Relative Fear was made by Canadian director George Mihalka, a regular genre hand who has also made B-budget horror films such as the original My Bloody Valentine (1981), The Blue Man/Eternal Evil (1985), Psychic (1992) and Watchtower/Cruel and Unusual (2001). Like the rest of George Mihalka’s films, Relative Fear is unexceptional – in fact, it is dreary in most regards. Victims are predictably set-up – you can see the target they have on their forehead from the moment they seem to cross Adam. Most of them have their means of dispatch heavily foreshadowed – M. Emmet Walsh’s reliance on his oxygen mask, Linda Sorenson and the dumbwaiter. And Mihalka directs with a blandness that wrings any potential suspense out of his set-ups. The lamest scene is when the killer bursts through the door quoting Jack Nicholson’s line from The Shining (1980) – “I’m home, honey” – which falls flat either as a joke or as genre reference.

Like most of the aforementioned killer child films, Relative Fear draws inspiration from the classic in the field The Bad Seed (1956). Relative Fear does so even more than the others in terms of the plot device about the mother believing that her child has been erroneously substituted with the child of a murderer and as a result having inherited a ‘bad seed’. But the film sets up some unpleasant associations when it starts to suggest that autism is an inherited genetic malfunction along with psychopathology. Although to the film’s credit, it does offer a surprise twist that reveals the killings as being conducted by someone other than the autistic child.