chill-dren: what to expect when you’re expecting

Mixing children and violence is a taboo even for horror cinema. What compelled you to turn kids into killers in The Children?
In my first film — which was called WAZ [in the UK] and The Killer Gene over there — we did kill a child and I remember thinking, “God, that’s so disturbing.” It’s obviously transgressive within society but also within a movie. It’s such a potentially explosive cocktail when you do any kind of mix of children and violence that we knew we had to handle it with intense sensitivity. But at the same time, massive amounts of dread and tension can be extracted from this situation you set up.

Were you thinking about any other movies about bad seeds when making The Children?
Going into any genre, I like to know as much as possible about what’s gone before. That’s partly because I don’t want to rip things off — it’s best to know everything there in order to throw it away. A lot of it was technical, like learning how they shoot the kid to look scary in The Omen. But I very much love Village of the Damned and the great Spanish film Who Can Kill a Child?, as well as Don’t Look Now and The Shining. The Brood is one I don’t know as well but I was really affected by it when I saw it as a teenager. They were very much on my mind. There was something so interesting about being immersed in this theme because you’re getting in touch with this taboo or primal fear that clearly exists in society about how civilization will basically be destroyed if kids are uncivilized.

Your film taps into many of those anxieties that adults feel about youngsters, especially those who are beyond their control. Is it fair to say we’re a little terrified of our own progeny?
I think everyone is very screwed up about it in certain ways. The attitudes in western societies to disciplining children were much simpler until late in the 20th century. If they did anything you didn’t like or approve of, you could discipline them with corporal punishment and that was socially acceptable. When you remove that convention, it becomes much more complicated. That’s for all the right reasons, obviously — we want to live in a civilized society where you don’t hit children. But it does get complicated when children go a bit haywire.

Parents and child psychologists are endlessly excusing and explaining and romanticizing this kind of potentially aggressive behaviour. I suppose I wanted to poke the stick in that hornet’s nest of all of our slightly fucked-up, middle-class-parenting attitudes. To be honest, it’s kind of my revenge on all my friends with kids for making me go out on weekends where you’re all hungover and the kids are running around screaming. Obviously, there are lots of kids in my life who I love very dearly but there are those moments when they kick off and they start hitting you and you can’t really do anything. You can just say, “Would you stop that please?”