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[Blu-ray Review] Spanish Horror Classic ‘Who Can Kill a Child?’ Finally Gets a Proper Release
Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), a young British couple, head out on vacation before giving birth to their first child. Their vacation leads them to a small, quiet Spanish island. While the island is gorgeous, something doesn’t feel right. The island appears to be only populated with children. As if that isn’t weird enough the children don’t seem to speak, however, they do giggle. As Tom and Evelyn roam the island looking for anyone over the age of 18 they witness the children all behaving strangely. They soon discover the kids are capable of intense and brutal acts of violence, and before they know they’re forced to ask themselves, who can kill a child?
Who Can Kill a Child? is a fascinating film on many fronts and can have different impacts depending on when in life you watch it. I first watched the film when I was in my late teens, early 20’s and at the time I viewed it as just a straight exploitation film that placed a pair of adults in a world in which children are bloodthirsty killers. My point of view at that time was that of course you’d kill those kids because they’re nothing more than a movie monster, just like any other horror film. They just happen to be kids.
As I’ve gotten older and I’m now into my early 30’s my feelings on the film have changed a bit. I don’t have kids, and I likely never will, but now when I watch it I think to myself, “maybe they should try talking to these kids, because they are kids.” Maybe they just need someone to be nice to them? Can they possibly be monsters? How do they even know what monsters are? They’re too little to fully understand. Right?
Despite my shifting viewpoints on how to handle the kids, my appreciation of the film has only grown. I’ve always enjoyed this movie, but the more I see it the more I become convinced that it is truly a superb piece of filmmaking. The entire subject is quite taboo. Child deaths are always shocking and yet this is a film that is entirely focused on that subject. And even though it is an exploitation film, it’s not really exploitative. Director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador could have just went balls to the wall and had Tom and Evelyn just start taking kids out. That would’ve created a lot more shock value, but he really held off and didn’t have the couple fight back until they had no choice. He made the right choice.
Who Can Kill a Child? is also a gorgeous looking film thanks to the work of José Luis Alcaine. It takes full advantage of Spain’s natural beauty, and while it takes place in one location it was actually shot in 4 of 5 different Spanish locations and is edited together seamless to look like it’s all in one place.
Special Features
The bonus features port over two interviews from the old DVD release. One is with the director Serrador, and he goes in-depth about the writing of the screenplay which he did within four days and claimed to have finished before the novel was written. He also gives some more specifics on the story that are only implied in the film. From Serrador’s POV the children are the protagonist, being forced to fight back against adults because they are responsible for all of humanity’s troubles. The second interview is with DP Alcaine and he talks about working with Serrador and even dives into his work with Pedro Almodóvar. The new stuff included on this Blu-ray are a commentary with Samm Deighan and Kat Eillinger, an interview on killer kids with Kim Newman and the 46-documentary Version Espanola. The commentary and doc dive into the specifics themes represented in the film, while Newman uses his wealth of knowledge to educate us on the history of killer kids in films. Newman makes a fantastic point about how Brian Taylor’s Mom and Dad is almost the opposite version of Who Can Kill a Child? where the tables are completely flipped.
The film is presented in both English and Spanish and with a brand-new 4K transfer from the film negatives. It’s a stunning presentation that looks a lot better than the old DVD. This is a rare horror film in that it takes place entirely during the day making for a very bright film, and this new transfer cleans up a lot of the old DVD’s issues and provides a lot more clarity and detail.
Who Can Kill a Child? is a landmark Spanish horror film from the 70’s. While it may share similarities with other horror entries about killer kids, it is a cut above the rest.
Who Can Kill a Child? is now available on region free Blu-ray from Mondo Macabro.
There’s something really insidious, in a great way, about setting a horror story in a movie theater. It’s something filmmakers have known for decades, going back to The Blob and beyond, but it never fails to strike a chord because, in a way, it hits us exactly where we feel safest. Seeing a horror movie on the big screen, surrounded by like-minded moviegoers, is a communal experience, one in which everyone screams and laughs together. We are together, and therefore we are much less vulnerable, so when someone punctures that bubble of safety, it’s all the more frightening.
Matinee (also released as Midnight Matinee in some territories) is a movie that understands this from the jump, setting up a stunning opening kill that predates a similar sequence in Scream 2 by almost a full decade. A smart, layered, very stylish Canadian slasher released at the tail end of the 1980s, it’s one of those films that’s spent a lot of time in the dark even among the horror faithful (I’m willing to admit that I hadn’t seen it until recently). Now, a new Kino Cult Blu-ray release is out to change that, and it reveals a slasher essential that, while not perfect, has charm and style to spare.
Two years ago, the Paramount Theater in the small town of Halston closed its doors when, during the theater’s annual horror festival, a young moviegoer was murdered in his seat, mid-movie. Leads in the murder quickly dried up, and the case is cold enough now that the town barely talks about it anymore. Fortunately for local horror fans, that means the Paramount can open again in time for its Halloween horror festival, and they’ve got a hotshot producer (William B. Davis) in town for just such an occasion.
As the festival draws closer, the film introduces us to a variety of characters, including rebellious teenager Sherri (Beatrice Boepple), her boyfriend Lawrence (Jeff Schultz), her overbearing mother Marilyn (Gillian Barber), and the theater’s kindly owner, Earle (Don S. Davis), who’s just hoping he can run a business without more bloodshed. But someone clearly remembers what happened two years ago, and their violent streak is on a collision course with opening night.
Matinee has quite a few things going for it, but what stands out right away, and maintains a consistent grip right up through a wonderful crescendo in the third act, is the film’s visual style. Writer/Director Richard Martin, cinematographer Cyrus Block, and special effects wizard Bob Comer make great use of the film’s limited locations, giving the movie a charming small-town feel reminiscent of Halloween or The Blob while building a self-contained little world inside the theater itself that’ll remind you of films like Popcorn and Demons.
The colors are striking, the framing is clever, and the film clearly has a ball making references to all kinds of other horror cinema moments ranging from The Phantom of the Opera to Friday the 13th. The kills, while relatively sparing with gore, are delivered with style and appropriate tension, creating that sense of unease right in the middle of a place where we as movie fans should be comfortable: The movie theater. Along the way, the Paramount itself becomes a character, and this release definitely dials up its retro splendor.
The Blu-ray upgrade preserves the film’s attention to detail and ambitious cinematography, helping the colors to pop while never letting go of the texture and feel of a relatively low-budget horror film made in Canada in the 1980s. There’s a certain gauziness to many exploitation films of this era, that haloed light you get when the scene is perhaps overexposed just a little too much. It makes the film dreamlike even when it reaches for realism, and Kino Cult’s upgrade preserves that feeling. Throw in a smart script and a whodunit plot that leans heavily into the psychological details of each character, and you’ve got a winner.
There are a couple of things that stick out as slight issues here, including the lack of special features beyond an excellent commentary from film historians and Kino regulars Jason Pichonsky and Paul Corupe. The disc is quite reasonably priced, so it’s not a letdown economically speaking, but I’d love a deeper dive into the film and the Canadian slasher boom in general, particularly for a movie like this that seems to have faded from so many memories, including mine. The sound mix also has some issues, probably left over from previous releases, that might have you playing with your volume settings a little more than you’d like over the course of a 90-minute film, particularly when lines of ADR dialogue crop up.
These are minor concerns, though, and they do nothing to diminish the impact of Matinee, or the joy that’ll come from watching this film for the first time if you’re a slasher devotee in search of something new, or even someone who saw this movie way back when hoping to relive its glories. This is one of those slashers I’ll be talking about with fellow horrorphiles for a long time, and it’s because of this disc.
Matinee is now available on Blu-ray from Kino Cult.
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