The Mumpsimus

Yes, the title got me. I knew almost nothing about Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's 1976 movie ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? except that it was a horror movie, and I figured a horror movie with a title like that ought to at least be interesting.  And it is that. The film has had other titles over the years -- Island of Death, Death is Child's Play, Lucifer's Curse, Los Niños , etc. -- but Who Can Kill a Child? is apparently the original one, and is the one used on the 2007 DVD from Dark Sky Films , the edition I watched.  It's provocative, but it's also perfectly accurate for the movie. The story is fairly simple: a nice British couple visit Spain and travel to a small, secluded island the husband had visited twelve years before.  When they arrive, the island seems deserted.  The husband says the people often went to festivals on the other side of the island.  Eventually, he and his wife discover the truth: the children of the island have, for mysterious rea...

Richard Hughes's first and most famous book, A High Wind in Jamaica , is one of the strangest novels I've ever read, which is really saying something. It's both delightful and disturbing in the way it presents -- in an unfailingly light tone -- children as amoral aliens. The novel is rich with irony, and it's not a satire so much as a relentless attack on sentimental notions of childhood. The possible interpretations of the novel are likely endless, but in many ways the book itself is about interpretation -- about the futility of trying to interpret a child's experiences and thoughts through adult eyes. (It's also worth noting that the novel was first published in the U.S. under the title The Innocent Voyage , which I'm rather more fond of than its better-known title. It was also once illustrated by Lynd Ward .) I was surprised this morning to discover an essay by British teacher Victoria de Rijke in a 1995 issue of Children's Literature in Educatio...