I’m going to try to recommend a new movie each day until Halloween.

I went to watch this recently only to find I don’t own it on disk! I guess I’d watched my VHS copy so much that I remembered it like I’d bought it recently. Because this movie stays with you.

The premise: everyone in a tiny village in England suddenly collapses and is unconscious. When they awaken later that day, every woman able to carry a child is pregnant. The children all have platinum blonde hair and creepy eyes, and they pair up as if they already know whom they will have kids with someday. George Sanders (the voice of Shere Khan in 1967’s Jungle Book) plays the father of one of the boy children, and while he knows there is something amiss he is nevertheless happy to be a late-in-life father.

As the children age, they exhibit disturbing powers…and a lack of conscience. When a man almost hits one of them by accident with his car, their eyes glow and they compel him to drive his car into a brick wall. Sanders attempts to teach the children morality, while the government watches to see what will happen. When everyone realizes that the children can read minds, it makes doing anything other than obeying them almost impossible.

The SFX hold up very well for 1960. Granted, the glowing eye effect is done on a still image because they lacked the ability to track it with moving eyes, but it’s still eminently creepy! George Sanders…well, I could listen to that voice read the Dreamweaver instruction book, but here he is great as a middle-aged father who must accept that his child is a menace. Also … not his child.

The directing and editing make this movie, giving it a suffocating atmosphere.

John Carpenter remade this in the mid-90s, and there are a few things to recommend it. It’s in color, which seems to be the one reason old movies get remade even when the original is terrific. There are more deaths from the people falling unconscious, including one man who slumps over his barbecue grill. I like Kirstie Alley as the new addition of a government liaison, and her fate is disturbing. There are moments here and there that I like, but overall it just lacks the wonderful feel of the small British town with the kids in school uniforms. California just isn’t a convincing substitute; it would be better to place it in Maine, perhaps.

I recommend the original.