Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie Review

Beware the Stare

Reviewed by Michael Reuben August 1, 2018

What's in a name? For the 1960 thriller Village of the Damned, naming was crucial. The film was a reasonably faithful adaptation of a successful 1957 sci-fi novel by English author John Wyndham (who also wrote Day of the Triffids). But Wyndham had titled his novel The Midwich Cuckoos, in reference to the bird that lays its eggs in another's nest and whose young usually kill the chicks of the nest's owner. As apt as that analogy might be for Wyndham's tale, it wouldn't have had the same impact on a movie marquee as "Village of the Damned", with its connotations of supernatural evil.

MGM's marketing campaign played up the horror theme wherever possible, and I vividly recall the "Coming Attractions" poster outside my small town's local cinema, with its lurid promise in all caps: "STRANGE STORY OF THE WEIRD CHILD-DEMONS!" The poster alone was enough to give my little brother nightmares, and our mother yelled at me for reading him the tagline. Sorry, Mom, but it wasn't my fault; it was brilliant studio branding that helped propel a low-budget British production to worldwide success.

Village of the Damned (or "VotD") is part of the extensive MGM library now owned by Warner, and the Warner Archive Collection is adding the film to its Blu-ray catalog in a new transfer that aptly showcases German director Wolf Rilla's understated and efficient direction. Rilla never made another film as successful, but he ensured his place in film history with a chilling classic that hasn't lost its eerie fascination. John Carpenter tried to remake the film in 1995, but even with his considerable skills, Carpenter's version couldn't come close to the impact of Rilla's creation.

The key to VotD is its simplicity. With minimal prologue, we watch Prof. Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) telephone his brother-in-law in London, Major Alan Bernard of the British Army (Michael Gwynn). Then, in mid-call, Zellaby collapses to the floor of his study, along with his loyal dog Bruno and the entire country village of Midwich. Rilla's camera lingers over disturbing tableaus of people lying unconscious, their daily routines abruptly interrupted. Meanwhile, Major Bernard musters a force to quarantine the village, marking a precise line that no person or animal can cross without instantly passing out. Flyovers confirm the general paralysis, and as one pilot discovers the hard way, the barrier extends upward into the sky.

Four hours later, the village awakens just as mysteriously as it passed out. Except for minor injuries and damage to property from activities interrupted at the wrong moment, all seems normal—except that every woman of child-bearing age is now pregnant, including a virginal teenager and a woman whose husband has been away at sea for a year and is none too pleased when he returns to a pregnant wife. (Since he immediately suspects his brother, family tensions run high.) Zellaby's wife, Anthea (Barbara Shelley), also finds herself expecting, and initially she and the professor greet the news with joy.

As Prof. Zellaby and Major Bernard work with a joint task force of government scientists and military officers trying to unravel the Midwich mystery, the fetuses develop at an accelerated rate. They're all born early, at about the same time, and continue to mature with alarming speed. There are twelve in total, all with striking blond hair, slightly enlarged heads and an unnatural stillness accompanied by an apparent lack of emotion. They share each other's thoughts, read the minds of normal people and are able to control others' actions through piercing eyes that emit a ghostly light. The effect was achieved by superimposing a negative image of each child's eyes over a still frame and, in one sequence with a moving image, by adding the glow through rotoscoping. (According to the disc commentary, reports that an early British release depicted the children with all-black eyes are an urban legend.)

Prof. Zellaby's son, David (Martin Stephens), is the group's spokesperson and leader, perhaps because the children are aware that Zellaby has become their principal defender to a government alarmed by Midwich's increasing number of apparently accidental deaths and suicides. All of the incidents involve people who attacked or offended the children. Zellaby offers to separate them from the village in an isolated cottage where he will personally provide instruction—and try to learn whatever he can about them. Zellaby has already grasped that their origin is extraterrestrial, and in the long line of movie scientists who believe that humans and hostile aliens can learn to coexist, he tries to serve as an intermediary in a futile effort to tap their superior intelligence for the sake of human progress. But events both locally and globally, where other villages have experienced similar blackouts and strange births, rapidly overtake Zellaby's good intentions.

In addition to its taut direction, VotD benefits from two great performances. One belongs to Sanders, who made his reputation playing villains and cads, most memorably as the pitiless Addison DeWitt in All About Eve, for which he won an Oscar. But here he's playing a fundamentally decent man, a devoted husband and father who goes to extreme lengths to control an uncontainable threat and is ultimately forced to make a terrible choice. The decency of Sanders' Zellaby is neatly matched by its opposite in Martin Stephens' incarnation of David, whose self-possession would be unnerving in an adult and whose clipped diction is the result of post-dubbing that makes it sound otherworldly and unnatural. Some have suggested that Stephens' voice was replaced by that of an anonymous actress, but it's the same voice heard in The Innocents, where Stephens played a real child in a very different style of horror film. Stephens gave up acting six years after VotD, but his disturbing portrayal of David Zellaby is enough to earn him a place of honor in the annals of scary cinema.

Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Village of the Damned was photographed by venerable British cinematographer Geoffrey Faithfull, who had been shooting black-and-white images since the silent era. For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray from the Warner Archive Collection, Warner's MPI facility scanned a fine-grain master positive of relatively recent vintage at 2K, followed by MPI's customarily precise color correction and WAC's thorough cleanup to remove dirt, scratches and age-related damage.

WAC's Blu-ray of VotD is another sterling demonstration of the ability of black-and-white photography to convey a sense of depth and texture in a two-dimensional moving image. The precision of the rendition is evident in everything from the finely detailed patterns of Prof. Zellaby's houndstooth sportsjacket to the interiors of his study and the local shops and pub. Against this quaintly rustic setting, the uniformity of the alien children's clothing and their brightly blond hair pops them out of the frame and makes them seem as threatening and out of place as their glowing eyes. As noted in the feature discussion, the effect was achieved by optical superimposition, but here that technique hasn't accentuated the film grain as it usually does, because it's being applied to still images. (In the one shot where David's eyes glow as he speaks, the rotoscoping is obvious from the slight wavering.) In general, the grain pattern is natural and finely resolved. Blacks are deep, shades of gray are finely delineated, and the only noticeable artifact is a slight but visible shift in densities during dissolves. This is no doubt inherent in the original and would have been masked at the time by a slight loss in quality from the printdown to release prints. MPI appears to have managed the transitions as best it can.

Given its short running time, WAC has opted to place VotD on a BD-25, but they have used all of the available space to attain their customary high average bitrate, here just a fraction under 35 Mbps.

Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

VotD's mono soundtrack has been taken from the original magnetic master created by MGM's British division, cleaned of any age-related damage or distortion and encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0. It's an excellent mono track, with clear dialogue and effects and a seamless blend of production dialogue and the post-dubbing that gives David Zellaby's voice its unearthly clarity. The dynamic range can't match that of a contemporary production—none of the several explosions rock the room—but there's a subtle fidelity in small sounds like a ticking clock, a steaming iron, running water and flaming torches. (The crumbling bricks are silent; anyone who knows the fillm will recognize that reference.) The score is by Ron Goodwin, who would later compose the memorable musical accompaniment for Hitchcock's Frenzy, and whose atmospheric cues for VotD are sparely but precisely used.

Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's 2004 DVD of Village of the Damned.

• Commentary with Steve Haberman: Haberman is a screenwriter who has worked extensively with Mel Brooks, scripting Life Stinks and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. He is also a film historian with works that include Silent Screams: The History of the Silent Horror Film (which no doubt explains his suggestion at the end of his commentary that VotD would work well as a silent film). Haberman's commentary provides interesting information and some astute analysis of the film's technical accomplishments, but it's a bad sign when there are long silences in a 77-minute commentary. Was there really so little to say?



• Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:01): "Today their control reaches out into space. Tomorrow will it girdle the globe?" The effort to play on the fears of a Sputnik-era audience terrified by the Soviet lead in the space race couldn't be more direct. As Haberman's commentary explains, the emotionless Midwich "cuckoo" children were seen by contemporary audiences as avatars of communism, much like the pod-people of the original Cold War Invasion of the Body Snatchers (released in 1956).

Village of the Damned Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

My brother survived his nightmares and grew up to be a happy and accomplished family man. I don't know whether he ever saw VotD, but when I was finally old enough to be allowed to watch "the strange story of the weird child-demons", it was every bit as creepy as the ad campaign promised. It still is today, and if you only know John Carpenter's remake, you owe it to yourself to see Rilla's version, which remains unmatched. WAC's Blu-ray brings the unearthly kids of Midwich vividly into your home and is highly recommended.