I just finished watching Village of the Damned (1960) and Children of the Damned (1963) on DVD, and I had the odd feeling that I was watching an earlier, British, black-and-white version of the Omen trilogy (1976-81). You’ve got desperate adults puzzled by, and ultimately turning against, their own evil offspring; you’ve got scenes of people being hypnotized; and you’ve got massive continuity problems and drastic re-imaginings of the story’s central premise.
For example, the original film, based on a John Wyndham novel (The Midwich Cuckoos) that I have never read, makes the point that all these children are essentially alien offspring; the children, who have been born in several places around the world, all have blond hair, and in a few places, the children are immediately killed, because their appearance is radically at odds with the appearance of the locals or because it violates the local taboos. It is only British decency and civility and tolerance that allows the children in the town of Midwich to survive as long as they do.
In the sequel, however, six children with identical skills are born in six different countries, and each one looks like a normal member of the local ethnic group; what’s more, exactly how these children were born is never revealed, even though at least one of them was apparently born of a virgin, but we are told that they represent the next step in human evolution. And then the film goes so far as to suggest that they are not evil, but only very powerful and self-defensive, and if only we poor humans were not so fearful and irrational we could all live together in peace!
Never mind the differences in concept or backstory; the incongruity between these two films on a purely thematic level is enough to give you whiplash. I can’t remember the last time I saw a sequel that so profoundly rejected and inverted the whole point of the original film. The “perfection” of the children in the first film is ultimately something to be feared, because it is cold, alien, inhuman, rational, and without emotion. In the sequel, however, it is human emotion that is ultimately to blame, and the children — one of whom does admit to being frightened for her survival! — represent a form of “perfection” that we ought to embrace.
I’m sure the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took place between the two films, is to blame for some of this. The people who made the sequel suddenly felt the need to be “relevant” or something, to send out a message of love and peace. (A portrait of Gandhi hangs on the wall of one Indian official, and wouldn’t you know it, screenwriter John Briley went on to write Richard Attenborough’s hagiographical 1982 biopic Gandhi, and to win an Oscar for doing so.) But it makes the film awfully dated and self-important.
The first film feels dated too, of course, in terms of its cinematic or narrative conventions. For example, the notion that “perfection” requires a modernist, scientific, emotionless outlook was still popular, and was still being challenged, during the original Star Trek series (1966-69), but I don’t think it has so much currency today. The thing is, it does not feel like the makers of that film were using it as a soapbox to preach a political point. And it ends on a wonderfully eerie note, with pairs of eyes soaring into the night sky like bats, which the sequel utterly fails to capitalize on.
Two comments re: the casting of Village of the Damned. First, after seeing George Sanders play so many haughty, sarcastic, droll figures — from the Philistine king in Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949; my comments) to Shere Khan in Walt Disney’s The Jungle Book (1967; my comments), to say nothing of his Oscar-winning turn in All About Eve (1950) — it was funny to see him play an earnest scientist and devoted husband.
And I cracked up when I realized that Sanders’ equally earnest military brother-in-law was being played by Michael Gwynn, who went on to play the con artist “Lord Melbury” in the premiere episode of Fawlty Towers (1975)! That was kinda funny.
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