Adapted, as I'm sure you already know, from the
John Wyndham classic, '
The Midwich Cuckoos', 'Village of the Damned' is the story of an invasion of sorts that begins when the entire village of Midwich is sealed off from the outside world by a cone of sleep. For four hours everything - human and animal, villager and visitor - inside the village boundaries immediately falls asleep. Waking with no memories of what has transpired it's not until 2 months later, when every woman of child bearing age is discovered to be pregnant, that the scale of the enigma begins to be revealed. The pregnancies develop at an accelerated pace and the babies are born simultaneously with each displaying strikingly similar characteristics. This acceleratted development continues as the children mature at four times the speed of an entirely human child and display notable telepathic abilties.
Narrowing the focus from the novel, the film concentrates on one family, Professor Gordon Zellaby (
George Sanders - '
Psychomania'), Anthea Zellaby (
Barbara Shelley - '
Quatermass and the Pit') and their 'son' David (
Martin Stephens - '
The Innocents') who ostensibly acts as the leader of the children, who are, despite not appearing for the the first 30 odd minutes, the undisputed stars - as well as the focus - of the film. The children, who operate a hive mind, are neatly conformist, joyless, quick to anger and utterly ruthless in it's expression and an obvious metaphor for the Nazi and Communist regimes that had so preoccupied minds over the previous decades and a reflection of the fear of the newly maturing baby-boomers and the societal changes they were inspiring - "
Couldn’t you learn to live with us, and help us live with you?".
Anglo-German director
Wolf Rilla in his only foray into science fiction plays a subtle hand avoiding those cliches that potentially would have littered the film if the originally planned US productions hadn't floundered. His version (and vision as one of the scriptwriters) emphasises the mundane reality of the village made weird by the actions of the cuckoos in the nest, the cosiness that Wyndham was famously accused of shown to be only a thin veneer covering the turmoil raging below - the accusations, the abuse, the fear, the violence - and the focus is kept deliberately narrow only hinting at the wider picture. There are no answers provided, Gordon Zellaby's solution is one of coldly pragmatic necessity that is a reflection of the children's nature - "
if you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are" - and the who and the how of the children is never revealed and both they and the movie are all the more chilling for it.
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