The 1976 Spanish film, Who Can Kill A Child?, opens with a series of documentary clips, all detailing the world’s inhumanity to children.  We hear about how children were experimented upon in Auschwitz.  We see displaced refugees from the Korean War.  We saw the famous footage of a naked Vietnamese child running down a road after her village has been napalmed by American forces.  We see footage of Nigerian children being forced to serve as soldiers.  The footage is disturbing but it’s also a necessary reminder that, as much as everyone claims to love children, they are often those most harmed by the wars that are waged by adults.

The film then segues into the story of Tom (Lewis Fiander) and Evelyn (Prunella Ransome), an English couple who are vacationing in Spain.  Evelyn is pregnant with their third child and this vacation is their last getaway before they have to focus on raising a child.  (It is mentioned that this is their third child.  Presumably, they left their other two children behind in the UK while they jetted off to Spain.)  Finding the beaches to be too crowded and loud, Tom and Evelyn head off to a nearby island in hopes of having some time to themselves.  When they arrive at the island’s main village, they find it to be populated almost entirely by children.  At first glance, there doesn’t appear to be any adults around.

As Tom and Evelyn explore the village, they discover that almost all of the buildings appear to be abandoned.  They also can’t help but notice that the children seem to be watching their every move.  Eventually, Tom does spot one adult but that adult is quickly attacked by a group of children who beat him to death.  Tom realizes that the children have killed the adults in the village and now, they’re planning on killing him and his pregnant wife.

There have been many films made about killer kids but it’s hard to think of any of them that are as grim and downbeat as Who Can Kill A Child?  There’s really not a moment of humor to be found in the film and even the movie’s most infamous scene, in which an unborn child rebels against his mother, is played with total seriousness.  The children are frightening not just because they’re adorable kids but because they’re relentless in their violence and their determination to kill every adult in their path.  In many ways, they’re like the fast zombies from Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City.  The main difference is that, because their children, they’re given a benefit of the doubt that would not be given to older homicidal maniacs.  Even as the children attempt to use a battering ram to burst into the room in which they’ve locked themselves, Tom and Evelyn are still hesitant to fight back because their attackers are just children.  When Tom does fight back, it backfires on him because, to the rest of the world, he’s not a man fighting for his life but instead a man attacking innocent children.  Even when a four year-old aims a gun at Evelyn’s head, his playful smile leaves the viewers wondering if he truly understands that guns kill or if he just thinks he’s playing a game.

Who Can Kill A Child? plays out at its own deliberate pace.  It’s nearly two hours long and there’s a lot of footage of Tom and Evelyn walking around the deserted village but director Narciso Ibáñez Serrador does such a good job of creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending doom, the film itself never feels slow.  The deserted village is a wonderfully creepy location and Serrador makes sure that the viewers realize just how many spaces there are where the killer children could be hiding and waiting for someone to walk by.  When the children suddenly show up in a group, coldly watching as Tom and Evelyn explore the island, it’s a truly chilling scene.  The film also benefits from the performances of Lewis Fiander and Prunella Ransome, who are well-cast as Tom and Evelyn.  At first, both characters seem to be a bit too complacent to be sympathetic but, as the film progresses, both Fiander and Ransome win the viewers over.  Ransome, in particular, will break your heart.

The film’s conclusion is appropriately downbeat but one can’t help but feel that the children are merely doing what they’ve seen adults do for years.  The children may be dangerous, violent, and ruthless but the film suggests that they learned from the best.