Ending Explained: Who Can Kill a Child?

💡 What does the ending really mean?

In the climax, Tom reaches the lighthouse only to witness his pregnant wife being savagely beaten to death by the children with rocks and sticks. Driven mad, he guns down several of them before the swarm overwhelms and lynches him, laughing as they bludgeon him to death. The film ends with the kids sailing to the mainland to spread their slaughter. Symbolically, it is the total collapse of adult authority: innocence is not corrupted but exposed as primal, organized evil. For post-Franco Spain, it is a nightmare of unleashed youth turning on their elders without remorse or restraint; the child is not victim but the new, merciless executioner.