a review of 魔童村

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT THIRTEEN: I saw the (decent, not great) Carpenter remake of this a long time ago and as a result had kinda written off the original (sight unseen) as maybe a little too corny/old-fashioned for my sensibilities. I'm here to happily confess that I was wrong, this was actually kind of a blast. The opening sequence with the military and local authorities clumsily grappling with the mystery of the strange occurrence in Midwich works as an interesting weird-procedural, and the way in which it continues through to the arrival of the psychic hivemind children and the revelation of the wider phenomena happening around the world, all creates a sense of everyday paranoia and dread that feels very relatable right now. I don't think it's a coincidence that director/cowriter Wolf Rilla's family fled Germany immediately following the rise of Nazism, and that this movie's villains are blonde-haired/bright-eyed conformist youth menacing their communities through soft intimidation and curtailing free thought. It feels like Rilla's vision of what his own youth could have become if had he stayed in Germany, and it feels applicable to how a similarly authoritarian mindset is becoming normalized again here and now.