The Days Of Hallowe'en: #001
The Children
The Christmas holidays. What starts as a relaxing house party for two families coming together to celebrate the festive season gradually turns into a horrifying fight for survival as one by one the children mysteriously fall ill and begin to turn against their parents with increasingly disturbing consequences.
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To continue into my (spoiler-free) review of The Children -
As a Christmas film, The Children does not so much as bother. The “Christmas season” aspect is really just a thinly veiled plot device to get the two families in the same household.
As a horror film, meanwhile, The Children is as doting and eager to please as a puppy. It tries very, very hard to frighten you - for this it earns itself a gold star. The score is tense and eerie, to the point you feel anxious just watching the families meet in the beginning. It lobs foreshadowing at you so viciously that it seems almost forced, and there are plenty of the sharp, sudden starts that so many English-language horror films display reliance on.
As far as blood and seeping wounds goes, there is plenty. The appealing thing about The Children is that it really doesn’t show as much as you feel it has shown. They aren’t gratuitous with the gore; they show you enough to give you a taste, and allow your subconscious to fill in the rest.
The choice of setting - a cozy British farmhouse carved out of the forest - was perfect. Even with the wintry environment and massive home, there is a certain sense of claustrophobia and tension - similar to The Shining, though not on quite the same level. The choreography is beautifully and captivatingly filmed, even when coping with the high-contrast backdrop of endless snow. I shivered while watching, and not just because of the violence.
If you happen to, like me, find the concept of rage-filling viruses frightening above anything else, definitely grab this one. The ending is a bit trite (especially since I saw similar in Antichrist recently) and you will be left with more questions than answers, but it’s certainly a movie worth a rent.
Originally published at The Circus at World's End. You can comment here or there.