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Inquiring minds want to know — why you’re thinking about a Brick Wall. John Wyndham’s diabolically clever alien invasion fantasy is taken straight from nature: children fathered by who-knows-what are found to possess a hive mentality and brain-powers that we puny Earthlings cannot oppose. Is it simply Us against Them, or was this perhaps a paranoid image of anti-social, dangerous 1950s teens? The CineSavant review is a full essay this time.

Village of the Damned

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1960 / B&W / 1:85 widescreen / 77 min. / Street Date July 31, 2018 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Martin Stephens, Michael Gwynn,

Laurence Naismith.

Cinematography: Geoffrey Faithfull

Film Editor: Gordon Hales

Special Effects: Tom Howard

Original Music: Ron Goodwin

Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, Ronald Kinnoch from the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Produced by Ronald Kinnoch

Directed by Wolf Rilla

These are the eyes that Hypnotize!

The...

Presenting murderous moppets on screen is always a dicey proposition. For every The Bad Seed or The Omen, there is always The Good Son or Mikey skulking about. It’s all about the fear – making a five or ten year old believably frightening is hard to do. As audience members, we put our faith in filmmakers to produce tension, conflict, and danger in a palpable (but not necessarily plausible) way, and when it’s tested we end up wading through Children of the Corn. But when our faith is rewarded, we find ourselves in the Village of the Damned (1960), a seminal killer kid chiller.

Based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, Village was produced by MGM’s British division and distributed there in July, with a December rollout in the States. The film was a great success, both with critics and audiences alike, luring them in with...