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Village of the Damned
1960 Sci-Fi / Thriller / Horror
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Credits
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Director: Wolf Rilla
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Script: Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, Ronald Kinnoch,
based on "The Midwich Cuckoos" by John Wyndham
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Photo: Geoffrey Faithfull
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Music: Ron Goodwin
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Cast: George Sanders (Gordon Zellaby),
Barbara Shelley (Anthea Zellaby),
Martin Stephens (David Zellaby),
Michael Gwynn (Alan Bernard),
Laurence Naismith (Dr Willers),
Richard Warner (Harrington),
Jenny Laird (Mrs. Harrington),
Sarah Long (Evelyn Harrington),
Thomas Heathcote (James Pawle),
Charlotte Mitchell (Janet Pawle),
Pamela Buck (Milly Hughes),
Rosamund Greenwood (Miss Ogle),
Susan Richards (Mrs Plumpton),
Bernard Archard (Vicar),
Richard Vernon (Sir Edgar Hargraves)
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Country: UK / USA
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Language: English
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Runtime: 77 min; B&W
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Summary
One day, Midwich, a small village in southern England, finds itself
mysteriously cut off, its entire population rendered unconscious for
two hours. No explanation for this bizarre occurrence is
found. Then, a few months later, something even stranger
happens. Every woman of child-bearing age in the village is found
to be pregnant. A year on, the new-born children resemble one
another in every way. Each has blond hair, deep penetrating eyes
and an extraordinary level of intelligence. A local scientist,
Gordon Zellaby, father of one of the children, decides to take them
under his wing so that he can learn more about them. But
the villagers are becoming increasingly anxious that the children are
dangerous. Then the killings start...
Review
Closely adapted from a novel by John Wyndham (the most widely read
British science-fiction writer of the 1950s, best known as the author
of "The Day of the Triffids"), Village
of the Damned deserves its reputation as one of the most
frightening horror films of all time. In spite of its paltry
budget (around £200,000) and the fact that it has virtually no
special effects, it stands as one of the best examples of its genre. It
continues to scare the living daylights out of anyone who is brave
enough to sit down and watch it alone on a dark winter’s evening.
What makes it such a chilling piece of cinema is the sly juxtaposition
of the mundane - and there’s hardly anything more mundane than a quaint
English village - with the supernatural, represented by a hugger-mugger
clan of oddly identical children with peroxide wigs, eerie voices and
eyes that glow in the dark. The sets, lighting and camerawork
evoke an atmosphere of barely contained terror, which the measured
performances, from such great English actors as George Sanders and
Barbara Shelley, can only accentuate. The film is the perfect
example of the "less is more" principle (which most modern filmmakers
seem to have forgotten) - namely: the less an audience is shown, the
greater the psychological and emotional impact. There is
no better special effect a director can call upon than an audience's prompted imagination.
At times, the film bears more than passing similarity with Nigel Kneale’s
hugely popular Quatermass
television serials of the 1950s. The later had engendered a
quintessentially British version of science-fiction, which was far more
firmly anchored in the reality of everyday life than its American
counterpart. Like the groundbreaking Quatermass stories, Village of the Damned can be viewed
as a subtle allegory of Cold War paranoia, in which a community’s
instinctive suspicion of an Outsider quickly escalates into blind
hatred and disastrous conflict. Today, the film is more likely
to invite reflection on the seemingly unbridgable rift that has developed in recent years
between parents and their offspring - two species that really do seem to come from
different planets and who find co-existence increasingly difficult.
When it was first released in 1960, Village of the Damned was a
hugely successful film in both Britain and America, and had a
respectable sequel: Children of the
Damned (1963). It is still regarded as one of the great
classics of the sci-fi/horror genre and has been the inspiration for
countless similar films featuring demonic possession of children - most
famously Richard Donner’s "daft but scary" 1976 film The Omen. John
Carpenter directed a remake in 1995 (described as one of the most
pointless films ever made). It may have been imitated many times,
but as a supremely effective minimalist spine-chiller, Village of the Damned has rarely
been surpassed.
© James Travers 2008
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