A fiendishly clever twist on the ``evil child'' genre of horror films, Orphan (Warner Home Entertainment, $29 DVD, $34 Blu-ray) was unceremoniously dumped into theaters this summer with little promotion. But the movie, produced by Joel Silver's Dark Castle Entertainment, which specializes in modest little B-pictures (House on Haunted Hill, Ghost Ship), deserved better.

The first sign that Orphan, about a family who adopts a peculiar 9-year-old girl, is a cut above the usual schlock is the presence of Peter Sarsgaard (An Education) and Vera Farmiga (The Departed, Up in the Air) as the unsuspecting parents. The couple initially fawns over cute little Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman), a precocious Russian girl who loves to paint, favors fancy dresses and whose previous foster family was wiped out in a mysterious house fire.

Esther immediately gets along with her adorable new little sister (Aryana Engineer), who is deaf and mute and can't yell out when Esther suddenly points a loaded gun at her head for kicks. Esther has a little more trouble bonding with her new brother (Jimmy Bennett), a situation that becomes a much bigger problem for him than for her.

Stylishly directed by Spain's Jaume Collet-Serra, Orphan uses Esther's increasingly disruptive presence in the lives of her new family to reveal fissures within the couple's marriage and the dysfunction lurking beneath their idyllic veneer. After about an hour, though, the movie sets aside all the serious stuff and gets down to business.

Esther may not be a demon spawn, but she's wicked enough to give The Omen's Damien a run for his unholy money, and the young Fuhrman has great fun with the role, making Esther the kind of horror villain you genuinely love to hate, regardless of her tender age.

Orphan also has a corker of a plot twist you won't see coming no matter how hard you try, and the revelation sends the climactic 15 minutes into a wonderfully lunatic frenzy of bloody carnage that treats the violence in a refreshingly serious manner: No wink-nudge ironic humor here. All this, plus The Shield's CCH Pounder in a habit. What's not to love?

Orphan is accompanied on DVD and Blu-ray incarnations by a couple of brief deleted scenes and a darker but less effective ending that probably would have sent theater audiences into the lobby screaming for blood. There is also a fun 15-minute featurette, Mama's Little Devils: Bad Seeds and Evil Kids, that offers a cursory but engaging overview of the genre.

There have been countless other demon-child movies before Orphan, but there's never been a bad little girl quite like Esther.

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