Village of the Damned

Adapted, as I'm sure you already know, from the John Wyndham classic, 'The Midwich Cuckoos', 'Village of the Damned' is the story of an invasion of sorts that begins when the entire village of Midwich is sealed off from the outside world by a cone of sleep. For four hours everything - human and animal, villager and visitor - inside the village boundaries immediately falls asleep.  Waking with no memories of what has transpired it's not until 2 months later, when every woman of child bearing age is discovered to be pregnant, that the scale of the enigma begins to be revealed.  The pregnancies develop inhumanly quickly and the babies are born simultaneously with each displaying strikingly similar characteristics.  This accelerated development continues as the children mature at four times the speed of an entirely human child and display notable telepathic abilties.

Narrowing the focus from the novel, the film concentrates on one family, Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders - 'Psychomania'), Anthea Zellaby (Barbara Shelley - 'Quatermass and the Pit') and their 'son' David (Martin Stephens - 'The Innocents') who ostensibly acts as the leader of the children, who are, despite not appearing for the the first 30 odd minutes, the undisputed stars - as well as the focus - of the film.  The children, who operate a hive mind, are neatly conformist, joyless, quick to anger and utterly ruthless in it's expression and an obvious metaphor for the Nazi and Communist regimes that had so preoccupied minds over the previous decades and a reflection of the fear of the newly maturing baby-boomers and the societal changes they were inspiring - "Couldn’t you learn to live with us, and help us live with you?".

Anglo-German director Wolf Rilla in his only foray into science fiction plays a subtle hand avoiding those cliches that potentially would have littered the film if the originally planned US productions hadn't floundered.  His version (and vision as one of the scriptwriters) emphasises the mundane reality of the village made weird by the actions of the cuckoos in the nest, the cosiness that Wyndham was famously accused of shown to be only a thin veneer covering the turmoil raging below - the accusations, the abuse, the fear, the violence - and the focus is kept deliberately narrow only hinting at the wider picture. There are no answers provided, Gordon Zellaby's solution is one of coldly pragmatic necessity that is a reflection of the children's nature - "if you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you could be as powerful as we are" - and the who and the how of the children is never revealed and both they and the movie are all the more chilling for it. 

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The Midwich Cuckoos

Published in 1957, 'The Midwich Cuckoos' was the fourth of John Wyndham's post war novels after 'The Day of the Triffids', 'The Kraken Wakes' & 'The Chrysalids'. 

The book tells of the mysterious 'Dayout' suffered by the population of the town of Midwich and the subsequent discovery that every woman of child bearing age in the village has become pregnant.

Many people will be familiar with the story through the fantastic 1960 MGM movie 'Village of the Damned' starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley and Martin Stephens as their fabulously creepy 'son', David.  Some of you may even know it through the risible 1995 John Carpenter remake starring Chrisopher Reeve.

The version below is a BBC Radio adaptation from 1982 starring William Gaunt (who played Richard Barrett in 'The Champions'), Charles Kay and Pauline Yates (perhaps most famously known as Elizabeth - wife of Reggie - Perrin) and with music by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.  It's a remarkably well-mannered adaption that seems like it should have been made in 1962 rather than 1982 but it does retain much of the post war character of the original material.