Village of the Damned (dir. Wolf Rilla, 1960) — Review
The quaint little England depicted in Village of the Damned (1960) has vanished into oblivion; the humdrum employment and casual sexism of the classic sci-fi can no longer be flaunted with such relish. Yet the underlying disturbance — the inexplicable arrival of something strange that our civilized society seems helpless to defeat — remains as potent in the age of ChatGPT and Covid as it was at the height of the Cold War. While its melodramatic, somewhat supernatural title suggests a Hammer Horror affair, Wolf Rilla’s adaptation of 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos explores an existential threat to humanity — and the failure of humanity to respond to it. Those darned emotions!
The film’s famous blonde-haired, glowing-eyed children (the cuckoos of the novel’s title) feature as a constant topic of discussion, but they are hardly the agents of the chaos that unfolds. Only half an hour into a brisk 77-minute runtime does the clique appear, after an opening more reminiscent of The Archers than The Exorcist.
Filmed in black and white for financial reasons, yet evocative of The Twilight Zone, Village of the Damned starts on a bucolic scene in the quiet village of Midwich (actually the Home Counties enclave of Letchmore Heath), where all is well with the world: a farmer’s sheepdog gambols at his heels, a tweedy English gent bumbles around his country house. But as the residents fall into a deathlike, simultaneous sleep, the idyllic meshing of modernity and tradition (a tractor on a field, a milkman’s van passing the village shop) takes a turn for the uncanny: a cow keels over, taps overflow, a vinyl eerily winds down and distorts the human voice. Ah, the fragility of the modern man!
After a slightly contrived bit of plotting, the bizarre incident comes to the attention of the army, leading to a truly delightful display of British incompetence — another structural pillar of the film. As the soldiers establish a cordon around Midwich, attempting to work out the nature of the tranquilizing effect and gamely sending a few pilots to their death in the process, the scene could be straight out of any military ‘heroic failure’ of the past few centuries.
This serves as a cue meet our nominal leads. Zellaby (George Sanders) turns out to be that perfect country gentlemen and also — conveniently — a scientist, complete with dazzlingly over-attractive younger wife. Rounding out the snug, chummy lineup are the wife in question, Anthea (Barbara Shelley), and her brother Major Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn); thus, even more conveniently, placing both the scientific and military response to a national emergency firmly in the friends-and-family sphere. PPE contracts, anyone?
Again, in the spirit of the British kitchen-sink drama, Village of the Damned doesn’t press its characters too firmly to develop. Rather, a sprinkling of local character — the useless but paternal village doctor goggling over his half-moon spectacles, the angry locals straight out of Beauty and the Beast, and a pair of comically frumpy pharmacists — help the exposition slip by.
However, the real stars are the children born to the women of Midwich, nearly all of whom fell inexplicably pregnant on the day of the mass passing-out: an indiscernible litter of entitled freaks. While the children’s rapid physical development and apparent collective consciousness unnerve their parents the most, modern audiences would be struck by their extreme politeness, their reedy little cut-glass voices, and their charming but unbending assurance of their right to take over the world. In other words, they look like your average class of first-form Etonians. The crudely executed glowing-eyes effect, created by inserting freeze frames, somehow heightens their creepy stillness, part of the broader contrasts of style — sometimes reassuringly conventional, at other times unsettlingly modernistic — that define the film.
Quite what the children are is never fully explained; we never get to know their full capabilities or final agenda. But it’s clear they represent the dangers of social change through technological progress. The identically-dressed, unsmiling squads that march around the village convey obvious Aryan overtones, while the other threat of the film comes in the form of nuclear weapons to wipe out a ‘Soviet colony’ of the children.
“If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are,” chides Zellaby’s adopted son, conjuring up the idea of the cold, cruelly rational robot. Naturally, because this is England, our villagers find but one refuge from the scourge: the pub, where they can take sanctuary to contemplate infanticide.
And yet, even if the villagers eventually march on their school with flaming torches (a rare descent into horror cliché), Village of the Damned isn’t entirely unsympathetic to these spooky children. “They may be the world’s new people,” Zellaby muses. Anthea at one point speaks to David in a decidedly liberal way which might even bring to mind the immigration debate: “Wherever it is you come from, you’re part of us now. Couldn’t you learn to live with us, and help us live with you?” The genuine uncertainty in how to respond that question (at least for most of its running time) gives Village of the Damned an unusual profundity.
