Who Can Kill a Child? The film that splits Spanish cinema

Who Can Kill a Child? and the argument over the best of Spanish cinema

Is Who Can Kill a Child? among the best Spanish films of all time? The question landed just like that, without warning, in a conversation about homegrown pavor, and it peine a three-way rift between camps that don't speak to each other. One hails it as a major work. Another dismisses it as a bad copy of Hitchcock's The Birds. And a third simply doesn't care about Spanish cinema at all. The film, made by Chicho Ibáñez Serrador in the seventies, is more than forty years old and still stirs up tempers.

Why is it compared to Hitchcock's The Birds?

The parallel shows up as soon as you scratch the surface. Chicho's film has children attacking the inhabitants of an island where Hitchcock had placed crows and gulls, the very blueprint the British director established in the sixties. The reading isn't a stretch: some consider it outright an inferior copy of the original. To that debt add another, Village of the Damned, whose original version dates from 1960 and which John Carpenter would later remake with the actor who had played Superman.

A never-settled theory also hangs over the plot: that the boy leading the group was in fact an alien disguised as a human, tasked with mentally controlling the rest. Nobody confirms it or denies it. It does, however, fit the tone of a film that explains almost nothing.

The piñata scene and the drag of dubbing

If anything survives the near-unanimous verdict, it's the scenes of violence involving children, praised as original and unlike anything being made at the time. The piñata sequence, according to the most repeated analysis, is on its own enough to earn the film a place on any list of the best pavor cinema.

Then there's the other side. Watched a second time, without the surprise factor, the whole loses force. And it's penalized by something that was standard then and grates today: the dubbing of the leads, children included, a device used in the era's cinema to mask accents and unfamiliar voices.

From 1,2,3 to pavor: Chicho's double legacy

Few filmographies mix fright and laughter so cheerfully. The same man who directed this film hosted Un, dos, tres... responda otra vez, the game show where twenty-five pesetas were handed out to anyone who named the correct Spanish province. It's hard to fit both things in the same head. And yet there they are, in the same biography.

Against Spanish cinema: The Furious and The Children

The tone, on the low end of the scale, is harsh. Part of the audience admits that rather than watch Spanish cinema they'd rather gouge their eyes out, an exaggeration meant to mark genre distance. In that same stretch comes the recommendation of The Furious (2025), an Asian film cited as the exact opposite of the domestic product.

There's also a more reasonable bridge: those who remember the impact of Chicho's film put forward The Children as a recent example of a similar formula. Unease, children and small communities. The recipe hasn't changed much in forty years.

Forty years on, the argument remains open. A masterpiece to some, a well-shot plagiarism to others. Chicho, meanwhile, had already proved the genre didn't matter: he could scare you just as much with a game-show clock as with a group of children staring straight ahead.