The Village of the Damned

George Sanders - Gordon Zellaby
Barbara Shelley - Anthea Zellaby
Michael Gwynn - Alan Bernard
Laurence Naismith - Doctor Willers
John Phillips - General Leighton
Richard Vernon - Sir Edgar Hargraves
Jenny Laird - Mrs. Harrington
Richard Warner - Harrington
Thomas Heathcote - James Pawle
Martin Stephens - David Zellaby
Charlotte Mitchell - Janet Pawle
Keith Pyott - Dr. Carlisle
John Stuart - Professor Smith

Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned, apart from some trimming of minor characters and slight amendments to the plot for dramatic reasons, remains faithful to The Midwich Cuckoos. The village of Midwich is subject to an alien intrusion: for some hours it is cut off from the rest of England. A hemispherical field around it causes all within it to fall into a deep sleep. No explanation is given in the film, we lack even this hint, but it is clear that the cause is not natural. It is even clearer when several months later all the female population of the village of childbearing age become pregnant. The children they give birth to are golden-haired, with eyes which (at least in American prints of the film) on occasion mysteriously glow. That they are not 'human' is suggested not only by their origin but by the fact that they communicate telepathically and can enforce their will on the village adults.

The film's first few scenes emphasise the idyllic rural location of a village for which the word 'sleepy' seems to have been invented. George Sanders's languid dialogue as he collapses and the exchange between him and Barbara Winters as they awake borders on the comatose, even taking into account the fact that the characters they play have actually been in a deep sleep. Sanders and Winters as the Zellabys - he a cerebral Professor, she his glamorous younger wife - contrast with the properly respectful country bobbies on bikes and the faintly comic, faintly threatening, stupid working-class characters. Fortunately, once the relationship between the characters is established the acting improves. The authorities cover up the unexplained ‘time out’, and the first sign of the impending events is Anthea Zellaby's purchase of large quantities of pickles in the village shop. Her announcement of her pregnancy to Gordon is delightfully comic, satirising his engagement in plant cross-breeding, but it also ironically foreshadows the fact that cross-breeding between human and alien is precisely what has happened. It is immediately followed by a shot of a desolate young woman being told that she is pregnant despite her husband being away at sea for a year. Hints at attempts to induce miscarriages given in the novel are removed in the film, but it is none the less clear that the mysterious pregnancies are threatening. The women are unable to explain their conditions; the men glower impotently, cuckolded by something they cannot identify.

Anthea's attacks of doubt and fear during her pregnancy are soon dispelled after the birth, although it soon becomes clear that the children have powers of coercion over their human hosts. Rilla conflates these latter incidents into a horrific scene where Anthea plunges her hand into boiling water after giving her baby, David, milk that is too hot. As the children grow, their powers increase. Gordon shows that what one of them learns, they all learn, by means of a simple experiment in teaching his son to open a puzzle box. The children move together in groups, outcast from the other village children; their strange, precise, cold way of talking and their blond hair and staring eyes causes nervousness in adults. When dressed in dark clothes, they have the eerie look of photographic negatives, which the black-and-white film only emphasises. Advisory committees on which Gordon Zellaby sits discuss what to do with the children, who it turns out are not the only group worldwide. Zellaby argues for time to study them, which is granted, but adverse circumstances are looming. We have learned that some of the village children have died in mysterious circumstances. When a motorist nearly runs down one of the children they will him to drive himself into a wall. After an inquest brings a verdict of 'accidental death' the dead man's brother goes after the Children with a shotgun. The Zellabys dissuade him, but too late. As he walks away the children will him to turn the shotgun on himself and blow his head off.

The stakes are increased when it is discovered that the Russians have shelled a village in which similar children were born, and the men of Midwich, angered by the second death, march upon the school in which the children are now living. Carrying burning torches, more ensues when the ringleader is forced to torch himself. Following this, David, who has become the main spokesman for the children, orders his father to get them away. Zellaby, by then the only adult the children trust at all and whose lessons the children enjoy, agrees, but he comes to the next lesson with dynamite in his briefcase. The mental shield he puts up - a simple image of a brick wall - is only sufficient to withstand the combined assault of the children for a few minutes, but it is enough.