Who Can Kill a Child?

Yes, the title got me.

I knew almost nothing about Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's 1976 movie ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? except that it was a horror movie, and I figured a horror movie with a title like that ought to at least be interesting.  And it is that.

The film has had other titles over the years -- Island of Death, Death is Child's Play, Lucifer's Curse, Los Niños, etc. -- but Who Can Kill a Child? is apparently the original one, and is the one used on the 2007 DVD from Dark Sky Films, the edition I watched.  It's provocative, but it's also perfectly accurate for the movie.

The story is fairly simple: a nice British couple visit Spain and travel to a small, secluded island the husband had visited twelve years before.  When they arrive, the island seems deserted.  The husband says the people often went to festivals on the other side of the island.  Eventually, he and his wife discover the truth: the children of the island have, for mysterious reasons, killed almost all of the adults.  And enjoyed it.

The film would be a somewhat routine (if surprisingly well directed, acted, and filmed) story of demonic children and people trapped somewhere dangerous if Ibáñez Serrador didn't have more on his mind than just shocking an audience.  He did have more on his mind, though, and it is that more that makes the film fascinating -- fascinating both for its content and for what seems to me to be a contradiction between its construction and its theme.

Who Can Kill a Child? doesn't begin right off with its story.  Instead, the first ten minutes presents images of dead or dying children in concentration camps and war zones.  A voiceover tells us that in war and in disasters caused by humans, children are the greatest victims.  Millions and millions of children have died because of adult actions.

From this disturbing black and white imagery, we move to the bright sunlight of Spain and a happy British couple, Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome).  Evelyn is pregnant with their third child.  They enjoy their time in a coastal city, but it's noisy and crowded, so they head off to the island Tom, a biologist, spent time on more than a decade before.  The sunny happiness slowly gives way to sunny anxiety, until Tom and Evelyn discover the secret of the children.  The last third or so of the film is thus all about their attempt to escape, and, naturally, that escape raises the title's question, since it's clear that the only way to escape is to kill some kids.

From the opening sequence and from some statements Ibáñez Serrador has made, it's obvious that part of his intention is to make us realize how hypocritical we adults can be about the killing of children -- most people believe it is absolutely wrong to kill children, but in war children are "collateral damage" and even in peacetime millions of children die from easily-preventable illnesses, so obviously we don't really believe it's unforgiveable to kill them.  In Who Can Kill a Child, the childrens' behavior is never definitively explained, but there's some talk of evolution and adaptation, and in an interview on the DVD, Ibáñez Serrador seems to indicate that, for him, the explanation is that the children have realized (subconsciously, maybe even genetically) that the biggest threats to their existence are adults, and so they are wiping out the threat.  From the opening sequence, Ibáñez Serrador seems to want us to understand that it is in some way or another understandable that children should want to kill adults, since adults kill them so wantonly.

That would certainly be a provocative theme for a movie to develop, but this movie does not really develop it.  Our sympathies as viewers are focused on Tom and Evelyn, while the children are not the least bit sympathetic except for the fact that they are children.  Though she spends at least half of the movie trying to prove she is utterly ignorant of the world and everything around her (presumably because the only way Ibáñez Serrador could think of to make the film long enough was to make at least one of the characters really stupid so lots of time can be spent explaining things to her), Evelyn is by the last part of the movie someone whose welfare we have begun to care about, and Tom seems like a nice enough guy.  The story has mostly been presented through their point of view, making their interpretation of the world is the one the spectators identify with.  What suspense there is in the movie comes from our not wanting them to be harmed.

We don't have any access to the children's inner lives at all and very few of them are named or even differentiated from each other for us.  The boys behave like sullen, petulant brats and the girls giggle and cry, and so all of the children are little more than the most annoying stereotypes of annoying kids.  When Tom and Evelyn are driving all over the island in a Jeep, we're cheering for Tom to just plough through the kids who stand in his way.  Go, Tom, go!  Splat, kid, splat!

Maybe this is the point -- we, the spectators, are put in the position of rooting for children to be killed.  But if Ibáñez Serrador's point is that we should recognize that it would be rational for children to want to kill adults, shouldn't our sympathies instead be with the homicidal kids?  The children in the movie are nothing more than sadistic little demons.  Wouldn't Ibáñez Serrador's point have been made more profoundly and more complexly if we had been brought to see the little demons as sympathic and justified, while the adults deserved their fate?

In the interview on the DVD, Ibáñez Serrador says he thinks the one mistake he made with the film was putting the opening sequence at the beginning rather than the end.  Ending with those scenes of atrocity would have certainly been jarring, and might, indeed, have worked better: we would have been happily cheering on the killing of children, maybe a little uncomfortable at the thought, but nonetheless content that it was all "just a movie" and then we would have had proof that no, in fact, our willingness to kill children is not confined to killing the demonic ones in movies.

Or the effect might have been for us to be annoyed at the false analogy, and to see the film's manipulations as exploitative, sensationalistic, and ridiculous.

Whatever our conclusions about the film's theme, though, it's nice to see a horror film that's thought through the purpose of its violence, even if a bit more thought might have led to a more complex and rewarding experience overall.

Rude Words and Piracy: A High Wind in Jamaica and the Child Reader

Richard Hughes's first and most famous book, A High Wind in Jamaica, is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, which is really saying something. It's both delightful and disturbing in the way it presents -- in an unfailingly light tone -- children as amoral aliens. The novel is rich with irony, and it's not a satire so much as a relentless attack on sentimental notions of childhood. The possible interpretations of the novel are likely endless, but in many ways the book itself is about interpretation -- about the futility of trying to interpret a child's experiences and thoughts through adult eyes. (It's also worth noting that the novel was first published in the U.S. under the title The Innocent Voyage, which I'm rather more fond of than its better-known title. It was also once illustrated by Lynd Ward.)

I was surprised this morning to discover an essay by British teacher Victoria de Rijke in a 1995 issue of Children's Literature in Education, "Reading the Child Invention", in which de Rijke explores the very concept of "children's literature" by having children read A High Wind in Jamaica. The majority of the essay consists of transcripts of a conversations de Rijke had with an 11-year-old who read the novel, Ayeshea Zacharkiw. It's possible that Zacharkiw was extremely precocious, but de Rijke writes of many other children who read and appreciated the book, too. Toward the end of the discussion, she asks Zacharkiw if she thinks Hughes's novel is a book for children or for grown-ups, and Zacharkiw says she thinks it depends on reading ability, and a child's willingness to use a dictionary.

AZ: ...It’s an old book as well, so it’s got all these old expressions, but I think anyone could read it whether they’re children or grown-ups. Yeah. It might take the children longer than older people, but cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages.
VdR: Right. I agree. And do you think there’s anything in it that adults now wouldn’t like children to read?
AZ: I don’t know why it’s been republished for adults. There are words in it I suppose, rude words (laughs) and piracy, but you can get horror books especially for children, but adults read them. Well, anyone can read any book. It’s just what level you are at reading, whether you like that particular type of book, and if you don’t like it, you can always put the book down.
VdR: Mmm, absolutely. You’re free to do that, aren’t you? It’s not in control of you! (laughs)
AZ: (laughs) No, course not. Once you’ve bought it. It doesn’t matter who you publish it for. Anyone can buy it and read it, or get it out of the library.
VdR: So what kind of particular type of book do you think this is?
AZ: Well, it’s about life. It’s about life on the schooner, and about children, as they’re the man characters, and about the difference between grown-ups and children, who’s in control.

De Rijke draws some interesting conclusions from this exchange:

Children’s observations are often valued by grown-ups for their blunt honesty and wisdom, for cutting through the adult flannel and exposing simple truths, most often because adults are already uncomfortable about hypocrisies which they are concealing. Ayeshea reminded me that there are a number of basic requirements for effective reading: a level of basic literacy, information retrieval and developmental skills ("cut at two year olds, cos you have to be sensible about ages"). What a terrifically blunt reminder of the low expectations teachers and adults have of reading potential! ... The act of reading cannot be controlled by publishers’ reading-age targeting, or price, given access to the library and a free choice of genre. In conversation, Ayeshea and I also emphasized, by the repetitive use we made of the word control the significance the book places on power relations, in terms of its subject. The term subject could be applied to both reader and plot.

It's a fine reminder not to underestimate readers.

For another view of the book, Francine Prose's introduction (PDF) to the NYRB edition is a good overview of some of its strange wonders and terrors. And I'm entirely in agreement with Mr. Waggish: "The sheer oddness of this book really defies summary."

In place of summary or analysis, I'll leave you with a direct quote from the middle of A High Wind in Jamaica:

In short, babies have minds which work in terms and categories of their own which cannot be translated into the terms and categories of the human mind.

It is true they look human -- but not so human, to be quite fair, as many monkeys.

Subconsciously, too, everyone recognizes they are animals -- why else do people always laugh when a baby does some action resembling the human, as they would at a Praying Mantis? If the baby was only a less-developed man, there would be nothing funny in it, surely.

Possibly a case might be made out that children are not human either: but I should not accept it. Agreed that their minds are not just more ignorant and stupider than ours, but differ in kind of thinking (are mad in fact): but one can, by an effort of will and imagination, think like a child at least in a partial degree -- and even if one's success is infinitesimal it invalidates the case: while one can no more think like a baby, in the smallest respect, than one can think like a bee.

How then can one begin to describe the inside of Laura, where the child-mind lived in the midst of the familiar relics of the baby-mind, like a Fascist in Rome?