Horror

“Village of the Damned” and the Power of Scary-Ass Kids

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By Kyle Anderson

We’re somewhat obsessed with movies about scary kids here at Nerdist. Mostly because little kids are just terrifying.

Yes, they’re cute and precocious and everything, but that’s how they lull you into a false sense of security. I mean, kittens are adorable, but if a bunch of them decided to gang up and attack you, you’d be terrified. But children can be sinister in a way tiny animals can’t, especially British kids, and dear heavens, alien British kids with telepathic control over people might just be the scariest of all. Which is why, even 58 years later, Village of the Damned is a paranoid classic.

Village of the Damned is based on the 1957 John Wyndham novel The Midwich Cuckoos, is the rare major studio production of a British sci-fi/horror film, MGM in this case. Its inherent Britishness–the gloomy weather, the thatch-roofed little village, the droll speech–makes it all the creepier, and the premise all the more unsettling. Like the later Spanish horror film Who Can Kill a Child?, Village ponders what you’d do if your children were evil. Not just normal evil, either, but otherworldly, unstoppable evil.

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The tiny village of Midwich, UK suddenly falls under a strange power, causing every inhabitant to fall asleep. Anyone who ventures inside the parameters of the village immediately fall asleep, including military people sent in to investigate. It’s a strange plague, but one that soon lifts, causing everyone to wake up. However, miraculously(?), each and every woman of maternal age suddenly becomes pregnant, and within five months, they all give birth, on the same day.

The children all have platinum blonde hair and seem to be preternaturally intelligent but lack any and all empathy or the ability to love their parents. They can communicate with each other over great distances and have some hold over people’s actions through their terrifying stare. So, obviously there’s some bad stuff going on. Professor Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) is part of a council that is meant to determine what exactly these children are (his own “son” David being the children’s de-facto leader) and they learn Midwich is not the only village where this phenomenon occurred; in fact there are such towns all over the world.

Obviously there’s some alien shiz going on, but the movie does a tremendous job of only giving us the information we need. The story is not about aliens, it’s about children who are evil and seemingly unstoppable. The film’s director, German filmmaker Wolf Rilla, went to great lengths to make the children exceedingly scary, even when they aren’t doing anything particularly threatening. The blonde hair and cold faces is one thing, but the relatively simple trick of giving them camera-negative eyes when they use their powers is incredibly effective. He also had the child actor Martin Stephens, who plays David, post-dub his own performance, making David’s speech in the movie seem all the more unnatural.

Stephens has the distinction of being the creepiest kid in two of the best British horror films of the era. The year after Village, Stephens played Miles in Jack Clayton’s excellent Gothic ghost story, The Innocents. In that film, Stephens is one of two children living in a massive manor house under the care of a governess and who seem to be somehow controlled by the spirits of the former groundskeeper and previous governess. In both films, the young actor–who was around 11 when the movies were made–conveys an air of age beyond his years. Kids seeming wise can be used for cuteness, but can also, as in the case of these movies, give off the air of menace.

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But menace is nothing without follow through. Several instances in Village of the Damned feature the children making bad things happen to people. Especially for 1960, this level of screen violence is shocking. One man is made to drive his car at full speed into a wall, causing it to explode. The man’s brother, suspecting the children were behind it (what was your first clue?!?!) approaches the group of them with a shotgun. However, they can read his thoughts, and they make the group of adults nearby freeze while forcing the man to shoot himself. It’s a harrowing moment, and the film’s centerpiece of true horror.

And we mustn’t discount the importance of a good score to create mood. Ron Goodwin’s compositions for Village of the Damned are somehow able to combine the typical ’50s electronic sound synonymous with science fiction with traditional sounds of Gothic horror and a bit of plinking noises traditionally used for childhood or nursery music. It’s pretty phenomenal how effective it is.

Village of the Damned is only 77 minutes long but it manages to pack in the unease and outright terror from the beginning. It’s an alien plot that feels very personal and crueler. These are people whose children turn out to not even really be theirs, but the machinations of some alien plot. It’s got a high concept but the homespun, rural realness of the fictional village of Midwich makes it feel all the more immediate. No ships hovering over massive cities, but a slow and creeping invasion, far more insidious. The closest analog I have would be the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but even that seems too grandiose.

Children are terrifying. Little British alien blonde-haired kids with weird eyes? The most terrifying.

Village of the Damned is out on Blu-ray now from Warner Archive.

Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist. He is the writer of 200 reviews of weird or obscure films in Schlock & Awe.

Source: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED and the Power of Scary-Ass Kids

The Wicker Man: 1973 folk-horror endures to this day as a masterpiece of the form

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Free love and folk-singing hides a dark secret on the Scottish island of Summerisle in a film that’s bracing, exciting and downright funny

By Shaad D’Souza

Have you seen the horror film about a gormless, well-intentioned westerner lured to a lush, sparsely populated isle in search of meaning, only to find paganism, unbridled sexual politics, folk dancing and abject violence?

I’m not talking about Midsommar, the 2019 folk-horror hit by auteur Ari Aster that freaked out audiences with its broad-daylight senicide and twee ritualism. I’m referring to a film that came out nearly 50 years earlier, and which often out-weirds and out-wilds its younger cousin despite containing none of the gore or violence. I’m talking about The Wicker Man, the 1973 British horror-musical that popularised the folk-horror genre, and endures to this day as a masterpiece of the form.

Directed by Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man is a strange but essential B-movie artefact, one which has, over the past 20 years, been reclaimed as a masterpiece of British cinema and now has a home on prestige streaming platform Mubi. Starring Edward Woodward and iconic 60s actress and sex symbol Britt Ekland, the film follows police sergeant Neil Howie who receives an anonymous tip that a young girl has gone missing on the far-off Scottish island of Summerisle.

When he arrives, he finds that he’s bitten off far more than he can chew. Not only are the island’s residents cheerily working together to obfuscate the details of what happened to the girl, they also seem to have given up on Christianity entirely – worshipping pagan gods and conducting a sinister masked procession on May day.

The devoutly Christian sergeant is appalled – villagers roaming naked and having sex in the lush fields, churchyards overrun with wildlife and entirely devoid of Christian symbology, school lessons on the phallic origins of the maypole, and a suave, smartly dressed lord, played by Christopher Lee, who rules in place of an elected official. Most sinister of all is that despite their wide grins and penchant for song and dance, Howie is pretty certain the missing girl has been given up as a human sacrifice in exchange for an abundant harvest.Devoid of any “traditional” horror devices – jump scares, gore and the like – The Wicker Man instead asks viewers to draw their own conclusions about the traditions of Summerisle. (As with Midsommar, I found the supposedly barbaric villagers to be sympathetic and perversely reasonable, but the film allows for any number of interpretations while still being straightforward and accessible, one of its greatest formal triumphs.) What transpires over the course of the film is unsettling and often bizarre, but also poses salient questions about tradition, judgment and moral relativism. And it does it all in a breezy, evenly paced 88 minutes. Although sometimes arcane in its references, I cannot express how bracing, exciting and downright funny a first watch of The Wicker Man is.

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The Haunting at 60: is it still one of the scariest films ever made?

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Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg count the slow-burn 1963 horror as one of the greatest of all time but it wasn’t always seen as a classic

By Guy Lodge

There’s a strange kind of pride that many people take in not being frightened by certain celebrated horror films. “Oh, it’s not scary at all,” they’ll say loftily about The Shining or The Exorcist or The Babadook, as if they’ve somehow outsmarted the film and the other, weaker viewers it worked on, all still cowering too much to give the holdout’s smug bravery the shrug it merits. Scariness, in addition to being wholly subjective, is not exactly a value judgement. There are any number of shoddy identikit slashers out there that can make an otherwise discerning viewer jump in all the right places; there are likewise many smart, artful horror films that may not elicit much more than a stray shiver, but stick with you in other ways. Which of those you value more is your call.

Classic horror films are frequently subjected to this kind of dismissal by modern audiences – the contemporary limitations on their violence or explicitness or special effects too often taken for a timidity that outweighs whatever psychological weaponry they may yield. But The Haunting, released 60 years ago this week, has been weathering such taunts since it was brand-new. Director Robert Wise and screenwriter Nelson Gidding’s leisurely, elegant adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s 1959 literary ghost story wasn’t much of a hit: reviews were respectable but cinemagoers were underwhelmed by its slow-burning storytelling and curtailed shocks.

Writing about the film a year after its release, in an essay titled Are Movies Going to Pieces?, the critic Pauline Kael – semi-admiring of the film’s accomplishments, while conceding that it wasn’t “a great movie” – despaired at the reaction of the audience around her: “[They] were restless and talkative, the couple sitting near me arguing – the man threatening to leave, the woman assuring him that something would happen. In their terms, they were cheated: nothing happened. And, of course, they missed what was happening all along.”

To this day, the divide remains the same. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg have both declared it among the scariest films ever made; head on over to the horror film website Where’s the Jump, however, and The Haunting gets a lowly one-star “jump scare rating”. That’s not necessarily damning – think of the the site as a consumer service for the especially faint of heart – but it does indicate opposing ideas of where the horror in horror cinema lies. The Haunting is at heart an old-fashioned haunted-house movie, and boasts its share of that subgenre’s requisite spooky door slams and unexplained nocturnal rumblings.

They’re executed with taste and restraint, which may equal tempered scares for many. Wise, a smooth A-list studio director making a return to modestly budgeted monochrome entertainment between the Oscar-winning musical exhortations of West Side Story and The Sound of Music, wasn’t a B-movie exploitation merchant in the mould of William Castle or Roger Corman. Nor did The Haunting quite aspire to the spare, artsy chills of Jack Clayton’s essential Henry James adaptation The Innocents.

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From Enys Men to The Witch: What’s behind cinema’s folk horror boom?

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Eloise Hendy delves into the genre that turns the pastoral idyll into a place of terror, and asks what’s behind this obsession with the natural world, magic cults, standing stones and feminine powers

By Eloise Hendy

In Enys Men – the much-anticipated new film written and directed by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, whose last feature, Bait (2019), earned him a Bafta for Outstanding Debut – a woman in walking boots, jeans, and a translucent red anorak trudges across gorsy moorland towards a cliff face. She clambers down, perches on a rocky outcrop, and stares intently at a few white flowers as they sway in the wind, high above clamorous waves below.

Every day she studies these flowers. Then, every day she drops a rock into an abandoned tin mine’s inky depths, and stands listening for a distant thud. She returns to an isolated, ivy-covered cottage. A standing stone sticks out of the landscape like an ancient dagger-head. The woman pulls the cord of a power generator, makes a pot of tea, listens to the scratchy, indistinct noises of a radio communication device, and, in a logbook, records the date – April 1973 – and the words ‘”no change”. At bedtime, by candlelight, she reads an environmental manifesto titled Blueprint for Survival. Snatched glimpses of the cover reveal a quote in red: “Nightmarishly convincing… After reading it nothing quite seems the same any more.”

This phrase goes to the heart of this strange, spectral work of cinema. Even calling it a film feels wrong somehow; it feels more like a fever dream, or hallucination. For, almost as soon as the unnamed wildlife volunteer’s routine comes into focus for the viewer, it starts to fracture. Lichen blooms on her flowers and on a scar that stretches across her abdomen. Grubby-faced men holding pickaxes stare at her from the mineshaft; sailors lost at sea grin and drip outside her front door; a girl in white bell bottoms stands on the outhouse roof. Steadily, the whole far-flung landscape begins to teem with apparitions. They are both convincing and nightmarish; nothing quite seems the same any more. Is the volunteer losing her mind? Or merging with an ancient Cornish terrain – one riddled with myth and old scars, like her lichen-sprouting stomach?

In a statement accompanying Enys Men (which is pronounced Ennis Main, and means “stone island” in Cornish), Jenkin suggests his starting point for the film was a single question: “What if the landscape was not only alive, but sentient?” Long fascinated by Cornish standing stones and their accompanying legends – one of which imagines the rocks as the petrified remains of a group of young girls, punished for dancing – Jenkin found himself imagining what these stones and remote moorlands might get up to under cover of darkness. “Almost inevitably, considering the setting,” he writes, “the idea was inclined towards folk horror.”

Jenkin is far from the only contemporary filmmaker inclined in this direction. Indeed, for at least a decade we have been in the midst of a magnificent folk horror revival. But why has this strange subgenre of standing stones and spectral presences captured the imagination of filmmakers and audiences in the UK and beyond? What does the folk horror boom say about our contemporary fears?

The term itself only went mainstream in 2010, when Mark Gatiss used it in the BBC documentary series The History of Horror to describe three British films now known as the Unholy Trinity: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). It is certainly no coincidence then that Enys Men is set in 1973, as, making the film, it was precisely these cinematic roots Jenkin wanted to rummage in. “For me,” Jenkin writes, “folk horror has very English connotations. The stripping away of a pastoral layer of Merrie England to reveal an earlier Celtic and pagan past full of perceived brutality, deviance and threat.” Yet, since Gatiss first invoked the genre, cinemagoers on both sides of the Atlantic have been offered up Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013), Paul Wright’s For Those in Peril (2013), James Crow’s Curse of The Witching Tree (2015), Robert Egger’s The VVitch (subtitled “A New England Folktale”), Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Scott Cooper’s Antlers (2021) and, most recently, Alex Garland’s Men (2022). All present nightmarish visions of a deviant, occult and cult-addled countryside. And that is far from an exhaustive list.

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