Day Five - Village of the Damned (1960)

    This is the first traditional horror film I've watched in the festival this year. It's the first time I've ever seen Village of the Damned. I have seen John Carpenter's 1995 remake, but this is my first experience with the original. The film centers on a small English village where all the inhabitants lose consciousness at the same time. When they wake, all the women able to bear children are pregnant. The babies grow at a remarkable speed and soon are young men and women with the ability to hypnotize those they see as a threat with their eyes and persuade them to kill themselves.
    Village of the Damned fits nicely into the creepy children sub-genre of horror films that have enjoyed a long, terrifying history. From The Bad Seed to Children of the Corn to this year's Orphan, kids have always been creepy. I mean, I think kids are creepy anyway, so these movies really get to me. As for these kids in particular, they are blonde, proper and very well behaved aside from the forced suicide. Up until they started murdering people, I thought they were the perfect kids. They have good manners, they're self-reliant, they move out of the house at a young age. They're the children of my dreams, really. If only they weren't murderers.