Village of the Damned (1960)

Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned arrives from 1960 with a premise that could have supported any number of contemporary sermons, and it chooses instead to be quietly frightening. An English village called Midwich falls unconscious for four hours. Every woman of childbearing age wakes pregnant. Five months later they give birth, all on the same day, to platinum-haired children with arresting eyes and a single shared mind. George Sanders plays Professor Zellaby with the tired civility of a man who has read too much and expects the worst. The picture runs seventy-seven minutes and wastes almost none of them.

The film is remarkably free of instruction. The pregnancies are horror machinery, not a platform, and the screenplay never pauses to tell us how to feel about them. When British Intelligence compares notes with other nations, the Australian, Arctic, Mongolian and Soviet cases exist to widen the threat, not to invite reflection on empire or ideology. The village is white, rural, and unexamined as such. The children's coldness is handled as alien biology, not as a condition to be understood or accommodated. Nobody in Midwich delivers a speech about tolerance. Nobody delivers a speech at all, which is the film's great virtue.

Rilla shoots in a low-key documentary manner, and the ordinariness of the setting does work that a score or a monologue would ruin. The climax, in which Zellaby walls off his own mind with the image of a brick wall and carries a bomb into a classroom, is patient and grim and entirely without moral instruction. This is a chiller from a period when genre cinema assumed the audience could reach its own conclusions. It remains effective, and it remains innocent of any agenda beyond the desire to unsettle. Such a thing is now a rare commodity.