never fully vanishes, and the relentless push-pull between legacy and home.