Village of the Damned

(John Carpenter, USA, 1995)

1995 was a curious year for die-hard fans of writer-director John Carpenter. He was responsible for one of the best films released that year – the largely overlooked In the Mouth of Madness – and one of the worst. Village of the Damned is a limp, deeply disappointing version of John Wyndham's ever-popular novel The Midwich Cuckoos.

Carpenter has long proved himself a master of the uncanny – the sense that even the most ordinary person, object or landscape hides a sinister threat. There are moments in this film, as in his The Fog (1980), where Carpenter delivers quiet chills comparable to those Hitchcock achieved in The Birds (1963) – where sheer terror resides in a patch of silence, a flapping curtain or a slightly askew gateway.

But, beyond these few chills, there is almost nothing to recommend Village of the Damned. Everyone, it seems, carries an indelible memory of the 1960 British version directed by Wolf Rilla – another fine exercise in the uncanny. Why has it proved so difficult for Carpenter to repeat the success of this formula?

The elements of the story remain essentially the same. One day, in the small town of Midwich, there is a mysterious blackout. As a result, a tribe of children is born – white haired, expressionless, uniform in their dress and gestures. While the local teacher (Christopher Reeve) discourses on the amorality of these accursed kids, a sinister scientist (Kirstie Alley) makes haste to exploit them.

Many commentators on the art of horror like to tell us that its generic features are universal, archetypal, timeless. Yet box-office figures indicate clearly enough that what the public likes to be scared by goes in and out of fashion quite rapidly. Vampires, for instance, may be terrifying one year and simply yawn-inducing the next.

This is not just audience fickleness or jadedness. Prevailing tastes in horror at any given moment are closely keyed to contemporary cultural obsessions. The most recent occasion when the evil child was such a potent symbol of horror was the '70s, in films including The Exorcist (1973/2000), The Omen (1976) and It's Alive (1974).

Only rarely did these films make explicit their true, secret theme – that these kids were monstrous because they were the children of the '60s, the result of all that dastardly experimentation with sex, drugs and radical politics.

This dimension of meaning is unavailable now to Carpenter. So he struggles to find something to replace it, something that will tie the film to the urgent concerns of life in the '90s. In interviews he compares these damned children to the unfeeling, "sociopathic" kids of today, zombified by TV and violent pop culture. This connection is sadly absent from the film itself.

This Village of the Damned shows the peril involved in re-making certain, beloved B-movies from another era. The reason that the 1960 version worked so well is because, like so many films of its type, it had an abstract, unreal, sketch-like quality. The moment that Carpenter opens it out, giving it a '90s air of screen realism, the story's fragile spell dissolves.

Carpenter tries to recreate the old B-movie feel in several respects – in the very subdued use of special effects, and the casting of actors such as Reeve, Alley and Mark Hamill in patently one-dimensional roles. His gamble fails badly. Carpenter is still one of the best and most imaginative directors around, but this movie will have horror buffs running to the video store for the less subtle gore-fests of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films (1982-93), which are certainly a lot more fun to watch.

MORE Carpenter: Ghosts of Mars, Vampires, Escape from L.A.

© Adrian Martin August 1995