General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Damned (1963 film)

The Damned is a 1963 British science fiction film directed by Joseph Losey, in which an American tourist and a young woman are chased by a biker gang into a secret government compound where radioactive children are kept in underground bunkers. It was produced by Hammer Film Productions, presented by Columbia Pictures, and based on the 1960 novel The Children of Light by H. L. Lawrence.¹^•² Although completed in 1961, it was shelved for about two years and released in Britain in the spring of 1963 as the lower half of a double bill with Maniac, in a cut version; in the United States it appeared in 1965, further shortened and retitled These Are the Damned.³

Key fact	Detail
Director / source	Joseph Losey; based on H. L. Lawrence's novel The Children of Light (1960)¹
Production	A Hammer Film production presented by Columbia Pictures; producer Anthony Hinds, executive producer Michael Carreras, screenplay Evan Jones²
Principal cast	Oliver Reed, Shirley Anne Field, Macdonald Carey, Viveca Lindfors, Alexander Knox¹^•⁴
Setting	A southern-English seaside resort, filmed entirely around Weymouth and Portland, Dorset¹
Release history	Completed summer 1961; UK release spring 1963 (87 minutes, from 96) as the lower half of a double bill with Maniac; US release 1965 at 77 minutes as These Are the Damned³^•⁵
Premise	Nine 11-year-old children, impervious to radiation, are held in a secret underground compound as Britain's last line of defense in a nuclear war⁶
Later standing	Restored footage returned for DVD, Blu-ray, and television showings; critic Raymond Durgnat called it one of the most important British films of the year, perhaps of the 1960s³^•⁷

Spoilers

Story

The film opens in a southern-English seaside resort, where an American tourist (Macdonald Carey) is picked up by a young woman, Joan (Shirley Anne Field), and then beaten and robbed by a gang led by her brother King (Oliver Reed).⁴ When King and his gang attack the American again, he and Joan fall from a cliff and are rescued by children who emerge from a nearby research facility run by the scientist Bernard (Alexander Knox).⁸

The children are the film's science-fiction core. Nine 11-year-olds are held in a secret compound behind barbed wire, armed guards, and intruder alarms; they are impervious to the harmful effects of radiation and are treated as Britain's last line of defense in a nuclear war.⁶ Cut off from the outside world, they do not know their destiny; one child imagines the bunker is "a huge spaceship" bound for a star.⁶ Within the compound, educationalists and the military argue over the children's upbringing, a teacher complaining that the security men "have the imagination of prison wardens".⁶

A character not in the novel, the sculptor Freya (Viveca Lindfors), introduces a theme Losey's program notes trace back to H. G. Wells's Things to Come: art in opposition to science.² Her sculptures on a bird and freedom theme were actual or ongoing works by the British sculptor Elisabeth Frink (1930–93), who was present on set to guide Lindfors in adding clay or chipping at plaster.³ In the film these works of plaster and bronze embody what one critic has called the age of anxiety, standing as a redemptive alternative to both the lowbrow Teddy Boy King and the highbrow government scientist.⁹ Bernard's shooting of Freya, the scientist's victory over the artist, is presented as regressive and ultimately responsible for humanity's impending demise.²

Production

Joseph Losey, an American director who had left Hollywood after running afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was working in England when he took on the project.¹⁰ He had no interest in science fiction and misgivings about the source novel's pulp content, but was drawn to it by his belief that the novel spoke passionately about the irresponsible use of atomic power; he was unconvinced by the central premise that a human organism could be radioactive and still survive.² The original treatment was submitted by Ben Barzman after an intense writing period at his home in southern France, with Losey in attendance.⁵

The film was shot entirely around Weymouth and Portland in Dorset, in what was evidently a hot early summer; production photographs show the crew sunbathing, boating, and posing in swimwear.¹^•⁴ Real helicopters, blown budgets, and artistic bickering marked the shoot, and the film was completed in the summer of 1961.⁵

Release and cuts

Hammer simply did not like the film's odd fusion of textures and held up the release until 1963, distributing it only in a heavily cut version.⁴ The film had been submitted to the British Board of Film Censors in 1961, but the UK release was held back for almost a year after Losey delayed making a requested censor cut showing King beating the American with his umbrella; he eventually made the cut.³ Hammer cut the film against Losey's wishes from 96 minutes to 87 minutes, and it was cut further to 77 minutes for its American release in 1965.³ The missing footage has been fully restored for DVD, Blu-ray, and 21st-century television showings, though the film has usually been shown under its American title, These Are the Damned; the 2010 DVD restored footage to approximate the UK version while the opening credits proclaim the US title, because the original British titles are not preserved.³^•¹¹

Losey's preferred title was The Brink; The Abyss was considered but he thought it pretentious. After the delay, the studio preferred to link the film with the similar though source-unrelated 1960 success Village of the Damned.³

Reception and standing

Critics found the film excessively grim, but Nick Riddle's study contends that its source novel, The Children of Light, is darker yet, and that it preserves or transforms considerably more of the book than Losey claimed to: the lead characters' names, the juvenile gang, the romance, the southern-English location, the radiation-damaged children confined to a bunker, the helicopter serving as a sinister hunter, and the father figure who commits atrocities in humanity's name.¹²

Critical standing has grown since the muted release. The critic Raymond Durgnat called it, in 1963, "one of the most important British films of the year, even, perhaps, of the 60s".⁷ Many have seen its vision of vicious delinquency as a precursor to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971), and indeed to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel.⁴ BFI Screenonline notes describe it as one of Losey's most intriguing and undervalued works and among Hammer's finest and most haunting productions, strongest in its science-fiction themes and weakest in the biker-gang material Losey used to argue that the overt violence of the young was a corollary of the covert violence of the Establishment.²

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026