The Midwich Cuckoos is one of John Wyndham's best books and almost as popular as his groundbreaking The Day of the Triffids, the story about deadly walking plants that now seems a progenitor of the post-apocalyptic subgenre. Wyndham's narrative logic is impeccable. Weird scientific mysteries are followed by further impossibilities that overturn everything dear to the English heart: Order, propriety, civilization itself. Instead of meteor showers and deadly flora, this time it's an unexplainable "Sleeping Beauty" blackout of a town followed by the simultaneous pregnancy of every woman capable of bearing children. Cuckoos are birds that lay their eggs in the nests of another species so that other mothers can be tricked into raising them. "Life will find a way," but it's an unethical jungle out there.

Juvenile delinquency as a modern problem emerged in the middle of WW2 in both the U.S. and the U.K.. Unsupervised adolescents got into trouble and formed unauthorized associations outside of the family ... to wit, gangs. The kids in Village of the Damned are a little mob of pre-Droog, pre X-Men mutant freaks. Their fathers are not human (would the taboo there be miscegenation or reverse-bestiality?) and they look as if half of their chromosomes are some alien blueprint designed to implant a dominant alien consciousness in whatever life form they encounter - identical blonde hair, calm rounded faces, dark eyes. They even wear identical black raincoats with the cool fashion conformity that has become a given in neo-sci fi. They have a communal instinct and a communal mind, evoking fears of Communism and enforced conformity engendered by top Science Fiction like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Their super-intellignece is a byproduct of their communal mind; as George Sanders' Zellaby puts it, they're "one mind to the power of twelve." Instead of single consciousnesses, they're really one, much like the composite alien beings in Quatermass 2. Zellaby's "son" David is only half-human. His other dominant half bears a loyalty to his own kind far stronger than his affection for his mother.

Village of the Damned has several brilliant strokes, like the use of expressionist imagery to illustrate the crumbling of Gordon Zellaby's defensive mental wall under the bombardment of the alien mind-probes. There are also hints of terrifying sadism in the killings. The children cooly force adults to be witnesses as they force a man to crash his car, and his brother to blow his own head off. The morbid slaughter committed by emotionless zombies has a stylized appeal that would soon be transferred to movie hit men (Lee Marvin in The Killers) and then become a cliché.

Wyndham had his share of weak female characters, such as the Triffids' porn-star/adventuress/Earth Mother heroine. Village downplays the story's seemingly essential female element. The women of Midwich suffer in medium shot here and there, but we mostly feel their anguish through male characters. When pregancy-fear havoc is running riot, we merely hear the town doctor reporting attempted suicides. Whereas we do get a few first-person anxieties via Gordon's wife Anthea (Hammer queen Barbara Shelley), most events are experienced through George Sanders' cool-headed sensibility. Sanders emotional relationship with his much younger wife is much more verbal than it is physical. The name Anthea suggests that Gordon's wife is another rose in his garden.

I'm surprised that Anthea Zellaby doesn't kill herself in Village of the Damned. Her husband is a wet noodle, and her mystery child rejects her unequivocally. Then hubbie goes and sacrifices himself without so much as consulting her first.

The most powerful shock cut in the film is to Anthea plunging her arm into scalding water, accompanied by a James Bernard-like musical explosion. Shelley flails violently; it's one of the few "female" traumas in the film. When the going gets tough the men abandon their spouses and go to the pub to drink ale and find solace in male bonding, all to some incongruous Ron Goodwin marching music. The equally uptight Hammer films didn't exploit the full range of female power either.

An unintentional laugh (at least when I saw the film for the first time in 1970) comes when the Midwich women line up at an aid station to be told that they are all pregnant. Just as the idea that every Jill in town has the same problem, there's an abrupt cut to Zellaby's large German Shepherd dog. Gee, is the dog preggers too? Are there going to be little puppies running around with blonde wigs between their ears?

The film keeps hinting that the Midwich children are aware of their status as spearheads for invasion, a fave theme of lowbudget Sci Fi that couldn't afford the effects needed to show full-scale alien invasions. Zellaby's brainy kindergarten class avoids his probing questions about life on other planets, and the kids are soon a sealed-off conspiracy of the Them against Us variety. There's no ambiguity about the necessity of exterminating them. The only question is How.

Village of the Damned was competently filmed on the same village location seen in Hammer films like Die! Die! My Darling! and The Dirty Dozen, the one with the little race track-like rail around the triangular common. George Sanders clearly was interested in the intelligent story, for he plays it straight. Fantasy familiars Michael Gwynne and Laurence Naismith also lend solid credibility to the story. The standout is little Martin Stephens, who does a brilliant job acting out the visual David Zellaby with an intelligent poise far beyond his years. He's dubbed by the same (female?) voice talent as in The Innocents and a large part of his eerie character is conveyed by the precocious calculation in his voice. Children are so often dubbed in English movies, many seem to articulate their words too clearly.

Savant was too young to see Village of the Damned and was prevented from doing so by a mother who picked up on the same "sick" elements noted in the Variety review. But I did a lot of staring at the poster (I remember it played the day after Butterfield 8 at the Air Base Theater) and was traumatized by one viewing of a TV spot. For years afterwards I had scary nightmares featuring, of all things, the TV spot's image of people waking up and climbing out of a disabled bus!

Warner's DVD of Village of the Damned is a beauty. The film has always been in good condition and this enhanced transfer only improves it. The edition includes a trailer and a good commentary from author Steve Haberman. He brings up several of the points mentioned above. Haberman's insights about the apocryphal English cut of the film are fascinating, as is his discussion of how the "blasphemy" issue stalled the movie's production for three years.

Is the film "sick" and blasphemous? Larry Cohen would go right to the heart of the Immaculate Conception idea in his 70s film God Told Me To. In that one a mutant Messiah is born when a woman is impregnated by aliens. Cohen clearly delights in upsetting church applecarts when the opportunity arises. Both his film and Wolf Rilla's imply by extrapolation that Jesus could have been the son of an alien being. Frankly, the Christian concepts of mercy and pacifism sometimes do seem alien to the core human character.

Children of the Damned 1963 / 89 min. Starring Ian Hendry, Alan Badel, Clive Powell, Barbara Ferris, Alfred Burke, Sheila Allen, Ralph Michael, Patrick Wymark Cinematography Davis Boulton Art Direction Elliot Scott Film Editor Ernest Walter Special Effects Tom Howard Original Music Ron Goodwin Written by John Briley Produced by Lawrence P. Bachmann Directed by Anton M. Leader

Packaging: Keep case
Reviewed: July 6, 2004

Footnotes:

1. Alraune was a turn-of-the-century novel about a scientist who "grows" a human female from the semen of a hanged man, thereby creating an artificial woman without a soul. The blasphemous idea involved all kinds of taboo sex for the purpose of creating the perfect villainess - a wicked female who delights in destroying men as she would pull the wings from a fly. Alraune is traced through Lulu and Pandora's Box into the false Maria of Metropolis and several Alraune film versions. Along with Frankenstein, it's generally responsible for the idea that any man-made creature is soul-less and therefore Evil with a capital E. The seductive man-killer heroines in Pandora's Box and The Blue Angel aren't fantastic in origin, but the principal question in both films is whether they are innocent catalysts or inherently Evil.
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2. Aliens are forever searching for human females for mating purposes (The Mysterians) but here there's no chase, just the Blessed Event. Disc commentator Steve Haberman says that the book alludes to the fact that a spaceship was rumored to have been sighted, which points to the idea that space aliens landed and physically assaulted the women of Midwich. For some reason, I strongly remember that the book held the idea that the women were impregnated by "radio waves" from outer space. The idea of a universally compatible DNA beam makes a lot more sense than imagining an alien race physically compatible with homo sapiens. In any case, are the virgins of Midwich still virgins? (More 'inappropriate' thoughts.) As in The Day of the Triffids, Wyndham keeps origins purposely unclear. The reason the Triffids have spread all over the globe in the book is strongly suggested to have a Cold War origin, but Wyndham keeps it as a rumor.
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3. Of course, the idea of using children as perverse demons was revisited again and again in things like Rosemary's Baby and its commercial derivative The Omen. There was a pointed Italian horror film called Who Can Kill a Child? where the moppets of a sunny island band together to murder their parents. There the reason remains unexplained, as in The Birds. The Innocents literalizes the James story The Turn of the Screw, turning its demonic children (they've witnessed adult sexual cruelty) into wanton sadists. In it Village of the Damned's Martin Stephens returns as the precociously nasty kid, along with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie's wonderful Pamela Franklin. Thematically, killer children feed back to the knowledge that in an age of riches and leisure, children are more neglected than ever and society should as a result feel guilty about it. What did Charles Manson say? "Your own kids will come at you with knives?" Charlie is human vermin, but he could turn a phrase like a modern prophet.
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4. When the Beatles came along three years later and millions of kids started growing their hair long, Establishment backlash criticized the Fab Four for starting a fashion that emphasized group conformity. We 60s kids identified this with precedents in our own experience, like the "cool" uniformity of the kids in Village of the Damned. I've also often wondered if the identical blonde wigs worn by the Eloi in George Pal/MGM's The Time Machine of the same year were hand-me downs from Village of the Damned.
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5. The effect is so chilling, I've seen it as an unintended echo in several similarly surreal shots in the Ziegfeld "meat parade" scene in the musical Funny Girl. For those who think I'm nuts, I'm referring to the intro with the showgirls on the stage risers immediately preceding the scene where Streisand does her 'pregnant' gag number - The Beautiful Reflection of My Love's Affection. Take a look.
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6. In the book, I believe one of the Cuckoos is killed somehow, leaving Zellaby's little colony with an odd number of boys and girls. This presents a problem of mates that becomes an issue in John Carpenter's dreary Village of the Damned remake. It's one of the film's many links with Joseph Losey's These are the Damned, also about deady children who are man-made victims of atomic testing, borne to pregnant women who have been irradiated. One of the questions the children (innocently) ask is how they all can have romantic story-book love mates when they grow up, when there's an uneven number of girls and boys. The answer is a Strangelove-like poligamy, I suppose.
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