I remember back in the day, during all of the Video Nasties hysteria, one film would always be featured alongside The Evil Dead and Driller Killer, and that was Suffer Little Children. It was only recently, on seeing that the film was on YouTube, that I realised that I had never actually seen it.

A mute young girl called Elizabeth arrives at a children’s care home looking to stay there. She is taken in by the carers and that’s when the crazy shit starts to happen. She seems to be possessed, can hypnotise people to do things against their will, and she seems to embody some kind of ancient black magic.

Suffer Little Children is certainly an oddity of the era. The fact that Alan Briggs, the director (fun fact- he was also a rock promoter and at one time was the manager of the music venue Brixton Academy) decided to make a full-on, bloody and fucked up horror movie at the height of the Video Nasties era is either very daring or very stupid. The film appeared on the radar of the authorities because the distributors released the film uncut and didn’t send it to the BBFC so that it could be classified, even though that was required by law at that time.

The cast of mainly children was taken from the newly formed Meg Shanks Drama School from South London (Shanks would marry Alan Briggs).

Suffer Little Children was shot on a camcorder, and it looks like it. The, ahem, camerawork (point and shoot) is elementory, as if it were shot by someone who had picked up the device for the very first time. The editing and sound design as just as primitive (the music for the film is excellent and consists of loud guitars and frantic drumwork. The only thing is that it’s too loud, and so when it’s placed over scenes in which characters are speaking, you can’t hear what they’re saying!)

But, for all of this zero budget goodness, it’s very enjoyable. The amateurish qualities lend an authenticity and level of sleazy lo-fi to proceedings, and it really does feel like a VHS grimy experience. There’s something else that lends an unsettling air to proceedings that comes with hindsight. The fact that the story takes place in a children’s care home and, at one point, involves a celebrity (in this case, a pop star) who is coming to the institution to meet the children who are currently staying there, is kind of sinister in this post Jimmy Savile world. OK, so this character used to live in the care home himself, but this part of the narrative still made my skin crawl where it wouldn’t have if I was watching the film in 1983.

Suffer Little Children is a no-budget, 80’s horror oddity, but this holds a charm for me.

2.5 out of 5 stars