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"You have to be taught to leave us alone."
Many of these old cheesy horror movies would end up remade a generation later. My professional blogger ethics forbid me from daring to say that you should watch The Thing from Another World instead of Carpenter's The Thing. One movie is clearly superior. Much of this series has been about tracing the origins of these masterpieces of the late Seventies and Early Eighties. The 1951 movie feels like a template, one that can be built upon into something masterful. Special effects are only part of that story. The Blob (1988) can depict nightmarish things that The Blob (1958) cannot, even the Fifites movie had one hundred times its budget. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) can be emotionally and culturally rich in ways that no Fifties B-movie ever could, thanks to the new trends in Hollywood and increasing psychological complexities of movie-making.
Uniquely Village of the Damned gets remade in 1995 and is much worse than the original.
The problem is, what do you add to the original? Wolf Rilla directed a perfect movie. It is stodgy and a bit dry in the way that a black and white British movie of the period had to be, however what does it lack? The villains of this film are creepy kids in blond wigs and glowing eyes, you do not need three decades of special effects technology to pull that off. The themes are represented with terrifying clarity here, the British were not pulling punches with their SciFi horror in this era. Unless you have a unique and brilliant new take on the material, all you'll do is ruin it. And sadly, John Carpenter in 1995 did not have that brilliant new take he had for The Thing in 1981.
Anyway, since I do not plan on reviewing the '95 version, let's talk about the good movie today instead.
Village of the Damned has a cold open, very rare for this period. We start with footage of various villagers living their normal day in the town of Midwich, England. Then suddenly every one of them falls over, asleep, even the dog (brilliantly played by Bruno). We get a montage of all of man's machinery continuing without operators. All our 20th century gadgets doing tasks for nobody, they are our mindless survivors in this brief apocalypse. A phone rings. A lawnmower crashes into a tree, its comatose driver unaware. A running sink overflows. An iron burns a dress. The camera pans up to the church clock as the hour rings, then finally we get our first cast credits. One heck of a haunting statement to start your horror movie.
This is another great mystery concept, as intriguing as any opening in the Quatermass series. A circular stretch of territory around the village has been taken over by a mysterious force, knocking out all animals within the space. The first perspective character we get is Major Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn), looking to reach his colleague inside Midwich, Gordon Zellaby (George Saunders). Bernard attempts several experiments to understand the nature of the force field. A canary in the cage lets them know the precise limits of the space. They send in a soldier wearing a gas mask with a rope tied around him, he still succumbs to whatever is happening. The private reports terrible cold after he is dragged back to safety. Then Bernard sends a pilot over Midwich, a reckless test that ends in a predictable crash beyond the tree line.
Just then, the people wake up.
They're all fine, merely a bit embarrassed to have dozed off. There's no sign of radiation, no lingering after effects, the dog is fine. The soldiers hang around long enough to fill out the necessary paperwork, but why linger without any threat? The government leaves Gordon, a local scientist and a country gentleman, to stay at home and report whatever happens. Gordon is an older man, married happily to a younger woman, Anthea (Barbara Shelly, who will go on to be in Quatermass and the Pit). One gets the sense this is not the most passionate love affair, not that these films of this era were exactly dripping with sexual tension. It is all the more surprising when Gordon's hobby of crossbreeding plants becomes a metaphor for what's going on in town. The Zellabys are pregnant, so are dozens of women across town, mothers and daughters alike, virgins and women whose husbands have been away for a year.
Alien babies. The book this movie is based on is called The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. "Village of the Damned" is a better title, sure. But just what are these human-shaped things that have entered our nests? If we cannot explain where they came from, we'll have a harder time explaining what they will do.
Village of the Damned is not shying away from the implication of cuckholdry. (And just a short unfortunate hop away, terrors of miscegenation.) Gordon calls himself a "dubious father" in the film. While the children are born, we follow a bitter father across town to the pub, finding it filled with silent men shooting laser beams of pure hate out of their eyes into their pints. There are Lovecraftian themes here, a corruption of the human bloodline by a foreign, unknowable force projected into our reality. Good sober man of science Gordon wants to be the reasonable good man, who can bridge the gap between humans and this rapidly-aging brood of well-dressed, well-mannered, platinum blonde and blue-eyed Aryan super children. The beings are intelligent, one named David (Martin Stephens) calls Gordon "father", but they cannot co-exist with us. This is a Darwinian competition between two species and they have the adaptational advantage.
Whether you like it or not, these alien films are about a terror of difference. I'm not in love with the politics on display, but the affect is undeniable: this movie is really scary.
The monsters of this film are the children, who do look quite creepy in frames together. Village of the Damned is one of the first movies to recognize how terrifying a tiny child-shaped creature can be. They're little psychic demons and a singular collective of emotionless rationality - the same villain that keeps popping up in all these movies so far. The only big special effect is to freeze the footage and add glowing eyes over the still photo in post-production. And you know what? It holds up well, there is no cornball alien to laugh at here. There's lots of blond wigs - which look a lot better in black and white than they do in color in Carpenter's version. What sells the horror is the performances more than anything else. These kids pull off creepy monotone threatening performances quite well. The script is great, as the kids casually mention how their psychic powers are growing. "Soon we'll have reached the stage when we can form new colonies."
We never see it on camera, but a government meeting mentions how there have been "casualties" amongst Midwich's... let's say "less talented" children. Gordon is in many ways the one most capable of communicating with the children not because he's a "father" in scare quotes, but because he's the most scientifically-minded, tempted by knowledge beyond his humanity. The USSR was similarly tempted by a brood of cuckoos in the Urals. The Soviets end up inventing a new kind of long range artillery shell to wipe them out.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers ends with just as much grim finality. Gordon conjures a clever trick to block the children's ability to see into his mind, mentally focusing on a brick wall, then he suicide bombs them all away. Quite a movie to make an audience cheer for an older man blowing up a school full of three-year-olds, but here we go.
I really do think Village of the Damned is perfect. The tension builds in every scene. Not one detail does not add to the SciFi premise. We get just enough of Antheha and her struggle to be a mother to a child with no interest in being mothered. We see enough of Midwich to understand it and the minor characters living there. And movies back then knew to end. We get a big boom, a burning miniature of the school, credits. That's it. Pure efficiency.
I know I wrote this whole thing but I could have just as easily written "movie is perfect, no notes".
There was a sequel in 1964 called Children of the Damned, directed by Anton M. Leader, which I watched for this series. Nobody ever talks about this movie and to my disappointment, for a good reason - it is really boring. I actually scrapped the whole post, because there is little to say. It is not really a sequel to Village as much as a reimagining of the ideas of the novel, this time the children are an international multi-racial collection of super-evolved mutants from the future. (So not even aliens, BOOOOOOO!) Cold War brinksmanship soon leads to a siege of a London church. There's ideas, some attempt to treat the children with more sympathy, but the movie drags and drags, its metaphor against Mutually Assured Destruction militarism being laudable but also trite. Don't bother.
So, John Carpenter, who I'm sure is reading this, don't feel bad. You at least made a much better movie than the '64 version.
Next time! Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, a grubby alien mummy, a train, Kojack, and two Spanish babes dubbed over in English. It's Horror Express.
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