Village of the Damned (1960) - film review

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...

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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