Imagine yourself an innocent 5th grader, sitting quietly in your classroom learning vocabulary, when suddenly a crazed, blood-spattered deer crashes through the window. Because that's what happened yesterday in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

The Bambi Rampage (Bampage?) reminded me that the scariest films don't always involve monsters or serial killers or space aliens, but rather the things we least suspect, the gentle things, the things we see everyday.

Sweet kids turn creepy and then murderous in the bone-chilling thrillers The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, The Exorcist and The Good Son. Happy, peaceful homes reveal themselves to be anything but in Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. An adorable gremlin bought in a Chinatown gift shop spawns much less adorable offspring because its owner doesn't take the proper precautions. And all the birds in Bodega Bay go bonkers for no good reason at all.

Sometimes filmmakers overreach, trying to horror-fy the hopelessly benign - witness Night of the Lepus and its giant bloodthirsty bunnies, or Frogs and its slayers from the swamp (okay, snakes. but frogs?). 

Of Lloyd Road Elementary School's Cervine Marauder, Larry Katz, chairman of the Rutgers Department of Animal Sciences, noted that "We are approaching the breeding season and the males get pretty aggressive competing for potential access to females." If this particular buck is looking for love among the human tween set, I don't have a lot of confidence in his successful procreation. Which is probably for the best.

The Birds, Poltergeist II: The Other Side and Exorcist II: The Heretic are playing this month on AMC.