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Beware
 the
Stare!
“If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings, you’d be as powerful as we are.”—David
 For those of you in the dark, it’s now common practice for any restrictive government action, whether censorship of pornography or increased authority for removing a minor from the home, to justify child protection.
But when the situation is reversed, when children are “monsters”…what do we as a society do? Do we violate the most inviolate tenet in our culture by destroying what we cherish?
What happens when the human race is threatened, but our social conventions and political institutions prevent us from murdering our children to save ourselves? What happens when a society's virtues are exploited as strategic and tactical weaknesses by a cruel and cunning enemy within? What happens when we’re under attack but cultural mores and folkways prevent us from adequately defending ourselves? What happens when unthinkable warfare with an army of children exploits the baseline human instinct we nurture; do we pull the levers of our military advantage, or do we defer in our belief that children do not have full command of themselves? What happens when our children are touchable but unreachable, familiar to us yet so far from us?
Little sociopaths with indifference toward the mothers who birthed them and reckless disregard of the law that protects them may sound just a little bit too familiar.
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED sleeps with a vague sense of disquiet, building dreadful insinuations, somber threats in a drab setting, after a mysterious force renders the town SILENT, COLD, and WITHOUT POWER—and anyone outside the village powerless to enter.
 Wrapping around the opening credits are dialogue-free mundane activities, low-key scenes of bucolic tranquility in the rural hamlet of Midwich. It’s 11 a.m. when every living thing abruptly falls asleep. A blackout surrounds the “sleepy” little hamlet like an invisible dome. Hours later everyone awakes, but within a couple of months the town's entire fecund population of females turns up pregnant, the embryos developing far more quickly than normal; and the babies once born (on the same day) mature at an accelerated rate.
Within the next few years they are physically the equivalent of children four times their age, prematurely attaining full mental acuity and behaving conspiratorially, which the villagers naturally deem as odd. But what really frightens the residents of Midwich is discovering that these youngsters possess a “communal” mind capable of telepathically forcing their will with unsettling implications. Born with mental prowess beyond anyone’s comprehension, the children share their thoughts and combine their power to destroy anyone who stands in their way.
These kids who all look the same when slightly older do band together. Their lack of emotion, choreography of movement and determined un-child-like manner is not their most recognizable feature; that resides in their glowing eyes, quite disturbing, unifying …and alien. As if half their chromosomes are some alien blueprint, otherwise normal looking children marked by an almost uniformed appearance, much has been made of how each possesses curiously blond cross-hatched hair and a rounded face, darkly piercing eyes and very calm demeanor. They wear identical black raincoats with cool conformity, moving about with predator instincts, evoking an aggregate personality and communal mind. Best of all, for sci-fi fans, their superior intellect and chilling malevolence holds the group together with a single-minded composite personality and universal awareness.
What actually distinguishes the film is its sense of reality, presenting children as children, which seems more likely to unsettle the viewer than the horrific events as they unfold. So easily (mis)interpreted, whatever opinions or useful cautions bestowed, the movie successfully manages to enter the collective consciousness of all who view it; the most unforgettable motion picture ever made, consistent with the science-fiction and horror of its era while serving up pronouncements about the ambiguity of our civilized social order. The notion that “dog will eat dog” to survive over an opposing species, that life will always find a way—what then if the central philosophy of our society is being subverted by big-headed, glassy-eyed children whom we might have some difficulty destroying? What if our evolutionary successor is both repulsive and terrifying?
The film eschews a number of innuendoes about alien invasion, emergence of a new life form, and the children resulting from some sort of mutation that represents the next stage in human evolution. But the movie is singularly freighted with social markers that have inspired over the past half century a legion of pop-psychologists.   Is the movie really about the dangerous resurgence of Nazism and Fascism after World War II? Is it about the Cold War and the toxic movement of the Communist scare during the 1950s? Is it anti-Catholic, raising the unwarranted hypothesis of virgin birth and Immaculate Conception? Is it anti-Semitic in its exultation of blond-haired Hitler Youth; or racist in presenting the Aryan specter of white intellectual superiority? Is it a glorification of rape, negating a woman’s right to control her own body? Is it the cold and calculating psychosis of teenage gangs and dark bile of juvenile delinquency? Or is it about the creeping pressure on young people to conform to adult authority? The horror that underlies the film is the question of what will happen when the Children’s power develops singularly to full capacity and they’re in complete control.
What’s remarkable about the appeal of VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is the fact that younger viewers aren’t afraid of these “Children” but would very much like to be them; to have that kind influence reserved only for adults—gang violence having become explicit with the ability to take revenge.
 A Jungian fantasy made literal, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED faithful to its source, The Midwich Cuckoo was shot in captivating black & white, tautly directed, and tightly edited throughout its nail-biting 77-minute running time featuring the elegant George Sanders in the role of brainy Professor Gordon Zellaby, who is painfully slow in coming into shockingly awareness that his son, David is the leading cause of the horror in the village of Midwich—where anyone all mind and no heart is indeed monstrous and the definition of evil. The opening 20 minutes skillfully realized by Director Wolf Rilla, and so unlike traditional American fare, unfolds slowly by adding uncanny layers of abnormality to the innocuous rural setting by meeting every criteria of cinematic excellence with the masterful restraint of the best "Twilight Zone" episode. Withholding the crux of the narrative, in one of the film’s more indelible moments, we’re introduced to the affected villagers; the ingenious momentum of the film never stalling, even during the brief respite in a dialogue-free sequence that hauntingly conveys the Midwich horror found in a woman’s womb and a man’s dilemma. The unborn children are anticipated by their “fathers” with inexpressible anger; the men impotent against an invisible spoiler, a sexual predator and rival upon whom they cannot unleash their fury. 
And in the pre-computer-graphic-imaging environment of 1960, the only “special” special effect is the eerily lit “glowing eyes” supremely signaling the Children’s paranormal use of their telekinetic strength. This beautifully static stare fashions a disturbing tableau vivant.
Where the past looks like a foreign country or (more apt) another planet, the movie may appear trapped in its own parody or homage, like a late entry in the wave of 1950s sci-fi films. But its seriousness of purpose is more a character peculiar to its time of conservative ethics, when moral values took a negative view of unwed motherhood and dubious paternity. The story with masterful control and utmost dignity conjures visions of female rape by alien creatures from outer space, commercially daring in making ordinary-looking children the alien menace. To present children as killers portrays blond moppets as little devils, who frighten rather than startle; wantonly murdering at will; shocking but moreover, at the time of its release, contrary to acceptable behavior of children on screen.   VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED in ending the decade-long wave of “paranoid” science-fiction thrillers also bridged the gap between Rhoda Penmark, the little girl of inherited evil in THE BAD SEED (1956) and the huge wave of films that would follow within the decade, showcasing the “demonic seeds" of Satan in ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and its commercial derivative, THE OMEN (1976). 
Stirling Silliphant’s screenplay co-written with director Wolf Rilla and producer Ronald Kinnoch (under the pen name "George Barclay") is the best example of a reliable transliteration of a book to film, put upon a leisurely but chilling pace with utmost efficiency, investing in audience intelligence over gut reaction.
The writer’s cleverness and director’s aptitude enlarge the sinister nature of the Children, handily reconvening the panic of a Communist takeover sublimated in INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956). During that storied period in the 1950s known as the Cold War, a powerful aura of visceral fear inspired corruption of the body politic in most Western countries that had armies mobilizing to express through military coalitions certain strategies decided upon with hush sanctions and urgent espionage, weapons in development and of mass destruction, small invasions and convincing propaganda, competitive technologies that included the space race underwritten by massive defense spending, stockpiling enormous conventional and nuclear arms in a race for military supremacy, and inciting numerous and global proxy wars. Might a bit more knowledge of our enemy instead of more ways to blow up the world have saved the day? If those all-too-real images of Europe’s destruction during World War II could be later reinterpreted as science-fiction, then imagine the state of conflict, tension and competition between Great Britain and the Soviet Union reaching the boiling point in a tiny English hamlet, an alien "fifth column" that has come to Midwich, bringing animus between indigenous villagers and unwelcome outsiders. The theme of invasion/occupation, always resonant and quite intense, would be of no moment if it didn’t leave viewers with its true horror left intact. The safety that knowledge provides is never achieved here. Where the Children come from and why they are here are questions with no one around to supply explanations and the film is well served by that.
 John Wyndham—born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (July 10, 1903 –March 11, 1969) a British novelist most famous for having crafting a tale of killer plants threatening to conquer the world (The Day of the Triffids, 1951), redefined the genre previously afloat almost exclusively in outer space. Relying upon an obsession with catastrophe and its aftermath that appear in his work time and again, Wyndham modeled his formula for science fiction upon the literary etchings of H.G. Welles, whereby he introduced fantasy elements into a real-life setting, delivering the strongest impact upon the province of ordinary people, then bringing the entire affair into a satisfying denouement.  The Midwich Cuckoos is written with passive detachment and analytical rationalization, telling us where human being place in the grand scheme of the universe. Wyndham's ground-breaking The Day of the Triffids (about deadly walking plants) applied impeccable narrative logic; a scientific thriller telling of impossibilities that overturned everything dear to the English order: the upheaval of civilization at a time when the British regarded itself as the most civilized culture in the world. Philosophical conversations among the characters recall the tradition of Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984 by combining science-fiction with intelligent reading. In what the author refers to as “logical science fiction,” characters are reasonable and the surroundings properly English before introducing this "rational society" to extraordinary conditions then taking an analytical approach to examining the cultural reaction. It's only when our rationale fails, according to Wyndham's thesis, must we face the facts, and that one last glimmer of hope flickering. Wyndham uses similar characters throughout his short list of novels, the four most popular written during the 1950s: The Day of the Triffids , 1951 (also known as Revolt of the Triffids) The Kraken Wakes, 1953 (also known as Out of the Deeps) The Chrysalids, 1955 (also known as Re-Birth) and The Midwich Cuckoos, 1957. The protagonists are typically sensible, self-made and educated. A successful woman is headstrong yet quite dependent on a man at times. The tragic flaw in Cuckoos, and the inescapable paradox that enraptures the story of rape, is that the narrative is never about the women. Instead, it canonizes patronizing sexism—typical of the era. This fact notwithstanding, in nearly all his other stories Wyndham, ironically, presents pro-feminist sympathies and women as key intellectual problem-solvers, more practical-minded than the men. Wyndham died with two unpublished sci-fic novels, including the unfinished sequel to Cuckoos under the less intriguing title, Midwich Main, but the author abandoned the effort after a few chapters.
Stirling Dale Silliphant (January 16, 1918 – April 26, 1996) was a prolific American screenwriter and producer, born in Detroit, Michigan, and best known for his Academy-award winning screenplay IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT. His script-writing also includes THE TOWERING INFERNO and THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.
Silliphant's script written simultaneously with John Wyndham's novel in 1957, microfilmed pages sent to the screenwriter regularly, the production draft of the screenplay, however, got shelved until 1960 mostly due to a complaint coming from studio executives who considered the story anti-Catholic—the alien impregnating single women that mimicked the Immaculate Conception and Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Much like Wyndham’s narration, the point of view of the screenplay is almost entirely male, despite the inciting motivation is with the trauma of female rape and the resulting pregnancy. Subsequently, no actress is featured prominently with the exception of Barbara Shelley as the level-headed wife of Gordon Zellaby.  Thoughtfully well-acted, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED is genuinely scary without being graphic, and without question a cinematic classic. Originally an American production, as mentioned, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shelved the project before filming began in 1957, deeming the sinister depiction of virgin birth as inflammatory and a group Immaculate Conception gone wrong. 
Produced in turnaround as an MGM-sponsored British import, one of the problems of low-budget filmmaking solved the issue of expensive special effects: By soliciting high quality acting talent, and shooting the picture in black & white, the exemplar for pre-gore-splatter horror films was reestablished. This non-effects-driven fantasy succeeds in no small part due to smooth direction, terrific plotting and excellent casting, delivering solid tension with subtly persuasive storytelling—and a modest budget that affirms the adage: Less is more.   Benefiting also from re-establishing the story in England, where it properly belongs, many welcome British actors in minor roles were cast, with George Sanders as Gordon Zellaby and Barbara Shelley as Zellaby’s wife, Anthea.  Marvelously aplomb, Sanders, seldom better, delivers his best late-career performance; and Shelley, equally first rate in the role of the worrying mother, flawlessly renders the loving mother responding haplessly to those demands of the heart.
More than anything, casting 11-year-old Martin Stephens (who looks younger) as the bloodless David Zellaby is the film’s masterstroke, a priceless child actor whose “adult” performance of self-assured superiority allows the viewer to comprehend the immediate threat, that of intelligence divorced from emotion and morals. Moreover, Stephens re-dubbed his own voice to sound more "alien"—a commentary on American science fiction films of the era tied to a streak of anti-intellectualism, and how articulated intelligence coming from a child seems somehow terrifying.
 Released in the United States on December 7, 1960 this little movie became a big international box-office sensation. 
The Hugo Awards originally called "Special Achievement Awards" then "Science Fiction Achievement Awards" and now simply "Hugo Awards" are given each year by the World Science Fiction Society at the World Science Fiction Convention. The awards are granted every year since 1953 for work done in the previous year. The Hugo Award is not movie-related, but rather dedicated to science fiction as a genre. Honoring films officially since 1958 (but in the category known as Best Dramatic Presentation since 1960) for theatrical or TV releases, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED was nominated, but out to an episode of The Twilight Zone.
Wolf Peter Rilla (March 16, 1920 - October 19, 2005) born in Berlin had a prolific film career in Briton. In 1942 he joined the BBC World Service then later the brave new world of British television as script editor in the late 1940s. He left the BBC staff in 1952 to pursue filmmaking and realized his ambition in minor low-budget thrillers when asked to join Group 3, a production company set up by the National Film Finance Corporation, an outlet for new talent; an idealistic production company set up to give young talent a chance to make low-budget quickies. Unfortunately, the director’s cinematic efforts brought only modest returns.
Rillia by 1960 worked regularly for MGM in Britain. But it was the first of two projects for the American studio, VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, that Rilla shone his talent by extracting every chill from John Wyndham's eerie tale, The Midwich Cuckoos. Its minimal budget meant that special effects were few, but particularly unsettling was the way the children’s eyes glowed. Tom Howard, photographic effects specialist, created the illusion by cutting a negative print over the positive, thereby turning the irises nearly white.
Martin Stephens, the precocious child actor who played the role of David, now an architect, described Rilla as a very good director, a patient one and very clear about what he wanted. People always asked Wolf Rilla about his child actors: How did he get such good performances. He simply asked the children to do nothing except be still and stare. “Children fidget and are never still, and I wanted (the actors) all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very un-childlike and, of course, very unsettling.”
 A trendy filmmaker but reliable and steady, much loved by the crews with which he worked, he was not beyond remaking a classic motion picture. Rilla's second film for MGM, CAIRO (1963) rebooted John Huston’s THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950) a heist movie with the jewels of Tutankhamun the intended booty.  The decade included the occasional “guest director” of British television plays, baptism by fire in producing live drama on Sunday nights. Eventually, he mostly dabbled in a variety of TV programs, returning to feature films in the early to mid-1970s. A serious reader and music-lover, Wolf Rilla wrote six novels, lectured brilliantly at the London International Film School, and published The A-Z of Movie Making (1970) the most lucid, comprehensive and intelligent guide to writing for the industry. Later in life, he and his wife Shirley bought and ran a hotel at Fayence in Provence, Le Moulin de la Camandoule in the south of France. He died at the age of 85 having directed 24 movies, though his masterwork is well above the rest.
No doubt a cliché but VILLAGE OF THE DAMN not only endures, but quite simply is the greatest motion picture of its kind ever made.  The film’s unexpected success for MGM spawned a pseudo-sequel, CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED. In stark contrast with the original, the follow-up is an overheated aberration with heavy-handed political discourse, baring only the slightest resemblance to its antecedent, clearly the superior film. Drastically disappointing fans, the movie failed disastrously at the box office.
These are the eyes that HYPNOTIZE!  CHILDREN OF THE DAMNED (1963) directed by Anton M. Leader offers an “unofficial” sequel to the 1960 classic—but only thematically—scrubbing the thoughtful ambivalence of author John Wyndham’s “The Midwich Cuckoos” that speculated upon a possible “alien invasion”. Instead, the argument here is for the innocence of children over government ambition to win the Cold War. The initiative of researchers for the United Nations identifies six children—from China, the Soviet Union, India, Nigeria, United States, and the United Kingdom—all sharing advanced intelligence. Gathered in London for collective study, the young group of multiracial youngsters, it’s soon found out, were also born without fathers. Later, when it’s discovered the children are capable of mental telepathy, as Cold War tensions mount, those world governments request the return of their respective child prodigy for use as a “secret weapon” against the enemy. The kids band together in opposing their exploitation, murder their individual government’s representative, escape their detention, take over a derelict church in London, take mental control of a woman to enable their survival, demonstrate their capacity for telekinesis in the death of several soldiers and government officials, and leaving the military to debate whether they are a threat or merely misunderstood. After some intermittent muddle about the children’s blood cells being far more advanced than ordinary humans by at least a million years, the authorities try to take control of the matter, which only compel the children to protect themselves, escalating into a showdown: the church is destroyed and the children are killed.   Director John Carpenter’s dreary 1995 $22 million remake of VILLAGE fails miserably to live up to the 1960 film version that cost a mere $200,000 with minimal action sequences and very little special effects (the iconic glowing eyes).  Carpenter’s remake only notable for Christopher Reeve in his last starring role in a feature film before his unfortunate horse-riding accident that left the late actor paralyzed, this 1995 reboot is more violent, a sop for American moviegoers, with far less in common with its British forerunner. Beyond the inexplicable "Sleeping Beauty" blackout of a small town (transplanted to the United States in California) followed by 12 simultaneous pregnancies.   Carpenter would have been better served mining John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos with the creative savvy used in thoughtfully quarrying the details of the 1938 novella Who Goes There by John W. Campbell, the basis for the motion picture THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951) and Carpenter's impressive remake, THE THING (1981). What a pity not to have called upon those untouched elements in the Wyndham novel, many either not exploited or unexplored in the original due to its modest budget and brief running time.  How wonderful it would have been to have seen the “elderly” Gordon Zellaby portrayed by—oh, say, Christopher Lee—and to have used the original title, a metaphor that alludes to the cuckoo bird placing its eggs in the nests of another. Mistaken for its own, the surrogate mother hatches the fledglings by nature and cares for them as her own.
Hollywood currently obsessed with churning out prequels, sequels, and remakes, M-G-M may finance a filmmaker to take another bite of this apple. If not ... just as well. After all, John Carpenter has shown you can't improve upon perfection.
Title of the movie is a reflection, suggesting that villagers have been cursed, doomed to some eternal punishment. A staple of 1950s sci-fi, intellectual superior aliens are defeated by emotional human beings, and so it is the Children who perish—or do they? Their disembodied eyes appear to survive their fiery deaths.  The closing credits fall over this incorporeal glowing, as the flaming debris of the building collapses and the brightness of luminesced orbs fly off the screen.
“Is there no limit to the power of these children?”
—Dr. Willers
“In a strange sort of way, they trust me.”
—Professor Gordon Zellaby
What Demonic Force Lurks Behind Those Eyes?
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) has what every science-fiction film before it and since woefully lacks, the power in dealing with broader issues: government reaction in times of crisis, the people’s actions a reflection of themselves, and how the moral line is not etched but chalked when drawn. The miserable events in the movie take on a tragic inevitability. The film’s downbeat finale is at once off-putting while reclaiming the social order of the village. What most engages the viewer, though, is the human element—an element for which "the Children" had neither time nor appreciation. Its resolution is the tragic answer to all those tough questions, but none tougher than the moral query:
Is it the realization that our children might have been born with evil intent that shapes our morality in dealing with this realization?
  The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham best illustrates what the author calls “logical fantasy” published in 1957 with an intriguing title. More about that in due course. The old-fashioned coziness of the story and the quaint, innocuously English setting are central to the power of the novel, implying that “the apocalypse” might occur anywhere and, indeed, at this very moment. Set largely within the eponymous Midwich, Winshire that appears commonly unremarkable, like any other English village, Wyndham’s story centers upon a suddenly untoward and unexplained episode whereby an invisible boundary forbids all entry into the town; interlopers fall instantly into unconsciousness. The effect extends for a two-mile radius, encompassing and sedating the town’s inhabitants within, all of whom have come under a spell. The entire population (except for someone who died from falling down the stairs) goes hastily into a deep sleep. Police officers using a canary in a cage determine the shape and size of the boundary—a perfect hemisphere. Scientists rule out unknown chemical or biological agents and aerial reconnaissance reveal a peculiar object on the ground, silvery and just inside the village proper. The prior evening an Unidentified Flying Object is detected on radar. The military is called in. And then, shortly, the sedative lifts and the slumber is over. A spaceship rumored to have been sighted, the book points strongly at the idea that the women were impregnated by "radio waves" from outer space. But as it happens, the virgins of Midwich are still virgins—? The author purposely withholds the origin of the “semen”, so it’s unclear if the alien search for fertile females is a rumor. After a period of one day, the influence vanishes along with the object. The villagers wake, apparently with no ill-effects, however some months later every woman of child-bearing age is found pregnant with all indications that their condition initiated on what’s being called the “Day-out.” 
IN THE MOVIE: Although the author's narrator goes much farther than the film in depicting the military quarantine of Midwich, the “Timeout” lasts only a few hours. Afterwards, those affected immediately feel a lingering bodily chill. And while the possibly of space aliens is offered up, more unlikely the births resulted from radioactivity, possibly extraterrestrial in nature.
IN THE NOVEL: Anthea Zellaby is persuaded by her husband and the town doctor to speak out at a town hall meeting about the pregnancy phenomenon.
IN THE MOVIE: There is not a single instance in the film when any woman participates in a discussion concerning the women's pregnancy crisis.
IN THE NOVEL: The first of the Midwich “evil” children is born. And the nature of that evil is revealed quickly then followed by very little physical action or threats. The children appear normal except with unusually golden eyes, blond-white hair, and skin almost silver. Nevertheless, the birth mothers raised their offspring without comment.
IN THE MOVIE: For a time what follows is the most powerful section of the film before the story shifts. The suggested alternative dares not even hint at abortion. This is 1960 but still comfortably within the accepted boundaries of the Fifties. So the mothers are nurturing.
  Soon enough the children are born very pale with dark eyes, each having a zombie-like cold pitiless stare and white-blond hair.
(Those indelible wigs the child actors wore were padded to give the impression that each child has an abnormally large head, along with the unsettling effect achieved by casting real-life dark-haired performers whose coloring is subtly inappropriate for the light hair as worn.) (And with a wink at the audience...) Even the plant life has become excessively fertile and profligate.
IN THE NOVEL: Sixty-one children—thirty-one boys and thirty girls—resulted from the Day-out. Equal numbers of males and females were intended, however a woman already inseminated with child failed to seed her Gnostic ejaculation of “immaculate” conception. Later, one male and two females would die from illnesses. 
IN THE MOVIE: Twelve children resulted from the Timeout. ON SCREEN there are 7 boys and 5 girls—with none dying prematurely or subsequently.
IN THE NOVEL: Each one of these children has no genetic relationship with the birth parent, as it becomes increasingly clear the lot is not entirely human. They are prepossessed with telepathic abilities, capable of imposing their will upon others, controlling other people’s actions, their organs and any part of their bodies. Also, they share two distinct “group” minds: as one boy learns, others of his gender do too—but the girls do not. A reciprocal arrangement when one girl learns, all the other females are equally endowed.
IN THE MOVIE: There is no “group mind” alienation or any division whatsoever between the sexes. As one learns, they all do. The kids commiserate uniformly, knowledge being received in equal shares between both the boys and the girls with mutual benefit, “…one mind to the 12th power.”
IN THE NOVEL: “The Children” (is how they’re referred to) have accelerated growth; so when they are eight, physically they appear as old as sixteen.
IN THE MOVIE: As the children grow, so do their powers. Physically, though, the Children never exceed pre-pubescence. 
(Casting the actors ignored obvious disparity in their ages, but slight similarities are accomplished with black & white photography that a color film could not have achieved.)
IN THE NOVEL: The author maintains ambiguity about the Midwich "colony of aliens” that seem less an outer space invasion by extraterrestrials than the manifest destiny of some new life form spreading its seed. The question whether the Children are innocent catalysts or inherently evil is deliberately left unanswered.
IN THE MOVIE: In that Us-against-Them tradition, the Midwich Children with frightening charisma form “a gang” and, unattended, they get into trouble. It’s imperative that they reach puberty and multiply to establish their own colony. Clearly, the “landing party” of these aliens (if this is what they are) is not a spearhead for a future invasion—because of the implication that no one else is coming, therefore they MUST survive. Even though a probing question about “life on another planet” is raised by their village mentor, it’s abruptly sealed off by the Children lowering their eyes, as though out of chagrin, letting the movie allude to the invasion idea without credence beyond whatever inference the audience is willing to give it. So the authorities are left with their suspicions and the viewers with their assumptions, and the mystery of the Children’s origin goes unresolved.
IN THE NOVEL: The Children’s desire to protect themselves is paramount; and it’s paranoid in the way this small group unified, telepathically-gifted, physically fragile find themselves in the hostile nest of Midwich, tangled up with villagers and competing suspicions. Thus, when one of their members is struck in the hip by a “boy” driving a car, they react like human venom, forcing this person against his will to drive the vehicle into a wall. Later, a bull chases the Children, so is sent to its death, drowning in a dirty pond.
 IN THE MOVIE: The incident involving the bull does not occur, but OFF SCREEN “accidental” deaths among the village children are a growing number. An example (again, OFF SCREEN) an expert child swimmer drowns. And it’s the opinion of some that the Children are completely responsible.
  Born to intellect, free of emotion, still the Children remain sensate, albeit without a moral compass. Example: knowing how the grocer is discomforted by their arrival in the store, David (who speaks for the others) promises that he and his colleagues will stay away in the future. When a “normal” boy with good aim deliberately strikes Nancy, one of the five “alien” girls with a soccer ball, David forbids her retribution.
Intriguing how the children’s actions appear to lack consistency. On the one hand—a man in his car nearly runs over a girl in David’s group. Despite the fact that there was no apparent intent to do harm, David instantly melds with his comrades, light up his eyes and deploy the necessary telekinesis to force this man to commit suicide by driving into a brick wall. David’s face ever-so-slightly flickers with a smile. The nastiest moment in British cinema… And when the brother of the man killed in that auto “mishap” ferrets out the Children with deep suspicion and a loaded shotgun seeking his revenge, the aggrieved is constrained by David and the rest to place the muzzle under his chin then pull the trigger! On the other hand—a torch-bearing villager threatens the Children at school when “persuaded” by David to self-immolate; the enraged Military Liaison confronts the blond-haired wunderkind. But, here, David and the others do not induce the Liaison to self-destruct. Rather, they, align their power to immobilize him as “punishment” with severe but temporary shock and deep paralysis. “You have to be taught to leave us alone,” David hypnotically intones. Sharing a single consciousness always in calm accord, they read people’s minds and can be very dangerous, depending upon what they read. Put upon the fulcrum of intellect over emotion, the threat perceived is the action received.
IN THE NOVEL: Most of the residents are repulsed by these youngsters, fearing them and out of exasperation (then desperation) attempt to burn down the Midwich Grange, where the kids live and also attend school. But to no avail—the Children cause the villagers to attack one another!
IN THE MOVIE: The villagers are not reduced to internecine. The men, spending a great deal of time at the local pub, form the traditional torch-bearing mob. (The women do not join in.) As many accusations of infidelity and premarital sex are overtaken by the extraordinary nature of the Children, the mob baring torches march on the building housing the Children, certain these demons possess powers far beyond those of ordinary mortals, so they must be stopped—when a lone child, David steps on the threshold and induces one of the disgruntled to drop his flaming stick, setting himself on fire.
IN THE NOVEL: Military Intelligence learns that elsewhere in the world such “Children” had been born to an Inuit community in the Canadian Arctic region, a cattle depot in the northern township of Australia, and two settlements in the Soviet Union: Irkutsk along the Mongolian border and in the rural Siberian northwest territory. The Inuit instinctively killed the newborns with blond hair and golden eyes (a taboo); the Australian infants perished within a weeks of their birth, alluding to a misstep with the insemination process; in Irkutsk, assuming the mothers’ infidelity, both women and children were put to death by the men; and in Siberia—the children having survived are being educated to the highest possible level by the state. But later when they attempted to take control, long-range artillery eviscerated the entire community, the military claiming the incident merely an accident. An extremely literate science-fiction novel verging on horror, the author posits differing philosophies in coming to terms with the events in the story—the Soviet reaction in contrast to the British. The children don’t spend much time on these pages. Suspense centers on determining exactly what the children are up to and exactly what can be done about them.
IN THE MOVIE: The event involving Soviet destruction of that town was discussed (not seen) and Russian resolve perceived as Machiavellian—the Cold-War view from the British shores. The Children living in Russia developed at a faster rate than those in Midwich until on the verge of “taking control”, whereupon the Soviet government took action: Everyone in the vicinity blown off the face of the earth. Bridled against a story arc mandated for political argument, it’s no surprise the Russians OFF SCREEN sent an atomic shell 60 miles into that Siberian village, reducing everything to smithereens. The Midwich children remain to be dealt with. (NOTE: This point given unwelcome degree of plausibility by the fact that during the Moscow theatre hostage crisis known as the 2002 Nord-Ost Siege, seizure of a crowded theatre on October 23, 2002 by 40-50 armed Chechen rebel fighters took 850 hostages with demand for withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya that ended when Russian forces pumped an unknown chemical agent into the building’s ventilation system then raided the theater, resulting in [officially] 39 hostage-takers killed along with at least 129 hostages, but possibly many more.
IN THE NOVEL: The Children are aware of the threat against them, and use their power to prevent any airplanes from flying over the village.
IN THE MOVIE: We can believe in the Children’s unity of purpose, although the only occasion an airplane is downed by this “unseen force” is prior to their births during the air reconnaissance of the “sleeping” village.
IN THE NOVEL: The Children explain to the Military Intelligence liaison that it is impossible for them to be eliminated without incurring massive civilian casualties by destroying everyone in the town. The Children want to migrate to a deserted island, where they can live unharmed. Their demand of the government is for airplanes to transport them to this destination.
IN THE MOVIE: Requisition of an island and air travel is never discussed. Instead, David’s request is to spread out, disperse because he and the others are reaching the stage whereby they can “form new colonies.” Knowing how they have attracted far too much attention, the goal is to come up with a plan by which the Children may be fostered within English families throughout the country. “Military Intelligence” is supplanted by British Intelligence, including the Home Secretary who arrives not gladly upon the decision (but one palatable to English taste) not to destroy the Children outright.
IN THE NOVEL: Gordon Zellaby takes center stage, an elderly and mildly eccentric Midwich resident, professor and village sage with a severe heart condition and only a few weeks to live, who reaches a solution to the crisis. One evening at the Midwich Grange, he shows the Children a film about Ancient Greece with a bomb hidden away inside the movie projector—when at an unspecified time he sets off the device, blowing himself up—along the Children.
IN THE MOVIE: Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) is far from being extraneous to the plot. The aging “father” of David, entrusted by him (and by the government) to educate the strange brood, attempts to determine their purpose. A gentle-natured Ph.D. with the cool-headed sensibility of his creator (author John Wyndham), Zellaby eminently discipline in physics is arrogant, which at first appears justified. Being informed by his role as “surrogate” father to David, which he plays with egalitarian relish, and mentor of the Children, he misguidedly assumes that they will become his protégés, while refusing to see the dangers so apparent. Tradition of the “mad scientist” upheld, Zellaby far too close to the problem to see a problem in keeping the Children alive, he clouds his judgment with enthusiasm—and, perhaps, the fact that David is really not his son, license which absolves him of responsible for whatever the Children may unleash on the planet. Finally, it’s too late, when the steady drumbeat of death-by-misadventure has grown horribly explicit. “We must protect ourselves,” David advocates with dark ulterior motive and whatever that extra layer of resonance may imply. “We have to survive, no matter what the cost.” Gordon likens the children’s opaque resistance to candor as “a brick wall.”  Earlier, when the professor is unable to frame a question he hesitates to ask, all the children show emotion for the first time, then David comments: “You don’t know how to put your question?” “Are you aware of life on another planet?” “Father, we know what you’re trying to find out. It would be better if you didn’t ask these questions. We want to learn from you.”
IN THE NOVEL: Anthea Zellaby is first to grasp the untoward realities of the conditions in Midwich, but takes no direct hand in helping to change the situation affecting the town. 
IN THE MOVIE: Anthea (Barbara Shelley) attempts to reach out to her “unnatural” child on an emotional level but fails, miserably. None of her affection is ever returned. Her son David has no conscience; rather, he demonstrates a kind of coldness. The heartbreaking interaction between them is quite chilling.  She caresses the boy to win a response. David merely stands there with indifference, having pledged allegiance to some unseen dominant force far greater than a mother’s love.  Among a small group of affectless clone-white “aliens” with no emotional baggage but with creepy glowing eyes, David (Martin Stephens) the tweed-suited spokesman for the children is four feet off the ground with a following determined to strike out in defiance of anyone who might get in their way.
 The Children, ironically, would have been better served by never trusting Gordon Zellaby, keeping those barriers between intellect and emotion firmly in place. By their acceptance of the professor as mentor, David and the others have made themselves vulnerable, coming late to the realization that he stands the only chance of destroying them.
 Deeming the Children unconquerable, Professor Zellaby carries a hidden time-bomb in his briefcase to the meeting, proffering a discussion about atomic energy but mentally visualizing “a brick wall”—blocking the presence of the lethal device from the Children’s awareness. Scanning his mind, David asserts, "You're not thinking of atomic energy, you're thinking of ... a brick wall!" 
"I must think of a brick wall."
Collectively, one mind to the 12th power, the children probe his thoughts, metaphysically tearing down Zellaby’s mental defense; the expressionist imagery of that brick wall slowly crumbling beneath the onslaught of their mental bombardment, they learn what he’s hiding from them. David glares at the briefcase in astonishment just as the climatic explosion brings about the ending.
VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED dramatically depicts faith in the power of the mind to vanquish monsters, and the end of mankind narrowly averted. Never spelling out the origin of the Children or their mission, the movie’s central enigma remains in tact—forever a mystery—while retaining its power in answering the tough and tragic moral question:
Is it the realization that our social order might have evil intent which shapes our morality in dealing with this realization?
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