Fantastic Fest 2009

If you were to poll 1000 adults on what scares them the most, high on (if not topping) every list would be demonic children. Classics such as The Omen, Village of the Damned, Devil Times Five and It's Alive paved the foundation upon which the horrifying knuckle-biter The Children is built.

 

Three families meet up at a country estate to celebrate the winter holidays together. Everything starts out idyllic: snowmen, sledding and hot-out-of-the-oven Christmas turkey. Almost imperceptibly, however, tensions gradually build and the tranquility starts to fray at the edges. Robbie (Jeremy Sheffield) brought copies of his herbal-medicine business prospectus to inappropriately seek family investors. Jonah (Stephen Campbell Moore) bonds with his teenage niece, but his flirtations walk the razorís edge between the cool uncle and the creepy incestuous pedophile. The audience takes a fly-on-the-wall perspective for the mounting uneasiness. You watch the darkness slowly building in the children: quick icy stares, malevolent glances and a newfound interest in cutlery, but are powerless to warn the oblivious adults. The rambunctious playfulness of the kids takes on a sinister edge, and soon the freshly fallen snow is soaked in blood.

 

The Achilles heel of a youth-heavy cast is always the acting. Tom Shankland expertly dodges this pitfall and directs the large cast of children to deliver note-perfect performances. There ís actually very little dialogue; instead he relies on menacing laughter, facial expressions (or lack thereof) and judicious editing to amplify the tone. Adding to the potboiler build-up, much of the early bloodshed is judiciously restrained. The parents, very slow to imagine that their own children could be sadistic killers, time and time again get lured into their playful but deadly snares. Shankland also manages to avoid another classic fumbling point: the Scooby-Doo exposition. One can infer the origin of the illness that is affecting the children, but thankfully it is not fully articulated. This keeps the focus on the forever mounting tension, all the way to the bloody end. Since the chaos is generally confined to a single remote estate, we also donít know how far sweeping this malady has spread, but why have the police and ambulance not arrived on the scene?

 

Hand picked by Raimi and Tapert’s Ghost House Underground for release on DVD later this year, The Children boasts all the best features of contemporary independent horror. In a lean 84 minutes, director Tom Shankland has crafted a one of the one of the creepiest, edge-of-your-seat horror thrillers in recent memory. You may never fully trust your own children again. (Tim League)