Is there a more terrifying sight, come Christmas morning, than a horde of children descending on the presents that have slowly amassed around the tree and totally gutting them, tearing them to pieces and leaving behind nothing more than a pile of wrapping paper viscera? Seriously, it's like that one bit from the end of Day Of The Dead when the zombies tear that guy literally limb from limb. Only with more bows. It's that innate childhood capacity for energetic violence that informs The Children. Creepy kids are a dime a dozen in horror films, but usually they're just lank-haired ghosts from Japanese horror or the Midwich Cuckoos types. Very rarely are kids seen as actually physically violent menaces who could do you serious harm, and thus necessitate you being violent towards them. That's a particular societal taboo broken by this underrated (and admittedly, at times, downright silly) British horror from a few years ago. A few families meet up in a remote countryside home for the holidays, with their respective toddlers in tow. The kids start acting strange, being ill and stuff, before it becomes clear that something evil has taken root in their brains, and the kids start to (again) literally tear their families apart. Sometimes genuinely chilling, sometimes a little girl examining some gore in a plastic Wendy house.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
