Who Can Kill A Child? (Quien Puede Matar A Un Nino?) (1976)

In August of 2020, after a full six years of promises, my friend Newt finally sent me a box of stuff he said he'd been putting together for me. While mostly full of good items, like an interesting, if hard to pose, Dracula figure, a novelization of the 2014 Godzilla film, and, best of all, Scream Factory's Blu-Ray release of Candyman, he also felt the need to throw in some crap, like a copy of M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit. Also in there was a Blu-Ray of a film I'd never heard of before called Come Out and Play, a Mexican horror film from 2012 about an island where all the children have suddenly gone mad and become homicidal towards adults. I'll talk more about that movie tomorrow, and you'll learn why in a minute, but, in short, I didn't think it was bad but I also wouldn't call it amazing by any means. When Newt and I talked about it after I watched it, he told me it was actually a remake of a Spanish horror film from the 70's, which he described as having virtually the same plot but being very slow and boring. Since I decided to do Come Out and Play as part of this year's theme, I figured I might as well do the original, too, and streamed it one night in October of 2021. While I do agree with Newt that it's way too drawn out, taking a long time to finally get going (it's 111 minutes long, while Come Out and Play is only 86), and I also don't care for the eight-minute prologue of actual footage of Nazi concentration camps, children suffering during the Vietnam War, and horribly malnourished kids in Nigeria, among other atrocities, on the whole, I don't think it's that bad. Like its remake, it's no classic, but it benefits from competent direction, pretty good acting, well-done instances of atmosphere, and a really unsettling core premise that's never given a concrete explanation (although, at the same time, the movie doesn't truly capitalize on it, either).

The brutalized body of a young woman washes up on a beach near the Spanish village of Benavis, around the same time that English couple Tom and Evelyn, who's pregnant with their third child, arrive. Though they find it to be picturesque, it's also swarming with tourists and the constant sound of fireworks and shouts from a local fiesta quickly becomes tiresome. The next day, they plan to rent a boat to reach the isolated island of Almanzora, which Tom visited twelve years before and has not yet been impacted by tourism. When they arrive on the island, they're greeted by a group of seemingly normal children, although one of them suddenly cops a hostile attitude towards Tom. The couple then roam the island's village, finding it seemingly deserted, save for the children, though Tom feels everybody may be at a fiesta on the other side of the island. Strange things also begin to happen. Evelyn encounters a young girl named Lurdes who takes a keen interest in the baby she's carrying, putting her hand and ear to her stomach, Tom senses that he's being watched while searching the village, and they continually receive calls on the local bar's phone by a frantic woman who appears to be speaking in some European language. They then locate the local pension, or hostel, only to find it's seemingly deserted as well. Shortly afterward, they witness something truly horrifying: a young girl takes an old man's cane and beats him to death with it. Stopping the girl, who just smiles and laughs madly at him before running away, Tom carries away the old man's body and places him behind a gate, only for some kids to hang the corpse above them like a pinata, while another bats at him with a long scythe. Not telling Evelyn of this, Tom searches the pension again, this time finding several guests murdered in their rooms. They also meet an injured man who later tells Tom what happened: the previous night, all of the children in Almanzora suddenly went mad and started slaughtering the adults. Now, to escape the island, Tom and Evelyn may be forced to do the unthinkable and actually kill children.

The film was one of only a small handful of features directed Narciso Ibanez Serrador, with the others being the 1969 film, The House That Screamed, and, one of his final projects, 2016's La Culpa. For the most part, he worked in Spanish television, having a hand in directing, writing (often under a pseudonym, Luis Penafiel), and producing horror-related projects and shows like a 1960 mini-series adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera and the anthology series, Historias para no dormir. He was also famous for creating the popular Spanish game show, Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez, and in 2001, he received a Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts. He adapted Who Can Kill A Child? from a novel called El juego de los ninos, streamlining the story and also removing a definite explanation for the children's madness. I don't know what Serrador thought of the movie overall but, from what I've read, he didn't like the decision the producers made to dub the two British leads into Spanish for the original version, feeling it hurt the movie's atmosphere and tone. In any case, after acting as a producer on the short film, Insania, Serrador died in 2019 at the age of 83.

While not the greatest protagonists ever, and I would have really liked to have seen the young Anthony Hopkins, Serrador's original choice for the male lead, in the film, I do think Tom (Lewis Flander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome) do a pretty good job of carrying the story. The two of them are a fairly happily married couple who are on holiday in Spain before the birth of their third child, with Tom keen on getting away from the noise of the fiesta in Benavis and heading to the

quiet island of Almanzora. However, there is a tiny bit of conflict, mainly in that Tom originally wanted to abort Evelyn's third pregnancy, which has weighed on him since then, making him particularly uncomfortable with the idea of children suffering or dying. He's also intent on protecting Evelyn from seeing or knowing of anything that might cause her distress or shock, often using the fact that he speaks Spanish and she doesn't as a means to do so. When the two of them arrive on Almanzora, Evelyn opts to find a place to sit down and get out of the heat, while Tom searches the village but finds no one aside from all the kids. Though he gets an eerie feeling at various points, as though he were being watched, and sees how bizarre the children act, he shrugs it off and tries to explain it all away, mainly for Evelyn's sake, insisting that the lack of adults is because they're probably on the other side of the island, attending a festival of their own. However, Evelyn does sense that there's something wrong, especially with the children after one girl appears to her and seems quite interested in her pregnancy. When they finally find the village's pension, they get a glimpse of the horror that's befallen the island, as a girl beats an old man to death with his own cane. Even more gruesome, after he picks up the body and tries to put him somewhere else out of respect, Tom sees the children using him as a pinata, a sight that nearly causes him to throw up. Like before, he attempts to keep this from Evelyn, despite her having glimpsed what the girl was doing, as well as him carrying away the man's body. Tom lies, insisting that the girl merely cut the man's head a little, but Evelyn doesn't fall for it at all. Upon getting another distress call from the European woman who tried to contact them, Tom searches the seemingly deserted pension more thoroughly and finds the bodies of murdered guests.

They then come across an injured islander who, at first, threatens them with a broken bottle, Evelyn manages to talk him down. While Tom has Evelyn rest, he talks with the man and learns of the homicidal madness that has suddenly gripped the island's children, after which Tom witnesses more of the atrocities the kids have committed when they murder the woman who was trying to contact them and then defile her body in a church. The man then falls prey to the children when his own daughter

lures him out to them, prompting Tom and Evelyn to try to escape. Tom implores Evelyn to run, despite the pain it causes her, and also tells her to think of their other kids, rather than the one she's carrying. Making it to a truck and driving away, Evelyn, having now seen the children's monstrous behavior for herself, asks Tom what the man told him and he tells her of how the children have been taken over by some form of insanity and now see adults as their enemies. Being a biologist, Tom

tries to think up a reason why this is happening, suggesting the children are being guided by some instinct or have gone through a kind of evolution that's led them to try to wipe out all adults, but doesn't come to any true conclusions. Not that any of it matters, as they're forced to drive back to the village, with Tom intent on their surviving no matter the costs. He attempts to run over a mass of children but Evelyn makes him swerve, causing them to crash their truck and to then run and take cover inside a jailhouse. Tom is forced to kill one

of the children when he attempts to shoot them through the window of a cell they've taken refuge in, an act that horrifies both of them, with Evelyn collapsing into tears. It also makes them wonder if they're really any different from them, as Tom, again, brings up how he considered aborting their unborn child. By the next morning, he likely wishes he had, as the unborn baby, having been influenced by the girl who paid Evelyn a visit at the bar, attacks her from the inside and kills her, with her realizing what's happening before she expires. Now alone and completely shattered, Tom tries to escape the island, gunning down a bunch of the children and making it to the docks, where they swarm and attack him. He manages to fight them off, but when a Coast Guard patrol boat appears, the officers, thinking he's murdering the children in cold blood, shoot him dead.

Aside from Tom, Evelyn, and the children, there are very few other characters of note. One is the injured and traumatized man (Antonio Iranzo) whom the couple meet at the Almanzora pension. Initially, he threatens them with a broken bottle, but Evelyn's frightened and pleading nature manages to bring him to his senses. After that, while Evelyn is resting, Tom, having seen to his wounds speaks with him, pouring him a drink and asking what's happened on the island. The man is

unable to explain it and merely describes how all the children on Almanzora suddenly started attacking and killing the adults the night before. He also talks about how his wife was killed in the streets and how, even though he had a shotgun, neither he nor any of the townspeople could bring themselves to kill the children, dooming them all. Tom intends on having the man escape with them, but he's promptly lured to his death by his own daughter when she comes to him, crying and claiming that both her aunt and grandmother are horribly sick. Tom tries to warn the man not to go but he solemnly says, "She's my daughter," and goes with her, leading to him being attacked when the two of them round a corner. After that, in their attempt to escape from the island, Tom and Evelyn rush to the other side, where they meet a woman (Marisa Porcel), who lives there with her mother, children, husband, and brother-in-law, the latter two of whom are out fishing. She takes them both in, giving Evelyn some water, while her mother gives her some tea, but she's also shown to be rather impatient and abusively disciplinary towards her children, harshly smacking one on the back of the head when he peeks in at the visitors. Unfortunately for her, two of the evil children then arrive and pass their homicidal tendencies on to hers. After Tom and Evelyn leave, the woman orders her children to come in and wash up, and tells the other two to go home. But their evil stares and the rest of the children converging on her house spell out her fate, as well as the rest of her family.

Before they journey to Almanzora, Tom and Evelyn stop at a camera shop in Benavis, where they see a small television broadcasting news and images of the fall of Thailand and the civil war that has erupted due to the death of Mao Zedong. The employee (Fabian Conde) who gives them their film notes what they're watching and comments, "The world is mad. The worst is that the children are the ones that suffer the most. If there's a war, the children. If there's hunger, the children." The

man who rents the couple the boat, Enrique Amoros (Luis Ciges), also happens to be the one who delivers mail from the mainland to Almanzora (and he also apparently receives shipments of beer from the local bar there). Before they leave, Enrique tells them of the pension on the island and how it's always half empty because of the lack of tourists. He plans to pick them up, but whether or not he ever made it to Almanzora is never revealed. And when Tom and Evelyn first arrive in Benavis, Tom asks a man who walks by what's going on and he tells them the village is having a big fiesta; that man happens to be Narciso Ibanez Serrador himself in a quick cameo.

In regards to the kids themselves, they're mostly just faceless little murderers but there are several who stand out. One is a dark-headed boy who's fishing on the dock when Tom and Evelyn first arrive on Almanzora. When Tom asks him what he's fishing for, he doesn't respond and harshly slams down the lid on his bait basket when Tom attempts to have a look. He and a sandy-haired boy act as something of a leader for the kids, the two of them converting the woman's children over to their

side when they follow Tom and Evelyn to her home. Another is the girl who comes across Evelyn while she's alone in the bar. Smiling endlessly, she does tell Evelyn that her name is Lurdes but that's the only thing she says, and she becomes interested in Evelyn's pregnancy, putting her hand on her swollen belly and then putting her ear to it. This proves to be quite significant, as it leads into Evelyn's unborn child attacking and killing her from within the womb. There's also the daughter (Maria Druille) of the man they meet at the

pension, who appears there, crying and claiming that something's wrong with her aunt and grandmother. Although the man doesn't listen to Tom and goes with her, his suspicions are justified when the girl lures her father into a trap and the other kids massacre him. And finally, there's the rather young boy who attempts to shoot them through the jail cell window, only for Tom to gun him down first. 

The children are mostly a deadly force rather than individual characters, but what's scary about them is how normal they look and, initially, act. For instance, the boys who meet Tom and Evelyn at the dock when they first arrive act as playful and rowdy as you would expect them to be at that age, as they're swimming around by the dock and getting into a little horseplay onshore, while one of them is fishing with a little pole. Though none of the children really speak to Tom and Evelyn, they

can occasionally be heard talking and giggling to each other as they play. However, the way in which the kid who's fishing reacts to Tom looking at his bait is a precursor to more bizarre behavior they see the children partaking in, such as Lurdes' off-putting interaction with Evelyn at the bar, the kid with the fishing pole ignoring and then running from Tom as he walks down the street, and the way the kids seem to watching and hiding from Tom as he wanders the village by himself. When the kids'

homicidal nature is revealed, what makes it disturbing is how they're so happy and giggly while doing the most horrific things. That girl who beats the defenseless old man to death with his own cane does so with a big grin on her face, and when Tom stops her, sees what she's done, and asks her why she did it, she just giggles giddily and smiles before running off. And when the children then use the man's corpse as a pinata, they act as though they're at somebody's birthday party. This continues throughout the movie, with the boys

laughing and talking when they're disrobing the German woman after they murder her, while one of the girls is seen parading around her dress, as if it's something she just bought and is showing off. They're also quite aware that most adults would be reluctant to fight back against them, emboldening them to go all out in trying to hunt down and kill the survivors, using everything available to them, from knives and scythes to guns. While Tom's shooting the one kid in the jailhouse does give them a moment of pause, they're still confident enough to act innocent and smiling towards him when he confronts them the next day. It's only when he guns down more of them that they rush him all at once, viciously trying to kill him at all costs.

While the exact nature of what's going on is never revealed, it's obviously something supernatural, as the homicidal kids are able to pass it to others, like when two of them follow Tom and Evelyn to the woman's home and make her kids murderers just by looking into their eyes. Even an unborn child can be made into a killer, as seen when Lurdes' interaction with Evelyn leads to her baby killing her from the inside near the end of the movie. And they have no intention of keeping it confined to Almanzora. After Tom and the Coast Guard officers are dead, they begin plotting to head to the mainland via a motorboat in order to make other children, "Start playing the way we do." They're also cunning enough to go in small numbers so as not to attract suspicion.

When you watch this film, it's obvious that Narciso Ibanez Serrador worked mainly in television, as his direction is, for the most part, functional but very standard. However, there are moments where he does get creative and even Hitchcockian with it, such as in slow, detailed pans through sets and environments, slowly revealing things, both in the background and up front, in skilled ways, big, overhead shots showing off the scope of a sequence, a handful of instances of handheld camerawork to make things feel a bit more frantic,

and major close-ups and POVs. I especially like how he shoots Evelyn's death, which is over Tom's shoulder as her life gives out and she slowly slumps down, out of camera-range. The same sort of functionality applies to Jose Luis Alcaine's cinematography as well, which does a good job in capturing the feeling of a hot, sunny day in Spain, and also does well with dimly lit interiors, notably the church Tom investigates at some point, and the nighttime exteriors, which were actually filmed at night rather than day-for-night, as you might expect. 

What the filmmakers are most successful at visually is shooting the locations in a way that makes them come off as exotic and quite lovely, while also creating a complete contrast between Benavis and Almanzora. During the first act, you get some nice looks at the picturesque Spanish countryside, and when Tom and Evelyn arrive in Benavis, both the town and the local beach are absolutely bustling with people, especially the former, as there's a fiesta going on, with tourists crowding the streets and filling up the hotels,

people playing instruments or milling around while dressed in costumes and holding sparklers, kids playing with a pinata, and numerous colorful fireworks exploding, which look especially breathtaking at night. When the couple sets out to Almanzora the next day, they leave the crowded Benavis harbor for the open ocean, which looks just as picturesque as everything that was seen on the land. Almanzora itself is a lovely place, with a fairly simple village and small harbor on one end, while the other is less developed, with open, sandy

terrain and a rocky shoreline where the one woman lives with her family. The main village is a classic little Spanish community, with white-painted buildings that tend to have a similar color scheme on the inside, arches that connect various structures together, narrow streets and alleyways, little courtyards that appear to double as stables, and some modern conveniences such as telephones on a local exchange, an ice cream cart, a bar with a cooler, oven, television set, and ceiling fans, a post

office, and a hostel with a radio and switchboard. Speaking of the hostel, or pension, it's definitely the loveliest place on Almanzora, with a nice interior courtyard of white furniture, green plants and pinkish red flowers, and a green canopy where the roof would be. The actual interiors also look quite nice, especially when the sun is shining through the windows with wicker blinds in the hallways, with its white-painted walls, green doors, and fairly small but cozy rooms. Tom also finds an

upstairs storage area filled with hay, wicker baskets, and chairs, which where the one man is hiding, and at one point, he finds an ancient, dark church that's been taken over by the children, who commit some rather hideous acts inside. And when he and Evelyn momentarily escape to the other side of the island, they find the woman living in a small, quaint little house in front of a hillside by the shore.

The major difference between Almanzora and Benavis is that, when Tom and Evelyn arrive on the island, they find it seemingly deserted, save for the children. There's something inherently creepy about a place like this that's totally empty and quiet, and the movie spends much of the second act developing that kind of eerie atmosphere as the two of them wander about the village. As they do, they find melted ice cream in a cart and a deserted bar with the TV all fuzzy, cups of coffee sitting on tables, and spits with blackened turning endlessly,

suggesting that whatever happened occurred just several hours or so earlier. The blistering heat and flies that often land on the characters' sweaty faces add a feeling of oppression and uneasiness to the proceedings, and as Tom searches the village by himself while Evelyn stays at the bar, he realizes he's being watched when he sees the blinds in an upper window suddenly come down. He goes inside the house and heads up to that room but finds no sign of anyone, although when he heads back downstairs, a closet door slowly opens and

the sound of giggling children is heard. The townspeople's people fates are gradually revealed when Tom enters a convenience store and the camera pans with his feet as he walks down an aisle, passing by the body of a dead woman on the aisle next to his, which he never sees. Later, they repeatedly receive phone calls from a woman speaking a European language (Tom later says she's speaking Dutch but you need only listen to realize it's German, so I'm going to continue

referring to her as such) who whispers in a frightened voice. And after getting a taste of what's happening with the one kid glaring at Tom when he tries to look at his bait, as well as how there are no adults, you slowly realize more and more that there's something going on with the children, as Evelyn has her encounter with Lurdes and Tom tries to speak with the boy carrying the fishing pole, only for him to just stare at him, avoid him, and run away. This culminates when they get to the pension, find it's apparently deserted as well, and witness the horror these maniacal children have and continue to wreak on the adult populace firsthand.

But, while I appreciate the decision to make the movie a slow burn and slowly build to the reveal of what's going on, it spends a bit too much time in doing so, as it's almost fifty minutes in before you see what these children are capable of and I could see some viewers getting really antsy by that point. I think a big problem is that they don't reach the island until at almost thirty minutes, with the first act spent following Tom and Evelyn as they mill about the fiesta in Benavis and try to find a place to stay, and while that's necessary to set up the major

differences it and Almanzora, it could've been tightened up a little more. Also, the movie proper opens on the body of a murdered young woman floating ashore and horrifying the beach-goers, but while you can assume this is meant as the first sign of what's happening at Almanzora, the man Tom and Evelyn meet there says the children's rampage began that night, so it doesn't add up, unless this woman was killed by another pocket of homicidal children elsewhere (like on a yacht, as one of the paramedics suggests). And when Tom and Evelyn are on the beach, it seems as though another body drifts in, as a whistle is heard and the beach-goers start running to one spot, further compounding the issue.

This may sound ridiculous at first, but Who Can Kill A Child? does have a lot in common with Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, namely in its core concept of something you normally wouldn't think twice about suddenly becoming a dangerous threat for unknown reasons, to the point where the characters go out of their way to avoid other kids, even when they seem benign. Like in The Birds, there's a handful of possibilities as to what's behind the children suddenly becoming sadistic and homicidal but no concrete explanations, making it

all the more unnerving, especially in how it just suddenly started and, by the end, is in danger of spreading beyond Almanzora. In that regard, there's a correlation in how both films are different from their source material: like Daphne du Maurier's original short story of The Birds, the novel of El juego de los ninos gives a clear explanation for the children's madness (a strange yellow pollen). As the isolated community where this is happening, Almanzora can be seen as akin to

Bodega Bay, and there is talk of whether or not this is happening elsewhere (unlike in The Birds, it seems as though this phenomena is confined to the island). There are even images here that hearken back to Hitchcock's film, mainly the sights of children massing together for an attack, like in the town square when they chase after Tom and Evelyn or when a huge group appears on the hillside behind the woman's house.

Though never definite, the film's prologue suggests that the reason for the madness is all the suffering children across the world have endured from war, cruelty, dictatorships, poor living conditions, and just plain apathy on the part of adults throughout history, an idea that's reinforced by the man in the Benavis camera shop when he talks about how children suffer the most from such atrocities. Whether they found it within themselves or some unexplained outside force drove them to it, you could view the children of Almanzora as simply

taking matters into their own hands and fighting back against adults, as well as getting other children on the island who haven't be affected to join them. Of course, the horror here comes from the notion that the children are killing their own families, most of whom are likely not abusive or cruel to them in the slightest, and they're either too weak to fight back, as in the case of the old man who gets turned into a pinata, or are unable because they don't dare kill their own kids. Interesting concept, but I really, really wish they

hadn't used actual footage of the Holocaust, the suffering caused by the Vietnam War, the Indochina Wars, or the bad conditions in Nigeria to suggest it. The opening credits play over eight minutes' worth of that stuff, as you see footage of people lying dead in shallow graves, children crying for their parents, badly burned from bomb explosions, and hideously malnourished to the point where they're basically skeletons, with flies buzzing around them and landing on their faces and in their mouths, and

it's just awful. And later, in the camera shop, we see more on a television broadcast about the conflict going on in Thailand, including a real shot of someone burning alive, corpses littering the ground, and a little girl all alone in the middle of a field, crying. I don't like watching documentaries on the subject because I hate seeing that stuff, but in a horror film like this, while I get the purpose it's meant to serve and I know attitudes were very different at the time, it feels downright exploitative and in bad taste. 

The film also posits the question of whether or not the children's murders are any different than when supposedly sane, rational adults commit pedicide, with Tom, at the beginning, mentioning Fellini's film, La Dolce Vita, which features a happily married, gentle family man suddenly killing his two kids before committing suicide, an act he interprets as the man wanting to spare his children from the horrors of the future. That's when Tom's initial desire to abort his unborn third child because they already have two is first brought up, and after

he says he's now happy that they're having him, Evelyn dismisses the subject matter of the film as being the work of a crazy Italian. But then, near the end of the movie, after they've witnessed what the children of Almanzora are capable of and Tom has been forced to shoot one in order to protect himself and Evelyn, they question the difference between a "normal child" who's "incapable of killing an adult" and a "normal man" like Tom who considered killing a child long before he was

actually forced to do so. And while I don't think Narciso Ibanez Serrador was trying to make any sort of pro-life statement, I do find it interesting that the very baby Tom considered aborting is the one who takes his wife away from him, killing himself in the process. Finally, as horrifying as it is when the Coast Guard officers unknowingly gun down Tom as he's desperately attempting to defend himself from the kids and escape the island, it is true that, out of context, you would think he was the attacker as he's smashing them in the face and throwing them into the sea.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't do much with its intriguing concept beyond positing it and the possible explanations as to what's behind it. Though they do discuss it and its ramifications, the third act is mostly about Tom and Evelyn's doomed attempt to elude the children and escape Almanzora, and as impactful as it is when the weary and defenseless Tom is mistaken for someone who's murdering children and is killed for it, the movie doesn't let that notion sit during its final moments. Instead of going further with it and

the Coast Guards sergeant's belief that Tom alone was responsible for the carnage on the island, while the children continue to stand by and act all innocent, it ends with the children killing the officers and preparing to, little by little, make their way to the mainland in order to spread their homicidal tendencies. A frightening and horrific way to end the story, for sure, and another callback to The Birds, but just imagine if the children continued acting innocent and traumatized,

allowing the Coast Guard to take them to the mainland and give them the chance to spread their madness more stealthily and gradually, with more and more incidents of children "defending themselves" from "cruel adults." Given how much turmoil there is in the world, especially involving children, would anyone really notice? I may be overthinking it but I believe that would've been the perfect way to bring this movie's core concept full circle.

As for the horror inflicted by the children, while there are truly some grisly images, most of it consists of the aftermath of their murders, with the actual violence being either implied or obscured. Examples of the former include the dead body seen in the convenience store, Tom finding the bodies of two guests at the pension (one is lying up against the door, with his head smashed in, while his wife is laying across the bed, partially covered by the sheets, with blood all over the bed and pillows), and the children defiling the body of the German

girl after they murder her offscreen. When the old man is beaten to death by his own cane, the act itself is hidden behind a wall, as we just see the girl wrestle his cane away from him and then slam the cane up and down, and it's only when Tom stops her that we see the horrific aftermath. And when the kids turn the old man's corpse into a makeshift pinata, we see a quickly edited montage of the hanging body being lowered and then raised back up, the kids yelling excitedly, the one swinging the long scythe at him, and Tom watching in horror,

but we don't see him get split open. Instead, the camera follows Tom as he walks away, leans up against the wall, nearly throwing up at what he just witnessed, and we then hear the kids cheer. We know exactly what they're cheering about without needing to see it. The death of the man Tom and Evelyn meet at the pension is totally implied with the sound of him yelling and the screaming of the kids, and the same goes for the certain death of the woman and her family, which is chillingly alluded

to by a shot of dozens of children walking down the cliffside towards her house. It's only during the latter part of third act that we see a good amount of onscreen violence, such as Tom shooting the kid who tries to shoot him (we don't see the actual shots but we do see the aftermath, with his blood dripping down the wall), Evelyn bleeding out down her legs from her baby attacking her in the womb, and the sheer massacre that ends the movie, with

Tom mowing down more kids with an MP-40, him trying to fight off the blade-wielding children while trying to escape, his death at the hands of the misguided Coast Guard, and the officers themselves getting gunned down by the kids (some of the blood in these moments has that almost orange color you sometimes get in low budget, 70's horror films).

Like I said earlier, the movie's first act and much of its second act are very slow, focusing on Tom and Evelyn's arrival in Benavis, their journey to Almanzora, and their slowly but surely realizing something is wrong on the island. Things start to ratchet up around the fifty-minute mark, after they find the pension, which appears to be as deserted as the rest of the island. Looking out the pension's backdoor, Evelyn says she saw an old man go across the street and duck behind a wall. Though

Tom doesn't see anything, she insists he's there and that she can see a bit of his cane sticking out. Tom goes to check, when a young girl comes running down the street, seeming very happy-go-lucky and grinning from ear-to-ear. But then, the scene goes from playful and innocent to horrifying when the girl spots the old man, takes his cane away, and beats on him violently and unrelentingly. Tom runs to her, wrestles the cane out of her hands, and when he sees what she's done, he asks her, in both

English and Spanish, why she did it. She simply smiles and giggles maniacally before running off back down the street, ignoring Tom's yells to come back. He then checks the old man's pulse, confirming that he is dead, and picks up his battered body, carries him down the street and around a corner, and takes him through some gate and places him in some hay in a stable-like area. He walks back out, closing the gate behind him, and leans up against the wall, preparing to calm his nerves with a cigarette. But, before he can

light it, he hears the sound of squeaking, followed by children laughing and talking amongst themselves. That's when he walks back to the gate, peeks through, and sees the kids stringing the old man's body up like a pinata, while one girl smacks and pokes at him with a scythe, a sight that sends Tom running back down the street and nearly causes him to throw up against the wall.

Tom rejoins Evelyn at the pension and tries to keep the truth of what happened away from her, telling her the girl was just "playing" with the old man and then going to pour himself a drink. Having seen the girl beating on the old man and Tom carrying him off in his arms, Evelyn doesn't buy this at all, so Tom says she injured him and he took him home. He then tries to make her drop it but she isn't having it and insists he tell her the truth. Before he can, they receive another call from the German

woman who called them several times on the bar's phone. Answering her on the pension's switchboard, Tom tries to get her to speak more slowly, asking her if she's Brit van der Holden, one of the guests he saw is registered there. He gets no reply and goes to search the place again, thinking she may be somewhere on the grounds. He checks room 6, which he checked before when they first arrived, and finds it's still empty, but when he checks room 7, he finds the slaughtered bodies of

two guests, one of whom is lying on the floor and blocking the door. Hearing the sound of bottles rattling upstairs, Tom cautiously heads up there, finding several storerooms, including one filled with hay. When he walks in there, a man hiding behind the open door slips out, though Tom does turn around right after he does, having sensed him, and checks behind the door. Evelyn, meanwhile, sits down in the pension's interior courtyard, when she hears the man's footsteps as he heads down the stairs. He stops momentarily when she calls Tom's

name but then continues on down, prompting her to investigate. Upstairs, as he looks in a storage space filled with chairs, Tom hears Evelyn scream for him and runs back down. When he reaches the stairway, he finds the man standing between him and Evelyn, holding a bottle. He warns Tom not to get any closer, and when Tom doesn't listen, he smashes the bottle and threatens him with its shattered, jagged edges. Evelyn, however, manages to diffuse the tension by placing her hand on the man's shoulder and pleading with him by saying, "Por favor." With that, the man, who has a bad cut on his forehead and tears in his eyes, relents and lowers his makeshift weapon.

Following a quiet scene where, as Evelyn rests, Tom talks with the man, who tells him what happened with the island's children the night before, they receive another call on the switchboard. As Evelyn and the man listen in, Tom, knowing it's the woman from before, asks where she is. We see a close-up of her face as she quietly but desperately asks for help, as there's banging on the other side of her door. The banging gets more and more intense and the woman all-out

yells for help, when the door gives way and the children swarm in. Having heard this, Tom asks the man where the girl may be and he suggests she may be using the public phones at the post office. After he gives him directions to it, Tom heads out to find the post office so the girl can leave with the rest of them. He finds the building with little trouble, but when he runs inside and upstairs to where the switchboard is, he sees he's too late, as the office has been ransacked: glass has been

smashed, a chair at the board is overturned, and wires have been yanked out of it. He then hears the bell in a nearby church ringing and, instead of going back downstairs and out the front door, he leaps out the window, with a mound of dirt below softening his landing, and runs for it. Inside the church, he finds it dark and seemingly deserted, but as he walks further in, he hears the sound of children chattering and laughing. Peering around a corner, he sees a group of girls messing about in front of the altar, one of them parading around in the

dress the German woman had on, before they run out past him, not giving him a second thought. He sees a girl apparently whispering to someone inside a confessional, then sees some shadows behind a door with glass windows. Walking towards the door, he sees a group of boys attempting to remove undergarments from the woman's body. When he walks in and they see him, they, like the girls, run out without paying any attention to him. Like with the old man, Tom checks to see if she really is dead and, when he finds she is, he solemnly walks out.

He's about to leave the church, then walks back to the confessional and sees that the girl from before is still. She runs out when she spots him, prompting him to cautiously approach the booth, terrified of what might be waiting in there for him, and yank back the curtain. It turns out to be another child, who just smiles at him and runs out of the church, much to his relief (he was probably expecting to find a dead priest in there).

Tom returns to the pension and tells the man that the three of them need to escape Almanzora as soon as possible. He tells Evelyn the same, when the man's daughter shows up, crying and calling for her father, telling him, "Aunt Isabel is sick... She's at Grandma's house, and Grandma is sick too. They can't breathe, and I'm really scared. They've been hurt." The man walks to his daughter and embraces her, as she begs him to come with her. He acquiesces and allows her to lead him out the door.

Tom tries to stop him, asking him to stay with him and Evelyn, but he can't bring himself to abandon his daughter and goes out with her. Tom and Evelyn run to the doorway and watch as the two of them walk down the street and round a corner up ahead. They then hear the man yell and the sound of children screaming, which terrifies Evelyn. Tom tells her they need to run, that she's going to have to ignore the pain it causes her, and he'll carry her if she falls. He also tells her to think about Richard

and Rosie, rather than the baby she's carrying. With that, the two of them, holding each other's hands, run around a corner and race down a street towards the town square, unaware that they've already got the attention of the children, who watch them from various vantage points like windows and balconies. As expected, the running is very hard on Evelyn, who stumbles and falls to the ground. She tells Tom she can't go on but he grabs her, insisting that they need to keep going, and forces her to her feet, pulling her along. When they reach the square,

they stop dead when they see the children gathering in an ominous manner straight across from them. Tom spots a truck nearby and they run for it. Tom finds and pulls out the brutalized body of the driver lying in the seat and he and Evelyn get in. He turns the key in the switch, trying desperately to turn the engine over, as the children stand nearby and watch them. They then start rushing towards them, when Tom manages to get the truck working and drives towards a road leading out of town. The children chase after them, attempting to grab onto the truck, but Tom manages to elude them and drive out into the countryside, leaving them and the village behind.

As they drive, Tom tells Evelyn they're going to try to find some houses on the other side of the island and see if they can get a boat to escape. That's when they come across the small house on the shore but, while there is a boat down there, Tom is reluctant to go towards it because of the presence of children. But, when an adult woman comes out of the house, he realizes it's safe and they head down to it. Tom asks the woman if anything happened there that night, then learns that her

children and her own mother live there as well. She tells them her husband and brother-in-law are out fishing in their boat but won't be back until sunset, and that the boat that's onshore has a large hole in the bottom. Evelyn has Tom ask the woman if she has any water and she invites them into her house, as her children, who are playing in the shallows, watch. They spend some time with the woman and her mother, but then, there's an eerie moment where they see a young boy watching them from

the doorway, and he's joined by another one who peeks in. At first, it seems as though they're about to be attacked, but then, the woman angrily chastises her children for disturbing them, harshly smacking one on the back of the head, and forces them back outside and closes the door. The children go back to playing in the shallows, when two of the children from the village appear and make their way down towards them. Seeing them, the woman's young daughter skips out of the shallows and greets the newcomers with a cheerful,

"Hola!" One of the boys says, "Hola," back, and then, we see the transfer of the madness to her, as he looks into her eyes and her smile slowly disappears; in the background, the other boy does the same to the girl's brothers. Tom and Evelyn come outside and see what's happening, as the woman's children join those from the village by the boat, staring at them menacingly. Tom tells Evelyn they need to escape and tensely make their way past the children and to the truck. The children don't make a move against them, but stare daggers

at them as they walk to the truck and climb into it. The woman comes out of the house as they start the engine and drive away, yelling at them that her husband and brother-in-law will be back that evening. Once they're gone, she yells at her children to wash up and come inside, telling the other two to go home. She gets no response, and realizes something's wrong as they just stare at her. That's when the swarm of children heading down to her house from the hillside behind it is revealed.

Heading back to the village, Tom tells Evelyn he plans to drive to the dock without stopping, adding, "If we run into any of them... never mind." Evelyn then sees what Tom means when a group of children stand out in their path on the dirt road, one holding up and waving his arms. Tom doesn't stop, forcing the one kid to dive out of the way, and they head on back to the village. It's dark by the time they do and, like before, dozens of children mass in the town square, blocking the way leading on into

the village. With no other recourse, Tom pops the truck into gear and drives right at them. Evelyn, however, can't stand the thought of running the kids down, and once Tom's almost on top of them, she grabs the steering wheel and yanks it. The truck crashes into some stacked oil drums and the children immediately come for them. They jump out and are chased into a nearby building, which turns out to be a jailhouse. Tom and Evelyn close the door behind them and press up against it, as the

mass of children pushes back, pounding on it. Tom manages to push it to and engage both of the locks on it, as the kids continue pounding on the other side. He takes an MP-40 off a murdered guard and, realizing the kids are going to break the door down any minute and finding that a door leading out back is locked, decides they have no choice but to head down towards the cells and duck inside one of them. He takes the key out and locks the door from the inside, just as the children burst into the

building. They swarm every inch of the place, searching for them, and it isn't long before they look through the hatch in their cell door and spot them, as Tom tries to find some other way out (they have to jump up to look through because they're so short, meaning Tom and Evelyn miss an opportunity to duck out of sight when they do). They amass on the other side of the door, pounding on it, then get an enormous pillar of wood and use it as a battering ram. Tom frantically puts furniture

up against the door, while Evelyn watches from nearby. While most of the kids continue their assault, some of them search the office and take a revolver off the dead guard. They head outside and around to the exterior of the cell's window, boost one particularly small child up to the alcove the window is in, and give him the gun. He crawls to the bars in the window, with Tom and Evelyn too preoccupied with the assault to notice him, and pulls the hammer down on the gun. That's when the two of them turn around and see him, and he

smiles at them. Tom grabs the MP-40 and shoots him, killing him instantly. The whole place suddenly grows dead quiet, as they watch the blood drip down the wall from the window and the revolver fall out of the dead kid's hand. The children promptly stop their assault and retreat, while Tom pushes the kid's body out of the alcove. The realization of what's going on and what just happened causes a breakdown for Evelyn, which Tom has a hard time quelling. Once she does calm down, he goes out into the now deserted office, grabs a pillow, a pack of cigarettes, and fills a glass of water. He gives the pillow and water to Evelyn, while he takes one of the cigarettes and sits down in the corner.

The film fades to a long camera pan that starts in the office, goes down the hallway containing the cells, and stops on a shot of the small window on the door of Tom and Evelyn's cell, when Evelyn suddenly lets out a pained scream. Tom rushes to his wife's side, as she begs him for help, grabbing at her stomach and saying, "I can't stand it." Tom tries to get her to lie back down, thinking it's stress from everything they've been through and that she'll be fine in a minute, but Evelyn says the pain she's going through is different from when she

gave birth the first two times. When he refuses to let her get up, she grabs his hands and plants them on her midsection, asking, "Can't you feel it? Something... something... inside me... is moving!" She lets out a pained yell and, despite what he says, insists she has to stand up. She gets to her feet and stumbles over to a cabinet, telling Tom, "He's... killing me... I can feel him inside me. He's... he's killing me!" She then hears the sound of the children giggling up above them, a sound Tom doesn't seem to hear, and asks, "Can't you hear

them? They're laughing. They're laughing... because... they know. They know that... what I'm carrying is... Tom, he's..." She starts punching at her stomach, exclaiming, "Tom, he's one of... one of them!", as Tom tries to grab her hands. As she tells him what happened when she was alone in the bar and the girl named Lurdes touched her stomach, blood starts running down her legs and tears stream out of her eyes. She cries, telling Tom she's sorry, asking where Richard and Rosie are,

and her voice slowly fades away as she slumps down and collapses to the floor, dead. Speechless and devastated, Tom bends down, gently caressing her cheek, before walking over to a small stool beneath the cell window and sitting down. Come morning, with the only light in the room being the sunlight coming through the window, Tom, taking the MP-40, kisses Evelyn on the lips one last time and walks out of the cell and jailhouse. He wearily walks out into the town square, passing by the crashed truck, and heads on down the dirt road and around a corner.

There, he's confronted by the children, who all block his way and look at him with innocent, even smiling, faces, with one girl holding a baby in her arms. Tom scans their faces, even cracking a smile himself here and there, then raises his rifle, loads it, and, after a short instant of hesitation, fires. He manages to cut down a number of them in the center of the group and uses the others' shock over it to rush past them, tossing away the now empty rifle. He rushes for the docks and attempts to untie the boat, but the children soon come rushing at

him. He manages to undo the knot and jumps into the boat, but when the children reach the dock, he rips the steering paddle off the stern and uses it to defend himself when they start climbing in and rushing at him. He bludgeons a number of them in the face, sending them falling into the water, while also grabbing and throwing others overboard. At one point, he's knocked down and a girl stabs him near the right shoulder with a pair of scissors, but he manages to yank it out, get back to his feet, and keep fighting. A boy lunges out of the water and

stabs him in the side of the leg with a knife but he grabs the knife and throws it into the boat. He manages to whack a boy who grabs the knife back into the water, and goes back to clubbing them, when the brown-haired boy sees the Coast Guard approaching. Tom, also seeing them, yells that the children are the attackers as they come in. The sergeant, getting the wrong impression, ignores his cries, which are in English, and grabs his rifle. He warns Tom to stop but Tom continues fighting the

children off and yelling for help. The sergeant then shoots him through the chest and he falls over backwards into the water. The officers come ashore and the sergeant, looking at the kids who are lying dead, either onshore or in the water, and the many who are crying and injured, murmurs to himself, "Look at what this man did." As the kids tend to each other's wounds and hoist the bodies out of the water, the sergeant asks several kids where the townspeople are and a sobbing girl points back

towards the village. He and his two officers walk towards the buildings, when one of the kids suddenly says, "Adios." He turns around to see that the crying and sobbing was merely an act, as they're now smiling and giggling at him. He also sees that they've commandeered his patrol boat, including the weapons, with one boy cocking a rifle before turning and firing at him. The movie then ends with many of the kids playing in the sea, as they were when Tom and Evelyn arrived, while some prepare to head to the mainland in order to make the children there "play" the way they do.

The main motif of the music score, composed by Waldo de los Rios (who, sadly, committed suicide just a year later), is this lullaby that you first hear over the opening credits, where it's continually hummed by a child, followed by the sound of kids giggling. Throughout the movie, you hear an instrumental version of this song, sometimes done in a lovely or poignant manner, such as when Tom carries away the old man's battered body and when the other man tells Tom of how all the children went berserk and the carnage they caused, and other times in a threatening manner. Disturbingly, when the girl beats the old man to death, it's scored with a child-like, music box-esque piece that transitions into a nightmarish version of that song. Going back to threatening, when the children's menace is emphasized or touched upon, it's often done with a low, monstrous-sounding bass piece, and there are also instances of synthesizer and electronic sounds in the score, such as this lovely, picturesque melody that plays when Tom and Evelyn travel to Almanzora, and eerie, otherworldly sounds for when the children from the village influence the woman's kids. In short, the music runs the gambit of emotions you'd expect in this kind of story and does it effectively, with various themes and motifs that are genuinely memorable.

If you can get past the horrific real-life images the film opens with, Who Can Kill A Child? is worth a watch in my opinion. The two leads give pretty good performances, the movie is efficiently directed and shot, the locations used are very nice to look at and are photographed very well, the core premise is quite unnerving, especially in its lack of an explanation, there's plenty of atmosphere throughout, and it has a memorable score with some unsettling aspects to it. But, in addition to the ill-advised use of real footage of human atrocities, the first act and much of the second can come off as slow and dull, as it takes a long time for the film to finally show its hand, and I don't feel the core concept is as quite fulfilled as it could be. So, know what you're getting into, but on the whole, the film does have something to offer.