It’s okay for horror movie villains to be rabid grandmas or killer Santas. But what kind of monster kills a cat?
In the new supernatural horror movie “The Innocents,” that monster is a preteen named Ben (Sam Ashraf), and his panting act at the start of the film is a hint of the sins to come by his little hands and others.
“We always like to think of kids as pure angels,” Eskil Vogt, the film’s writer-director, said in a recent video interview. “I think we have to admit that the opposite is true.”
Ben, who lives in a sprawling apartment complex in Oslo, isn’t the only kid with psychic powers. When young Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), her autistic older sister, Anna (Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), and their mother and father move into the building, Anna miraculously regains her ability to speak. Anna and a neighbor named Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), who can hear thoughts, team up to use their powers for (mostly) peaceful purposes, flying under the radar of their distraught parents.
But Ben, a bullied boy raised by an estranged mother, struggles with a power far more sinister than he’s unequipped to handle, and the consequences are deadly and heartbreaking.
A chilling dread film, “The Innocents” unsettlingly explores how children can be both uncorrupt and cruel, a paradox that can have deep emotional repercussions that linger well beyond the playground years. The young characters don’t question their otherworldly powers, or fully understand the responsibility that comes with them. But they know enough not to tell their parents.
Vogt was no different. As a child, on vacation, he remembers using an air gun to shoot a seagull in flight; he saw the bullet make an impact, but the bird did not fall. He hid it from his parents.
“I remember walking around that day and going to bed that night thinking that this seagull was slowly dying in agony somewhere because of me,” he said.
Vogt said he was inspired by that and other heavy childhood decisions to create “The Innocents.” The film (in theaters and on demand) comes just months after he and his longtime friend and collaborator, director Joachim Trier, shared an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for their humanistic comedy-drama “The Worst Person of the world”.
In a separate video interview, Trier said if there’s a dividing line between the two films, it’s how Vogt uses “form and visualization to create something worth showing. on the big screen. If the terrors in “Les Innocents” are more pernicious than sensational, Trier says it’s the product of Vogt’s deep affection for the films of Alain Resnais (“Hiroshima Mon Amour”) and other formalist cinema of the 1960s. “He’s hardcore about it,” Trier said.
Slow-burning horror too. In 2014, Vogt wrote and directed the moody thriller “Blind,” about a paranoid blind woman. Three years later, he and Trier co-wrote Trier’s film “Thelma”, about a college student with telekinetic powers.
A lover of horror films, Vogt said he was drawn to the films of David Cronenberg, particularly the devilish man-child film “The Brood” (1979), but also Wolf’s “Village of the Damned” (1960). Rilla, with what he called his “strange and special” youngsters.
Vogt said he also looked no further than his living room and his two children, aged 9 and 11, who “can be the best kids in the world and in an instant they can go berserk “. He said it was because of the open casting, not an intentional choice, that the children of “The Innocents” are strangers beyond their powers: Anna has autism, Aisha has vitiligo and Ben is a colored boy (Ashraf was born in Norway and is of Persian and Pakistani descent).
“It wasn’t like they were magic because they were special,” he added.
What Vogt didn’t do, he pointed out, is an evil children’s movie.
“It’s a story about basic humanity,” he said.
“The Innocents” joins other recent projects about children on the dark side, including the new film adaptation of Stephen King’s “Firestarter” and HBO’s dark comedy series “The Baby.”
TS Kord, the author of “Little Horrors: How Cinema’s Evil Children Play on Our Guilt” (2016), said in an email that evil children have featured in horror with increasing frequency in recent decades. while the horror “means to emphasize all the way the human race spoils itself.
“We’ve devastated children and childhood for almost forever, now they’re fighting back,” said Kord, who teaches German, film studies and comparative literature at University College London. Yet we have a societal interest in affirming that children are innocent, she added, “because their innocence defines us as a human society.”
What may confuse viewers the most about “The Innocents” is Vogt’s bold choice to cast naughtiness on tweens with at least some agency in their actions. In horror, the kids are usually bad because of outside forces (“The Exorcist”), or they’re teenagers who have already been messed up (“Eden Lake”). Of course, there are also evil fetuses (“The Unborn”) and black-hearted babies (“Grace”), but their consciousness is still formless and therefore particularly susceptible to outside evil forces.
“The Innocents” is closer in spirit to “The Bad Seed” and other much scarier middle horror movies, where kids do bad things because they haven’t fully understood the others have feelings.
“During childhood, we have to create our own set of values and morals and not rely on what our parents told us,” Vogt said. Eventually, he continued, “you have to do some of the things your mother said you shouldn’t do, and figure out whether she was right or not.”
It remains to be seen how the lethal-behaving children in “The Innocents” will land with audiences. One reviewer wished Vogt had focused “more on the harmless side of children’s powers”, an indication of the strength of the desire to affirm childhood as a time of incorruptible purity.
But “kids with powers have consequences,” Vogt said. So is being a child.
“I remember lying in bed and hearing sounds and imagining the worst thing and how it would be part of my reality because I had no way to distinguish between what was real and which it isn’t,” he said. “I would be completely and utterly scared out of my mind. I don’t think I was as scared as an adult as I was as a child.
