“Who Can Kill a Child?” (1976)
An effective, unsettling Spanish-language b-movie from Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, “Who Can Kill a Child?” remained largely unavailable for 30 years until a small DVD release in 2007 prompted a cultish reappraisal. And it merits one more than most — with an almost mondo vibe to its no-star, low-budget, on-location shooting, it’s the story of a biologist and his wife, six months pregnant with their third child, who go on vacation to a tiny Mediterranean island. Once there, they discover that the children of the island have, as one, risen up and slaughtered the adults, largely unopposed because, as the title asks rhetorically: who can kill a child? But what elevates it above the likes of Stephen King‘s similarly premised “Children of the Corn” is an extended prologue which suggests that the rebellion is prompted by a juvenile collective unconscious drive (which they can transmit to one another telepathically) for retaliation against an adult world that continually victimizes children. The desperately upsetting documentary footage of humanitarian disasters, from the Holocaust to the Vietnam napalm bombings to famines and wars elsewhere that have claimed millions of children’s lives, provides grim social context for the fable and ensures that this well-shot, eerie film cuts deep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIBd-DmzUp8
“It’s Alive” (1974)
This is one of the better titles from “b-movie auteur” Larry Cohen. In contrast to the usual complaint, this monster-baby horror can’t really be accused of showing too much, making it a refreshing change in a genre that more often reduces the uncanniness by too quickly, and too fully revealing the Big Bad as just a guy in a rubber suit. Perhaps Cohen knew that fundamentally the idea of a bloodsucking, malevolent newborn crawling through vents and flinging itself at people’s necks might, if shown clearly, be too close to comedy for the horror to really take hold (indeed the “Basket Case” series mines that silliness for all it’s worth). So instead we get a surprisingly subtle and relatively slow-paced horror in which the glimpses at Rick Baker‘s creation are few (and mostly partial), Bernard Herrmann‘s score is strong, but more muted than his Hitchcock work, and the violence is more often suggested than shown. It also has a relatively serious subtext in which the pharmaceutical company reps and fertility doctors who plied the mother (Sharon Farrell) with pills most of her adult life are shown to have been responsible for the horrible mutation, while the dynamic between her and husband John Ryan is also fascinating, albeit unavoidably colored by the sexism of the time.
“Let The Right One In” (2008)
The annals of cinema history have presented us with a few child vampires, from “Salem’s Lot” and “The Lost Boys” to “The Little Vampire” to Kirsten Dunst‘s Claudia in “Interview with the Vampire.” But to represent all those bloodsucking siblings, and indeed her own reincarnation as Chloe Moretz in Matt Reeves’ remake “Let Me In,” we’re going with our favorite-ever underage Ancient, Eli in Tomas Alfredson‘s wonderful “Let The Right One In.” Adapted from the great book by Swedish author John Ajvide Lindqvist , the film follows Eli (a brilliantly melancholic yet ruthless Line Leandersson) a centuries-old vampire trapped in the body of a (seemingly) prepubescent girl, whose colossal loneliness (she is provided for, only ineffectually, by an older man who is part lover, part slave) finds some relief when she befriends her bullied, isolated 12-year-old neighbor Oskar ( Kåre Hedebrant ). There are elements in the book that Alfredson’s films plays down or avoids — such as the issue of pedophilia in Eli’s relationship with her “minder,” as well as the question of her gender — but mostly it’s a masterful work of adaptation featuring Alfredson’s exceptionally meticulous visual control, and a beautifully sad little horror film to boot, with a perfectly crooked little turn from Leandersson at its cold, unbeating heart.
