Movie Melting Pot…’Who Can Kill a Child?’ (Spain, 1976)

There’s a nice, little website out there that some of you may or may not have heard about.  On it, you answer a series of multiple choice questions about yourself.  Questions range from “What’s your body type?” to “What describes your best sense of balance?” to “How high can you kick?”  You answer all these questions, and, voila, the site calculates for you how many five-year-olds you can take in a fight.  

The website is www.howmanyfiveyearoldscouldyoutakeinafight.com.  Pretty self-explanatory.  

Of course, whether or not you are physically capable of fighting a child is one thing.  You have to go through the moral dilemma of whether or not you even want to fight a bunch of five-year-olds, something the site doesn’t take into account until the third page in.

And so it is, with Narciso Ibanez Serrador’s film, ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’. Serrador, who claims the novel by Juan Jose Plans was based on his screenplay and not the other way around, asks this question of his main characters and of the audience.  What would it take for you to turn your sense of violence against a child?  Of course, the kids in ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ make this question a whole helluva lot easier to debate.

The film takes place on a small island just off the coast of Spain.  A couple of English tourists, played by Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome, decide the village that lies on the shore of the island would make a fine getaway for some relaxation.  Once they arrive in on the island, they discover that all the adults are gone, and all that remains are the children, children with creepy gazes, children that have inexplicably been possessed by some, evil force.

Through the course of the film, and this is no spoiler for anyone who knows anything about the film, we learn the children have turned on the adults.  They have killed off every, other adult in the village.  At first, the English couple just try to survive.  Before too long, it grows into an “us or them” scenario, and the couple must make a decision.

Serrador handles the earlier moments of the film with subtety and a surreal visual style.  Before even showing shot one from the film, we are shown documentary footage of horrors that have befallen children throughout history.  It is as if Serrador is mocking us with how awful it is to do harm to a child only to have us proceed to watch a film about killer children.  

Once the story begins, though, Serrador’s intense and dreamlike style continues to shine.  The couple searches the empty streets of the small village, finding nothing but desolation and quiet.  Serrador never appears to be forcing the action.  He lets the quiet settle before the violent nature of the children becomes quite evident.  These early moments are made all the more unnerving by the innocent nature of Fiander and Ransome.  They are both incredibly likeable characters and the actors embrace this innocence in their performances.  You could never believe Fiander would do anything to hurt a child.  Likewise, you know he would do anything to keep his wife from being hurt.  And therein lies the dilemma.

‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ is not a horror film in the sense of blood and death splashed all over the screen.  There are moments of violence.  There is blood, bright and vibrant as it is with most films of this nature.  However, most of what unsettles in this film is the overshadowing sense of dread on this small village.  We know something is horribly wrong.  We know the children are not what they appear to be.  There is some, unexplaind presence within them, something that Serrador keeps locked away like an unanswerable mystery.  There seems to be some form of telikenesis between them, as their plans are never outwardly explored.  

At one point, the couple ventures deeper onto the island in an attempt to seek refuge.  They come upon a small farm where a woman and her children live.  These children are fine.  However, once the children from the village come across them, they appear to infect the good children with some sort of evil virus that only affects adolescents.  It’s a creepy moment when the evil children stare without speaking, and you realize without a word being said between them that the new children have now been turned.  It’s as if an evil switch in their brain has been flipped, and, now, all adults must suffer.

Another aspect of the film that is quite unsettling is the pregnancy angle of the female protagonist.  You know, at some point, with the apparent infection of children on the island, that her pregnancy will come into play.  The scene in which it does, though you have prepared yourself for it, is as unsettling as anything else found within the film.

Fiander’s acting in the climactic moments of the film are genuine and justified.  All the while, his innocent and likeable nature has been building up in our minds, and Fiander has no issues with running through the gamut of emotions his character must face.

Serrador’s film is a hidden gem that, until recently, was difficult to find on DVD.  In June of 2007, Dark Sky Films released the film on a Region 1 disc that includes a making-of featurette with cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, a featurette about handling child actors with director Serrador, and a still gallery.  It is an unpleasant film with dark ramifications, but it is so much more than a throwaway horror film.  The themes explored in ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ are deep and powerful, and they make the overall narrative that much more disturbing.