I haven’t even gotten to the end of the previous episode yet, to find out how we got to this movie, although I plan to provide an update in the footnote[1]. But it turns out even though I knew like 35-45% of the story, I had never actually seen Village of the Damned. And to be fair, I probably would have told you I knew more like 75% of the story, before I saw it.

It shares an astounding amount of DNA with WandaVision. See, there’s this village that’s cut off from the outside world, and before you know it, some magical children are the most important thing happening. If you leave out the witch and the android, it’s practically identical? Okay, but seriously, there’s this village where everyone falls asleep, including people who get too close. After they just as mysteriously wake up, bam, wait a couple months and it turns out all the ladies in town are pregnant. Even the ones whose husbands had been at sea for a year, or who were quite adamant about being virgins.

Then, all the kids are creepy blond/es with glowing eyes who grow up too fast and know too much, and have other probably not magical after all properties that it would be a spoiler to mention, and basically it’s a race to analyze whether this is about the recent Nazi menace, or Cold War paranoia, or fear of the incoming generation, or what other underlying existential terror the writers and directors were grappling with.

The glowing eyed menacing stare part is pretty great, until you realize any time it’s happening, it’s a freeze frame. Even with that, though, I liked it. You can tell why it’s a seminal classic of the “evil children” horror subgenre.

[1] It turns out to have been style British, and scare Altered. I understand why they tried to stay away from werewolves, but at the same time, I’m not convinced the children nor the village were altered in any meaningful way. Oh well. Still a pretty great movie!