The Godsend (1980)

Alan, wife Kate and their four children are out for a fun afternoon in the fields near their home when Kate stumbles across an extremely pregnant woman sitting under a tree.  She invites her back to their home, which Alan is not okay with since the lady is an odd duck.  She just stares at him and shows no signs of leaving.  When he offers to drive her home, she goes into labor and has the baby in their spare bedroom.

The next day the strange woman is gone, but her baby is still there.  Now most people would contact the police or turn the baby over to an agency who deals with abandoned children, but Kate and Alan decide they'll add her to their child menagerie.  This is unfortunate since this is one evil little killer baby.

Within a short period of time, their own baby dies while sharing a crib with the strangers child, who they've named Bonnie.  A year later, another of their children dies a tragic death.  As their children gets picked off, people in town start to talk. Let's face it, if your neighbors children kept dying, you might wonder if they were staging accidents in which to get rid of their children.  Either that or they're the unluckiest or most neglectful parents on Earth. No one is going to think, hmmm that little golden haired child may be an evil killer.

At one point, there is an analogy equating Bonnie to the baby cuckoo bird. Cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds nests, and then the baby cuckoo imitates the other birds so the parents don't realize it's different.  But when the parents aren't looking, the baby pushes the real babies out of the nest.

The disturbing thing about this film is the overall tone due to Bonnie killing her own siblings.  It's one thing when the killer child takes out a stranger, but when she's murdering the kids she's living with, it's so much worse.  Bonnie does a great job of looking suitably evil with her narrow eyed stare.

Some viewers might find the pacing slow and there's a lack of blood because the deaths are all off screen.  Let's face it, you can't show a child killing another child back in 1980. But overall it's a decent flick and you keep hoping someone will figure out that the little freak is evil.