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Column Science Fiction Film Club Village of the Damned: Killer Kiddos From Outer Space Parents grapple with raising brood parasitic aliens in this quiet, unsettling invasion story. By Kali Wallace | Published on December 4, 2024 Credit: MGM Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: MGM Village of the Damned (1960) Directed by Wolf Rilla. Written by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch, based on the novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham. Starring George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, and Martin Stephens. One of the things I love about researching these articles is that I never know what historical twists and turns I will stumble across. Let’s go back to 1934, a few decades before Village of the Damned (1960) was put into production. John Wyndham was writing for American sci fi pulp magazines under the name John Beynon; his breakout literary success with Days of the Triffids wouldn’t arrive until 1951. Hollywood was becoming both a major political force (the studios meddled enthusiastically in the 1934 California gubernatorial election) and, relatedly, a major source of moral concern for people inclined toward pearl-clutching and handwringing about what they saw on movie screens. In 1934, MGM released W.S. Van Dyke’s The Thin Man, which managed to slip in just under the wire as one of the last major films before studios accepted and began enforcing the self-censorship of the Hays Code. At the same time, across the country in Ohio, the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati, a man by the name of John T. McNicholas, founded a group called the Catholic Legion of Decency. The goal of the Legion was to push the film industry into avoiding any subject matter that would “offend decency and Christian morality.” The Legion did not advocate for governmental censorship; instead it operated by asking its members to pledge to avoid films deemed inappropriate by various bishops and priests, and to apply commercial pressure by letting studios know exactly why they refused to see certain films. To address the obvious question: No, I don’t know if the men making these lists of forbidden movies went to watch those movies first. This 1934 Time article contains some quotations that suggest somebody was sitting in the theater furiously taking notes on every seductive and unwholesome detail, as well as scouring the tabloids to keep tabs on Hollywood gossip about the lives of the people involved. I hope they did watch the films; that would at the very least put them ahead of today’s book banners, most of whom have probably not read a book since high school, much less the books they so vehemently denounce as pornographic. By the late 1950s, both the influence of the Hays Code (which was drafted by a Jesuit priest) and the religion-driven pressure on motion picture studios was lessening, but it was still very much present. The Catholic Legion of Decency (which was at some point renamed “the National Legion of Decency”) was keeping an eye on movies as they went into production. One of the movies that caught their eye was Village of the Damned. (Note: It’s not entirely clear when the title was chosen or who chose it. The initial development used the book’s title, The Midwich Cuckoos, but it seems to have been changed fairly early on. I think Wyndham’s title is much better for the story, and Village of the Damned doesn’t fit at all, but that’s just movie business nonsense.) In a 1978 interview with Starburst magazine, screenwriter Stirling Silliphant spoke about how after he finished the initial script, MGM grew wary of producing the film because their Catholic advisors found the premise “anti-Catholic.” The problem, of course, is that the entire story hinges on a rash of sudden and mysterious pregnancies that mimic the Immaculate Conception. The Catholic Legion of Decency and others felt that it was blasphemous and “insulting” to make a movie about an alien force impregnating a bunch of women who were not, presumably, free of original sin. This surprised me a little bit—not because I would have expected 1950s Catholics to not be extremely weird about pregnancy, that’s totally predictable—but because in my mind various types of invasive impregnation, brood parasitism, and evil children are familiar horror and sci fi staples. But I started digging into those tropes and realized it’s maybe not quite that simple. There have of course been changeling myths for as long as people have been telling stories, but those are notably about perfectly normal human children being replaced by inhuman children. There have also long been spooky kids in horror literature; Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) is of course one of the creepy children classics. But there weren’t actually many films with the evil children premise when Wyndham wrote The Midwich Cuckoos. There was 1956’s The Bad Seed, based on William March’s 1954 novel, which is about a sociopathic little girl who kills a schoolmate. The Production Code Administration strongly urged all the major studios not to adapt the novel, but Warner Brothers made the movie, and it was a big hit. I’m not sure if The Bad Seed is the first major Hollywood film to focus on a homicidal little child, but it certainly one of the earliest. Village of the Damned followed not long after, and quite a few more terrifying children from studios large and small would fill out the horror genre over the next few decades: The Omen (1976), Alice, Sweet Alice (1976), Who Can Kill a Child? (1976), The Brood (1979), Children of the Corn (1984), and so on. In any case, back in the late ’50s, killer kids weren’t the horror movie staple they are today, and MGM did not see Village of the Damned as a sure thing. Around the same time as the studio was balking under pressure from the Catholic Legion of Decency, the film’s original lead actor, Ronald Colman, died of natural causes. Rather than scrapping the film entirely, MGM shelved it for a while before moving it to the United Kingdom. This annoyed Silliphant so much that he broke his contract with MGM and spent a few years writing for television—he came back to the movies eventually, and is now most well-known for writing the Academy Award-winning screenplay for In the Heat of the Night (1978), as well as the iconic Irwin Allen disaster films The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the latter of which gave me terrible nightmares as a child, even though I lived a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. Upon its move to the U.K., Village of the Damned was handed to director Wolf Rilla and producer Ronald Kinnoch. Production was slated to start just a few weeks later, so Rilla and Kinnoch had a very short time to revise the script to make it more believably British. They filmed the movie in the Hertfordshire village of Letchmore Heath, featuring the village’s buildings and exteriors—such as the wall that unfortunate driver smashes into. Rilla was a writer and producer for the BBC before he decided to try his hand at making films, although Village of the Damned would prove to be his only real success. It’s interesting how much his journalistic background influenced the movie’s style. Contemporary reviews highlight how Village of the Damned is “quietly civilized” and “acted and directed with deadly seriousness.” The film has no real action, no jump-scares, very little on-screen violence, and the only special effects are the use of freeze frames and minor animation to give the children their glowing eyes. This approach is very understated, almost muted, which isn’t unusual for how horror movies normally begin, but it is unusual that it maintains that tone all the way through. This is a film about people desperately trying to believe they aren’t in a horror story. It works better in some places than in others. The film’s weakest element is in how the awful violation of inexplicable pregnancy is explored largely through the perspective of the men reacting to it, not the women. Sure, it’s a result of the film being very much of its time, as well as written by men, but I can’t help but think how much more unsettling the situation would feel if we got a glimpse into a conversation between the mothers of the children. For all of the worries about blasphemy, the movie barely touches on religion. What it’s more concerned about is the role parents and other people play in shaping a child’s moral compass. Gordon and Anthea Zellaby (George Sanders and Barbara Shelley) are concerned about guiding David (Martin Stephens) to maybe try not to kill people with his brain, although their efforts are ultimately futile and always undermined by their own suspicions and fears. Obviously, they know from conception that there is something strange about David and the other children. The kids grow at an unnaturally rapid rate and never bother to hide their psychic powers, so the film skips right over the “Little kids can’t be that bad!” stage and right into the “Those children are mind-controlling people!” stage. The few scenes we see of Anthea caring for David—mothering him—are notably uncomfortable. He is merely tolerating her, and she is afraid of him, and they both know the other one wants their relationship to be different. Gordon’s attitude toward the children is slightly different. It reminds me a bit of Dr. Yamane’s reaction in Godzilla (1954): acknowledgement that this is a terrifying situation beyond their understanding, but still wanting to learn from it rather than recklessly eliminating it. Atomic-era sci fi was often reminding us that with great power comes great responsibility, and Village of the Damned touches on this with the information about the strange children being born into other communities around the world. The purpose is to show that people have dealt with these children differently, although the details, taken directly from The Midwich Cuckoos, are rife with cultural stereotypes: Inuit and Mongolian communities killing their children outright, the Soviet community seizing upon the children’s skills to control and utilize them, and the Australian children (part of the Commonwealth, after all!) dying of natural causes. But let’s not forget what’s important here: Village of the Damned works because those kids are really, truly creepy. They are delightfully creepy. Zilla was very straightforward about how he achieved that creepiness from his young cast: he made them be still. It’s such a small thing, but all the more effective because of it. Children are not still. Children are chaotic perpetual motion machines. So by having the Midwich children be perfectly still, whether they’re in their cribs or in their mother’s arms, sitting attentively at their school desks or psychically forcing a man to shoot himself, there is a powerful sense of wrongness every time they are on screen. They are always calmly unmoving, emotionlessly blank, and outwardly unreactive. Heavy-handed late ’50s xenophobia and wonderfully creepy blond moppets aside, the film provides an interesting look into a whole swath of sci fi questions: How are we different? How are we the same? What do we do when we encounter somebody truly different? Not just on our planet, but in our bodies, in our families, in our homes? What do we do in the face of something so unfamiliar that it’s frightening? What do we do when we want the aliens to be like us, to adopt our ways and fit into our lives, but the aliens refuse? What do we do when neither humans nor aliens can ignore the mutual threat they present to each other? Much like the interplanetary spores in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the Midwich children have come to Earth to survive, but we don’t learn much about their purpose beyond that. We don’t even know if there is a purpose beyond that. Unlike the pod people, they don’t state any intent toward taking over the world or assimilating humanity under their control. (The film, unlike the book, even hedges a little bit on whether they are extraterrestrial in origin, but it’s a very little bit. It’s clear that everybody, including the children themselves, believes they are aliens.) Would things go differently if the children blended in better? If they weren’t so emotionless, or if the villagers weren’t so afraid? Was there ever a possibility in which Gordon and Anthea’s nurturing could have been more influential than David’s nature? We don’t know, but the endless possibilities are why writers so enjoy sticking odd children among ordinary people, for better or worse. I mentioned a bunch of creepy children stories above, but let’s also remember an alien-raised-by-humans story that predates The Midwich Cuckoos by a couple of decades, and which takes a similar premise in pretty much the exact opposite direction: the first Superman comic was published in 1938. Sci fi has long been fascinated with the presence or absence of emotion, whether it’s innate or learned, and to what extent it is a fundamental human trait. It’s a way to examine questions that tumble around the fields of psychology, sociology, and criminology—questions that don’t have easy answers, because humans are complicated creatures. How we treat children is a powerful lens for exploring how we view ourselves. When the children are a bit wrong, or quite creepy, or extremely dangerous, it becomes a way to challenge our ideas about our capacity for empathy, our willingness to engage the strange and unknown, and where we might reach the limits of our protective instincts. Who are your favorite creepy children in sci fi and horror? What do you think about Village of the Damned? I know there is a sequel, Children of the Damned (1964), that portrays the children in a much more sympathetic light, but I haven’t seen it and am curious to hear from anybody who has. Next week: Use your internet skills to hunt down Save the Green Planet!, or watch it on Kanopy if you can. I suggest checking JustWatch or a similar site to see about availability in your location.[end-mark] The post <i>Village of the Damned</i>: Killer Kiddos From Outer Space appeared first on Reactor.

With thousands of songs released a year, only an incredibly small percentage of them ever make it on the radio. And of the small percentage, even fewer leave their lasting mark on the medium. "Yesterday" by The Beatles can still be heard on the radio today while other tracks from the legendary band's catalog have fallen out of the rotation. What other songs have stood the test of time to become... Source

An animal shelter in Virginia shares the good news that one of their shelter dogs who has spent 472 days at the shelter has finally found her forever home. The Angels of Assisi shared the news on Wednesday, November 27. They wrote on a Facebook post, “Finally, during our Pet Expo Adopt-A-Thon last Saturday, RoRo met her human.” Angels of Assisi shares that Roro was brought into their shelter after her family suffered a loss which caused them to move and they could no longer take care of the pooch. Life was tough for Roro, because on top of being surrendered by her family, she also had some medical issues. “On top of that, RoRo needed to have surgery to remove a cancerous mass and has severe allergies, which caused her to have some hearing loss, and need to be managed daily.” “All 472 of those shelter days, RoRo has been a happy, playful and loving dog, with our kennel staff often going into her space on their breaks to spend extra time with her,” Angels of Assisi shares. And while there weren’t many potential adopters lining up for Roro, she had an “Angel Ambassador”, someone who takes her for weekly outings to help keep her spirits up despite the shelter life and give her some extra loving. And on Saturday, November 23, Roro finally met her forever home. “Kathy fell in love immediately and we know RoRo’s feelings were mutual,” the animal shelter shared. Angels of Assisi also reveals that Roro has quickly settled into her new mom’s home and giant yard! The animal shelter said they are very excited for this next chapter in Roro’s life and said, “Kathy says RoRo is in fact the one who rescued her, and she’s looking forward to growing together in the years to come.” “Animals like RoRo are why we do what we do,” Angels of Assisi wrote. Currently, the Angels of Assisi is offering special holiday weekend discounts on their adoption fees from November 30 to December 29, every Saturday & Sunday. The adoption fees for adult cats and dogs will be $25, $75 for kittens, and $200 for puppies. So, if you’re looking for a sign to adopt, this is it! The discounts are the animal shelter’s way of ensuring they can get as many of their shelter animals into a warm, loving home just in time for the holidays.

It's True! Trump Lost Childless Cat Ladies!

Not all asteroid impacts lead to devastating mass extinction, as it turns out.

On October 19, 2017, astronomers spotted the anomalous interstellar object `Oumuamua, as it arrived near Earth within a fifth of the Earth-Sun separation. At closest approach, it was moving at a speed of 54 miles per second relative to the Sun, traversing in one second the distance that a typical car crosses on the highway in one hour. At that speed, `Oumuamua was not bound by the Sun’s gravity and was heading out of the Solar system. It was the first large visitor to have been identified by astronomers from outside the Solar system. `Oumuamua had a diameter of order a hundred meters, the size of a football field. The brightness of sunlight reflected from its surface changed by a factor of ten as it was tumbling every 8 hours, suggesting a shape that is disk-like at the 91% confidence. Moreover, `Oumuamua exhibited non-gravitational acceleration away from the Sun without any visible signs of a cometary tail. The level of that acceleration, 0.1% of the gravitational acceleration induced by the Sun, required that the object lose about a tenth of its mass through standard cometary evaporation in order for it to obtain the observed push from the rocket effect. Such a high level of evaporation would have been easily observed in the form of a familiar cometary tail that reflects sunlight. However, no carbon-based molecules or dust particles were spotted around `Oumuamua following deep observations by the Spitzer space telescope. By now, `Oumuamua is 44 times farther than the Earth is from the Sun and 100 million times fainter than it was close to Earth. Its nature and origin remain mysterious. An artist’s impression of ‘Oumuamua, which means ‘messenger’ in Hawaiian. Last night, I gave a public lecture to an inspiring women’s organization near the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge Massachusetts. While discussing `Oumuamua, I pointed out the analogy with a memorable dating experience. Just as in an intriguing encounter with someone who left the bar to the dark street before we could get enough information from them, we can search for past encounters with their family members in order to gain more information about their origins. One of the attendees asked: “Could we find elongated crater impacts from `Oumuamua’s family on the Moon?” This was late last night. As soon as I woke up this morning, I did the related calculation before my morning jog at sunrise. Given that one `Oumuamua-like object was detected within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun in seven years, the number of its family members per unit volume is about 0.1 per Earth-Sun-separation cubed. Adopting this abundance and the local speed of `Oumuamua, I calculated that there should have been a few impacts by `Oumuamua’s family members on the Moon during its 4.5 billion years history. Can we identify the craters they left behind? Given the high speed and large size of `Oumuamua, a related lunar crater could be up to 20 kilometers in diameter and possibly show evidence for the elongated shape of the impactor. Unfortunately, finding the few craters from `Oumuamua’s family on the Moon is like finding a needle in a haystack. Based on a recent census, there are at least a million lunar craters larger than a kilometer in diameter, 83 thousand above 5 kilometers and 7 thousand larger than 20 kilometers. This large number of scars on the face of the Moon is not surprising since the abundance of `Oumuamua-size rocks from the Solar system that are flying around the Earth is about of order a thousand times larger than those originating from interstellar space. Finding the graves of `Oumuamua’s family members on the Moon is therefore as challenging as finding the corpses of a few specific people among a few thousand unmarked graves in a mass grave. Should we instead search for relics of `Oumuamua’s family members on Earth? Since the surface area of the Earth is 13.4 times larger than that of the Moon, there were probably tens of related impacts on Earth but their craters were compromised by pre-impact ablation in the Earth’s atmosphere and post-impact geological activity over hundreds of millions of years. Given a thousand times more impactors from the Solar system, it is extremely difficult to trace `Oumuamua’s family members on Earth. A better way to proceed is to search for `Oumuamua’s family members as they pass near Earth without colliding, just as `Oumuamua did. Starting in 2025, the Rubin observatory in Chile will survey the southern sky every four days with a 3.2 giga-pixel camera. This survey will enable the discovery of many new family members of `Oumuamua without requiring them to crash on Earth or a Moon. After all, there are many more fish in the interstellar ocean than those captured by our fishing nets. The post The Graveyard of `Oumuamua’s Family on the Moon appeared first on Anomalien.com.

On Monday's Morning Joe, MSNBC co-host Joe Scarborough proclaimed that "the only reason" that Republicans will have a majority in the House of Representatives is because North Carolina Republicans "rigged" the state's congressional districts to take three seats from Democrats. The MSNBC host did not mention that there are plenty of states (California, for example) where Republicans are substantially short-changed in the number of districts they can win compared to the party's overall performance in the state. As Scarborough was making an argument that, because the overall popular vote in the elections was close, pundits should not go overboard in predicting how much trouble Democrats are in, the MSNBC host brought up Republicans picking up three House seats in North Carolina after the districts were redrawn by the Republican legislature this year, twice claiming that they had "rigged" the districts: And the only reason Democrats are not in charge of the United States House of Representatives and Hakeem Jeffries is not Speaker of the House is because North Carolina legislators rigged the process so badly that they took away three Democratic seats there in a rigged redistricting attempt that actually held up. After court-drawn plans were used in the 2022 elections, the North Carolina State Supreme Court allowed the legislature to change the districts again to be used beginning in 2024. MSNBC regular Willie Geist then elaborated that, although Republicans won 220 seats, three of the Republican seats are likely to be vacant for several months, with two accepting appointments by President-elect Donald Trump, making the margin very close.  Geist eventually read a Tweet by The Cook Political Report's Dave Wasserman who observed that North Carolina redistricting probably put Republicans over the top for a House majority: That small majority may also be due in part because of the North Carolina Supreme Court. As Dave Wasserman of The Cook Political Report notes, "When Republicans won a majority on the court in 2022, they had the power to redraw three Democratic seats into the GOP's hands, which may have effectively killed Democrats' chances at winning the House this cycle." In spite of Scarborough's suggestion that Republicans did something underhanded by drawing districts to gain three seats in North Carolina, it was not mentioned that there are plenty of examples of Republicans being short-changed in other states such that it all balances out. In California, for example, even though the state's 52 districts were drawn by a nonpartisan commission to prevent gerrymandering, Republicans are being short-changed by a whopping 11 seats. Even though Trump won 38.3 percent of the vote in the state this year, which would work out proportionately to 20 out of 52 districts, there will likely only be nine districts that Republicans will hold. (And only seven California districts were Republican-leaning enough to vote for Trump in 2020.) There's also New York, where Republicans will hold seven out of 26 seats when 11 would be proportionate; Illinois where the GOP will hold three out of 17 when seven would be proportionate; New Jersey where there will be three Republican seats out of 12 when five or six would be more appropriate; and Massachusetts, where Democrats have held all the state's congressional districts (currently nine) since the 1990s. Transcript follows: MSNBC's Morning Joe December 3, 2024 6:16 a.m. Eastern JOE SCARBOROUGH: Like we said repeatedly going up to the election, this race is tight. Now, I can see, if this was like an LBJ-style blowout in '64 or a Nixon blowout in '72 or a Reagan blowout in '84, but this was one of the closest elections ever, especially if you look at the outcome in the House and the outcome of the Senate. And the only reason Democrats are not in charge of the United States House of Representatives and Hakeem Jeffries is not Speaker of the House is because North Carolina legislators rigged the process so badly that they took away three Democratic seats there in a rigged redistricting attempt that actually held up. So, again, here we are one month since the 2024 election, Willie, and only one House seat that remains uncalled this morning but is Democratic -- makes it look like they're in a dead tie. You know what they call this in Europe? A unity government because they're basically tied. So all these people saying that this is the end of the world for the Democratic party? I think they may be over-analyzing this just a bit. WILLIE GEIST: Yeah, a three-vote majority in the Senate for Republicans and an even narrower majority at this moment in the House. And, as you said, Joe, those swing state -- all seven of which went to Donald Trump, and there are some very troubling signs inside the vote for Democrats that they're already looking at and need to adjust to to change, but let's remember he won by a point and a half within the margin of error of all of the polling, as we said all along. He won by a couple million votes. He's under a majority -- he's at 49.9 percent this morning -- doesn't even have 50 percent. So you can throw out terms like "landslide" -- which his campaign and transition team likes to use. He does have a mandate in the sense of Republicans are fully behind him. But the idea that he's going to steamroll through anything he wants -- he is pushing those boundaries right now. Let's be clear to see how far Republicans will go. But he just doesn't have the votes to do it all on his own terms. So let's explain what Joe was saying. One House seat remains uncalled still this morning four weeks after election day. In California's 13th congressional district, Republican Congressman John Duarte is trailing his Democratic challenger by more than 200 votes with 99 percent of the vote in. Should his Democratic challenger oust him, House Speaker Mike Johnson will likely be dealing with a one-seat majority for those first 100 days of Congress. That's because two House members are likely to serve in the incoming Trump administration, and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz resigned from office last month, which will leave those seats empty until special elections are held. That small majority may also be due in part because of the North Carolina Supreme Court. As Dave Wasserman of the The Cook Political Report notes, "When Republicans won a majority on the court in 2022, they had the power to redraw three Democratic seats into the GOP's hands, which may have effectively killed Democrats' chances at winning the House this cycle."