Something is innately scary about children. Their big eyes look into you without the inhibitions of society and their unbridled excitement for newness is ever-present, making them the manifestation of unpredictability. Not to mention the sound of their laughter that can echo like distant bells. Tom Shankland and Paul Andrew Williams tapped these veins dry to create their film, The Children (2008).
The premise is simple. A family, two couples and their young children, gather in the country for a holiday. The heroine Casey, (Hannah Tointon), is a late teen or early twenty-something who is stuck in the middle and is plotting to sneak out mid-weekend to go to a party. Everything is bumping along nicely for everyone until the children start acting oddly and contracting a strange virus.
The build up on this one is like an over-inflated balloon that you keep blowing air into. The tension escalates and even the meaningless subplots make you uncomfortable. One of the mothers keeps forcing her child to play with her sick cousin with the promise of golden stars in an artificial rewards system. The parents make thinly veiled shots at each other about their parenting techniques, and Casey sneaks off to the green house to smoke pot with her uncle that she seems sexually stimulated by.
Once this discomfort inflates past capacity, the balloon pops with a sledding “accident” that leaves one of the parents dead and two of the children missing. Full diapers hit the fan soon after, as the children start outwardly attacking their adults and setting traps for them, breaking their legs and tearing their hoop earrings out with their mitten fingers.
While I think the plot needs to be experienced and can be done no more justice through summary, this movie has many other strengths. Every image of gore is medically precise and wince invoking. Not a single drop of cartoon blood is spilled. The Children uses the proper recipe of gore to avoid the comic book feel that some blood bath movies start to lapse into by the midway points.
The cinematography is also visually appealing from beginning to end. No wasted scenes were filmed to get a person from A to B. Every image blends into next with an artistic ease as the plot gets more intense and the tension builds to one of the most downright creepy endings I’ve seen in a long while. Most importantly, The Children doesn’t cop out with that last scare, that clichéd no-one-lives and “ha ha you thought they won” BS, that every horror movie feels the need to do. The final scene is much more thoughtful than that and left up to personal interpretation.
