<i>Village of the Damned</i>: Killer Kiddos From Outer Space

Village of the Damned (1960) Directed by Wolf Rilla. Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch, based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. Starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, and Martin Stephens.

One of the things I love about researching these articles is that I never know what historical twists and turns I will stumble across.

Let’s go back to 1934, a few decades before Village of the Damned (1960) was put into production. John Wyndham was writing for American sci fi pulp magazines under the name John Beynon; his breakout literary success with Days of the Triffids wouldn’t arrive until 1951. Hollywood was becoming both a major political force (the studios meddled enthusiastically in the 1934 California gubernatorial election) and, relatedly, a major source of moral concern for people inclined toward pearl-clutching and handwringing about what they saw on movie screens.

In 1934, MGM released W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, which managed to slip in just under the wire as one of the last major films before studios accepted and began enforcing the self-censorship of the Hays Code. At the same time, across the country in Ohio, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, a man by the name of John T. McNicholas, founded a group called the Catholic Legion of Decency. The goal of the Legion was to push the film industry into avoiding any subject matter that would “offend decency and Christian morality.” The Legion did not advocate for governmental censorship; instead it operated by asking its members to pledge to avoid films deemed inappropriate by various bishops and priests, and to apply commercial pressure by letting studios know exactly why they refused to see certain films.

To address the obvious question: No, I don’t know if the men making these lists of forbidden movies went to watch those movies first. This 1934 Time article contains some quotations that suggest somebody was sitting in the theater furiously taking notes on every seductive and unwholesome detail, as well as scouring the tabloids to keep tabs on Hollywood gossip about the lives of the people involved. I hope they did watch the films; that would at the very least put them ahead of today’s book banners, most of whom have probably not read a book since high school, much less the books they so vehemently denounce as pornographic.

By the late 1950s, both the influence of the Hays Code (which was drafted by a Jesuit priest) and the religion-driven pressure on motion picture studios was lessening, but it was still very much present. The Catholic Legion of Decency (which was at some point renamed “the National Legion of Decency”) was keeping an eye on movies as they went into production. One of the movies that caught their eye was Village of the Damned.

(Note: It’s not entirely clear when the title was chosen or who chose it. The initial development used the book’s title, The Midwich Cuckoos, but it seems to have been changed fairly early on. I think Wyndham’s title is much better for the story, and Village of the Damned doesn’t fit at all, but that’s just movie business nonsense.)

In a 1978 interview with Starburst magazine, screenwriter Stirling Silliphant spoke about how after he finished the initial script, MGM grew wary of producing the film because their Catholic advisors found the premise “anti-Catholic.” The problem, of course, is that the entire story hinges on a rash of sudden and mysterious pregnancies that mimic the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Legion of Decency and others felt that it was blasphemous and “insulting” to make a movie about an alien force impregnating a bunch of women who were not, presumably, free of original sin.

This surprised me a little bit—not because I would have expected 1950s Catholics to not be extremely weird about pregnancy, that’s totally predictable—but because in my mind various types of invasive impregnation, brood parasitism, and evil children are familiar horror and sci fi staples. But I started digging into those tropes and realized it’s maybe not quite that simple. There have of course been changeling myths for as long as people have been telling stories, but those are notably about perfectly normal human children being replaced by inhuman children. There have also long been spooky kids in horror literature; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is of course one of the creepy children classics.

But there weren’t actually many films with the evil children premise when Wyndham wrote The Midwich Cuckoos. There was 1956’s The Bad Seed, based on William March’s 1954 novel, which is about a sociopathic little girl who kills a schoolmate. The Production Code Administration strongly urged all the major studios not to adapt the novel, but Warner Brothers made the movie, and it was a big hit.

I’m not sure if The Bad Seed is the first major Hollywood film to focus on a homicidal little child, but it certainly one of the earliest. Village of the Damned followed not long after, and quite a few more terrifying children from studios large and small would fill out the horror genre over the next few decades: The Omen (1976), Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), The Brood (1979), Children of the Corn (1984), and so on.

In any case, back in the late ’50s, killer kids weren’t the horror movie staple they are today, and MGM did not see Village of the Damned as a sure thing. Around the same time as the studio was balking under pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the film’s original lead actor, Ronald Colman, died of natural causes. Rather than scrapping the film entirely, MGM shelved it for a while before moving it to the United Kingdom. This annoyed Silliphant so much that he broke his contract with MGM and spent a few years writing for television—he came back to the movies eventually, and is now most well-known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night (1978), as well as the iconic Irwin Allen disaster films The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the latter of which gave me terrible nightmares as a child, even though I lived a thousand miles from the nearest ocean.

Upon its move to the U.K., Village of the Damned was handed to director Wolf Rilla and producer Ronald Kinnoch. Production was slated to start just a few weeks later, so Rilla and Kinnoch had a very short time to revise the script to make it more believably British. They filmed the movie in the Hertfordshire village of Letchmore Heath, featuring the village’s buildings and exteriors—such as the wall that unfortunate driver smashes into.

Rilla was a writer and producer for the BBC before he decided to try his hand at making films, although Village of the Damned would prove to be his only real success. It’s interesting how much his journalistic background influenced the movie’s style. Contemporary reviews highlight how Village of the Damned is “quietly civilized” and “acted and directed with deadly seriousness.” The film has no real action, no jump-scares, very little on-screen violence, and the only special effects are the use of freeze frames and minor animation to give the children their glowing eyes.

This approach is very understated, almost muted, which isn’t unusual for how horror movies normally begin, but it is unusual that it maintains that tone all the way through. This is a film about people desperately trying to believe they aren’t in a horror story.

It works better in some places than in others. The film’s weakest element is in how the awful violation of inexplicable pregnancy is explored largely through the perspective of the men reacting to it, not the women. Sure, it’s a result of the film being very much of its time, as well as written by men, but I can’t help but think how much more unsettling the situation would feel if we got a glimpse into a conversation between the mothers of the children.

For all of the worries about blasphemy, the movie barely touches on religion. What it’s more concerned about is the role parents and other people play in shaping a child’s moral compass. Gordon and Anthea Zellaby (George Sanders and Barbara Shelley) are concerned about guiding David (Martin Stephens) to maybe try not to kill people with his brain, although their efforts are ultimately futile and always undermined by their own suspicions and fears.

Obviously, they know from conception that there is something strange about David and the other children. The kids grow at an unnaturally rapid rate and never bother to hide their psychic powers, so the film skips right over the “Little kids can’t be that bad!” stage and right into the “Those children are mind-controlling people!” stage. The few scenes we see of Anthea caring for David—mothering him—are notably uncomfortable. He is merely tolerating her, and she is afraid of him, and they both know the other one wants their relationship to be different.

Gordon’s attitude toward the children is slightly different. It reminds me a bit of Dr. Yamane’s reaction in Godzilla (1954): acknowledgement that this is a terrifying situation beyond their understanding, but still wanting to learn from it rather than recklessly eliminating it. Atomic-era sci fi was often reminding us that with great power comes great responsibility, and Village of the Damned touches on this with the information about the strange children being born into other communities around the world. The purpose is to show that people have dealt with these children differently, although the details, taken directly from The Midwich Cuckoos, are rife with cultural stereotypes: Inuit and Mongolian communities killing their children outright, the Soviet community seizing upon the children’s skills to control and utilize them, and the Australian children (part of the Commonwealth, after all!) dying of natural causes.

But let’s not forget what’s important here: Village of the Damned works because those kids are really, truly creepy. They are delightfully creepy. Zilla was very straightforward about how he achieved that creepiness from his young cast: he made them be still. It’s such a small thing, but all the more effective because of it. Children are not still. Children are chaotic perpetual motion machines. So by having the Midwich children be perfectly still, whether they’re in their cribs or in their mother’s arms, sitting attentively at their school desks or psychically forcing a man to shoot himself, there is a powerful sense of wrongness every time they are on screen. They are always calmly unmoving, emotionlessly blank, and outwardly unreactive.

Heavy-handed late ’50s xenophobia and wonderfully creepy blond moppets aside, the film provides an interesting look into a whole swath of sci fi questions: How are we different? How are we the same? What do we do when we encounter somebody truly different? Not just on our planet, but in our bodies, in our families, in our homes? What do we do in the face of something so unfamiliar that it’s frightening? What do we do when we want the aliens to be like us, to adopt our ways and fit into our lives, but the aliens refuse? What do we do when neither humans nor aliens can ignore the mutual threat they present to each other?

Much like the interplanetary spores in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Midwich children have come to Earth to survive, but we don’t learn much about their purpose beyond that. We don’t even know if there is a purpose beyond that. Unlike the pod people, they don’t state any intent toward taking over the world or assimilating humanity under their control. (The film, unlike the book, even hedges a little bit on whether they are extraterrestrial in origin, but it’s a very little bit. It’s clear that everybody, including the children themselves, believes they are aliens.)

Would things go differently if the children blended in better? If they weren’t so emotionless, or if the villagers weren’t so afraid? Was there ever a possibility in which Gordon and Anthea’s nurturing could have been more influential than David’s nature?

We don’t know, but the endless possibilities are why writers so enjoy sticking odd children among ordinary people, for better or worse. I mentioned a bunch of creepy children stories above, but let’s also remember an alien-raised-by-humans story that predates The Midwich Cuckoos by a couple of decades, and which takes a similar premise in pretty much the exact opposite direction: the first Superman comic was published in 1938.

Sci fi has long been fascinated with the presence or absence of emotion, whether it’s innate or learned, and to what extent it is a fundamental human trait. It’s a way to examine questions that tumble around the fields of psychology, sociology, and criminology—questions that don’t have easy answers, because humans are complicated creatures. How we treat children is a powerful lens for exploring how we view ourselves. When the children are a bit wrong, or quite creepy, or extremely dangerous, it becomes a way to challenge our ideas about our capacity for empathy, our willingness to engage the strange and unknown, and where we might reach the limits of our protective instincts.

Who are your favorite creepy children in sci fi and horror? What do you think about Village of the Damned? I know there is a sequel, Children of the Damned (1964), that portrays the children in a much more sympathetic light, but I haven’t seen it and am curious to hear from anybody who has.

Next week: Use your internet skills to hunt down Save the Green Planet!, or watch it on Kanopy if you can. I suggest checking JustWatch or a similar site to see about availability in your location.