Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned
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Features
• Black & White
• Closed-captioned
• Dubbed
• DVD-Video
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
• Dolby
• NTSC
In Theaters : 07 December, 1960
DVD Release : 10 August, 2004 |
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Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned description
What's scarier than scary kids? Village of the Damned is the definitive scary-kid classic, a truly unsettling film drawn from John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. The brilliant opening sequence depicts the sudden and temporary paralysis of a small English hamlet, which is followed by the town's women becoming mysteriously pregnant. The spawn of this occurrence are a dozen eerie, blond-headed children, who are either gifted, evil, or "the world's new people." A splendid outing, not least in the way it catches parental anxiety about this small new stranger in one's home. (It was remade by John Carpenter in 1995.) Children of the Damned follows up with a story about six more creepy kids, brought from all over the globe to huddle in a old church in London. An excellent opening half-hour gets bogged down in the movie's global-political ambitions (it's very much a cold war offering), but it has its share of shivery moments--the sight of the six youngsters striding down a London street as though they controlled the world is a chiller. But where's the blond hair? The two films are different in tone; Village feels like a fifties sci-fi offering, with an old-school star (George Sanders) and classical style; Children is a film of the sixties, with hipper techniques, urban setting, and young actors Ian Hendry and Alan Badel. But both have those damned kids. --Robert Horton |
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Village of the Damned/Children of the Damned Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Creepy glowy-eyed kids take over village, film at 11
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Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960)
Wolf Rilla directed quite a few movies in his time, but these days, he's remembered for only one-- Village of the Damned, Stirling Silliphant's thoroughly weird adaptation of John Wyndham's even weirder The Midwich Cuckoos. I am somewhat convinced that Silliphant has more to do with the movie's enduring creepiness (and its classic status), but when it comes right down to it, none of the folks behind the cameras can take anywhere near as much credit as Martin Stephens, the towheaded lad who would immediately become typecast as "that weird little squib," ending his career quite prematurely by playing similarly eerie kids in Jack Clayton's The Innocents and Cyril Frankel's The Witches (though he was slightly older by then). I get ahead of myself, though, as Stephens and his similarly shockingly blond companions don't pop up until almost halfway through this flick.
We start out with the town of Midwich, a bucolic little English village, falling asleep. Yes, falling asleep. The entire town, animals and all. At the time this happens, Midwich resident Gordon Zellaby (Geroge Sanders) is on the phone with his brother-in-law, Alan (Michael Gwynn). Alan is understandably concerned, and as a military man, he has the resources to make people take his concern seriously. He soon discovers that Midwich seems surrounded by an odd sphere of sleep-- anyone who crosses into the sphere falls asleep immediately. After a few hours, this goes away. Nine months later, every woman in the village of childbearing age, including Gordon's wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley), gives birth to a child with a bright shock of blonde hair. Needless to say, this causes some marital tension (and more than a few unwed mothers). Where did these kids come from? Fast-forward a few years, we meet them as adolescents, and that's where Martin Stephens, playing David, the Zellabys' son, and his cadre of blond psychopaths enters. Gordon, a scientist, is desperate to study the children; other towns where similar outbreaks occurred at the same time have taken a more pragmatic route, destroying the towns and the children. Zellaby senior fights the British government to keep the kids alive, even as Zellaby junior makes him question the wisdom of the decision.
It's pretty obvious that the underlying anxiety in this movie has to do with kids reaching their adolescent years and asserting their independence; doesn't take a highly-qualified psychologist to pick up on that. What Wyndham (and Silliphant, in his extraordinary adaptation) focuses in on is the inherent creepiness of the idea from a parent's perspective. Here's this being who is, for all intents and purposes, a part of you, but who is struggling to no longer be a part of you. Wyndham exaggerates the "not part of you" aspect of it by making the kids odd, leading to their being shunned by the provincial villagers; "not one of you" is thus made literal. He also exaggerates the power displayed; interfamily power struggles are the hallmarks of puberty, Wyndam has simply once again taken the concept to a logical extremity. His kids are telepaths, psychokinetics, sociopaths; their goal is to take over the world (and of course each generation thinks the generation below it is going to destroy the planet; nothing new there). This is what makes Wyndham's books so great, and through strong source material and a strong adaptation, it's also what makes Rilla's film endure-- this may be a horror movie, with weird glowing kids'-eyes and the roots of evil and all that hokum, but the horror that lies at its heart is all too real, and (from a Western perspective, anyway) universal. And-- let's face it-- thirty-five years later, even Superman had a problem stopping these kids. ****
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