Dr John Sears
Manchester Metropolitan University, MMU Cheshire
The Boundaries of Horror in Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned
Windows Media Video
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Wolf Rilla’s Village of the Damned (1960), a major British sci-fi / horror film, exploits the uncanniness of post-war England (filmed in rural Hertfordshire as an apparently pastoral, totally white society) to frame an analysis of a society split by barely-containable internal divisions of class, race, age and sex. Based on John Wyndham’s critically neglected novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957) and made (by a German immigrant director) on the cusp of the sixties’ sexual revolution, the film explores contemporary anxieties about Communism and the Cold War, immigration, racial and cultural difference, the English class system, the emergence of the ‘teenager’ and even Nazism, alongside and within its examination of heterosexual relations and the overtly signalled ‘fiction’ of paternity. Such polysemy suggests a cultural artefact of some significance, but the film has sustained a ‘cult’ (rather than ‘cultural’) status through the absence of any video or DVD release in the UK.
This paper will address the film’s obsession with “invisible” boundaries that both contain and exclude (and fail to do so), in order to examine its contribution to post-war horror cinema. From the inexplicable “barrier” surrounding Midwich to the “brick wall” imagined by the ‘hero’ Zellaby to defend his mind against the cuckoo children, these boundaries allegorise social divisions, the differences within post-war English society, and demand simultaneous erection and demolition in order to comprehend the continuing transformations undergone by that society. The film, it will be argued, constructs England as a liminal, imaginary space circumscribed by barriers that are either impenetrable or alarmingly absent, in which it announces an interconnected rhetoric of the horrific – murderously ungrateful children, infanticide, uncontrollable feminine sexuality, declining patriarchal authority, miscegenation, reverse colonisation – that will adumbrate and delimit the political unconscious of much late-20th-century horror.
