By
Hank Reineke
Village
of the Damned is the cinematic moniker of John Wyndham’s
far less exploitative titled 1957 novel The
Midwich Cuckoos. Wyndham’s writing specialty
was science-fiction: he graduated from contributing short stories to such
colorful genre magazines as Wonder
Stories and Amazing Stories to publishing
full-fledged novels. Though his stories
were occasionally adapted for such television dramas as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, his cinematic credits were relatively few. Village
of the Damned is perhaps his best remembered movie tie-in, but a 1951 novel
was also filmed and subsequently released as Day of the Triffids (Allied Artists, 1962).
Village
of the Damned was originally conceived to film in
Hollywood, and American writer Stirling Silliphant was tapped to compose the
screenplay for the movie – which was to be, more or less, a faithful adaptation
of Wyndham’s novel. Though Silliphant
had accrued a few film credits, he was primarily regarded as a television
writer, having contributed a score of 1950s teleplays to a variety of programs
ranging from The Mickey Mouse Club to
Perry Mason to Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Wolf Rilla, a German-born novelist but long-time a
resident of London, was tapped to direct Village
of the Damned. Rilla’s background
too was mostly in television production, having written or directed a score of
TV comedies and dramas over the span of a dozen years. Rilla was approached to direct Village when studio accountants deemed
it far more economical to film in England rather than Hollywood. Rilla thought Silliphant’s scenario was
workable. But he also thought the Yank’s
grasp of contemporary British customs and vernacular was lacking. So Rilla and the film’s British producer Ronald
Kinnoch (the latter writing under the pseudonym of “George Barclay”) reworked
the original script to better authenticate and Anglicize.
The rewrite was successful in that regard. The atmosphere surrounding Village of the
Damned is nothing less than stiff-lipped British in tone. In 2022 looking back, one could easily
mistake Village as a Hammer Film Production
(ala the Quatermass series).
Several prominent cast members of Village,
including Barbara Shelley and Michael Gwynn, would be familiar to Hammer Films devotees,
their faces having graced screens in such productions as The Camp on Blood Island, The
Revenge of Frankenstein, Quatermass
and the Pit, Dracula, Prince of
Darkness, Rasputin, the Mad Monk,
Scars of Dracula and The Gorgon. The venerable British actor George Sanders,
the former star of The Saint film
series, is fittingly at the center of the mystery. And there’s plenty of mystery about…
The tiny, sleepy hamlet of Midwich is the “village”
referenced in the film’s title. Nothing much ever happened in Midwich
until, for an odd four-hour interval, time not only stops but is seemingly lost. The townspeople, for reasons unknown, all
fall into unconsciousness. Initially there doesn’t appear there was any
significant fall-out from this strange time-warping aberration, but several
months later every village woman of childbearing age - married, courting or
celibate - finds themselves pregnant. This collective simultaneously give
birth to children unusual in both manner and appearance. The children, whom some suspect are the
product of some strange “impulse from the universe,” are uniformly uber-intelligent,
gifted beyond their years. While polite
to their parents and other adults, the children also strangely distant, unusually
formal and unemotional in manner.
The children are also endowed with several peculiar special
gifts – not the least of which is the ability to read the minds of the adults. This ability has unnerved those members of
the community who are forced to interact with these mysterious
youngsters. It’s soon revealed these children are, as suspected, the
offspring of alien beings. They have
been imbedded in the village to study the minds and culture of their
earth-bound galactic neighbors. For what
purpose? Well, no one is sure, but the
worst is feared. Once the British military gets involved their
intelligence agents report the residents of Midwich are not alone.
Reports are coming in of similar alien birth-takeovers amongst rural Eskimo
populations as well as countries sitting behind the Iron Curtain.
Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) and his wife Anthea (Barbara
Shelley) are the parents of one such “special” child, David (Martin Stephens). David seems to be the spokesman of the
children. He also is not shy in
demonstrating the bad habit of telepathically coercing those he perceives as
enemies to take their own lives. The situation worsens when the school-age
alien brood make the decision to abandon Midwich to imbed more widely among the
populace. The town elders and military realize they can’t allow these
aliens, semi- contained in Midwich, to spread further afield. But how
does one plot against those with the ability to read every thought that crosses
the minds of those wishing them destruction?
It’s a neat premise and Village of the Damned was a surprising hit for MGM, the B-film’s appeal
amongst cinemagoers and critics alike having caught the studio off guard. When studio brass realized they had a
commercial steamroller on their hands, the publicity department was free to go
full throttle. MGM began to take out
full page ads in the trades, boasting that “Village of the Damned Saturation
Openings” were rollin-up “Sensational Grosses!” This wasn’t mere ballyhoo, it was the truth. So it wasn’t terribly
surprising when MGM announced a follow-up feature was already in consideration.
Anton Leader was chosen to direct this sequel Children of the Damned. Similar to Rilla, Leader was best known for
his directorial work on television, not in motion pictures. In fact, following a successful career in the
1940s as a producer of radio dramas, Leader had worked almost exclusively on
the small screen. He would subsequently
helm an episode or two of practically every iconic television series of the
1950s and 1960s. Leader had left the U.S. for Europe in February 1962, hoping
to set up his own production company on the continent. This dream was deferred
when Leader was asked to direct Children
of the Damned and given a nifty $400,000 budget to do so.
Having worked almost exclusively in the penny-pinching television
industry, Leader gladly accepted. He
would tell a journalist from Variety
that it had been good to get away from TV since a big screen filmmaker was “more
respectfully regraded” and given more time and latitude to do a “respectable
job.” The problem was Leader envisioned Children
of the Damned as an “art picture.” The brass at MGM Britain was less
interested in making a profit, not a point. They wanted Children of the Damned
be a coattail-riding horror film, which wasn’t the film as delivered.
Variety
recorded Leader’s chagrin when the director was first made aware of the
“advertising campaign mapped out by MGM […] lurid billing as an exploitation
special.” Indeed, the poster art played
up only a ghastly sensationalism: “They
Come To Conquer the World… So young, so innocent, so utterly deadly!” A second ad mat was no more constrained (nor
honest) in its carnival-barking: “Beware the Eyes that Paralyze! All-New Suspense Shocker… even more Eerie and
Unearthly than Village of the Damned!”
In truth there’s very little eeriness and only a bit of suspense
in the film. Children isn’t a bad film, but it is a curious follow-up, one that
wildly detours from the premise of the original. There’s only a smattering of sci-fi elements. The “children” number only six in this sequel
and their provenance is multi-national. The
children are, again, borne by unwed women “never touched.” All six are brilliant, each possessing
“intellect beyond belief.” It’s this reason
that makes them of great scientific interest to Dr. Tom Llewellyn (Ian Hendry),
a psychologist and Dr. David Neville (Alan Bader), a geneticist. They suggest a UNESCO program should be
commissioned to study the children.
The problem is that the children do not wish to be
studied. They escape from their
respective embassies to gather inside the bowels of an old church. There was no need for them to proactively discuss
this decision amongst each other – or, at least, not in the usual oral method. Since they communicate with one another
through telepathy, they already share a communal knowledge base. They have no separate nor distinct
personalities and mostly, if not exclusively, communicate their wishes to be
left alone through an intermediary they control through hypnotism.
A sector of both the scientific establishment and
military believe it would be best to “destroy” the children, believing them to
be the spearhead of an invasion of aliens. But the army discovers the children are well-equipped to defend
themselves against any aggressive action. Unlike the Village children,
this new group of moppets choose only to use their telepathic energies towards
their own defense. They’re not
interested in causing harm to anyone, even as the bowels beneath their church
sanctuary are wired with explosives.
Children is,
without doubt, a different animal than Village. John Briley, the U.S. born screenwriter would
contribute an original screenplay for the sequel, one only loosely based on the
premise of the Wyndham novel. Though
early in his career, Briley was no hack merely trying to get along by writing
B-pictures. In 1983, as the writer of Ghandi, Briley was awarded an Oscar for
Best Original Screenplay.
But the folks going to the cinema to catch Children of the Damned wanted a horror
film, and no doubt felt cheated upon exiting. This film was more of a preachy “co-existence not no-existence”
exercise. Most reviews of the film were
critical of the movie’s high-minded and obvious aspiration as being experienced
as a “message film.” One critic thought
the concocted scenario was simply too precious. The filmmakers were attempting to endow the film “with moral
significance […] heavy-handed, unnecessary and too pretentious an aim for so
relatively modest a production venture.”
Although Children of the Damned was Leader’s last
feature film of significance, the British trades were reporting the
novelist/director had already reworked Christopher Monig’s 1956 mystery novel The
Burned Man into a screen treatment, pitching the idea of bringing it to the
screen to Hammer’s James Carreras. That project would not happen, for
better or worse, and Leader soon returned to TV directing. Children
of the Damned is more of a curio today, but Village of the Damned has enjoyed lasting notoriety, even having
been remade by Horror-film maestro John Carpenter in 1995. But while Carpenter’s film easily bests any
of the antiquated optical effects of the 1960 version, Rilla’s original remains
the more iconic.
Village
of the Damned and Children
of the Damned are made available as BD-ROMS through the Warner Archive
Collection. Village is presented in 1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:78.1 and in
DTS HD Master Audio Mono. Children has been made available in
1080p High Definition 16 x 9 1:85.1 and in DTS HD Master Audio Mono. Both films are relativity sparse with extras,
though both offer each film’s theatrical trailer and removable English
subs. The only true “special features”
is Steve Haberman’s commentary track on Village
and screenwriter John Briley’s commentary on Children.
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