Who Can Kill a Child?
- cmil1167
- 18 hours ago
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
A look back at Narciso Ibanez Serrador's haunting 1976 cult horror movie Who Can Kill a Child?
Spanish Director Narciso Ibanez Serrador had an unusual career: he was a pioneer of the TV gameshow and the horror anthology series, but also directed two horror films regarded as masterpieces of the genre, The House that Screamed, 1968, and Who Can Kill a Child (AKA Island of the Damned), 1976. Both of his horror films were smash hits in Spain, but were cut and badly distributed in the US and the rest of Europe.
The Uruguayan-born Serrador came from a theatrical family that toured Spain and South America, specialising in stage adaptations of classic horror stories by such as Bram Stoker, and Poe for the stage. Between 1959 and 1964 Serrador and his father wrote and directed a horror anthology series for Argentina television, again using classic terror tales as source material. He went on to write, direct and present a similar series for Spanish television, Stories to Keep You Awake, which was hugely successful and ran from 1966 to 1982. He also originated the popular gameshow Un, dos, tres ... repond Otra vez, which ran from 1972 to 2004. It’s the most famous gameshow in Spanish TV history and was syndicated across Europe (in Britain it was known as Three, Two, One, and ran from 1978 to 1988).
With a background so steeped in classic horror Serrador’s first movie, The House that Screamed, is exactly what you’d expect. A lubricious pulp Gothic set in an isolated nineteenth century private school for wayward girls - some of whom of have gone missing in mysterious circumstances – run by a sadistic headmistress, Senora Furneau (Lilli Palmer), somewhat overfond of her creepy Peeping Tom son. It’s a gorgeous looking proto-slasher, proto-Giallo, heavier on atmosphere than gore, with two highly aestheticized murders that look backward to Hitchcock, and forward to Dario Argento. Perverse, with heavy Oedipal overtones, suppressed lesbianism, madness, flagellation, and a grand-guignol finale reminiscent of Psycho, it has all the familiar furniture of the Gothic and in the end is fun, a ride in a first-class carriage of a cinematic ghost train, up there with the very best of the Hammer movies.
Which doesn’t quite prepare you for his next film, the provocatively titled Who Can Kill a Child? This film, though not ‘fun’, is beautiful, provocative, sombre and harrowing, a film of tension and dread, entirely lacking in any of the cliches of horror. It’s a perfectionist’s movie, full of semiotically charged mis-en-scene, surreal painterly compositions, and a dreamlike use of colour, silence and negative space (the cinematographer, Jose Luis Alcaine, later went on to work regularly with Pedro Almodovar).
The film is in the killer-kids tradition, and is the very best, most intelligent and morally complex of this sub-genre, which includes The Village of the Damned, 1960, Children of the Corn, 1984, The Little Girl Who Lived Down the Lane, 1976, the grindhouse schlock of 1981’s Bloody Birthday, the campy The Bad Seed, 1956, the outstanding Heavenly Creatures, 1994, and the startling pulp poetry of Don’t Deliver us From Evil, 1971. In Who Can Kill a Child? you’ll see no mad staring eyes, robotic voices, identical bobs, or histrionics suggesting the extraterrestrial or demonic.
The film’s opening is artistically bold and was commercially risky, but is one of the most outstanding opening credit sequences in cinema history. It’s an eight-minute montage of black and white newsreels of various modern conflicts, some of them half-forgotten - Vietnam, the Biafran civil war, the India-Pakistan war, Auschwitz, and so on - and images of dead and suffering children, with a voiceover and a text banner listing the child-casualties of each conflict. This is intercut with the credits, over which we hear the chuckles of children and a child’s eerie, cracked humming of a lullaby.
Whether this ‘works’ or not divides critics. Serrador has said that he regrets putting it at the opening and not the close of the film, but not that he wished he’d cut it. This rubbing our noses in our shit establishes a mood, a very sombre one, and adds a dimension to and way of thinking about the story proper that would otherwise be lacking. Monochrome slowly resolves itself to colour in the image of toddler playing in the sand on a crowded beach. The switch to colour signals our entry into the world of fiction, and that we should suspend our disbelief. The edenic scene doesn’t last long. The child finds the corpse of a young woman washed up in the shallows, one of several, we find out later (Hitchcock, whom Serrador idolised, began Frenzy, 1972, in an almost identical manner, the beach replaced with the bank of the Thames).
As the ambulance leaves the fictional resort of Benahavis (several different resorts were used as locations) it passes the coach carrying a young, middle class English couple, biologist Tom (Lewis Finander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome). Evelyn is heavily pregnant and they have left two young children at home. There’s quite a long sequence – during which a second corpse washes up on the beach - where we see them enjoying their holiday and their time together, and it’s clear they’re still in love. This scene-setting, and atmosphere and empathy-building gives us an emotional investment in the characters, and the decision not to childishly bombard us immediately with action and plot twists makes for a more harrowing horror later on – it’s film for grown adults. We find out that Evelyn’s pregnancy was unplanned which, though not stated, introduces the theme of abortion or, if you like, child-murder. Tom wants to spend the rest of the holiday at Almanzora, a nearby, sparsely populated island, where he’d been ten years before. Evelyn agrees to go, even though they’re told there’s no doctor on the island, or a phone line to the mainland.
They rent a boat and arrive at the island. Some young boys are fishing and swimming, but they remain mute and stare. The village is empty and silent. They hole up for a while in an empty café and Tom goes to the village store for food. It’s also empty; he leaves money on the counter and the viewer, but not Tom, sees a corpse on the floor. Back at the cafe, the phone rings, it’s a terrified girl speaking Dutch, but they can’t understand what she’s saying, and she quickly hangs up.
They find the town’s hotel, also empty, and receive more desperate sounding calls from the girl. Tom sees an old man in the street who disappears around a corner, but before he can reach him a girl of around eleven appears, grabs the old man’s cane, and calmly batters him to death with it. We hear, but don’t see, the blows. When an appalled Tom remonstrates, the little girl just giggles and runs away. He moves the body to a barn. A few minutes later he hears giggling and chatter and peeks into the barn. The old man’s body has been hoisted and become a human pinata, and a blindfolded little girl holding a sickle tries to decapitate him, a scene which rhymes visually with the more benign pinata the couple had witnessed in Benahavis.
Tom returns to the hotel but tells Evelyn nothing. They encounter a man who’d been hiding in the hotel’s attic, who tells them that all the children in the town went crazy and, in roving gangs, murdered all of the adults on the island. “No one did anything”, he says, “because who can kill a child?” Tom finds two bodies upstairs, the parents of the Dutch girl who rings again, and who they trace to the telephone exchange, but are too late to save. The Spaniard’s tearful daughter arrives and begs her father to come home with him and they walk of hand in hand. We hear him being despatched off-screen. The couple make a run for it and find an abandoned jeep, which they struggle to start before they’re overcome. This is scene is very similar to a scene in Hitchcock’s The Birds, 1963, the presence of which is very strong in Serrador’s film. As with the birds, there is no explanation given for the sudden flocking together and turning murderous of the children. In the source novel a yellow interstellar dust falls on the town, but Serradorleaves out any such pat rationalisation.
They cross to the other side of the island and find a coastal cottage with a mother, grandmother and three children living there, untouched by the collective madness, and negotiate the renting of a boat. But children from the town arrive and meet those living in the cottage, and we see that the madness and telepathic bond between the children is produced by eye-to-eye contact. Tom and Evelyn drive back across the island: faced with a line of children barring the road, Tom intends to plough through them, but Evelyn grabs the wheel and they crash.
They take refuge in the police station and are besieged in a cell by the children. Serrador drolly, cruelly chose the most angelic looking possible preschooler to be the first child killed. At the window of the cell he’s trying, tongue out in concentration, to cock the hammer of a police pistol. You almost feel like helping him. Tom shoots him in the head with a police rifle, and this is when the full horror of the situation hits Evelyn.
Prunella Ransome’s performance is a tour de force in in its subtly calibrated rendering of reluctance, dread and final horrified acknowledgement. Her own baby murders her from inside the womb, in what is one of cinema’s most extraordinary, emotionally wrenching and finely acted death scenes. Tom, broken, leaves the police station, taking a police sub-machine gun with him, and heads towards the harbour. A line of smiling, sweet faced children block his way. He raises the gun and mows them down, makes a run to the harbour, trying to release a boat as the children attempt to board. As he knocks them down with savage blows to the head with an oar, filling the water with young corpses, a coastguard boat approaches. Misreading the scene, they shout for Tom to stop, then shoot him dead.
For contemporary Spanish audiences this film would have had additional resonances: at that time there was tension between liberal, urban Spaniards, the young who were leaving rural Spain for the cities, and more conservative, older, rural (and Francoist) Spaniards, represented by Benahavista and Almanzora, children and adults, respectively. There was also resentment against tourists, particularly English tourists. By the end of the 70s coastal Spain had been completely transformed by tourism, and by the 80s whole peasant villages had been left deserted or inhabited by a few old people as the young abandoned them. This murderously anti-tourist sentiment is much more explicit in Eugenio Martin’s campy and gruesome A Candle for the Devil, 1973, starring Judy Geeson. In what was still a staunchly Catholic country pressure was also beginning to bear from the young for contraception and abortion. It’s to his credit that it’s not cut-and-dried as to where Serrador stands on these issues (or even if he regards the children’s retribution as just), and that the film is a debate-engendering exploration of them, rather than a didactic parable.
The final scenes – which of course I can’t tell you about – are apocalyptic. What makes this film so disquieting is the completely naturalistic performances of the child actors. Their violence is presented as innocent play and acted as if that’s how they perceive it, with no indication that they derive any new, other pleasure from murder than they’d get from their customary games. What creates the most insidious disquiet is not what lurks in the shadows, impossible monsters, but that which has the appearance of the real, but which betrays our expectations if it.
The beginning of true horror is the same as the beginning of philosophising, a suspicion of reality itself.These children film are children yet not children. They symbolise the ways that reality can betray us, while continuing to look like itself: a child turning on its parents (like, say, in Maoist China); the discovered betrayal or depraved secret life of a loving partner; the unassuming neighbour who turns out to be a maniacal killer. The most extreme example of such circumstances was perhaps Nazi Germany, where Jews found themselves in a reality that had curdled into hell, surrounded on all sides by potential murderers who otherwise looked and acted like ordinary citizens.
What can be more trusted not to be a source of violence than a child, what could betray our expectations of reality more than a murderous infant? To be murdered by your own child from inside the womb is a darkly poetic symbol of a sudden undermining of causal determination, and therefore of death itself, which the way reality betrays and disappoints us all. How infinitely more fitting as a symbol for the indiscriminate contingency of death than a grim reaper is a blindfolded child with a sickle trying to decapitate a human pinata.
The film’s opening montage answers the title's question. Lots of people can kill a child, in the obscenest ways and at scale. That’s on top of the all the other sufferings inflicted on children around the world from sexual abuse, physical violence, and enslavement. Dostoevsky once said, to paraphrase, that if there's a child being beaten somewhere, then you’re in hell, and the world is and always has been a hell for many children. When they visit the cottage on the coast, shortly before the children from the town arrive to absorb them into their hive, we see one of the peasant woman’s children being hit by his mother, much to granny’s amusement. Shortly, they’ll get their comeuppance. Children experience the world even at the best of times as threatening and are filled with a helpless animus against adults and our power over them, our commands and chastisements, and oftentimes abuse and exploitation. We can perhaps see the children in Who Can Kill a Child? as enacting an ideal, righteous retribution for abused children throughout history, in which adults get their symbolic just deserts, though Serrador leaves whether or not he approves ambiguous.
As with The House that Screamed, the dialogue in Who Can Kill a Child? is in English, but some exchanges are in Spanish. These are not subtitled or dubbed in the version online, so currently you’ll need to buy a DVD or Blue Ray for the English subtitles.