#750: Village of the Damned

Village of the Damned

Wolf Rilla
Initial release: June 16, 1960 (UK)

You're children of the damned
Your backs' against the wall
You turn into the light
You're burning in the night

— Iron Maiden, "Children of the Damned"

Say you're working for the government or military during the Cold War. You've got the threat of nuclear annihilation, proxy wars, spies from all manner of nations. These are all rather ordinary threats in terms of the geopolitical situation of the late 1950s. What do you do when faced with a paranormal, even supernatural threat to national security and the international order? Is it even possible to respond adequately?

One day an entire English village falls asleep where they stand, dropping to the ground like a sack of potatoes, out like a light for hours. Anyone who gets too close to the village — animals included — is rendered unconscious. It's not a gas attack, but if that's the case, what is it? The question is seemingly rendered moot when everyone wakes up, but  not long after, it's revealed that every woman of child-bearing ability has been rendered pregnant simultaneously, even the virgins. After surprisingly short pregnancies, the children — all blonde, with strange eyes — grow up quickly, reaching per-adolescence in just a few years. A series of strange accidents and incidents, including a couple of deaths, are increasingly attributed to the otherwise well-behaved children, who seem to share a hive mind. And they're growing more powerful by the day — are they a threat to national security? Are they a threat to humanity?

Based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Village of the Damned is director Wolf Rilla's best-remembered film. Like a lot of science fiction films from throughout the 1950s and into the early 60s, Village feels like an extended episode of The Twilight Zone, which is hardly a bad thing. At a brisk 77 minutes, the film kind of speeds through the social aspect of an entire village's women being impregnated by an unseen force, and instead focuses on Professor Gordon Zellaby, whose "son" is one of the children, and who is determined to teach the children himself, unwilling to admit that these kids might be a threat.

Rilla mostly worked in television throughout his career, and he was handed the project almost at the last minute. Combined with having to rewrite the script to reflect a British setting (it was originally intended to be set in America) and having to do it over the course of a weekend, Rilla wasn't totally satisfied with the script, but nevertheless did the best he could. His cinematographic style is very plain, matter of fact, deliberately so as he wanted to present Midwich as a perfectly ordinary town beset by a very unordinary threat. I think it works, though some of the special effects aren't great: the film uses freezeframe to overlay glowing eyes onto the children, but in at least one case, the entire frame isn't properly frozen, so for a moment you get a blur of a mother's face as her alien child forces his human brother to hand back a treat he stole.

Nevertheless, Village of the Damned is an entertaining film, one that seems to anticipate The Andromeda Strain in some ways while also feeling a bit like a callback to Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Aside from a sequel titled Children of the Damned, it also had a remake by John Carpenter (in the mid-1990s, which wasn't his best era.) But perhaps my favorite development on the concept is Warren Ellis' Freakangels, a graphic novel and eventually anime, with the idea that a similar group of strange, telepathic children eventually grew up to break the world by accident.

There are a lot of must-see science fiction and horror films from the 1950s and early 1960s, so it can be overwhelming to pick one to watch; while I don't know that Village of the Damned would be my go-to, it might be yours.

-june❤