Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960)

Something strange is going on in the little village of Midwich. First, everyone within the village fell into a deep sleep. After they woke up, all the women discovered they were pregnant. When the children were born, they were all strikingly similar blonde moppets.

As they children grow, the adults become more suspicious of their offspring...

When I was growing up, I read a bunch of John Wyndham's books: Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids and Midwich Cuckoos.

I loved the way Wyndham juxtaposed the banalities of mid-Twentieth Century England with science fiction scenarios. There is an irony and atmosphere to Wyndham's work that I have not found with any other author.

While I am a fan of his books, I have never seen any of the movies adapted from his work. One of the best known examples is Village of the Damned, based on Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and directed by Wolf Rilla in 1960. My local arthouse hosted a screening of Village of the Damned to celebrate Friday the 13th, so I decided to check it out.


Before diving in, it is worth admitting that the movie’s power is considerably lessened after the Simpson’s’ parody ‘The Bloodening’. It skewers Village of the Damned so accurately, it definitely affected my viewing experience.

That aside, while it never quite achieves all it sets out to, Village of the Damned is a fun watch, with some points of interest that make it worth a look. The black-and-white photography is very sharp, it moves well and it is a blessed 77 minutes long.

My big thought about the movie is that it is far less unsettling once the children are around. Partially, that has to do with the ‘The Bloodening’, but the film suffers slightly from being unable to really tackle the taboos underlying its premise.

First, the good.

I really enjoyed the first 15 minutes of this movie. I liked it as a whole, but the whole set up is fantastically eerie. The early sequences do a good job of approximating Wyndham’s evocation of English mundanity. Played with little score, the filmmakers use a moving camera and diegetic sound to convey the disquiet of the sleeping town, tracking through houses and streets.

As the army surrounds the town, and run a series of tests against the invisible barrier around it,  the movie feels like a docu-drama, the camera a silent observer as people bustle around with equipment. There is an understated menace to these sequences, aided by the lack of familiar sci-fi signifiers (the film echoes the novel in that we never see the source of the children, either as a ship or aliens).

In The Midwich Cuckoos, Wyndham’s matter-of-fact approach strips the story of any potential melodrama, and increases the tension. There is something uncanny about these sequences that is completely dispelled once we have a group of blonde moppets marching around the village in their little Gestapo outfits.

The big issue I have is that the movie feels like it was made too early. The inherent terror of the novel, the sense of sexual and personal violation, is almost completely absent. This is almost certainly down to the censorship of the time - the film spends little time on this aspect of the story, and the female perspective is almost entirely absent.

Had this film been made later in the decade, with a similar aesthetic it might have been something special. As is, it is a slightly chilly thriller.

The movie gains a certain camp value once the children appear, but the filmmakers do not push the sense of menace. In the novel, there is a sense of claustrophobia as the children gain in power.

The film carries over the novel's description of what happened to the other cuckoo colonies around the world (including the disquieting revelation that the Soviets had to nuke a town without alerting the populace), yet there is no corresponding sense of escalation - it has been awhile since I read it, but I distinctly remember that the destruction of other Children around the world leads the Midwich branch to become more ruthless towards their 'parents'. 

There is no heightening here. 

There is plenty to unpack subtextually: the movie feels like an unsubtle Red Scare allegory (having the children in matching black trench coats also evokes WW2 fears of Nazi occupation). There are also probably some great post-colonial readings out there - however you could probably get more just by analysing the novel.

The adult cast, led by George Saunders and Barbara Shelley, are solid. The script does not give the much to dig into. Geoffrey Faithfull's photography is crisp and chilly, although once the Children appear, the more gothic touches (chiaroscuro and dutch angles) feel a bit over-the-top when the menace is a tyke in a blonde wig.

Ron Godwin’s score has some good ideas (there is a childlike quality to the main theme) but like the film’s visual style, it goes overboard and becomes histrionic as the film goes on. 

I think the thing I am bumping up against with this movie is that it is just too respectable to be scary and too hushed to be ridiculous. This movie is dealing with the moral quandary involving children - it should feel outside the norm and disturbing. But it never does.

There is potential in the quiet chill of the early sequences, but as a whole Village of the Damned is just fine. 

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