Scary Children

More horror movies come out per month than I have numbers for. Plot that out over a year and the number of titles becomes sheer cacophony. There is so much mediocrity in the world that a film must be either bolt-of-lightning brilliant or sack-of-hammers stupid to stand out amongst the din. The year is 2009. We've seen all we're going to see, right?

Tom Shankland thinks otherwise. Tom Shankland proves otherwise.

I'm not prepared to declare The Children "bolt-of-lightning brilliant," but it certainly is the most invigorating piece of horror I've seen since [REC]. That may not seem like a ringing endorsement, considering Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's Spanish powerhouse is barely two years old, but if one considers the hundreds upon hundreds of horror movies that have risen and fallen between the two, I'd call that a pretty strong compliment.

From the title alone one can gleam the conceit behind Shankland's film. No one ever names a movie after the component of the story that goes smoothly. Something is wrong with the children. We don't know what, the movie doesn't know what, but something is going to go wrong with the children.