Sitges Turns 59: Evil Children, Talking Foxes and a Very Bad Baby

The 59th edition of the International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia opened in Sitges, the coastal town south of Barcelona, with a lineup obsessed by monstrous offspring — explosive births, chewed-up nipples and babies that turn out to be, at best, sociopathic.

That's not a criticism. It's the programme's recurring theme, and the festival leaned into it with an exhibition at the Miramar Cultural Centre devoted to the evil-kiddy subgenre. The show marks the 50th anniversary of Narciso Ibáñez Serrador's "fantaterror" classic Who Can Kill a Child? (the Spanish label for homegrown horror-fantasy), parts of which were shot in Sitges itself.

What's in the evil-children exhibition?

The Miramar exhibition traces the subgenre across seven decades:

• The Bad Seed (1956), the founding text of cinematic killer kids
• Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, the Hollywood landmarks
• Nightborn, this year's new entry in the lineage

That last one premiered at the festival itself. Rupert Grint stars as a hapless husband who can't compete with the developing folk-horror bond between his depressed wife, their newborn "child", and the spooky forest around their house.

Finnish director Hanna Bergholm introduced the screening and confessed the film was inspired by her own experiences of motherhood. As the Guardian's reviewer dryly put it: "Only up to a point, one hopes."

What does this change for genre cinema?

The answer is lineage, not novelty. The festival — the world's leading showcase for fantastic film — is using its anniversary platform to argue that the evil-child film isn't a gimmick but a continuous tradition running from 1956 to now. Nightborn sits at the end of that chain, and Sitges is where the connection gets made explicit.

The festival's other headline offerings keep the same preoccupations. Olivia Colman goes vulpine in one featured title, and Joko Anwar contributes a warmhearted, violent ghost story set in an Indonesian prison.

The venue matters too. Who Can Kill a Child? was partly filmed in Sitges, so the 50th-anniversary exhibition returns the subgenre to the place that helped create it — a rare case of a festival celebrating a film made, quite literally, in its own streets.