In the great Gay Book of Beloved Monster Women, the name of one little girl is inscribed right up there with Mommie Dearest, Neely O’Hara and the Wicked Witch of the West.

Meet Rhoda Penmark, princess- perfect in her blonde pigtails and swishy taffeta petticoats. Just one thing. Never tell her that you’re going to leave her a lovebird when you die, especially if she helps you on ice-covered steps. And never win the class medal for penmanship just because you’re low-class and the teacher wants to encourage you for being, not truly the best, simply the most improved.

If our little Rhoda feels in any way deprived, she can — she will — become as efficient a carnage machine as Ted Bundy. Five minutes into The Bad Seed, classmate Claude Daigle is found drowned at the school picnic but not before Princess Pigtails has wrestled the penmanship medal off his shirt and left "crescent-shaped dents" on his forehead where she brained him with her shoe. (Her glossy Maryjanes, in high Fifties toddler chic, have taps on them.)

When her mentally fragile mother tells her to try to "get all those awful pictures out of your head," thinking only that her daughter was a traumatized bystander at the picnic, Rhoda sits there delicately munching a peanut butter sandwich, the very soul of composure. All she really wants, she says, is permission to go roller skating.

It’s only when Rhoda is needled by the pervy caretaker that the real fireworks fly. "Look at you, " the handyman leers — for he loves to poke holes in her halo. "How can you go skating and enjoying yourself when your poor little schoolmate is still damp from the Bay?" Rhoda barely gives him a backward glance as she takes off in a clatter of ball-bearing wheels "Why should I feel sad," she huffs incredulously. "It’s Claude Diagle got drowned — not me!"

Why do we gay men love The Bad Seed so? In the commentary on the DVD, Patty McCormack, who played Rhoda (at right, as she appears today) says she was pleased with the gay acclaim but thought it "bizarre" when she first learned how important the film had become. "I actually sat through the film at the Castro," she says. "People were screaming the lines out at the screen. I had no idea!"

Her co-DVD-kibbitzer, Charles Busch — himself a drag leading lady and the screenwriter for such goofy larks as Psycho Beach Party and Die, Mommie, Die! — tells her that The Bad Seed is "one of the top five gay camp classics." The true cult, he adds, is not just into the big lines. "No", interjects McCormack,"they knew all the moments!" "Right," says Bush, "the true cult is into the the’s and the and’s!"

Still the question remains. Why? Consider:

The way albino children are born without pigment, Rhoda was born without any trace of human feeling. She smiles and simpers and asks her father what he will give her for a basket of kisses (answer: "a basket of hugs") while below the surface all is craft and glacial composure.

In truth, she has only the barest, reptilian kit of instincts — rage, want and — above all — self preservation. This is coupled with a talent often noted in sociopaths (again Ted Bundy comes to mind): — a dead-on gift for mimicking life-like emotional states.

Rhoda Penmark might as well be one of the pod children left over from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Both films came out in the same year, 1956. Perhaps both movies were reactions to the right-wing ascendancy of the McCarthy hearings, when conformity was being pressed even if it meant only going through the motions of seeming to be like everyone else.

For many of us, the character of Rhoda comes out of the great troubled sleep of our childhood. Outwardly, she is what so many pert little boys, with their hair parted just so and their shirts crisply maintained, wanted to be — perfect, mechanical. Charles Busch wonders if Rhoda might not be a metaphor for the gay child who is an outsider, but not a victim, "who is getting the best of everyone and has this great confidence."

And of course, swishy skirts have a lot to do with it too. There is a total excess of style — big-assed 1950’s stage ACTING – in The Bad Seed, where almost the entire cast came from the Broadway run. The guardian of this style, the movie’s unsung source of its enduring camp appeal is — not simply Rhoda — but the breath-taking, over-the-top melodramatics of Nancy Kelly, who plays the mother with a sort of unhinged Judy Garland neediness. The Bad Seed is Mommie Dearest turned on its head : here the mother is the masochist, and the child is the monster.

Writes Gary Morris in Bright Lights Film Journal:

Nancy Kelly’s bag of acting tricks is ready to burst, and she deploys them shamelessly in a rhapsody of hand-wringing, table-clawing, eye-rolling, whisper-to-a-scream hysterics …. Hilariously weird … is her constant anguished pummeling of her stomach in what looks like an ongoing assault against the uterus that produced this demon seed. (This legendary bit of business was even immortalized in the cover art of the VHS tape of the film.) After seeing the mileage she gets out of her daughter’s name, few will believe that “Rhoda” has only two syllables — or should ever be pronounced in a normal tone.

"We’re eating the furniture," laughs Patty McCormack at one moment in the DVD voice-over. Then, almost off-handedly, she hits on the real reason why movies like Mommie Dearest, Valley of the Dolls and The Bad Seed have such penetrating gay appeal. "It was big," she says of the acting melodramatics, "but it was true."