Children of the Damned
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Children of the Damned | |
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![]() Children of the Damned movie poster. |
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Directed by | Anton M. Leader |
Produced by | Ben Arbeid |
Written by | John Briley Based on characters created by John Wyndham |
Starring | Ian Hendry Alan Badel Barbara Ferris Alfred Burke |
Music by | Ron Goodwin |
Cinematography | David Boulton |
Editing by | Ernest Walter |
Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) |
Release date(s) | January 29, 1964 USA |
Running time | 90 min. |
Country | ![]() |
Language | English |
Preceded by | Village of the Damned |
Followed by | John Carpenter's Village of the Damned |
All Movie Guide profile | |
IMDb profile |
Children of the Damned is a 1963 science fiction film, a sequel to the 1960 version of Village of the Damned. It is about a group of children, with similar psi-powers to the original seeding but with notable improvements upon their design and distribution.
[edit] Synopsis
The inexplicable appearance of a group of children, advanced 1 million years beyond Mankind's genetic development, causes fear among the governments of the world. When the authorities try to take control of them, the children are compelled to respond with deadly telepathic force.
The children were indentified by a UNESCO research initiative into child development and brought to London for collective study. However International and Cold War tensions led to their governments pulling out of this pact after knowledge of the children's immense intellects spread from academic to military circles. The children escaped their embassies and hid-out in an abandoned church in Southwark, London.
[edit] Improvement
Previously the children were seeded in large, concentrated groups all with similar blonde appearances. This led in several cases to their parents killing them at birth and in others, such as in the Midwich example, developing into a cold and malevolent group organism. In this second seeding the children were geographically distributed across the globe, each with appropriate ethnicity to mask their unearthly origins. Their telepathic abilities were more finely tuned and their understanding and tolerance of humans and animals and how to control them was far more advanced. Whomever 'created' the children had clearly observed or learnt of the outcome of the original seeding and made appropriate improvements, though the previous seedings are never mentioned in the film.