The Stepford Children reinvented the central premise as a teenage nightmare. The late author Ira Levin was hugely influential on the likes of Stephen King and wrote some classic novels like A Kiss Before Dying and Rosemary's Baby. The latter was adapted into a film in 1968, which starred Mia Farrow as a woman who suspects she might be pregnant with the Devil's son. The film is hailed as a horror masterpiece now and Levin later penned sequel novel Son Of Rosemary. The film previously received a TV sequel in the form of 1976's poorly reviewed Look What's Happened To Rosemary's Baby.
One of Ira Levin's other famous works is The Stepford Wives, where a woman finds the oddly stilted, "perfect" housewives in her new neighborhood have actually being replaced by robots by their husbands. The book was later adapted into a 1975 film starring Katherine Ross (Donnie Darko) which received mixed reviews at the time but has since become a cult movie. The ending of the film is a memorably disturbing one and the film has been praised for its feminist themes.
The Stepford Wives would receive an odd franchise in the form of three TV movie sequels, with the first being 1980's Revenge Of The Stepford Wives. This starred Sharon Gless and Don Johnson (Watchmen) and instead found the women of Stepford being brainwashed by pills instead of being replaced by robots. The third entry was 1987's The Stepford Children, which finds the Men's Association from the previous entries still operating and this time they replace wayward teenagers with robots too.
While The Stepford Children has an intriguing hook and could have been used to explore the pressure society puts on its teenagers, it's ultimately a bog-standard TV movie. It takes the key beats of the previous movies and replaces them with teen issues instead, and while there are a couple of eerie visuals - like main character Laura (Barbara Eden, Dallas) digging the grave of her husband's first wife to find a robot skull inside - it lacks any real suspense. The film is said to contain an early, uncredited appearance from Brad Pitt as a "Punk" but the movie isn't listed on his filmography and if he does appear, he's hard to spot.
The Stepford Children wasn't the end of the series, with The Stepford Husbands arriving in 1996, which is considered the weakest of the sequels. The Stepford Wives was also remade in 2005 with Nicole Kidman (Big Little Lies), but after suffering through a troubled production that found director Frank Oz at odds with most of his cast, including Bette Midler and Christopher Walken, the resulting film was considered a mess.