Where Is the 'Village of the Damned'?

A scene from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's 'Village of the Damned' (above) and Dorridge, West Midlands, England (below via Elliott Brown) 

From satanic babies to demonic spawn of the third kind—enter "The Midwich Cuckoos."

John Wyndham's 1957 sci-fi novel has seen multiple adaptations, from black-and-white movies to a sleek 21st-century TV show, jumping between fictional villages in the UK and US. Despite the name recognition, there is no "Village of the Damned" called Midwich IRL, neither in the English countryside nor small-town America.

In Wyndham's native England, the common cuckoo (Cuculus canorus) is a notorious brood parasite, laying eggs in the nests of unsuspecting birds. Wyndham amplified this natural menace on an intergalactic scale: aliens who impregnate an entire village of Homo sapiens in one silent stroke.

The novel was born of its time. UFO hysteria was at an all-time high; Cold War tensions were escalating. Several years before "The Midwich Cuckoos" hit shelves, an RAF Tangmere pilot reported Britain's first flying saucer above Portsmouth, a celestial inspiration for the book's silvery anomalies.

Wyndham, a liberal who served in both the Civil Service and the military, saw the world transition from one war to another while writing "The Midwich Cuckoos." His precocious, platinum-blond antagonists act as mouthpieces for the emerging geopolitical division then, taunting readers about the moral dilemma between First World individualism and Second World collectivism in this little thing called the Cold War.

"In Russia, the individual exists to serve the State," the Children tell their human hosts, referring to their distant brethren being bombed out of existence in the Soviet Union. "But for you, the issue is less clear. Not only has your will to survive been much more deeply submerged by convention, but you have the inconvenience here of the idea that the State exists to serve the individuals who compose it. Therefore your consciences will be troubled by the thought that we have 'rights.'"

Wyndham knew conflict even at a young age; his warring parents rocked his universe. Born John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris in the West Midlands village of Dorridge, he shuffled between homes in Edgbaston, Birmingham as he became estranged from his dad. Later in life, he would adopt the nom de plumes of Lucas Parkes and Wyndham Parkes in some of his works.

Needless to say, the planet has gone through many changes since the novel's publication. MGM was forced to shoot 1960's "Village of the Damned" in Letchmore Heath, England instead of America, which abhorred the interstellar immaculate conception depicted in the story. There wasn't as much religious outcry during the 1995 remake by John Carpenter, swapping England for Marin County, California, with Christopher Reeve taking over George Sanders as reluctant superman of the day.

The England of 2022’s "The Midwich Cuckoos" is also a far cry from that of Wyndham's youth. Although the Sky Max series returned the story to British soil—filming in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, the real-life cuckoo has grown quieter. Once a familiar harbinger of spring, the bird has suffered dwindling numbers, landing it on the UK’s Red List of species in 2021.

After all these years, the story is still a thought-provoking meditation on community and independence, a vociferous birdcall about the fears, hopes, and dangers of the Atomic and Space Ages. Wyndham's final question, "What happens when the future arrives—and it doesn't want to be raised by us?" is timelier than ever, its echoing chirps no longer confined to satellites, nukes, and unidentified spacecraft. 

In the era of AI, we welcome, with equal parts trepidation and delight, not fearsome extraterrestrial children but a form of intelligence sired by us, yet somehow beyond us.