Who Can Kill a Child?
Who Can Kill a Child? is a 1976 film from Spain, directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, running 100 minutes. reelscum files it under fantaterror and folk horror.
- Year
- 1976 · 1970s films
- Country
- Spain
- Runtime
- 100 min
- Director
- Narciso Ibáñez Serrador
- Updated
- 29 Oct 2026
- Obscurity
- cult (35/100)
- Also known as
- Island of the Damned · Trapped! · The Hex Massacre · Death is Child's Play · Island of Death · The Hex
Defined in the glossary: Fantaterror, Folk horror
Spanish, sun-bleached, upsetting. The opening newsreel is a hard sell.
A Spanish horror film of genuine dread, sun-bleached and deeply upsetting. A couple holiday on a remote island to find it populated entirely by children who have, silently and without explanation, turned on the adults, and the film's central horror is the title's unanswerable question. Narciso Ibanez Serrador directs it with real control.
It opens with several minutes of documentary footage of children killed in twentieth-century atrocities, a framing device that is a hard sell and colours everything after. The bright Mediterranean setting makes the horror worse, not better.
Disturbing, serious and not easily shaken off.
Trailer
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Written about
- Fantaterror: the Spanish horror boom, 1968 to 1976
Two cuts of every film, one for the censor in Madrid and one for the drive-in. Democracy killed the trick in two years.
On these lists
- The Spanish horror shelf
Shot twice, dressed for the Madrid censor and naked for the drive-in. The blind Templars on skeletal horses are still the best monster on the shelf.
Filed alongside
Tombs of the Blind Dead
Eyeless Templars on skeletal horses in slow motion. Best monster design of the 70s.
The Blood on Satan's Claw
A plough turns up a skull and a village falls apart. Coined the term.
Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
Spanish-Italian, shot in England, and much smarter than its stablemates.
The House with Laughing Windows
A rural giallo with no gloss and a deep, patient dread. Often voted the best one going.
The Blood Spattered Bride
Spanish Carmilla adaptation with an unusually pointed anger about marriage.
Calvaire
Deliverance relocated to the Belgian mud, and just as unwilling to let anyone leave.
Witchfinder General
Vincent Price with the camp removed. Reeves died at 25, a year later.
Hunchback of the Morgue
Naschy's grisliest, and the one where the rats were not an effect.
Return of the Evil Dead
Blind Dead again, this time besieging a whole village. The best of the four.
The Werewolf Versus the Vampire Woman
Naschy's Waldemar Daninsky at his most enjoyable.
Night of the Seagulls
The Blind Dead ride out one last time. A quiet, sad closer to Spain's best monster series.
The Ghost Galleon
The Blind Dead put to sea on a model boat in a visible fish tank. The runt of the four.