Who Can Kill a Child aka Quien Puede Matar a Un Nino (1976) Review

Since I haven’t seen any movies this week and I want to move the blog along at a steady pace, I’m going to delve into another old classic, Quien Puede Matar a Un Nino, or Who Can Kill a Child.



An English couple vacationing in Spain decide to make a journey to a tiny island off the coast named Almonzora. It is a quaint little town, old fashioned with few amenities, but perhaps strangest of all is that it appears devoid of adults. After wandering through the quiet streets the couple come across a small group of children, running about playfully. But the children aren’t playing games with adults. Something has happened to these kids and, as the two remaining adults alive, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) have to find a way back to the mainland.

I’ve always been fascinated by movies with evil children, simply because of the tricky politics that come into play when you intend to kill a child on film. It’s a big red flag, and certainly commercial films are often wont to stay far away from such subject matter. The movies I’ve seen on the subject so far tend to fall into two camps: hokey a la Village of the Damned (1960), where the children have glow-in-the-dark eyes; or they are exploitative, as in Beware, Children at Play (1989) which ends in a montage of child violence that redefines tastelessness.

So it is a breath of fresh air to find director Narciso Ibanez Serrador does not use the children, or the violence that befalls them, for shock value. When the story-proper begins, it is stark and subtle in its cinematography and editing. When the violence occurs, the shock is still there, but it has been earned through the story and characters instead of being the sole reason the story exists. It’s a difficult thing to pull off, an atmospheric horror film, and the tone here is less horror and more similar in tone to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or Hitchcock’s The Birds (which a few scenes in Child are obvious homages to.) Like those films, the slow pacing helps to create the dread rather using violence to telegraph it to the audience.

However, unlike Night, director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador films most of the terrors that occur in Almonzora in broad daylight, and while packs of murderous children are not an everyday sight, the daylight goes a long way towards making it more believable and negating the inherent implausibility of the situation. There is a morbid sort of comedy that arises, revolving around the titular line and the effects it has had on the adults, but in Serrador's world it seems reasonable.

Another interesting decision is to photograph the children acting as naturally as possible. They don’t look evil, they laugh and smile and play like any other children. Who could hurt such innocent beings? Could you? The film begins with documentary footage of real children suffering from war and pestilence, and Serrador seems to be asking people to remember that in the real world, children suffer worse horrors every day.

It’s an uncomfortable thought, and whether or not the film works as a social commentary, it is spooky, uncomfortable and remains a hugely underrated film that has been unfairly marginalized. This was Serrador’s second and last feature; he spent the rest of his life directing television programs in Spain, which is too bad, as this is a far better film than its legacy would indicate.