I love kids. They're way more honest than adults, and it's a fun and amazing experience watching them learn and grow and experience life. That being said, kids can also be extremely creepy. Something about their wide eyed innocence when it's corrupted by something evil, it gets under my skin for sure. For this reason, horror movies that feature kids can be scarier than almost anything else. I've been meaning to watch this movie, since everyone raved about it when it came out, so I have high hopes for this one. Plus dude, those posters are amazing.
This movie is about two families that go off on a holiday together, and when combined, they have 5 kids and only 4 adults, which is a bad ratio. Especially when the parents are as distracted as these ones are. Plus they have an angsty teenager along for the trip who would rather be at a party with her friends. Funtimes. Soon, one of the kids becomes ill (which all parents know means sickness is about to spread through the rest of the kids like the plague). The parents banish the kids off to their upstairs rooms so they can play with their cousins while the adults hang out and drink (some of my best childhood memories are from times like these with my own cousins). Since this is a horror movie, very bad things soon begin to happen. At first the kids seem just moody and whiney, but their behavior gets increasingly worse until it becomes sinister and violent.
I love how the tension builds in this movie. The adults are too wrapped up in their own drama to notice much about how the kids are acting. There are old wounds under the surface, and perhaps not the best of relations between the teenager and the other adults, so mild irritations become worse as time goes on, and it's honestly hard to tell at first whether the kids are just being regular bratty kids or whether it's something else. I want to be pissed that the adults didn't realize something was wrong sooner, but kids can be weird sometimes, and I honestly can't blame the adults because no one's mind automatically jumps to "damn, the kids are whining, they must be turning evil."
When something horrific first does happen, it's not what I expected, and again, I can't blame the adults or the teen for losing it and not holding everything together. I would have been freaking out too. Everything after that is just a slow trickling down of everything starting to fall apart at once.
The atmosphere is great in this movie. If you weren't creeped out by little kids at the beginning of this movie, you might reconsider that position by the end. The kids in this movie do an amazing job being quietly menacing and terrifying. I really felt disoriented and didn't know what was going on, and that chilled me almost more than anything else. There's some great gore here, but the filmmakers also show a good amount of restraint. They let us see enough to know what's happening without showing so much that the young actors will be traumatized for the rest of their lives, and that's difficult to do.
Now the movie isn't perfect. I don't care how incompetent your police are, there is no way the timeline of this movie is in any way realistic. They should have had someone take the phones so no one could call the police. It's a little unbelievable, but still better than what this movie is asking us to believe. I also have a hard time buying that people would be as horrible as some of these adults are. I know that when you're hurt and terrified you can start to fall apart, but movies like this always piss me off when people start turning on the teenagers and blaming them for everything bad that happens.
There, I said it. It pissed me off when it happened. in "The Witch," and it pisses me off here, for many of the same reasons. At one point in my life I was the teenage girl that got dumped on and blamed for everything that went wrong in my family. I remember how isolating and terrifying that was, because when you're a teenager you're not a little kid anymore, but you're not an adult either, and when the people who are supposed to protect and take care of you are ganging up on you and you fear for your life and suddenly have to protect yourself from them...that's terrifying.
That feeling is scarier than anything in a movie could ever be, and yet even after years and years, these movies reach those memories and that place in me, and it hurts. But at the same time, wounds don't heal if you cover them up and let them fester. You have to rip the bandages off sometimes and expose the wounds to air before they can be cleaned and healed. And movies like this do that. This is why I'll always be grateful for these movies.
So in conclusion, this movie isn't perfect, but it's pretty close. And as much as I love kids, I'm glad I won't have to take mine to a playground after watching this movie. As Casey so eloquently says at the beginning of this movie, before anything bad has happened, "Did you ever hear of contraception?" Amen, sister.
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