One fine day in a rural English village, without any warning, all the animals and people suddenly collapse. The farmer in his tractor, slumped over the wheel, spins in slow wide circles till the tractor hits a tree. And even then he doesn't budge. No one does. Not even George Sanders, who had starred in a string of B-grade amateur detective flicks a generation earlier before passing the baton to his younger brother.
After a couple hours of utter insensibility, Sanders manages to haul his genteel carcass up from the floor, rather as though he'd just been sleeping one off curled up with the dog. "What an extraordinary thing to do," he says, trying to cover up to his wife who caught him fair and square.
Soon, however, the whole village learns that everyone there went lights out at the same time and stayed that way for a few hours. What an extraordinary thing indeed. Gradually, they also learn something further: all the women of child-bearing age have now become pregnant. Some of whom, presumably just like George Sanders' wife, have never had sex in their lives.
All the babies gestate at an accelerated rate, each one a marvel of development. When they are born, all have blonde hair, arresting eyes, and are uniformly in possession of remarkable intelligence. Intellectual powers so vast, these kids can make people do things without ever saying a word.
Whenever someone tries to hurt them, they know it in advance. They don't have to say a thing. Those who would try to hurt them cannot help but stop. And receive a stringent lesson in the only thing that matters to Midwich's most gifted young minds: the only thing they want is to be left alone.
Village of the Damned (1960) is a gem of a picture with a story which may seem familiar even to those who've never seen it. Rod Serling sure did. One of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone, "It's a Good Life," stars Billy Mumy as a creepy kid who can read people's minds and do anything he wants.
Serling's take focuses on the problems of an "overly permissive" society allowing children to run rampant. But the original film from which he was so permissively allowed to directly lift comes from a different place entirely. The director, Wolf Rilla, was born in Berlin. When Adolf Hitler was suckering Germany, Rilla's father, who was Jewish, moved the family to England. So the real problem in the story isn't young people on the brink of peace, love, and rock n' roll. The real problem is blonde inhuman aliens who think that they're superior.
Re-made not as well in 1995 by John Carpenter, and re-made even more not as well as a television series in 2017, Village of the Damned inexorably demands to be seen, heard, and obeyed.
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED
Starring George Sanders,
Barbara Shelley,
Michael Gwynn,
Laurence Naismith,
Martin Stephens
Directed by Wolf Rilla
Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, Ronald Kinnoch
Based on the novel by John Wyndham
Stewart Kirby writes for
THE INDEPENDENT
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