The Village of the Damned (1960)

Movie
German title	The village of the damned
Original title	Village of the Damned
Country of production	Great Britain
original language	English
Publishing year	1960
length	77 minutes
Age rating	FSK 16
Rod
Director	Wolf Rilla
script	Stirling Silliphant; Wolf Rilla ; Ronald Kinnoch
production	Ronald Kinnoch
music	Ron Goodwin
camera	Geoffrey Faithfull
cut	Gordon Hales
occupation
	George Sanders : Prof. Gordon Zellaby; Barbara Shelley : Anthea Zellaby; Martin Stephens : David Zellaby; Michael Gwynn : Major Alan Bernard; Laurence Naismith : Doctor Willers; Richard Warner : Harrington; Jenny Laird : Mrs. Harrington;

The Village of the Damned (original title: Village of the Damned ) is a British feature film by Wolf Rilla from 1960. It is based on the novel Cuckoo Children (1957, The Midwich Cuckoos ) by John Wyndham . The film opened in German cinemas on February 3, 1961.

In this classic science fiction - horror movie in the world are born similar looking mysteriously children in several places. With their supernatural powers they cause a lot of damage to others; finally a struggle for survival ensues.

action

The retired physicist Gordon Zellaby lives with his wife Anthea and brother-in-law Alan in the small, dreamy town of Midwich in England. Gordon and Anthea enjoy their free time while Alan works as an officer in a nearby barracks .

One day Gordon wants to call Alan, but suddenly loses consciousness during the phone call for no apparent reason. When even the operator from Midwich no longer responds, Alan leaves immediately to see his brother-in-law. He is dismayed when he encounters unconscious passers-by in front of Midwich and alerts the police and the military. The authorities set up a cordon and test the radius of the phenomenon without coming to any conclusion about the possible cause. A reconnaissance plane supposed to circling over Midwich inexplicably crashes. A few hours later, Gordon wakes up, unharmed but confused. When Anthea and Alan enter the room and report that all of Midwich had passed away, there is great misunderstanding. Since no one in the village seems to have been injured or stolen, the only thing left for the residents to do is return to their normal everyday life.

A month later, Anthea finds out that she is pregnant. She and Gordon are overjoyed until they learn that a total of twelve women in the village are pregnant. When the day of the blackout is calculated as the time of conception, the shock is even greater. Even unmarried women are in different circumstances. After just five months, twelve perfectly healthy babies are born. All babies have hydrogen-blonde hair, dark staring eyes and strangely narrow fingernails. It is obvious that all newborn babies must be descended from the same father. Gordon decides to name his "son" David.

Some time later strange incidents occur. Gordon has to use force to dissuade his wife from dipping her hands in boiling milk after she apparently fed little David with milk that was too hot. Some time later, Gordon observed how David put together his own name with letter cubes. Gordon is speechless and does an experiment with Alan: David and two other cuckoo children can open a small box with a complicated locking mechanism correctly the first time, which leads Gordon and Alan to the conclusion that the children are not only above average intelligent, but also telepathic are connected to each other. They can also manipulate others with their uncanny look .

The children grow up unusually quickly; after only three years they have reached the physical condition of twelve year olds. The group separates itself from other villagers and stands out due to its uniform clothing and its hypothermic to ignorant behavior. In addition, the strange incidents that are always somehow related to them pile up. The villagers have developed fear and disgust for the cuckoo children, they avoid them and forbid their own children to interact with them.

Soon after, Gordon and Allan were invited to a special conference of the royal military in London because, after Midwich, “blackout children” were born in Siberia, Mongolia , Australia and an Inuit community in Canada. However, in Australia the infants died ten hours after they were born, and the Inuit killed the infants because the virgin births broke Inuit taboos . The same happened to the families in Mongolia, where even the mothers were killed. So there are only Midwich and the Siberian village left. One can only speculate about the origin of the children. The officers fear the strength of the children and want to lock them up or kill them. Outraged, Gordon intervenes and offers to look after and teach the children personally. Obviously surprised, the authorities consent.

Shortly afterwards, a puzzling "accident" occurs: a car driver drives into one of the children out of carelessness. Even though nothing happened to the child, the other children get the driver to hit a wall at full throttle. The man is instantly dead. Anthea, who witnessed the incident, is supposed to testify at a community hearing, but inexplicably can hardly remember anything. Thereupon there is a commotion in the courtroom because the brother of the dead man vows vengeance. On the way home, Anthea, Gordon, and Alan see him lurking on a street corner with a gun. Anthea, Gordon and Alan try to dissuade the man from his murder plan , but the children suddenly stand behind them and freeze the three with their gaze. Then they get the man to shoot himself.

While Anthea, Gordon and Alan are still in shock that evening, Alan receives a phone call from the military that the Siberian village has been exterminated by means of a remote-controlled nuclear missile . The situation in the village has now escalated, an angry mob wants to set fire to the building in which the children are housed. But the plan fails when David freezes the entire mob and the ringleader sets himself on fire. Alan, who happens to be a witness, storms into the building to confront David, which culminates in Alan lying apathetically in bed for hours .

When Gordon tries to mediate, David tells him to help the children escape by Friday. David also makes it very clear that he will harm anyone who should betray something to Gordon. Gordon realizes that he was wrong about the children and decides to destroy them with a time bomb in his briefcase. As he contemplated the brick wall by his fireplace, an idea occurred to him. On Friday morning he goes to the school building. David notices immediately that something is wrong with Gordon, but when he tries to spy on his thoughts, he is completely amazed that Gordon thinks constantly about a brick wall. As a result, the group of children tries to disrupt Gordon's concentration through telepathic attacks so that they can look behind the mental wall. When they see the timer face in Gordon's mind, however, it is too late. The suitcase bomb explodes and destroys the children. Gordon is also killed.

background

Production and shooting

The film was shot in Letchmore Heath , about 12 km north of London . The restaurant The Three Horseshoes Pub and Aldenham school served as backdrops and consist today. The time of shooting was the winter of 1959.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer acquired the rights to the script and film as early as 1957 . However, the film almost never went live because Catholic censors protested strongly against its release because of the sensitive content of the film. The film finally premiered in Great Britain in July 1960, and in Germany it was released on February 3, 1961. It is considered a low budget film with an estimated budget of $ 200,000.

In the novel The Midwich Cuckoos , there are originally 58 children who terrorize the village of Midwich. This number was not feasible for the film adaptation, so it was reduced to twelve, especially since such a large number of actors would have far exceeded the budget. There is also no leader of the group in the novel. While the main character's wife, George Zellaby, is called Anthea in the film, her name is "Angela" in the novel.

Film technology

The German film headquarters writes that Wolf Rilla deliberately refrained from gimmicky in favor of a subtle and exciting atmosphere. His primary concern was to process utopian - philosophical basic ideas and fears of contemporary society by gradually destroying the contemplative life of unsuspecting citizens rather than all at once. Above all, the film seems incomprehensible because it is children of all people who are slumbering evil. Rilla's film is now considered one of the classics of the genre.

The film achieves a particular drama through the suicide of a lovable, eccentric film hero, who initially takes goodwill and protection against evil. The sympathy towards the protagonist is generally attributed to the acting performance of George Sanders. Wolf Rilla effectively implemented the scenes in which the children mentally attack their victims by encouraging the children to behave completely atypical for children of their age. He himself says that, in his opinion, the children seem so “scary and unchildren” because children “are more likely to be used to fidgeting all the time and never standing still. And all I asked her to do was stand still and stare straight ahead. " Many viewers of the film today feel reminded of the Hitler Youth and their ideals of the Aryan male type when they see the blonde children - an effect that Wolf Rilla had not planned, let alone foreseen.

In the film, the children's eyes start to glow when they use their mental powers. This glow was subsequently incorporated in the film laboratory by placing negative exposures of the eye area over the positives; In Rilla's script, the special effect wasn't actually planned at all. In the British original version the eye effect was censored out again. The platinum blonde wigs the children wore during filming were intended to give the impression that their heads were unnaturally large.

The film had already started in 1957 with Ronald Colman in the lead role, but was then put on hold because it was considered too sensitive because of the gloomy portrayal of the virgin birth , which is why the producers were exposed to repeated smear campaigns by Catholic censors. After Colman died in 1958, he was eventually realized with George Sanders.

occupation

George Sanders also appeared in other well-known films, for example in Rebecca by Alfred Hitchcock , but also in the series Mission: Impossible from 1971.

Martin Stephens became famous for the role of David Zellaby when he was 12 years old and then played in other horror films , such as Castle of Terror . According to his own account, he remembers the film The Village of the Damned with humor, in his opinion it "amused him [...] to have these very adult qualities and control over adults". On the other hand, during the shoot, he realized how “powerless you really are as a child”.

Actor Michael Gwynn played the role of an officer several times in other films, in addition to The Village of the Damned , the "Secret Agent" in Danger Man and "Captain Branscombe" in Poison Island . In Justice - Not Guilty he played the brigadier "Craig Astley" and in Spy Trap he played the hero "Carson".

Actress Barbara Shelley became famous through several roles in various horror and sci-fi films and series. For example, she played "Lady Barbara Webster" in the television series The Third Man and "Sorasta" in Doctor Who .

The other "cuckoo children " - besides David - were played by June Cowell , Mark Milleham and Teri Scoble , among others . The shopkeepers Mrs. Ogle and Mrs. Plumpton were portrayed by Rosamund Greenwood and Susan Richards .

Film composer Ron Goodwin became famous for his music for the Miss Marple films with Margaret Rutherford .

reception

In modern psychology and sociology , film and novel serve equally as an example for depicting and highlighting social problems and taboos. The focus is on the topic of cuckoo children, which is timeless and particularly affects today's societies. According to the literary scholar Klaus Johann , the film The Village of the Damned shows very well how adults react to strange children when they get out of control: As in real life, fear and prejudice determine action in the film, which results from the mutual inability to adapt, grow. "If this adjustment process [...] fails, [...] the young person remains the personified other in society, which society is often afraid of because it is unpredictable and therefore not controllable [...]."

According to film critic Gary Giddins, the film also purposefully stirs up social fears that were typical of people in the post-war era: for example, that the man returns from the war and his wife has been impregnated by someone else. Or the fear of illegitimate and forced cuckoo children. However, MGM also censored words like "virginity" and "pregnancy".

According to Cynthia Hendershot, the Village of the Damned also presents "quite impressive, if somewhat clichéd, " typical social classes: In her opinion, the cell babies are definitely classed as upper class, while the rest of Midwich consists mainly of working-class families. The class division is underlined by the behavior of the villagers. While the cell babies, above all Gordon, deal with the situation passively and wait and see, the working class families are hostile towards the children from the start. In this context, the cuckoo children again occupy a special position: They are practically "classless" and yet completely equal to each other. Due to their intellectual equality and their cognitive, synchronized thinking and acting, they do not have any individual personalities. This is illustrated in the scene in which David can open a Chinese puzzle box as a toddler and other cuckoo children can also do this automatically. It is this above-average intelligence and alleged “abnormality” that are particularly disapproved of by the working class and are ultimately punished with violence (first the attempted murder of the man with a gun, then the attempted setting on fire). In return, the children react with increasing recklessness for the sake of self-preservation - David tells his uncle in a key scene: “We have to survive. No matter what it costs. ”The idea of an intelligent working-class child as a freak is also well received in the sequel Children of the Damned .

Reviews

The Village of the Damned had varying degrees of success with critics. Some of them have only recently judged the film positively, for example authors such as Adolf Heinzelmeier and Berndt Schulz in the Lexicon Films on TV from 1990, who described the film as a "classic of the genre in which horror comes on quietly". The New York Herald Tribune called the film “Far and wide the most successful, cleverest and most believable in the incredible genre that is sometimes called horror, sometimes“ pseudo ”science.” The critic Alan Frank also praised himself: “An extraordinarily successful one Adaptation of Wyndham's SF classic The Midwich Cuckoos with almost unbearable tension and an amazing opening sequence. Direction, script (with the exception of a few boring forays into domestic conflicts) and acting are excellent. The film is hardly inferior to the classics of the genre. "The German Film Service, on the other hand, expresses itself rather cautiously:" Suggestively staged fantastic cinema, whose quiet thrill effects are disturbed by pseudoscientific chatter. "

Variety , on the other hand, spoke on the occasion of the premiere in 1961 of a "rather tired and stupid film that starts out very promisingly, but then soon dies in a dive." Catholic censors described the film at the time as "simply disgusting".

Continuation and remakes

In 1963, director Anton Leader shot a kind of sequel under the title Children of the Damned , which, however, is more of a remake and did not come into cinemas in Germany. The film was named "The Children of the Damned" for DVD release. The main role of this film adaptation took Ian Hendry .

In 1995, John Carpenter produced a recast of the film with Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley . However, the film flopped and was nominated for the negative award Golden Raspberry .

Awards and media

The film was in the 1961 Hugo Award as Best Dramatic Presentation nominated. However, he did not receive the award. The Village of the Damned (1960) is now being marketed as a DVD and radio play.

literature

John Wyndham: The Midwich cuckoos. Ballantime Books, London 1957 (first edition).
John Wyndham: It happened on day X. Translated by Gisela Stege , Heyne, Munich 1965, OCLC 163938642 .
John Wyndham: Cuckoo Children . Roman (= Fantastic Library . Volume 277 ). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-38393-0 (English: The Midwich Cuckoos . Translated by Christiane Schreiter ).
John Wyndham: The Midwich cuckoos. Evans Brothers, London 2005 (new edition), ISBN 978-0-237-52689-4 .

Web links

Village of the Damned in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Letchmore Heath then and now (English)

Individual evidence

^ Letchmore Heath then and now

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g Return of the Cuckoos - A Backview . guardian.co.uk (English)

^ MGM's film rights

↑ Release dates . Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .

↑ Budget information. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .

↑ Wolf Rilla (1920-2005) . In: Die Welt , November 1, 2005. The budget was £ 82,000

↑ ^a ^b filmzentrale.com

^ ^A ^b ^c Trivia for Village of the Damned. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .

↑ Background information on grau.de

↑ Background information on the publication problems grau.de

↑ George Sanders. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .

↑ Biography. Martin Stephens. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 2, 2015 .

^ Quote from Martin Stephens

↑ Michael Gwynn. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .

↑ Barbara Shelley. Internet Movie Database , accessed June 10, 2015 .

↑ Complete cast. Internet Movie Database , accessed May 22, 2015 .

↑ Klaus Johann: Limit and Halt. The individual in the “House of Rules”. On German-language boarding school literature (= contributions to recent literary history , volume 201). Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2003, ISBN 3-8253-1599-1 , (dissertation Uni Münster 2002, 727 pages). P. 74, cf. ibid. pp. 73–75, with express reference to Rilla's film.

^ Gary Giddins: Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on comedy, film, music and books. University Press, Oxford 2006, ISBN 978-0-19-517951-4 , p. 82.

↑ Cynthia Hendershot: Domesticity and Horror . In: I was a Cold War monster - Horrorfilms, eroticism and the Cold War imagination . University Press, Wisconsin 2001, ISBN 978-0-87972-849-6

^ Adolf Heinzlmeier, Berndt Schulz. In: Lexicon "Films on TV" (extended new edition). Rasch and Röhring, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3-89136-392-3 , p. 163.

↑ Ronald M. Hahn , Volker Jansen : Lexicon of Science Fiction Films. 1000 films from 1902 to 1987 . Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-00731-X , pp. 186-187.

^ ^A ^b Ronald M. Hahn , Volker Jansen : Lexicon of Science Fiction Films. 1000 films from 1902 to 1987 . Heyne, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-453-00731-X , p. 186.