The Village of the Damned (1960, PG)

Dir: Wolf Rila, UK/USA, 77mins, 35mm

One day everyone in the small village of Midwich falls asleep. The incident is hushed up by the government. But two months later, every fertile woman in the village is pregnant; three years later, the children of Midwich have grown into blond, preternatural boys and girls, with the maturity and the nasty self-confidence of young teenagers. And with something more; they can read minds, and sometimes control them. Working from Stirling Silliphant’s adaptation of John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos, Wolf Rila’s film was a surprisingly controversial, pre-1960s, read on the less-than innocence of childhood – one that proved highly influential on subsequent decades of horror cinema.

Courtesy of the British Film Institute.