‘The Damned’: the shelved British sci-fi horror and Hammer classic
When it comes to British horror, it’s hard to look beyond the wild impact that Hammer Films made on the spookiest of genres. Known and loved for creating a series of gothic horror works with classic characters, including Victor Frankenstein, Count Dracula and the Mummy, Hammer’s projects from around the mid-1950s up to the 1970s are well celebrated and at one point, they ruled over the horror market.
Hammer had also ventured into other genres, including thriller, film noir, comedy and science fiction, and the latter category often found a kinship with the production company’s main ware. Around the middle of their successful era, Hammer released a classic sci-fi horror called The Damned, which remains one of their more intriguing works.
Directed by Joseph Losey and starring Macdonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Viveca Lindfors and Oliver Reed, The Damned, made in 1961, was based on H. L. Lawrence’s 1960 novel The Children of Light. The film was reviewed at the end of 1961 by the British censorship board and given an X certificate without any need for cutting scenes, but it was not actually released until around 18 months later, in May 1963.
A unique combination of science fiction, horror and social critique, The Damned looks into the themes of conspiracy, paranoia and an impending nuclear attack and the innate evil of humankind. Narratively, Losey’s film, set in Weymouth, England, focuses on an American tourist called Simon Wells who becomes embroiled in the lives of a woman, Joan, and her younger brother, King, as he is led into a strange world of a government experiment where radiation immune children are kept in a secret army base.
It transpires that the children are being kept by the antagonist, Bernard, who plans to repopulate the Earth after a suspected nuclear Holocaust. However, when King escapes from the secret base, an eerie and tense story unfolds, and a sense of dread and alienation begins to creep over the film’s audience.
Hollywood had blacklisted Losey in the 1950s, so he decided to move to the United Kingdom, where he first came into contact with Hammer, who had produced Dracula and The Curse of Frankenstein. According to Oliver Reed, the director used to take his cast out for dinner and preach “anti-Bomb stuff” to them, showing that nuclear anxiety had always been on his mind.
After completing the film and it being shelved for a year and a half, it was finally shown as the second half of a double bill of X-rated horror movies at the London Pavilion. A positive review in The Times followed despite its very limited theatrical release, which rightly gave high praise to Losey.
Two years later and the movie round its way back to Losey’s native United States, released under the name These Are The Damned and cut down to 77 minutes. Losey would go on to live the rest of his life in Europe and became widely celebrated for films like The Servant, The Go-Between and Monsieur Klein – he would be nominated for the Palme d’Or on four occasions, winning once.
The Damned, meanwhile, would be noted for his unflinching confrontation of taboo subjects like government oppression, sexuality and juvenile delinquency, which was rare in the cinema at the beginning of the 1960s. It proved the forthright commitment of Hammer Films to experimentation and helped to establish the production company’s legacy and cultural touchstone of the United Kingdom.
Check out the trailer for The Damned below.
