One Of The First Hivemind Horrors Is Still Terrifying

Two science-fiction novels published in the middle of the 20th century left a mark on the cultural psyche of Britain and America that still looms large today. In the 1950s, John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos and Jack Finney’s The Body Snatchers were published three years and one continent apart, and although both works speak to the original imagination of two unrelated writers, the crossover fears underpinning their speculative fiction have put them in conversation. Even today, the imprint of their eerie, foundational “hivemind” sci-fi is clear.

The Midwich Cuckoos is best known by its first film adaptation, Wolf Rilla’s B-movie Village of the Damned, which hit theaters 65 years ago today. It’s set in a quaint English village, one of a few locations worldwide where, one morning, every resident falls unconscious. Although they soon wake up, they discover that every woman able to conceive has fallen pregnant, and they eventually all give birth on the same day. These children are creepily uniform: their hair is platinum blond, their eyes are intense, and they foster a telepathic bond. They also grow territorial, ganging up on perceived threats and using their telepathic abilities to trigger fatalities and suicides.

Village of the Damned is not the only direct adaptation of The Midwich Cuckoos; John Carpenter, a devotee of classic genre fare, produced a middling remake in 1995, and there was a 2022 miniseries starring Keeley Hawes that retained the book’s original title. (There’s also a 1964 sequel and several radio adaptations.) But Village of the Damned’s legacy pales in comparison to the cinematic versions of The Body Snatchers: Jack Finney’s story of a small American community infected by space spores that grow perfect human replicants to replace the originals has been committed to screens in 1956, 1979, 1993, and 2007, and the first three are fantastic films rich in their eras’ style and anxieties.

The similarities between Village of the Damned and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the latter, a Don Siegel B-movie, shot four years before Rilla’s film) are evident: both are about normal townsfolk falling under the influence of a strange, intangible alien power, both pit ordinary people against a creepy, defensive, and violent hivemind, and both telegraph postwar fears of ceding the strength of traditional domestic community to illegible ideological forces. As B-movies, both films have economic pacing and a seemingly unresolvable sense of dread, but the ways Village of the Damned distinguishes itself from its more iconic “hivemind” cousin make it ripe for revisiting.

The fear coursing through Village of the Damned concerns a loss of control: as the children are the product of xenogenesis, their mothers — including Anthea (Barbara Shelley), the wife of Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders), a professor who oversees the children’s development — feel alienated from their offspring, and the growing faction of telepathic, precocious children feels like a threat to the traditions and order of the town even before their glowing eyes psychically compel people to off themselves. Young David Zellaby is played by an intense Martin Stephens, but his voice was allegedly dubbed by actress Olive Gregg, which may explain the child’s eerie vocal affect that further separates him and his flock from the village’s normal children.

The strange, alien influence affecting the town isn’t concealed as it is in Invasion of the Body Snatchers; rather, Village of the Damned is as concerned with questions of cohabitation and assimilation as it is with the steady, suspenseful discovery of its sci-fi premise. The Professor and his army major brother-in-law, Alan Bernard (Michael Gwynn), hold intelligence meetings to track similar broods around the world, and the cell of alien children in the Soviet Union, who are educated and eventually obliterated, would have been the most illustrative counterexample for the film’s contemporary audience.

The children are isolated in a separate building and are taught by Gordon, but after a mob forms against them (which results in the children’s third murder by telepathic “accident”), they demand to be taken somewhere safe, a colony for a new breed of unknown origin. Gordon ultimately opts for the Soviet solution, smuggling a bomb into the children’s quarters and imagining a brick wall to disguise his plans from their probing minds.

Village of the Damned is more interesting for being structured around an uneasy cohabitation between two types of people with vastly different resources, each paranoid of the other’s abilities. It’s a rich source of suspense that opts for ideas and themes rather than thrilling pursuit, like the third act of many Body Snatchers films. This is what makes a modern television version of the “hivemind” concept such an appealing approach, a position evidently shared by Vince Gilligan, the creator of Pluribus, which stars Rhea Seahorn as one of the last people on Earth not rewired into a collective consciousness by a signal from space.

Gilligan recently told Letterboxd, “You’ll definitely hear echoes of Village Of The Damned in our show,” and already the tensions of selfhood and isolation are growing over the first season, set in (where else?) Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sixty-five years separate the B-movie and the streaming hit, but the existential truth remains: the fear that our human identity is under threat of invasion and corruption can eat us alive.