Drive-In Dust Offs: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)

Presenting murderous moppets on screen is always a dicey proposition. For every The Bad Seed or The Omen, there is always The Good Son or Mikey skulking about. It’s all about the fear – making a five or ten year old believably frightening is hard to do. As audience members, we put our faith in filmmakers to produce tension, conflict, and danger in a palpable (but not necessarily plausible) way, and when it’s tested we end up wading through Children of the Corn. But when our faith is rewarded, we find ourselves in the Village of the Damned (1960), a seminal killer kid chiller.

Based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Village was produced by MGM’s British division and distributed there in July, with a December rollout in the States. The film was a great success, both with critics and audiences alike, luring them in with an intriguing premise and delivering a taut execution. Trading on audiences’ fear of the unknown and a xenophobic stance toward the next generation, Village of the Damned has lost none of its hypnotic power.

Welcome to the British village of Midwich. An idyllic countryside setting, and our film starts with the villagers going about their business. A farmer rides his tractor, a woman irons clothes, and a switchboard operator answers phones. We meet Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders – All About Eve) as he answers a phone call from his brother in law, Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn – The Revenge of Frankenstein). As he speaks with Alan, Gordon faints and collapses to the ground. We see he is not alone: the camera pans around the town, and everyone in the village, from the farmer to the operator, has done the same (eerily displayed without any musical accompaniment). Alan races off to Midwich to check on Gordon and discovers an invisible border surrounding the town (my favorite kind!) that causes anyone to pass out when crossed, including the military. After a few hours everyone in the vicinity of the village and its perimeter wakes up, and life goes back to normal.

And when I say normal, I mean every woman and girl of child bearing age is found pregnant after two months. Within seven months, the children are born, an even dozen of them. Unusual features include: accelerated growth rate, platinum blond hair, an aversion to emotion, and a knack for group telepathy. By the age of three, the kids are adolescents, very well spoken, and don’t take kindly to things not being done their way. The leader of the imps, David (Martin Stephens – The Innocents), acts as their spokesperson when dealing with Gordon (legally his “dad”, but no Maury Povich reveal is necessary), who takes on the task of educating, and hopefully learning from, the children in the hopes that they may be a boon to mankind.

When Gordon, his wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley – The Gorgon), and the rest of the village discover that this is a global dilemma, a mob mentality breaks out, resulting in unfortunate results for the villagers (maybe have a town hall meeting next time?). Gordon concocts a final solution - but is he too late, or will his lecture on the Atomic Age put the kids into an irreversible coma?

So here we have a collision (and ultimately, collusion) of sorts – the burgeoning evil child flick (see: The Bad Seed. Really. It’s terrific.) bumping up against the alien invasion subgenre (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), smothered with a serious distrust of the newly minted Generation X. And the subsequent decades would play off this too – especially The Exorcist, The Omen, and every other specious example from the ‘70s – but with a religious impetus, as opposed to the good old Red Scare tactics of the ‘50s. We always have reservations about how the kids will turn out (I have two, fully grown, and more or less acceptable citizens), and to drape our concerns with communism, demonic possession, or alien impregnation is often more strangely comforting to a horror fan than the normal adolescent foibles of say, Rebel Without a Cause. My kids being involved in a chicken run is at least a terrifying (yet very dated) possibility – however, dodging the Daggers of Megiddo sounds like a breeze, because the kids would have to be found first, and I can’t even get them on the phone (call your mom, please). However, for the casual viewer at the time, this paranormal paranoia surely must have felt visceral and real.

The distrust is built in, and director Wolf Rilla (Cairo) capitalizes on this – the children show no emotion, and they utilize a chilling yet flawed logic toward their goal of world domination (better assimilation might have helped – platinum blond hair is usually reserved for mid life crises) and destruction. Rilla also shoots the film in a crisp, mostly documentary style that highlights the inherent drama between the characters. The majority of the mayhem is implied, amping the imagination in chilling ways – a man is made to commit suicide with a shotgun, another forced to set himself on fire – and applying a dose of unease which the B & W cinematography of Geoffrey Faithfull (Corridor of Blood) captures with a low key, left of center realism.

Sanders, et al do a good job of selling this alien offspring drama, aiming a couple of notches below melodrama and generally landing there. The British cast tends to underplay, which suits the sharp screenplay by Stirling Silliphant (The Towering Inferno), Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch (Devil Doll). But don’t worry about the film being slow – 77 minutes does not leave a ton of time for exposition or romantic interludes and Village gets right to the crux of the situation, zeroing in on the conflict between the preternatural invaders and the quaint establishment.

Legendary director John Carpenter remade Village in 1995, and while it is not one of his strongest efforts, the original has influenced some of his best work (he’s an avowed fan of this period in British horror). The post Houseman scene from The Fog where the ghosts first make their presence felt by messing with the cars, gas station, etc. in Antonio Bay, is played sans music, mirroring Village’s eerie opening montage. The unsettling, black eyed stare of the children (in the British version anyway – in the American release the eyes were made to glow; so, you know, people could tell the kids were trouble) was reflected in the blank, bottomless visage of the mask worn by Michael Myers in Halloween. One could also point to the early works of Cronenberg and Romero for stylistically trumpeting Village’s plainspoken cinematic tongue.

Which is to say this: the church of the Village of the Damned has picked up many new parishioners since its debut fifty plus years ago, rewarding those who take the leap with a fruitful bounty. It’s all a question of your faith. And while these children aren’t what I would call blessed, they certainly are special.

Village of the Damned is available on DVD as part of Warner Home Video’s Horror Double Feature series with its sequel, Children of the Damned.