Two middle class families enjoy a Christmas getaway deep in the rural English countryside . One morning the children become truculent then visibly hostile and very soon the adults find themselves fighting for their lives against their own children
This is a low budget British horror film that seems to owe a bit to THE HAPPENING but in many ways is much more superior to the aforementioned film . Where THE CHILDREN works superbly is building up an ever escalating sense of tension as young cherubic children become more and more psychotic leaving the parents with the uncommon dilemma of wanting to live in which case they'll need to violently defend themselves against their offspring or having to politely remonstrate with them in which case the adults will almost certainly get murdered to death
The screenplay doesn't really itself with an explanation on what has made the children turn homicidal and this makes the film much more enigmatic and menacing as we see the story unfold through the eyes of the adults and somewhat typically the BBC decided to show this right bang in the middle of Summer during one of the very rare heatwaves we get in this country and one thinks this is certainly a film that would be very hard hitting it it's viewed in the bleak cold winter with snow on the ground
As good as THE CHILDREN is it's not flawless . Director Tom Shankland does use the stale format of loud noise to constantly scare the audience and has a technical feel of a debut feature . It's also a film you think is produced as a calling card where the production team get a massive budget for a sequel and you can see the ambiguous and gloomy ending a mile away . But that said as a disconcerting horror movie that didn't cost much it's very good at what it does
This is a low budget British horror film that seems to owe a bit to THE HAPPENING but in many ways is much more superior to the aforementioned film . Where THE CHILDREN works superbly is building up an ever escalating sense of tension as young cherubic children become more and more psychotic leaving the parents with the uncommon dilemma of wanting to live in which case they'll need to violently defend themselves against their offspring or having to politely remonstrate with them in which case the adults will almost certainly get murdered to death
The screenplay doesn't really itself with an explanation on what has made the children turn homicidal and this makes the film much more enigmatic and menacing as we see the story unfold through the eyes of the adults and somewhat typically the BBC decided to show this right bang in the middle of Summer during one of the very rare heatwaves we get in this country and one thinks this is certainly a film that would be very hard hitting it it's viewed in the bleak cold winter with snow on the ground
As good as THE CHILDREN is it's not flawless . Director Tom Shankland does use the stale format of loud noise to constantly scare the audience and has a technical feel of a debut feature . It's also a film you think is produced as a calling card where the production team get a massive budget for a sequel and you can see the ambiguous and gloomy ending a mile away . But that said as a disconcerting horror movie that didn't cost much it's very good at what it does