The 1976 film Who Can Kill a Child? (¿Quién puede matar a un niño?), directed by Narciso Ibáñez Serrador—the Spanish filmmaker, actor, and screenwriter—was released in the United States under the title Island of the Damned.
It tells the story of a foreign couple who travel to a small, seemingly peaceful island off the coast of Spain for a holiday. At the beginning, everything about their trip is pleasant and inviting. But gradually they realize that no adults live on the island; only children wander through it, behaving in strange and disturbing ways. At first this seems merely puzzling, but little by little the tone grows increasingly eerie and deranged.
The film was made one year after the death of General Franco. Spain stood suspended between fear and hope, in a transition from dictatorship to democracy, or something resembling it—scarred by years of censorship, torture, and terror, and only just beginning to rethink its own dark past. Drawing on this liminal and feverish atmosphere, the director opens the film with a documentary-style montage of the crimes of World War II, famine, and mass killings: a condensation of the collective memory of a country wounded by history, and of a world in which bullying leaders have repeatedly inflicted suffering on their own people and on others.
In that montage, regardless of where or when the images come from, what they all share is victimhood and the harm inflicted upon children. This visual prologue prepares us to enter a world that, at first glance, resembles a conventional horror story: “strangers arrive in an unknown place and become trapped.” But the film’s central idea seeps slowly into its very body: will yesterday’s victimized survivors become tomorrow’s monsters? Serrador develops the fear of the unknown and turns it into a moral problem: the innocent victims of yesterday have become the merciless judges of today—judges whose robe is hostility and whose verdict is revenge upon the cruel generation that came before them. Faced with such innocence, their gaze is stained with rage. Once this question is posed, what becomes of moral duty? Does the cliché of the “innocent child” still hold when that child’s sentence is the destruction of those who created a ruined world?
Read in a contemporary way, the film is in some respects even more legible now than it was at the time of its making. On an allegorical level, it reflects the crisis of communication between generations in the age of modernity, especially in relation to Generation Z—a generation that, in the eyes of many older people, seems neither understandable, nor controllable, nor even predictable. But are not these vengeful children themselves the offspring of the very order that was shaped through violence, however paternalistic or well-intentioned that violence may have claimed to be?
Generation Z is not innocent in the traditional sense. Rather, it carries and embodies a kind of collective anger—an anger that is not merely an emotional reaction to surrounding events, but one born from a stained memory and inherited from political, economic, environmental, and cultural crises. There are smiles on the lips of Serrador’s children, but behind those smiles lies the prospect of violence and anarchy. This is a violence that, in today’s world, is entirely intelligible, because it arises from historical injustice and from the domination of traditional morality and upbringing. It is a violence that lay in wait for a long time and now, through a new language and new tools—technology and digital activism—is conquering the old world.
Adults today, like the parents in this film, are helpless in the face of the new generation. But not because they are incapable of resistance; rather, because they do not know how to engage with these familiar strangers. The language of the new world is technology, and the distance between the outlook of the previous generation and the children of Generation Z has grown deeper and wider than ever. Dialogue is not simple, law has lost much of its force, and traditional morality has become ineffective in the face of this new threat. The title of the film, in our own time, might be reread in this way: “Can you ignore a generation when it is itself the survivor and product of the very order you created?”
