Village of the Damned (Wolf Rilla, 1960) & Children of the Damned (Anton Leader, 1964)

I had enjoyed reading The Midwich Cuckoos, so it was only a matter of time for me to watch the film adaptations.

I love ‘Village’, it keeps the tone, it’s creepy, it focuses on the prearrival… and it gets rid of unnecessary characters and that daft sex segregation that got on my nerves while reading the Wyndham book. I really enjoyed how ‘civilised’ it all is, there is no room for over the top horror campness, everything is melancholic, as if there they all knew there is really no way out of the situation.

I didn’t like ‘Children’, the sequel, as much. It is entertaining and I love some of the philosophical implications: the kids have no idea of the purpose of their existence and some scientist even suggest they are coming from the future, but governments still decide to kill them due to the potential risk their evident superiority poses. That final line when they say they came here to die is rather powerful.

I really can’t be bothered with Carpenter’s 90s remake of ‘Village’, though. I couldn’t be bothered back then and I still can’t be bothered now, not sure why.

Village: 8/10; Children: 7/10

The Midwich Cuckoos (John Wyndham, 1957)

I was hooked from page one. The first half is quite simply perfect: the couple coming back to the village and finding all the roads are closed, the strange phenomena, how every woman then was pregnant… it’s brilliant, exciting and rather creepy. I also like how the children do not arrive until the second half of the book. With a book like this, you’d expect the main focus would be on the kids’ shenanigans, but it plays very well with both the feeling of anxiety and the denial that anything outside normality could possibly be happening.

Once it’s obvious that the children are a bit ‘special’, it becomes more obvious that the book is a child of its time, which is not necessarily something bad, but there are several details that got on my nerves. Like the gender segregation amongst the aliens. The newcomers behave as a collective entity, what one person learns is learnt by the whole group… only that only works within your gender group. When something happens to a boy, all the other boys know about it, but not the girls, and viceversa. Really? Was it too far-fetched to make them just one group? It seems even 50s aliens had equality issues.

Anyway, I wasn’t too keen on some of the creationist rants towards the end, but it did rise some good points for a philosophical debate and it certainly lead to a great finale.

7.5/10