ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - December 7th
"VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED" released in 1960
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The inhabitants of the British village of Midwich suddenly fall unconscious, as does anyone entering the village. The military establishes a cordon around Midwich and sends in a man wearing a gas mask, but he, too, falls unconscious and is pulled back with rope. The man awakens and reports experiencing a cold sensation just before passing out. The pilot of a military reconnaissance plane is contacted and asked to investigate. When he flies below 5,000 feet, he loses consciousness and the plane crashes. The villagers suddenly regain consciousness and apparently are unaffected until two months later, all women and girls of child-bearing age in the affected area are discovered to be pregnant, sparking many accusations of infidelity and extramarital sex. The accusations fade as the extraordinary nature of the pregnancies is discovered, with seven-month fetuses appearing after only five months. Finally, all the women give birth on the same day.
Their children have an unusual appearance, including "arresting" eyes, odd scalp hair construction and color (platinum blond), and unusually narrow fingernails. As they grow and develop at a rapid rate, it becomes clear they also have a powerful telepathic bond with one another, communicating with each other over great distances, and as one learns something, so do the others. Three years later, Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders), whose wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley) gave birth to one of the children, attends a meeting with British Intelligence to discuss the children, where he learns Midwich was not the only place affected; follow-up investigations have revealed similar phenomena in other areas of the world.
At age three, the children are precocious, physically and mentally the equivalent of children four times their age. Their behavior has become even more unusual and striking. They dress impeccably, always walk as a group, speak in an adult manner, and behave maturely, but they show no conscience or love, and demonstrate a coldness to others, causing the villagers to fear and be repulsed by them. The children begin to exhibit the power to read minds and to force people to do things against their will, resulting in a number of villagers' deaths many of which are considered unusual. This is confirmed when the children are seen killing a man by making him crash his car into a wall, and again when they force his suspicious brother to shoot himself. The children are placed in a separate building to learn and live, while Zellaby, whose "son" David is one of the children, is at first eager to work with them, trying to teach them while hoping to learn more about them. Zellaby compares the children's resistance to reasoning with a brick wall and uses this motif as self-protection against their mind reading after the children's inhuman nature becomes clear to him. But will his resistance to their powers be strong enough to block his true, lethal intentions from them?
Their children have an unusual appearance, including "arresting" eyes, odd scalp hair construction and color (platinum blond), and unusually narrow fingernails. As they grow and develop at a rapid rate, it becomes clear they also have a powerful telepathic bond with one another, communicating with each other over great distances, and as one learns something, so do the others. Three years later, Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders), whose wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley) gave birth to one of the children, attends a meeting with British Intelligence to discuss the children, where he learns Midwich was not the only place affected; follow-up investigations have revealed similar phenomena in other areas of the world.
At age three, the children are precocious, physically and mentally the equivalent of children four times their age. Their behavior has become even more unusual and striking. They dress impeccably, always walk as a group, speak in an adult manner, and behave maturely, but they show no conscience or love, and demonstrate a coldness to others, causing the villagers to fear and be repulsed by them. The children begin to exhibit the power to read minds and to force people to do things against their will, resulting in a number of villagers' deaths many of which are considered unusual. This is confirmed when the children are seen killing a man by making him crash his car into a wall, and again when they force his suspicious brother to shoot himself. The children are placed in a separate building to learn and live, while Zellaby, whose "son" David is one of the children, is at first eager to work with them, trying to teach them while hoping to learn more about them. Zellaby compares the children's resistance to reasoning with a brick wall and uses this motif as self-protection against their mind reading after the children's inhuman nature becomes clear to him. But will his resistance to their powers be strong enough to block his true, lethal intentions from them?
Alan Bernard: People, especially children, aren't measured by their IQ. What's important about them is whether they're good or bad, and these children are bad!
Top: Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) struggles to understand the "unusual" children;
Above: Zellaby's wife Anthea (Barbara Shelley)
Adapated from the sci-fi horror novel The Midwich Cuckoos (by John Wyndham), Village of the Damned was originally to be an American picture, to be filmed at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios in Culver City, California when pre-production began in 1957. Ronald Colman was contracted for the leading role, but MGM shelved the project, bowing to pressure from religious groups that objected to the sinister depiction of virgin birth. The production was then transferred to the MGM British Studios and shot on location in the village of Letchmore Heath, near Watford, north of London, where many of the local buildings - such as The Three Horseshoes Pub and Aldenham School - being used during filming.
The blonde wigs that the children wore were padded to give the impression that they had abnormally large heads, and they were lit in such a way as to cause the irises and pupils of their eyes to merge into a large black disc against the whites of their eyes, to give them an eerie look. The glowing-eye effect, when the children used their mental powers, was achieved by creating animated overlays of a bright white iris; this created a bright glowing iris with a black pupil when optically printed into the film. This technique was used mostly on freeze frames to create the required effect; the only sequence of live motion processed in this way was the scene in which David tells Alan Bernard to "leave us alone" where the eye effect appears as David speaks. The other time David's eyes go from normal to glowing on screen (after one of the girl children is nearly run down by a car), a two shot of the girl and David, is a composite shot split by a slightly jagged black line; the half with the girl is live motion, and you can see her hair moving in the breeze, whereas the half with David is a freeze frame with the eye effect added.
The blonde wigs that the children wore were padded to give the impression that they had abnormally large heads, and they were lit in such a way as to cause the irises and pupils of their eyes to merge into a large black disc against the whites of their eyes, to give them an eerie look. The glowing-eye effect, when the children used their mental powers, was achieved by creating animated overlays of a bright white iris; this created a bright glowing iris with a black pupil when optically printed into the film. This technique was used mostly on freeze frames to create the required effect; the only sequence of live motion processed in this way was the scene in which David tells Alan Bernard to "leave us alone" where the eye effect appears as David speaks. The other time David's eyes go from normal to glowing on screen (after one of the girl children is nearly run down by a car), a two shot of the girl and David, is a composite shot split by a slightly jagged black line; the half with the girl is live motion, and you can see her hair moving in the breeze, whereas the half with David is a freeze frame with the eye effect added.
[last lines]
Prof. Gordon Zellaby: [voiceover] A brick wall... a brick wall... I must think of a brick wall... a brick wall... I must think of a brick wall... a brick wall... brick wall... I must think of a brick wall... It's almost half past eight... brick wall... only a few seconds more... brick wall... brick wall... brick wall... nearly over... a brick wall...
Top and Above: The children try to break Zellaby's "mental wall"!
A similar split screen effect is used during the first scene of a boy and girl using their powers to stop their 'brother' stealing a puzzle box; the close ups of the mother holding the boy as his eyes begin to glow and she turns to look at him are achieved as above this time without a black line separating the freeze frames of the boy from the live motion of the mother. The final effect of the children's eyes zooming out of the flames of their burning school house utilized multiple exposures of a model head with glowing eyes which the camera zoomed in on. UK prints - shown several months prior to the US release in December - without the glowing eyes effects show that during the final sequence, in the close-ups, the kids widen their eyes as they attack Zellaby's mind, unlike the freeze frames with added glowing eyes used in the American prints. Another example is a slight smile that David makes after setting one of the villagers on fire in the UK print; the freeze frames of the American print do not contain such subtle detail.
The Guardian praised the story as "most ingenious" and Rilla as applying "the right laconic touch", while The Observer wrote, "The further you have moved away from fantasy, the more you will understand its chill". American critics were also in favour of the film. The Time reviewer called it "one of the neatest little horror pictures produced since Peter Lorre went straight" and questioned the wisdom of MGM's low-profile release strategy. While not willing to call it a horror classic, Howard Thompson of the New York Times said, "as a quietly civilized exercise in the fear and power of the unknown this picture is one of the trimmest, most original and serenely unnerving little chillers in a long time".
The Guardian praised the story as "most ingenious" and Rilla as applying "the right laconic touch", while The Observer wrote, "The further you have moved away from fantasy, the more you will understand its chill". American critics were also in favour of the film. The Time reviewer called it "one of the neatest little horror pictures produced since Peter Lorre went straight" and questioned the wisdom of MGM's low-profile release strategy. While not willing to call it a horror classic, Howard Thompson of the New York Times said, "as a quietly civilized exercise in the fear and power of the unknown this picture is one of the trimmest, most original and serenely unnerving little chillers in a long time".
Above: The "children" in John Carpenter's remake
A British-produced MGM sequel, Children of the Damned, directed by Anton M. Leader, followed in 1963 with a smaller group of six children (each one from a different nation: China, India, Nigeria, the Soviet Union, the United States and the UK). Although their powers are similar, the theme and tone are nearly opposite, with the children in the sequel being portrayed as sympathetic characters. Not so sympathetic were the critics of the film, with The New York Times writing, "a dull, pretentious successor to that marvelous little chiller of several seasons ago, Village of the Damned. What a comedown". A US-produced remake was released in 1995 by Universal Studios with director John carpenter, starring Christopher Reeve, Linda Kozlowski, Kirsty Alley and Mark Hamill. And like Children of the Damned, the new Village of the Damned received mostly negative reviews, with Lloyd Paseman of the Eugene Register-Guard stating that while the remake did not attempt to make Village of the Damned "something" that its predecessor was not, the film had "mediocre" dialogue and plot development. Paseman also remarked that in this film Reeve made an "earnest" attempt, that Kozlowski did the highest quality acting for the film, that Dekker was "credible," and that Hamill was "badly miscast."
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 96%
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