INTRODUCTION

Hello, and welcome to The Monster & The Child, where childhood studies and monster studies collide! I am Dr. Kathleen Kellett, and today’s video is all about what happens when kids go monstrous en masse. We’ll be looking at four different stories that pit groups of kids against adults at the turning point of a historical moment. Now, four is usually more than I do at one time, so instead of a comprehensive plot blow-by-blow, we’re going to focus on the pertinent details of how the collective monstrosity of the children is constructed in each story and what that says about particular adult anxieties. The stories in question are Village of the Damned from 1960, Who Can Kill a Child? from 1976, Citadel from 2012, and The Girl with All the Gifts, which is both a novel published in 2014 and then adapted into a film in 2016. In each of these cases, we confront the question of what happens when the next generation completely breaks from the generations that came before. What does that mean for everybody’s future?

Before we dive into that, just a reminder that I have Monster Book Clubs open for enrollment if you want more monster education and discussion in your life! The adult Monster Book Club is already underway, but since there is a new book every month, you can sign up at any time. We meet on the last Wednesday of the month, and for August, we’ll be discussing Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster. When you sign up, you also get access to a private Discord server where you can chat about monster stuff throughout the month. The teen Monster Book Club is still recruiting, so if you want to jump on board for that, we will meet on the last Thursday of the month once we have enough people to get the ball rolling! Meanwhile, I am working towards launching my five-month educational mentorship program, Youth Monsterology, in the spring, and I’m hoping to reach lots of teen students with programming throughout the year, so if you work in a school or a library or some other organization like that, I would absolutely love to hear from you to see if we can collaborate on a workshop together! You can find more information about all of this at themonsterandthechild.com, which is linked below in the description. You can also email me at themonsterandthechild – all spelled out – at gmail.com If you want to support these programs, you can also check out my Patreon, where you get to vote on future video topics and watch extra monster story reaction videos. So I hope I see you somewhere in these various monster communities!

            All right, so back to our packs of monster kids, or the “child collective,” as Andrew Scahill calls them in “It Takes a Child to Raze a Village: Demonizing Youth Rebellion.” That’s raze as in R-A-Z-E, which is fantastic. A+ title. Scahill argues that “these films speak to a deeply embedded fear about losing control of the future itself.” I’ve talked plenty of times on this channel about how one of the key concepts when it comes to understanding the social role of childhood is the concept of futurity. “I believe the children are the future,” as Whitney once sang. This is a concept that a lot of people new to critical childhood studies can struggle to unpack, because it doesn’t feel like a social construct. It just feels literally true. The children today are the adults of tomorrow; that’s how time works. But how do we – collectively, on a culture-wide level – react to that idea? What meaning do we make out of it, and how do we consequently organize everyone’s lives – including children’s lives? The answers to these questions are where we find the social constructions: the collective beliefs and ideologies that, though they may feel natural and immutable, do actually vary across time and space.

            So what are some of the meanings embedded in “the children are the future” in modern Western society? Well, one of them is the idea that children are responsible for ensuring that “our way of life” continues on, and what is most important to “our way of life” is generally very responsive to world events. So, for example, during the Cold War, one of the most important things about “our way of life” in the West was capitalism. The child would ensure the future by becoming a productive member of the economy. Other features of “our way of life” – speaking in terms of the mainstream status quo and the institutions that are most powerful – have historically included the heterosexually reproductive nuclear family as the primary unit of society and certain types of Christianity over other religions. The continuation of whiteness, obviously, has been a really big one in “the West,” and with that, it becomes clear that maybe not all the children are the future, are they? Futurity, like innocence, is an attribute that is touted as universally applicable to childhood, but has never been equally bestowed across all sectors of society.

            Some people might be saying, hey, that’s not what I mean when I say “children are the future.” And that is fair: it’s important to recognize that the concept of futurity is not only conservative or reactionary. It’s a concept that progressives appeal to all the time, when talking about building the kinds of systems that can safeguard the future that children are set to inherit, in terms of things like environmental protections, personal liberties, etc. And, like, I also want those things, a lot. But one thing we should be very aware of regardless of political orientation is the propensity to focus on the future at the expense of the child’s present. Children are not just future adults; they are full human beings now. So what do they need now? And what happens if that is at odds with the systems that adults want to uphold?

            Well, sometimes when that happens, we turn those unruly or too-difficult children into monsters, at least in our storytelling. So let’s dive into the anti-future implications of the monstrous child collective and unpack exactly what we adults are so afraid of.

“THEY HAVE TO BE TAUGHT”: CONTROLLING THE FUTURE

            Let us begin our journey with the monstrous child collective in the sleepy village of Midwich in England. And when I say sleepy, I mean that literally: Village of the Damned, based on the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos, begins when, on a seemingly ordinary day, everyone within the town limits suddenly falls unconscious. The government mounts an investigation while this unconsciousness is still an effect – and pity the poor pilot they send, who crashes his plane when he flies too low over the town. But then the unconsciousness abruptly ends of its own accord, and everyone seems unharmed – for a bit. Starting several weeks later, many of the women of Midwich begin to discover that they are pregnant. For some, this is a happy discovery, like for Professor Zellaby and his wife, but for others, like those who haven’t slept with their husbands lately and are now accused of cheating – or those who’ve never had sex at all – well, the news is understandably more alarming. The women’s pregnancies advance unnaturally quickly, and they all give birth to very large, very blonde, but seemingly healthy full-term babies well before nine months have passed. The children, who also all have striking eyes, continue to grow at super speed, and their intelligence advances at a similar rate. They can use reason and logic that would typically be beyond even a much older child – and what one learns, the rest seem to automatically know.

            Understandably, not all the families are thrilled with these unsettling developments. Zellaby, however, thinks that this is all fascinating and ripe with potential. He accepts fairly easily that he’s not the biological father of his son, David, but he thinks that Midwich – and England in general – can take advantage of these unprecedented children to make leaps and bounds in science and technology. There’s only one problem: these children are given to violence for any perceived wrong, and they are like that from the very beginning. When one of the mothers accidentally gives her baby the bottle when it’s still too hot, the baby glares at her with glowing eyes. Then, the mother scalds herself – at the mind control behest of her tiny child. Things do not get better as the kids grow older and band together. If you slight one of them, you may soon find yourself doing something that you really don’t want to do.

            Zellaby’s brother-in-law, Alan Bernard, a major in the army, argues with Zellaby that the children’s intelligence doesn’t matter, but instead “What’s important about them is whether they’re good or bad. And these children are bad, to everyone but you.” Zellaby argues back, “But they are children, and children are not born with a sense of moral values. They have to be taught.” Zellaby is sure that he can do this, despite the children showing no indication that they register either pain or love. There is a government meeting where a bunch of adult men try to decide what to do with these children. Throughout the world, there were other inexplicable blonde baby hotspots that occurred at the same time, though most of those children have already died, whether through nonviable pregnancies and births or through community violence at the appearance of ethnically Other children in areas where blondeness doesn’t really exist. Which is an interesting detail in this mid-century British film, at a time when the Empire is losing a lot of its former colonies to independence. On the one hand, we’re definitely painting nonwhite cultures as reactive and superstitious and backwards to the point of infanticide, but there are also potentially shades of projection, that sort of fear of what if the story were flipped, and whiteness – as represented through blondeness – were actually the oppressed category? In other words, what if what we’ve done to the whole rest of the world were done to us? But with that said, in light of what unfolds in the rest of the story, there’s also the interesting implication that the people who got rid of the kids in the first place were actually correct to do so. That could lend itself to another sort of fascinating reading of this projection – almost an admission of imperial guilt. All of this adds to an oppressive atmosphere of Cold War anxiety and uncertainty.

Speaking of the Cold War, the only other group of uncanny children still living is in Russia, because of course they are. This adds to the urgency of the government committee in figuring out what to do with them. They float various theories of their origins, and the one that seems most likely is that they were conceived via some sort of alien energies beamed down into specific areas of the planet. Zellaby remains adamant that the children can be a national asset, and he successfully argues for one year to study and educate them. Though they have no emotional regard for Zellaby, they, and especially David, do seem to have a certain level of respect for him, though they refuse to answer direct questions about their origins or life on other planets. David says, “It’d be better if you didn’t ask these questions. We have to learn from you.” This uneven knowledge exchange is part of what makes these children so troubling. They observe us and gather information, but we can’t do the same to them. Children aren’t meant to know more than adults, let alone withhold their knowledge. That’s supposed to be our role.

Scahill points out that child collective films, as established by the precedent set in Village of the Damned, “focus intently on acts of surveillance by children, whose acts of looking, accompanied by silence, constitute a knowing and assaultive gaze.” Indeed, the children’s gaze is their defining characteristic. They all look as one, a group consciousness that overwhelms any single individual. And when those eyes start to glow, watch out. Despite Zellaby’s tutelage, they continue to take violent revenge on any perceived wrong. A man accidentally hits (but does not kill or seriously injure) one of the children with his car. The film takes pains to show that the driver wasn’t at fault and that he is concerned for the child’s welfare. But that doesn’t matter to the kids, who give him a collective fiery stare until he gets back into the car and drives himself straight into a wall, resulting in his death. When their victim’s brother accuses them of wrongdoing, they mind-control him into shooting himself. As Scahill writes, “The children have the ability, through seeing and knowing, to halt and control the will of others.” Adults are rendered absolutely powerless to the machinations of the younger generation. In other words, the adult will ceases to matter when it comes to shaping the future, not just for themselves, but for the whole world. In “The Global Village of the Damned: A Counter-Narrative for the Post-War Child,” Steven Bruhm explains that these kids are “counterfeit children,” a term similar to one that I’ve used in the past, “imposter children.” They aren’t actually children, but they make us doubt our faith in the real thing alongside them, presenting “a crucial counter-narrative to the master narrative of Futurity’s Child upon which they lean” (158).

Before we discuss how this plays out in Midwich – the endings of these stories will be the topic of the next chapter in this video – let’s hop over to another example of a future imperiled by a child collective. The evocatively titled Who Can Kill a Child? was the winner of a Patreon poll – as was Village of the Damned, initially – and I am now glad that it won, although upon first watching it, my immediate reaction was “oh no.” This is because the Spanish-made but mostly-English-language film begins with eight whole minutes of newsreel footage and commentary from various twentieth century atrocities and conflicts. First, we have the liberation of Auschwitz and the uncovering of Nazi experimentation on children. Then, we have the Partition of India, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and finally the Nigerian Civil War. Each of these segments focuses particularly on the suffering – and especially the starving – of children, and we are confronted with those actual images of actual kids. In between each segment, we hear unsettling children’s laughter and singing. The final reel ends with the newsreader saying, “As always, the most affected by the tragedy are the children.”

So by the time the actual story starts, eight minutes in, I’m already staring at the screen in total horror. To me, this immediately felt like such an exploitative way to begin a fictional horror movie, by displaying the starving bodies of real children around the world who definitely didn’t consent to being used in the film. And I still think that’s pretty true. However, in The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, Jessica Balanzategui points out something I really should have clocked, which is that the Spanish Civil War is conspicuously absent from this litany of suffering. Who Can Kill a Child? came out in 1976, less than six months after the fascist leader of Spain, Francisco Franco, had died. His party’s government was still in place at the time, though it was in the process of decline. Media censorship, however, was still being enforced, so the filmmakers literally couldn’t include any criticism of the Civil War or the decades of fascism that followed. But the Spanish audiences would have automatically filled in the missing conflict. The silence, as mandated by law, becomes less capitulation and more indictment, especially since the film proper is set in Spain and concerns Spanish children. As Balanzategui puts it, Spain’s own bloody history “eerily overarches [the opening montage] through its absence” (110). Does this excuse the display of other children’s suffering? To me, no, because those children did not sign up to be symbolic. But the historical context does make the opening thought-provoking, even if I still find it ethically fraught.

The story itself concerns an English couple, Tom and Evelyn, who are on vacation in Spain. They have two children back home, and Evelyn is pregnant with their third. Tom speaks Spanish and has been to Spain before, and he wants to take his wife to Almanzora, a sleepy little island that he has fond memories of. Evelyn does not speak Spanish but is gamely along for the ride. Neither of them know that bodies have begun to wash up on the shore from that island’s general direction. Even if Tom did know, though, he wouldn’t tell his wife, because he studiously refuses to tell her like anything throughout the whole movie, beginning with a conversation he has with a Spanish store clerk about children’s suffering after hearing a radio broadcast about war in Thailand. Tom doesn’t want to upset the pregnant Evelyn. But they do talk around the subject a little later, when Tom brings up a film in which someone kills their kids to “save them from the world of the future.” Evelyn literally scoffs at the idea.

They depart via two-person fishing boat for Almanzora the next day, which a group of quiet boys help them dock when they arrive. Other than that, the island appears empty. At first, Tom assumes there’s a fiesta on the other side of the island and he goes off to search for someone to check them into their hostel while Evelyn waits in an abandoned café. A young girl wanders in and seems delighted to see a pregnant woman. She lays her head against Evelyn’s belly and smiles. But after she leaves, it’s a ghost town again. When Tom and Evelyn finally see an adult – an old man – a little girl walks up and happily beats him to death with his own cane. Tom tries to stop her, but she just giggles and runs away. He stashes the man’s body in a barn and insists to Evelyn that everything is fine and the girl was just playing with the man, even as Evelyn is like I saw with my eyeballs what just happened, what are you talking about. Finally, they get answers from a wounded man who tells them his story: last night, all the children on the island woke up and spilled into the streets, laughing together. They proceeded to go from house to house to murder all of the adult inhabitants. The man explains, “It seemed as though they were playing, but they carried knives and sticks.” He grabbed his gun but didn’t use it. No one fought back, he explains, “because who can kill a child?”

Now, the opening sequence already answered the question of who can kill children: nations, governments, armies. But the singular in the title strikes me as significant. In all these global atrocities, children are victimized in the aggregate. A single child is something precious, priceless. A mass of children may just be part of the enemy, or even if they’re not, they’re collateral damage. Adults believe that they value childhood because of their love for individual children, but they fail to ensure the safety of the entire class. And now it seems the kids have noticed. They kill another tourist, a stranded Dutch woman, and Tom finds the girls divvying up her clothes while the boys curiously remove her underwear. They leave when they notice an adult watching, but not from shame or remorse. Adults just are not welcome in their world, and will eventually be killed, though they’re in no particular hurry. The wounded man leaves when his daughter comes for him, even though he knows he’s following her to his death. So from then on, it’s a race for Tom and Evelyn to escape the island before the children decide it’s their turn to go.

The viewer is treated to many shots of the children all arranged together, silently watching the adults. Just like in Village of the Damned, their knowing, violent gaze marks the adults as their lessers and their victims. Their gaze is also the way they transmit their hive-mind-like awareness and violence. Tom and Evelyn make it to the opposite side of the island, where a woman, her mother, and her kids occupy a house removed from the rest of the village. They don’t know what’s happened, and their kids haven’t yet been turned. The mother engages in some casual child abuse, smacking her kid just for just looking at their guests, and the grandmother laughs. Then the rest of the kids turn up and stare into these last few island children’s eyes. Their smiles drop and their faces twitch as they are brought into the collective. They let Tom and Evelyn escape, but the mother and grandmother are the next to go.

Evelyn is having a hard time believing all of this: “They’re children! They’re just little children!” Tom tries to make sense of it and muses, “It’s as though they thought we adults were their enemy. Perhaps the children of this island, guided by instinct, or by an evolutionary development, have started to …” He doesn’t finish that sentence. Neither instinct nor evolutionary development make biological sense with the eye contact transmission of the violent purpose, but we’re never given more information than that. The implication is clear: these children have awoken to the fact that adults pose the most threat to children. With a playful attitude, they have reacted to this knowledge by wiping the adults out.

Tom and Evelyn barricade themselves into a building for the night, but the kids boost a tiny little boy into an upper window, where he aims a gun at Evelyn. Without hesitation, Tom does what the villagers could not, and shoots that kid dead. Evelyn starts crying hysterically – a reasonable thing to do at this point, and the actor really does sell it – and asks, “Do those children realize what they’re doing?” Tom can’t say, and Evelyn insists, “A normal child is not capable of killing an adult.” Rather gently, Tom answers, “Well, I’m a normal man, and I managed to propose that we kill a child.” And if this film has a thesis statement, I’d say that was it. The way adults feel about childhood and the way we act towards childhood are badly disconnected. And, as Scahill explains, the film suggests through its opening montage “that these children – and by extension, all children – constitute a justifiable revolution against the adults who systematically murder them in genocidal numbers through acts of aggression towards one another.”

Balanzategui explains that in films such as this one, “the child’s spectral empowerment of suppressed traumas allows a reconsideration of entrenched teleological narratives not only of growing up, but of national progress and accepted history” (96). What an indictment this movie must have felt like at the end of a dictator’s long career, a decades-long span that had been defined by its attempts to centralize and crystallize Spanish-ness as something grand and everlasting. Balanzategui tells us that “In Spain, this relentless looking forward at the expense of adequately assimilating the past has become a defining condition of modernity, both in the period directly following the Civil War and again after the long-anticipated collapse of the Franco dictatorship after his death on 20 November 1975” (97). Without ever outright stating it, this movie’s inescapable implication is that that project failed so badly that the nation’s children would rather destroy all the adults than inherit the future they made for them.

Let’s now look at another vision of national futurity collapsing with Citadel. Released in 2012, Citadel is an example of the British subgenre of hoodie horror. In “Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know? Hoodies in Contemporary British Horror Cinema,” Anne-Lise Marin-Lamellet explains that hoodie horror can be either supernatural or not, but “the basic plot uniting these films is that of a gang of hooded youths preying on adults.” The hoodies are generally working class or impoverished, and their victims “can be middle-class but also working class,” but are always more “respectable” in some regard, and are “pitted against what is perceived to be an increasingly rougher underclass, using a dichotomy that is highly reminiscent of the old Victorian distinction to establish social hierarchy.” Indeed, the hooded youths are depicted as “amoral and bloodthirsty monsters.” This subgenre had its heyday in the aughts and early 2010s.

Now, I’m not British and I will say upfront that I have little personal experience with this subgenre. Before watching Citadel, I hadn’t seen any hoodie horror proper, though one of my favorite movies is Attack the Block, which I discussed in a previous video about childhood innocence and race. Attack the Block is really a deconstruction of hoodie horror, in which the delinquent and vilified “hoodies” are ultimately the heroes, and even without knowing the subgenre itself, its treatment of how age, race, and class intersect in terms of society-wide mistreatment of Black and brown youths is very clear and salient. Also, it’s really funny and has great creature design and fabulous performances, and everyone should watch it.

I can’t say I feel the same about Citadel. This film begins with a white couple, Tommy and Joann, moving out of their apartment in a condemned tower block, which is a public housing high rise, for U.S. audiences. They seem pleased to be moving, and overall they’re a happy working-class couple. Tommy gets in the elevator, but as the doors close, he sees a group of kids in hoodies – notably young kids, since they aren’t an adult height – surround Joann and stab her with syringes. He runs back up the stairs as soon as the elevator lets him out and rushes Joann to the hospital, but it’s too late. Their daughter, Elsa, survives, but Joann remains in a coma with an “unidentified infection,” and is eventually taken off life support. Tommy is left to deal with intense agoraphobia. The hooded kids loiter around Tommy’s new public housing when the power goes out, which is frequently. Tommy, played by Aneurin Barnard doing his absolute best tortured Frodo, is told by his therapist that he’s more likely to be victimized again because of his fearful body language, and I’m not sure if that’s good therapy, but it is at the heart of how this film treats fear in general.

Tommy has struck up a friendship with the nurse Marie, who is played by Wunmi Mosaku, who has thankfully gotten roles much more suited to her talents in the years since. At Joann’s funeral, the presiding priest tells Tommy to leave the area, because “they will come after her,” meaning baby Elsa. Marie dismisses the priest as nuts, but after the hoodies break into Tommy’s home, he seeks the priest out for more information. The priest takes Tommy, along with his blind adopted son/ward, Danny, to the condemned tower block and says, “This is where the scum are coming from.” The priest explains that the hoodies are pursuing Tommy because he is afraid of them – they sense fear and track it like dogs. Otherwise, they don’t have much sensory awareness. As they talk in the car, the hoodies shuffle out of the tower block like zombies. The priest asks for Tommy’s help in torching the building with the hoodies inside, and Tommy objects with, “They’re kids!” The priest responds, “Kids? I don’t see any kids. Do they look like kids to you?” As they get closer, we can see that they don’t, really – their hands are all corpse-y and mottled. Tommy begs the priest to get them out of there as the hoodies begin to attack the car, and the priest obliges, but he is disgusted by Tommy’s fear.

Marie, on the other hand, is disgusted by the priest. When Tommy tells her that the priest doesn’t think the hoodies are human, she insists, “Most of them are just unloved, runaways from a broken home. What they need is our sympathy.” Later, when Marie walks Tommy back to the bus stop, they encounter a pack of hoodies in an underpass tunnel. Tommy refuses to pass them, but Marie says she’ll show him everything is fine, and she goes ahead. They attack and kill her. So much for sympathy, clearly! It’s worth mentioning that Marie is the only character of color here. The hoodies themselves are zombie-gray, mostly, so racialization is a bit ambiguous, but from the little we get to actually see of their bodies and skin, they appear to be more mutated white children than kids of color, so we’re not doing an evil Black urban youth thing here, at least. But having the only Black character be naively sympathetic unto her death, and then having two white male characters rightfully take violent charge of the urban youth scourge is … a choice.

The hoodies give chase and knock Tommy out on a bus, then steal Elsa. When Tommy seeks the priest out for help, he is unsurprised: “That’s what the bastards do. They take children.” Little sweet blind Danny, in fact, was rescued as a baby from the hoodies’ clutches, before he could be changed completely into one of their ranks. The priest says that, because of this, Danny doesn’t secrete cortisol, which means that he’s invisible to the hoodies, so if Tommy stays near him, then he’ll be invisible to them, too. Tommy does not raise the obvious objection that that makes literally no sense at all. The priest explains that the tower block itself “poisons” the kids that the hoodies kidnap – and, indeed, we later see them literally licking the mold off of the walls of the building as food – but the original hoodies had an even darker origin. The priest tells the story of a junkie – his word – who hid in the basement of the tower. She died of an unidentified infection after giving birth to twins, who survived unaccounted for and grew up as feral children. Then, “they interbred, raised their spawn the only way they knew how.” Tommy says, “So they are children?”, but the priest says, “Don’t think of them as human or that they could be saved. I tried.” Now that he’s given up on that impossible dream, he has come to the conclusion that “They’re a cancer. Cutting it out is the most merciful thing you can do.”

So there’s a whole hell of a lot here. Clearly, hoodie horror is a reaction to urban neglect and impoverishment and the effect those things can have on young people. Like the Cold War anxieties in Village of the Damned and the fraught twentieth-century Spanish context of Who Can Kill a Child?, Citadel reflects the fears and failures of its own time and place. Marie at one point mentions a revitalization project that is supposed to improve the unnamed city’s public housing, but Tommy dismisses this as a promise that the government is never going to actually keep. Again, the implication is that society at large has destroyed its own future, this time through its disregard for those in poverty. However, you will also have noticed that the kids themselves are explicitly portrayed as irredeemable, inhuman, and ontologically violent. This is also true in the other two child collective movies and in this subgenre overall, though Citadel takes things a step further by stripping the children of any ability to speak or reason.

Now, not all hoodie horror does that, but for some reason, the director, Ciarán Foy, seems to think that this choice makes his monsters less objectionable than others. In an interview with reviewer Bernice M. Murphy, Foy says that he doesn’t think that his evil-hooded-children-originating-from-a-dilapidated-tower-block film is really hoodie horror, because both the protagonist Tommy and Foy himself are also working class. So how could it be classist? Besides, he says, “my antagonists are not kids, they’re inbred feral mutants!” (88). Murphy agrees with Foy’s assessment: “if anything, the real enemy in Citadel isn’t the feral creatures who roam the neglected urban cityscape, but the cycles of poverty, neglect and addiction that birthed them in the first place” (89). Except the hoodie kids literally are “the real enemy” of the film, because learning to face and fight them is Tommy the protagonist’s entire character arc. He doesn’t confront the aforementioned cycles except to complain about the endlessly deferred revitalization project precisely once. Also, making your impoverished child characters inbred and abandoned doesn’t actually make the depiction any better! Like, those are conditions that exist for actual kids, too!

By his own admission, Foy is extremely close to the subject matter. When he was a teenager, he was mugged by a gang of young people and subsequently dealt with the same agoraphobia that Tommy struggles with (83). While I obviously feel awful that Foy experienced the trauma of violent crime, I don’t think that the conclusion he has evidently come to is helpful for real kids – either kids like the perpetrators or working class victimized kids like Foy himself once was. Because he may distinguish between the good working-class folks and the monsters (separated, apparently, by proximity to “junkies”), but, like, the government isn’t gonna. Citadel is the clearest example of a problem that plagues monster child collective films: even if the kids themselves aren’t 100% at fault for their own monstrosity, they are still the ones who must be held to violent account for it.

Before we get into how that plays out here, let’s look at our final story, which I’ve included as a bit of a contrast: The Girl with All the Gifts. Thiswas published in 2014 and adapted for the screen pretty immediately thereafter, releasing in 2016. The author, M.R. Carey, also wrote the screenplay. This doesn’t really qualify as a classic child collective horror because part of what defines that, according to Scahill, is that the children are mostly undifferentiated. We might have a leader within the group like David in Village of the Damned, but they ultimately are not individuals – their identity is just as part of the whole. Here, however, we focus on a single child and her interiority as our protagonist. This child is Melanie, who has lived all that she can remember of her life in a high security military facility. She spends most of her time alone in a bare cell, but she is tightly restrained in a wheelchair each day to go to school. This is the highlight of her existence, not only because she loves to learn, but she adores her favorite teacher, Helen Justineau. Miss Justineau speaks to the children kindly and tells them stories from Greek mythology – such as, thematically, the story of Pandora, who released all the world’s evils, but also its hope. This makes for a stark contrast with the other adult interaction that Melanie gets, from military guards who call the children “friggin’ abortions.”

Melanie writes a story in class about a little girl who saves a beautiful woman from a “friggin’ abortion,” and then the girl and the woman live happily ever after. Miss Justineau, reading the obvious subtext, emotionally pats the top of Melanie’s restrained head, which causes Sergeant Eddie Parks to burst in and reprimand her. He demonstrates why the adult personnel are not meant to touch or care for the children in their charge. With his own spit, he scrubs a spot on his arm and holds it in front of a restrained boy’s face. The boy begins to make animal-like sounds and snap his jaws, trying to get to the flesh. As the scent, freed from the blocker gel the adults wear at all times, hits the other students, they react the same way. These kids, including Melanie but previously unbeknownst to her, are zombies – or, in the lingo of this post-apocalyptic setting, “Hungries.”

The Hungries in The Girl with All the Gifts are infected with a fungal parasite – very similar deal to The Last of Us – and it jumped the species barriers from ants all the way up to humans. In the novel, we are told, “Of course, the fungus might have had a helping hand. It might have been grown in a lab, for any number of reasons; coaxed along with gene-splicing and injected RNA. Those were very big jumps” (54). So early on, the issue of profoundly destructive warfare is raised: humanity’s propensity for decimating itself in its attempts to dominate other sectors of its own species. In “The Borderland of Humanity: Monsters and Humans in Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts,” Mahdieh Kheradmand also points out that, “In the twenty-first century, significant challenges, particularly the influx of immigrants into affluent Western nations, have led to the portrayal of these individuals as monstrous entities reminiscent of zombies” (34). And, indeed, this is a story set in England written right before Brexit, so that xenophobic and insular movement was already well underway. Kheradmand points out that not only have hordes of zombies been used in plenty of media as allegories of fears of migration, but focusing on zombie kids in particular really highlights the adult terror of displacement, both physically and culturally. What happens when the next generation is unrecognizable to you? What if they devour the world you knew and leave nothing of it behind?

Melanie and the other child Hungries differ from the adult zombies who crowd the fences of the military base because, when they are not overcome with the scent of fresh meat, the kids can reason and learn. How this is possible is more of a mystery in the novel than in the film, which has definitely been streamlined and pared down for the adaptation. For example, in the book, the military is just as much (if not more) under threat from the “junkers,” bandit groups that use Hungries as weapons, as they are from the wild Hungries themselves, but the film cuts this element entirely, somewhat to its thematic detriment, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Another change from the original to the adaptation that we should address is the race of the main characters. In the novel, Melanie is very pale and blonde, whereas Miss Justineau is a dark-skinned Black woman. However, in the film, as you have seen, Melanie is portrayed by the Black actor Sennia Nanua – in a really great performance for a 13-year-old, I might add – and Miss Justineau is played by the white Gemma Arterton. The young soldier Kieran, who is white in the book, is also played by a Black actor in the film. Like the excision of the junkers, these changes affect how the narrative can be read, as Karen J. Renner explains in “Zombie Desire, Queerness, and Race in The Girl with All the Gifts.” We’ll unpack how as we unfold more of the details, but I wanted to flag those changes upfront so we can compare impacts as we go.

First, we need to meet our next major character, Dr. Caldwell (white in both versions). She does experiments on the Hungry children, hoping that their resistance to the mind-destroying properties of the zombie fungus will yield a vaccine for the rest of the population. In order to do this research, she vivisects the Hungry kids alive to harvest their brains and spines. She does not believe the kids are really people, but rather that the fungus is acting as a puppeteer, albeit a more sophisticated one than it manages with the adults. She is about to harvest Melanie when the base is breached – by junkers in the novel and by Hungries in the film.

In the chaos of the breach, Melanie kills her first human to protect Miss Justineau. The circumstances differ a bit from the novel to the film, but the result is the same: Melanie feels her bestial Hungry nature to its fullest extent while also directing it purposefully, which goes against all assumptions of zombie mindlessness. Her love for Miss Justineau is incorporated into her monstrosity, making her not necessarily a threat to all adults, unlike the other monster children we’ve discussed. If an adult can care for a monster child, then they might be safe.

After the attack, we wind up with a small group of survivors: Melanie, Justineau, Sergeant Parks, Kieran, and Caldwell. They are trying to reach another military safe haven, but will have to traverse miles of Hungry-infested no-man’s-land to get there. The dynamics of this group are obviously explored in much more detail in the novel, where all of these characters have close-third point-of-view sections. The film is focalized more closely through Melanie alone, mostly, I would assume, due to time constraints. Frankly, I think this novel would lend itself to a limited series adaptation more than a movie, but that also tends to be my opinion about most book adaptations. In any case, this is where it would be worth exploring some of the racial dynamics in a little more depth. Renner lays out one major concern with the book: “Justineau, the only major character of color in the novel, becomes an object of sexual fantasy for almost all the other characters” (167). That includes not just the men in the group, but the sensually-charged feelings that Melanie has for her teacher. In the passages where Melanie desires Justineau (though she does not frame her desire as sexual, the reader and the other characters recognize it as “a crush”), frequent mention is made of the contrast between Melanie’s pale whiteness and Justineau’s dark Blackness (178). However, in the film, with a Black Melanie and a Black Kieran, we have the two least institutionally empowered people – the Hungry child and the very young junior soldier – under the command of three white adults. That clearly impacts the implications of how the rest of the plot unfolds.

So, for the majority of this story, it isn’t a classic child collective narrative, because Melanie is not part of a collective. She is separated from her classmates by restraints, making it difficult for her to even look at them. Then, with the survivors of the breach, she is both the only child and the only monster. But in their travels, they discover other feral children, and Melanie realizes that these are her people. Though they have no language, they have formed communities with each other, with bonds of care and leadership structures. They lay traps and use tools to hunt. They are fully sapient Hungries, just like Melanie.

At first, however, these children are her enemies, as they lay a trap for and kill Kieran, whom Melanie has come to care for. Kieran had also come to care for Melanie, and he has sympathy for the feral Hungry children, as well – which those children use against him. He threatens them with a grenade, but cannot bring himself to use it and kill all these kids that he recognizes as, if not humans, then still people.

Melanie is caught between these two types of people – the adult humans who raised her and the Hungry children who she would have belonged to if the military had not found her. Though the circumstances differ from book to film, Melanie has a confrontation with the latter to protect the former. She attacks their leader and kills him with his own weapon, a baseball bat. This choice of tool is certainly poignant: a symbol of wholesome childhood pastimes now completely divorced from its original meaning. In this scene in the film, we can see a lot of that child collective imagery that we’ve explored thus far. The Hungry children are largely undifferentiated, except for their leader. They don’t have a literal hive mind, but they operate in tandem in a way that’s made eerie by their lack of language. And they respond primarily to force. Melanie’s ability to provide this force shocks and disturbs the adult humans, even as they benefit from her protection. In the novel, she paints herself blue and dons a helmet to look like the heroes and gods of the stories Justineau had told. In the film, she just shrieks and growls like an animal asserting its dominance. The rest of the kids acknowledge her authority and run off after she demonstrates her strength by killing their leader.

So at this point, Melanie has taken charge of the child collective, but she still is not one of them, because she does not want what they want – or at least, not in the same way. But when, in the film, Parks calls them “dirty little fuckers,” she responds, “They just want to live. Everyone wants that.” And that is going to take us into how this story ends for the next section.

So let’s review. We’ve got four monstrous child collectives: alien-human hybrids in the Cold War, indeterminate but hypothesized biological hivemind animosity towards adults at the end of decades of fascism, “inbred mutants” in the context of poverty and institutional neglect, and fungal zombies in the mid-2010s, the era of Brexit, forever wars, and environmental degradation, which we haven’t talked about yet but will soon. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s tenet that “the monster always returns,” reimagined to fit its cultural context and all its attendant anxieties, certainly holds true here. The future seems to always be in danger, stretching decades into the past. So what are we adults supposed to do when the kids are not all right? What is the desired outcome when the next generation has turned on those who came before?

“NOT YOURS ANYMORE”: OWNING THE FUTURE

            Let us return to Midwich. In the wake of the murders of the driver and his brother, many of the adults in the village turn against their inexplicable progeny. Their feelings are not unique: we learn that the group of children in Russia have been nuked by their own government, causing, as one would imagine, extreme collateral damage and radioactive fallout. The USSR turned to such extreme measures because it’s otherwise pretty hard to kill kids who can both read and control people’s minds. The Midwich mob discovers this in the worst possible way when the children very calmly cause one of their number to use his torch to set himself aflame. Alan Bernard, arriving at the scene in his car, gets a brief impression of a pillar of fire out the window as he turns into the school. This was the most genuinely chilling moment of the movie for me.

            So at this point, Zellaby is forced to admit that his experiment has failed. These children cannot be brought into his society’s morality, because they simply will not bend on their primary focus: protecting their own. Right before they break Bernard’s mind, they tell him: “You have to be taught to leave us alone.” This reverses Zellaby’s line that the children have to be taught. Indeed, these kids believe that, if certain adults would adopt their ways, those adults would be better off. David tells Zellaby, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are.” As Bruhm puts it, “they perform a precocotiy and self-possession that leaves them no room to be molded by adults” (159). This makes sense as a Cold War narrative when we consider the prevailing stereotypes about communism as not just an economic system but as a worldview. Capitalist propaganda spread the fear that the inherent collective nature of communism would result in a kind of global hivemind, where all individuality and personal sentiment would be obliterated. This outlook was not seen as something that could be reasoned with: it could only be destroyed for the sake of a future that could still resemble the past.

            Now, the Soviets, being actual communists, couldn’t manage this destruction of the children without also destroying themselves, but of course the British Zellaby, wrong in his original assessment though he may have been, has the moral and mental fortitude to pull off a better solution. He manages to sneak a bomb, hidden in his briefcase, into the school, and he keeps the children from noticing it by building a brick wall around it in his mind. The children notice that he is hiding something and turn their collective stare onto him. The wall starts to crumble, but Zellaby holds out just long enough. The kids’ heads snap over to the briefcase a split second before the bomb goes off. The only additional adult life lost is Zellaby’s.

            With this self-sacrificial action, Zellaby sets the power dynamic between adults and children back to the status quo. The child collective, Scahill argues, had inverted that relationship, with the adults forced to become “restricted, ignorant, and helpless.” Without ripping out the problem of an incorrectly future-oriented childhood at the root, the film suggests, adults would remain in that role forever. The film does not, however, explore whether the fact that children are the ones who currently occupy such a helpless role may be a problem. Not so with Who Can Kill a Child?, where that issue is foregrounded from the beginning with its opening dying children montage. This film also comes to a very different and even bleaker conclusion.

            We return to that story where we left off, with Tom and Evelyn holed up in an abandoned building, trying to wait out the night. But the children are already inside – all the way inside. Evelyn suddenly starts screaming and panicking, and she beats at her pregnant stomach as she gasps, “Tom, he’s one of them!” Remember the little girl who pressed up against Evelyn before? Yeah, she inducted the fetus into the hivemind. At this point, I will admit that I started incredulously laughing because oh my god. Say what you will about this movie, I guess, but it is not afraid to go there. The unborn baby kills his mother – and with her, himself – to carry out the mission of total adult annihilation.

That leaves Tom alone to try to get off the island and back to his kids in England. To do so, he’s willing to do anything, including fully mowing down a whole row of the amassed kids with an automatic gun. The survivors give chase to the dock, and he smacks them off of the boat with a board as fast as they can leap onto it. In my notes, I’ve written LIKE WHACK A MOLE. I was laughing again at this point, because at a certain point the over-the-top taboo violence can turn into camp, though where that line exists is certainly in the eye of the beholder. A police boat arrives, and despite Tom screaming “IT’S THEM!”, the officers shoot and kill Tom because it looks like he is just wantonly murdering children. Once the police come ashore, the kids naturally kill them, too, and happily steal their weapons. Thus armed, a contingent readies to sail to the mainland. A girl asks one of the child leaders if he’s going to teach the kids over there how to “play like us.” He confirms that the goal is to teach all the children of the world to do so.

As Scahill wryly points out, in the child collective horror film, “The ‘success’ of the parent-victims … is judged by their ability to weigh ethically the proposition ‘Who Can Kill a Child’ and, with shotgun cocked, scream, ‘I can!’ for the future.” Despite the film’s indictment of adult violence for creating the conditions of the child collective in the first place, the film still positions Tom as correct in his attempts to destroy the children and escape without them. Since he failed, the whole world is imperiled, and we have no reason to believe that the kids won’t succeed as thoroughly everywhere else as they did in Almanzora. While they may not be geniuses like the Midwich cuckoos, they are perfectly capable of reason and strategy, and they repeatedly use adults’ assumptions of childhood innocence against their victims. They aren’t driven to kill in a mindless way; they can hold off until they have the numbers and the higher ground. So Who Can Kill a Child? presents a scenario where the adults have already lost the future because, in the past, too many people were all too willing to kill children. And even if Tom had succeeded, and he’d convinced the police to destroy the Almanzora children, who’s to say that whatever instinct or development that happened here wouldn’t happen elsewhere? After all, that continued violence against kids would only give them more incentive to start over. We’re already doomed, this film posits, and though it does not present the murderous kids sympathetically – they are monstrous, and we are positioned as an audience to want them defeated – their monstrosity and the monstrosity of the future is entirely adults’ collective fault.

Citadel, by contrast, is less introspective about the need for its monstrous children to be wiped out. As Tommy and the priest make their way through the tower block, turning on all of the gas valves, the priest reveals two things: one, he’s dying of person-in-movie-coughs-blood disease, and two, THE ORIGINAL HOODIES WERE HIS CHILDREN. That “junkie” that crawled into the basement, gave birth, and died was his abandoned lover. Oh my god?? The priest says that, by committing murderous arson now, he is taking responsibility for his past mistakes. Oh, and one more thing: Danny can’t actually hide anyone from the hoodies, that was all a lie to get Tommy into the building, and while I did complain about the original nonsensical explanation, this one is not better. Tommy holding Danny’s hand did not make him sufficiently unafraid to hide himself from the hoodies – he was still clearly shown to be terrified, even as he believed he was invisible. But now that the priest is going to use his dying self as human bait to the hoodies so Tommy can find Elsa, get out, and blow the building up, he bestows Danny to Tommy as his responsibility, which is what really makes Tommy brave. He renders himself invisible again and magically cures his agoraphobia now that he has two actually innocent kids to protect. Outside in the parking lot, he detonates the tower block and thus safeguards the future from the mindless child horde.

The conclusion of Citadel isn’t enormously different from Village of the Damned, when it comes down to it, so it’s worth trying to figure out why it pissed me off so much more. One big part of it is the difference in the child collective’s “intelligence”: that is, the Midwich cuckoos have lots and the hoodies have none. Plus the hoodies are literally blind, to boot, so there is an inescapable ableist dimension of Citadel as the hoodies’ malice literally manifests through traits that real human children can have, like being nonverbal or having a visual impairment. Then there is the issue of class, though that is not absent from Village of the Damned, or Who Can Kill a Child?, for that matter. Bruhm points out that, though Midwich is home to some prosperous professionals like Zellaby, it is primarily a working-class village, and most of the alien children are born to working class families. Their huge intellectual leap, without the need for prestigious schooling that would be out of their families’ reach, reflects another anxiety about not being able to preserve the structures of the past – here, the class system – for the future. The Almanzora children are also provincial and remote, their quaint working-class Spanish life romanticized by wealthier tourists. They share a psychic class solidarity with the other impoverished children of the world who have been particularly vulnerable in the wars highlighted by the opening reel. So all three of these films so far have a clear message of “fear the working-class children’s uprising,” even though Who Can Kill a Child? acknowledges that said uprising may well be warranted. But the total and literal dehumanization of children born into addiction and poverty in Citadel – I mean, at least, even though Village of the Damned is still classist as hell, the Midwich cuckoos are scary because they’re working-class children who might be better than the adults in some metrics, and that would upend the hierarchy. In Citadel, they’re just irredeemable contagion.

Plus, in both the fawning review and interview with the director from Murphy and in Marin-Lamellet’s analysis, I found denials of classism that I simply do not buy. We’ve already discussed how Foy thinks that his own background and his protagonist’s background make him immune from classism, even though his film makes a clear distinction between good working poor and bad addicted criminal poor, which is still classism. But then Marin-Lamellet, though she acknowledges that this delineation is present in Citadel and many other hoodie horror films, argues that hoodie horror’s ironic self-awareness mitigates its demonization of poor urban youth. She writes, “Accusing hoodie horror of classism is missing the point because class privilege goes both ways. All films mock lecturing self-righteous citizens that are prone to despise hoodies but prove to be far from perfection. They implicitly question Middle England’s beliefs and debunk its class arrogance since the hoodies’ victims are often presented as rather unsympathetic characters that are just as individualistic, selfish and flashy as their persecutors.” So, okay, Marin-Lamellet is writing about the genre as a whole, and I have no doubt that may films do skewer the middle- or upper-class victims of their versions of hoodies, if only because that seems like a really British thing to do. But equating that to “class privilege goes both ways,” to me, is wild. Also, I don’t agree that portraying the victims of violence as bad people makes the portrayal of poor urban youth as extremely violent any less classist. That just makes it classist and cynical. Also-also, though Marin-Lamellet includes Citadel in her corpus, the film specifically doesn’t really do those things as she describes, though it does highlight the priest’s past abandonment of his lover as part of the genesis of the hoodie scourge. But, like, he’s also still working class, and his solution to the problem he created – which the film positions his solution as correct – is to murder his own grandchildren. So I just do not see anything subversive here; all I can detect is a feature-length confirmation of the worst stereotypes of impoverished youth.

Tommy also has the cleanest victory over the child collective out of any of the films we’ve discussed. The priest takes the self-sacrificial Zellaby role, but where we’re positioned to see Zellaby as misguided but ultimately noble, the priest is presented as a total jerk, even if he is right about the kids. Add that to his role in creating them, and his death is much less emotionally impactful than Zellaby’s: it just sort of reads as the natural outcome of his misdeeds. Tommy gets to solely inhabit the hero role, and his triumph is total and uncomplicated. Plus, now he has a child of each binary gender, fully cementing his victory over the course of the future. Though the film gestures at the systemic issues behind the child collective’s generation, it presents only a completely individualized solution.

So if you’re keeping score, that’s two wins for the adults and one for the child collective. Though this is a small and fairly random sample of this subgenre, I do think it’s interesting that it turned out that both the too-intelligent and the not-intelligent-enough collectives are the ones who are defeated, while the most normatively human are the ones who succeed. The Almanzora group’s only difference from regular children is their murderous hatred of adults; otherwise, they’re just regular kids. We might not have adequate defenses for that one. But in all three cases, the future hinges upon adults’ ability to contain childhood monstrosity. If it’s not contained, then the implication is that the future itself is lost. But what if it isn’t lost – what if it just changes hands?

That brings us back to The Girl with All the Gifts. It turns out – and this is more of a revelation in the novel than the film – that Melanie and the other sapient Hungry children are the second generation of Hungries. They were born of Hungries, and unlike their parents, whose already developed brains were hijacked and mostly destroyed by the fungus, they gestated alongside the fungus into a truly symbiotic dual organism.

But that’s not the only way the fungus reproduces. Some adult Hungries’ bodies have become flower beds from which huge stalks and vines have sprouted, bearing pods that contain the fungal spores. These pods have yet to break open: they are practically impervious to physical force, but they likely would, Caldwell says, respond to extreme heat. At that point, the spores would go airborne and all remaining humans would be infected. She has been racing against this inevitability to complete her vaccine, and, as she herself is dying of sepsis from wounds she sustained at the breach, she pleads with Melanie to sacrifice herself for this cause. Melanie does waver as she thinks of Miss Justineau, but then she remembers the children: the hybrid species to which she belongs. She asks Caldwell if she is truly just the fungus mimicking human life, or if she is, in fact, alive herself. At this point, Caldwell is forced to admit that Melanie is a real, full person. So Melanie asks, “Then why should it be us who die for you?”

With that, Melanie lights the spore pods on fire. She encounters Parks afterwards, breathing in the infected air, and she is sorry to have killed him, but she is not sorry overall for what she has done. As Parks despairs, “It’s all over,” she answers, “It’s not over. It’s just not yours anymore.” In the novel, she elaborates that the children like her will “be the ones who live and grow up and have children of their own and make a new world” (399). But this can only happen if they’re allowed to grow up in the first place, which they won’t be if there are still uninfected humans destroying them to save their own lives – and destroying each other, for that matter, which is why the absence of the junkers in the film is a bit of a thematic letdown. Melanie concludes that the children like her will “be the next people. The ones who make everything okay again” (399).

In the end, the only adult left alive is Miss Justineau, safe (but now confined forever) to the airtight mobile lab. The story ends with Melanie corralling the Hungry children, survivors from the military base and ferals alike, to gather outside the lab to listen to Miss Justineau’s lessons as she educates the next – and now only – generation for the future.

So once again, we return briefly to the racial implications that shift from novel to film. Renner points out that, with Melanie as a white girl and Justineau as the only Black character, the ending of the book “could also be read as the enslavement of a black character by a white girl” (178). Swapping the characters’ races, however, “initially appears to yield more liberating connotations” (180). The filmic Black Melanie’s actions against the tyranny of adult human scientific experimentation and military action, represented by white characters, is, according to Renner, “more frequently celebrated as an act of revolution” (180). Renner herself is skeptical of this reading, as she sees hypocrisy in both versions of Melanie’s decision to enact genocide against the non-infected to achieve her vision of world peace: “As much as Melanie’s final act can be seen as a triumph for her people, it unfortunately bears much in common with the violence of the human world upon which she seeks to improve” (180).

I myself go back and forth on the ending of this story. I definitely see Renner’s point, and when I first read it, I was much more horrified than Melanie herself at the thought of all the remaining people who would succumb to a horrifying fate due to her decision. As an adult, I am automatically positioned to have more in common with the human characters than the hybrid Melanie, and therefore when I imagine my place in this world, it ends in all-consuming horror and undeath. Also, as an adult, I am the implied reader. Renner repeatedly refers to the novel as YA, but I don’t agree with that at all. Simply having a young protagonist does not a YA make.

With that said, part of the point of monster stories is exaggeration for emphasis. We blow up the topics we want to discuss to a literally superhuman scale, unbound by the human rules (that we break all the time anyway) in order to examine hypotheticals. So looking at Melanie’s decision from Kheradmand’s lens, for instance, we can see a vision of the future that “ultimately lies in the hands of these hybrid or posthuman children, who challenge the existing power dynamics and assert their right to exist beyond the constraints imposed by adult society” (39). The “native adults,” represented by the only-one-species humans, lose authority to children who embody more than one way of living (40). Meanwhile, in “Apocalypse…Eventually: Trans-Corporeality and Slow Horror in M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts,” Courtney A. Druzak explores the eco-critical implications of a hybrid species inheriting the Earth. The species supremacy of the only-humans was literally unsustainable: its days were numbered as soon as the spore pods emerged. A desperate clinging to one’s place at the sole top of the ecosystem – or not even really the top, but transcending the ecosystem, outside of the ecosystem – that leads to destruction.

(Quick interlude while I switch positions because of the setting sun and the fact that my office does not have curtains yet.)

The Hungry children, however, “represent the possibility of a new future now that the more-than-human world must be acknowledged as part of the self through intimate environment-human interactions” (305). Therefore, “the novel blatantly frames Melanie’s choice to eradicate Humans 1.0 as the most ethical option, both for (a type of) human and more-than-human survival” (311).

Both the immigration and environmental readings are, let’s say, relevant to both the moment in which the novel and film were written and today, a decade later. But it’s also really interesting to examine this ending in contrast to other child collective horror. Now, again, with Melanie as a focalizer outside of the main undifferentiated group of child monsters, we do have a major difference between this story and the others we’ve examined, and perhaps that difference is big enough that some may argue I’m comparing apples and oranges in terms of genre. But as I watched the other three films, I kept thinking about this book, which prompted me to finally watch the film adaptation. Village of the Damned, Who Can Kill a Child?, and Citadel, for all their differences, present scenarios in which the child collective is irredeemably Other. They represent a rupture between the present and the future that, if it is not fully erased, results in the total loss of said future. Even in Who Can Kill a Child?, in which the child collective wins and is treated more sympathetically than in the other two films, at least in terms of its origins, the ending is presented as a bleak failure for humanity. The Girl with All the Gifts, by contrast, imagines Othered children destroying the present status quo and radically altering the future in a way that does not necessarily mean that no future for humanity exists. It just, as Melanie says, no longer belongs to the ones who came before.

CONCLUSION

            Kheradmand writes of the end of The Girl with All the Gifts, “It is evident that neither Melanie nor the Other children, nor children globally, possess a promising utopian future. They are confronted with two potential paths: to perpetuate the mistakes of their parents and continue the cycle of violence and destruction or to reconstruct a new world from the remnants of the old” (47). You may argue, as Renner does, that Melanie ultimately falls into the trap of the former in her efforts to secure the latter. All of the stories we discussed today portray exceedingly violent children, and Melanie is no exception. Perhaps it is the nature of the monster child collective story to suggest that there is no humanity without violence, and that includes the children who we so badly want to imagine will create a better world than the one we have now. Of these films, honestly, Village of the Damned lets humanity off the hook the most, since those children are half-alien, and it is their lack of quintessentially human attributes like emotions that make them irredeemable. But all its Cold War anxieties about nuclear weapons and communism betray the fear that maybe the problem isn’t just up in the air, outside of our planet. Maybe, this type of story forces us to consider, the kids are not all right because none of us are all right. And if that’s true, what hope do we have for the future at all?

            Well, none, says Who Can Kill a Child? So, you know, at least that’s a clear thesis statement. Village of the Damned and Citadel locate hope in an adult man being brave enough to take charge and do what needs to be done to excise the wrong children from the fabric of society before it’s too late. I don’t love that, not just ideologically, but also narratively. For all the broader systemic fears that inform their premises, these stories still can’t imagine a way forward without falling back on the old individualistic patriarchal hero. And with that, there is the implication that the monster child collective is bad not just because they’re monsters but because they’re a collective. A united group of young people pushing for the same outcome is scary, while an individual man is good. And even in The Girl with All the Gifts, Melanie alone makes the decision to start the world anew. She is still an individual leader among the collective; she shapes the future on their behalf but without their input.

            So perhaps there are still limitations of our (ironically) collective imaginations when it comes to envisioning a future that actually is radically different from our past and present, in terms of who will create it and how. And I’m willing to cut us a little slack on that one. The present and past are the only references we have, after all. Imagining a truly different future can be like trying to imagine an alien without making reference to terrestrial lifeforms: what else can we even conceive of? And, of course, the future isn’t going to be completely divorced from the present or the past, because that’s not how history works. Also, I don’t actually want a catastrophic disruption like the outbreak of a zombie fungus. The singular apocalyptic revolution that changes everything all at once is not actually something to hope for – no accelerationism here, thank you. But what would happen if we were able to look at children who may be in some ways different from those who came before them and not react with terror? What if we entertained the notion, like M.R. Carey does, that they may deserve and be able to create a world beyond what we have previously been able to imagine? Futurity is inextricably conceptually enmeshed with childhood at this point, but what would happen if more of us reframed our relationship to those concepts as less antagonistic? Less literally conservative, in the sense of preserving what came before, and instead, more collaborative? What happens if we allow ourselves to join the child collective? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, because we haven’t done it yet. But I can’t help but wonder, and maybe that’s the first step.

            Let me know your thoughts about monstrous child collectives. Do you know of any contemporary ones, and if so, what fears of the 2020s do you see playing out in these narratives? How do you react to the historical anxieties and the monstrous children of yesteryear? I’d love to keep the conversation going! I hope you enjoyed this video, and if you did, please remember to like and share, and to subscribe to the channel so you never miss a monstrous discussion. If you want more monster community and education in your life, check out my Patreon or the book club programs at themonsterandthechild.com – both are linked down in the description. I’ll be back with some monster studies book reviews ahead of the next full video essay, so I hope you’ll come back for those. Until then, take care, and I will see you soon for more monstrous food for thought.

Media discussed:

• Village of the Damned, dir. Wolf Rilla (1960)
• Who Can Kill a Child?, dir. Narciso Ibáñez Serrador (1976)
• Citadel, dir. Ciarán Foy (2012)
• The Girl with All the Gifts, by M.R. Carey (2014)
• The Girl with All the Gifts, dir. Colm McCarthy (2016)

References:

• Balantazegui, J. (2018). The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema: Ghosts of Futurity at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century. Amsterdam University Press.
• Bruhm, S. (2016). The Global Village of the Damned: A Counter-Narrative for the Post-War Child. Narrative, 24(2), 156-173.
• Cohen, J.J. (1996). Monster Culture: Seven Theses. In J.J. Cohen (Ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (pp. 3-25). University of Minnesota Press.
• Druzak, C.A. (2022). Apocalypse…Eventually: Trans-Corporeality and Slow Horror in M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts. Text Matters, 12, 304-318.
• Kheradmand, M. (2025). The Borderland of Humanity: Monsters and Humans in Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts. Akshara, 17, 31-49.
• Marin-Lamellet, A. (2020). Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know? Hoodies in Contemporary British Horror Cinema. Angles, 10.
• Murphy, B.M. (2013). Review: Citadel. The Green Book: Writings on Irish Gothic, Supernatural and Fantastic Literature, 1, 82-89.
• Renner, K.J. (2021). Zombie Desire, Queerness, and Race in The Girl with All the Gifts. Revenant: Critical and Creative Studies of the Supernatural, 7, 165-189.
• Scahill, A. (2011). It Takes a Child to Raze a Village: Demonizing Youth Rebellion. Jump Cut, 53.