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TCM is doing horror movies on Sunday nights this month (go TCM!) and last night they showed one of my personal favorites from childhood (starring my first crush), Village of the Damned and its sequel, Children of the Damned.
CotD isn't really a sequel, since there are no characters in it from the first movie, and the premise is similar, but not the same. It's more like a remake or a second, far looser, adaptation of the book (The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham). I'm assuming most people know the original movie (and have hopefully avoided its dreadful 1995 re-make) because it's been spoofed and referenced all over the place. In a nutshell: the sleepy village of Midwich falls asleep one afternoon, and when they wake up lots of women are pregnant, whether or not they've any possibility of being so. The babies all develop faster than normal, and are highly intelligent with strange platinum blond hair. They also all share a mind, so what one knows they all know. Oh, and they practice mind-control, usually resulting in somebody ending up horribly dead. One child, David, has a father more interested in studying and teaching the children than destroying them (which is what happens to other colonies of children across the globe), but eventually even he begins to suspect there's just no compromising with these kids with the glowing eyes and, to paraphrase The Simpsons' Mayor Quimby, "creepy English accents."
In the sequel, six normal-looking children have been born around the globe--there's the English kid, an Indian kid, an African kid, an Asian kid, a Russian kid and an American kid (amusingly recognizable for wearing long trousers and a windbreaker while the other kids are bare legged and wearing those short black trench coats that were the standard uniform in the first film as well). The kids eventually hole-up in a bombed-out church with one boy's aunt. I remember seeing this movie as a kid. I saw the title in TVGuide and was thrilled thinking it was the original, then realized it was "Children" and not "Village," then saw it was a sequel. I was really disappointed, mostly because the kids weren't scary at all, just annoying. There's sort of a question in the sequel about how to treat the kids, and some weird justifications for the kind of behavior played for scary in the first movie. Both films end in pretty much the same way, only the second movie suggests it may be a tragedy...or at least, a different kind of tragedy than the first movie.
In his introduction to the movie the host said many people felt the nowhere-near-as-successful sequel possible did a better job exploring the premise. I know just what they mean--and I totally disagree. To me the second movie, and I think the remake that followed, suffers from the same thing a lot of remakes do. It's not exploring the premise, it's muddying the premise, tossing in things that seem intelligent but don't help the story at all. If you notice, many of the best horror movies, the ones that really stand the test of time, are quite simple. The filmmakers come up with a scary idea and just presses that idea to its horrible conclusion without letting up. It's disturbing because it's supposed to be (this is also, imo, why major studios have such a hard time making good horror movies--it goes against their instinct to offend). There's nowhere else to go.
Sequels and poorly thought-out remakes tend to dissipate the feeling, in my experience. VotD, like many classics, is elegant and cruel in its design: the children are The Other and are coming to get you. In real life, that's not a concept I particularly like, but it's what this story turns on. Good, old-fashioned 50s paranoia. After the movie is over one is free to consider the alternatives--what if the characters were wrong? etc. But the story sticks to its point. What is described as "exploring the premise" in the original is, imo, more like being bored with the premise. That is, the movie grabs the imagination because of its elegant simplicity, and keeps people thinking about it for a long time. Eventually you exhaust the possibilities explored in the movie and start riffing on it in your head: what if the kids were misunderstood (CotD)? What if there was a kid who didn't like being mean (I believe the 95 version does this)? And those are perfectly fine ideas, but if they'd been part of the original the original wouldn't be a classic. Really, VotD is what you get when you explore the premise. CotD and VotD95 are what you get when you've been thinking about the premise for a while and your mind starts to wander.
Really, they're like fanfic. Which is not to say they have to be terrible. For instance, I think Dawn of the Dead has a lot to recommend it, but it's not a horror movie the way Night of the Living Dead is. Day of the Dead gets even further away, with a zombie becoming a bit of a hero by completely undercutting the very premise of the first film that made it so horribly good.
It just sort of reminds me of recent discussions about trends in fanfic, and how sometimes when you read a story that's always been described as a classic you just don't really see how good it is, probably because without realizing it you're reading a riff on something rather than something that stands on its own. Not all fanfic has that problem, of course, but it's interesting when it does. Like...where you know that part of the reason a fanon character works is because s/he brings with him/her earlier canon. If canon itself had contained this version instead of the canon version, the character probably wouldn't have made that much of an impression.
CotD isn't really a sequel, since there are no characters in it from the first movie, and the premise is similar, but not the same. It's more like a remake or a second, far looser, adaptation of the book (The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham). I'm assuming most people know the original movie (and have hopefully avoided its dreadful 1995 re-make) because it's been spoofed and referenced all over the place. In a nutshell: the sleepy village of Midwich falls asleep one afternoon, and when they wake up lots of women are pregnant, whether or not they've any possibility of being so. The babies all develop faster than normal, and are highly intelligent with strange platinum blond hair. They also all share a mind, so what one knows they all know. Oh, and they practice mind-control, usually resulting in somebody ending up horribly dead. One child, David, has a father more interested in studying and teaching the children than destroying them (which is what happens to other colonies of children across the globe), but eventually even he begins to suspect there's just no compromising with these kids with the glowing eyes and, to paraphrase The Simpsons' Mayor Quimby, "creepy English accents."
In the sequel, six normal-looking children have been born around the globe--there's the English kid, an Indian kid, an African kid, an Asian kid, a Russian kid and an American kid (amusingly recognizable for wearing long trousers and a windbreaker while the other kids are bare legged and wearing those short black trench coats that were the standard uniform in the first film as well). The kids eventually hole-up in a bombed-out church with one boy's aunt. I remember seeing this movie as a kid. I saw the title in TVGuide and was thrilled thinking it was the original, then realized it was "Children" and not "Village," then saw it was a sequel. I was really disappointed, mostly because the kids weren't scary at all, just annoying. There's sort of a question in the sequel about how to treat the kids, and some weird justifications for the kind of behavior played for scary in the first movie. Both films end in pretty much the same way, only the second movie suggests it may be a tragedy...or at least, a different kind of tragedy than the first movie.
In his introduction to the movie the host said many people felt the nowhere-near-as-successful sequel possible did a better job exploring the premise. I know just what they mean--and I totally disagree. To me the second movie, and I think the remake that followed, suffers from the same thing a lot of remakes do. It's not exploring the premise, it's muddying the premise, tossing in things that seem intelligent but don't help the story at all. If you notice, many of the best horror movies, the ones that really stand the test of time, are quite simple. The filmmakers come up with a scary idea and just presses that idea to its horrible conclusion without letting up. It's disturbing because it's supposed to be (this is also, imo, why major studios have such a hard time making good horror movies--it goes against their instinct to offend). There's nowhere else to go.
Sequels and poorly thought-out remakes tend to dissipate the feeling, in my experience. VotD, like many classics, is elegant and cruel in its design: the children are The Other and are coming to get you. In real life, that's not a concept I particularly like, but it's what this story turns on. Good, old-fashioned 50s paranoia. After the movie is over one is free to consider the alternatives--what if the characters were wrong? etc. But the story sticks to its point. What is described as "exploring the premise" in the original is, imo, more like being bored with the premise. That is, the movie grabs the imagination because of its elegant simplicity, and keeps people thinking about it for a long time. Eventually you exhaust the possibilities explored in the movie and start riffing on it in your head: what if the kids were misunderstood (CotD)? What if there was a kid who didn't like being mean (I believe the 95 version does this)? And those are perfectly fine ideas, but if they'd been part of the original the original wouldn't be a classic. Really, VotD is what you get when you explore the premise. CotD and VotD95 are what you get when you've been thinking about the premise for a while and your mind starts to wander.
Really, they're like fanfic. Which is not to say they have to be terrible. For instance, I think Dawn of the Dead has a lot to recommend it, but it's not a horror movie the way Night of the Living Dead is. Day of the Dead gets even further away, with a zombie becoming a bit of a hero by completely undercutting the very premise of the first film that made it so horribly good.
It just sort of reminds me of recent discussions about trends in fanfic, and how sometimes when you read a story that's always been described as a classic you just don't really see how good it is, probably because without realizing it you're reading a riff on something rather than something that stands on its own. Not all fanfic has that problem, of course, but it's interesting when it does. Like...where you know that part of the reason a fanon character works is because s/he brings with him/her earlier canon. If canon itself had contained this version instead of the canon version, the character probably wouldn't have made that much of an impression.
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From:
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I'm not sure I see the phenomenon of fanfic as generally a "problem" though. Good storytelling is good storytelling, after all... the "problem" seems more to be that sequels and second installments are sometime brought into existence for other than reasons of artistic expression... and also unfortunately all too frequently the concept is given life again by clumsy hands.
From:
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From:
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I think one of the reasons I like VoTD so much was because it has a level of economy about it, in the sense of restraint in characterisation, and exposition. It tells you only so much as you really need to know, and allows you a whole range of possibilities in terms of interpretation. It’s a kind of emotional horror story. (Creepy kids, they do it every time.)
I think that’s why I’d say it’s ‘classic’ – it raises more questions than it answers, and it continues to do so even now 40 years later. Isn’t that what makes something ‘classic’? – its timelessness? Its thought-provoking potential? After all, it's still a pretty scary story.
I agree with your distinction too – in that the sequels and remakes tend to try and find the answers, to make a definitive statement about what it all means. So some things that aren’t referred to in the original are explicitly stated. And characters are given more obvious motivation for their actions. Fan fiction does this too, it tends to flesh out the hints that the original text gives us. They (generally…there are some exceptions…) follow a narrower line. The ones that don't are the ones I'd probably describe as 'classic' - although I can only think of one that I'd say really fits my vague definition of that category (Maya's Underwater Light) and I should reserve judgement on that because its a wip.
Maybe it's a confusion between 'classic' and 'strict adherance to canon'. I don't know, when all's said and done. :-)
From:
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Probably the best fanfic creates another world that also brings up questions, even while they're answering some of the things not fleshed out in canon.