Joseph Losey’s These are the Damned (aka The Damned) is one of the better thrillers to ever be released by Hammer Studios, although, apart from the presence of studio mainstay Oliver Reed, it hardly seems to fit into their repertoire. Yet they can claim it proudly – there, it says “shot in Hammerscope” in bright white type – and now that it’s finally been released on DVD, in Sony/Columbia’s new set Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films, it can at last reclaim its title as one of the studio’s most unique and striking efforts. Losey is something of a cult director, having made The Boy with Green Hair (now available from the Warner Archives) some years earlier; but These Are the Damned shows Losey at the height of his talents.

The film begins most impressively, with crisp black-and-white photography and elegant widescreen compositions that recall the work of Fellini; no surprise, then, that the main character’s boat is called Dolce Vita.  Set on the rocky English coastline, the film meanders its way, almost reluctantly, toward a plot.  We follow the middle-aged American Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), who picks up the bait when a pretty young woman named Joan (Shirley Anne Field) casually flirts with him; she leads him straight into a brutal mugging led by her brother King (Reed).  But Joan is intrigued by Simon, and seeks him out again, this time with no apparent motive but curiosity.  Simon, wary at first, escapes with her on his boat with King and his gang of leather-clad teddy-boys in pursuit.  Awkwardly he tries to seduce her, but it becomes clear that Joan is a virgin, any previous contacts with males sabotaged by her jealous brother, who’s psychotically afraid of his sister becoming “dirty.”  (Whether or not this jealousy is caused by sublimated incestuous longings if left for the viewer to determine.)  To hide from King, Simon and Joan decide to break into the home of a resident sculptor (Viveca Lindfors) and lay low, but when the gang arrives with switchblades and motorcycles, the couple flees over barbed wire into a top-secret installation built upon an abandoned quarry.  And here, almost halfway through the film’s running time, we arrive at the real story, for which we’ve only received fleeting hints hitherto: there is something sinister going on underground, at the center of which are the nine children who welcome Simon, Joan, and eventually the unpredictable King into their home.  The kids seem to be living alone, isolated from the outside world.  They have assembled strange shrines to their absent parents in a hideout in a cave.  They seem to know nothing of the outside world.  They can open electronically-sealed doors with a wave of the palm.  And they are utterly cold to the touch.

So what at first seems to be a docudrama about teenage gangs in early-60’s England shifts gradually into a science-fiction cautionary tale for the Cold War, and a shockingly cynical one at that.  The film is eerie and almost muted throughout, the dialogue delivered tentatively or in short bursts, the soundtrack silent apart from the occasional snatches of a rock and roll song which the bikers sing and whistle, reducing it to just a few bars, as the tune comes to sound increasingly unsettling.  The film has the atmosphere of a seaside ghost town.  What makes These Are the Damned so effective is that both distinct halves are solid, although in oddly different ways.  The opening shows off Losey’s skill at doing much with very, very little: it is rarely as compelling as these opening scenes, as the camera hangs back and pans left and right across streets – tracking footchases - and waterways, as Simon speeds away in his boat with the gang leaping into the water or mounting motorcycles to pursue by land.  A bridging section, ostensibly building up the romance between the leads, seems deliberately undercut by the threatening atmosphere, which makes one wonder if the film is headed into Roman Polanski/Cul-de-Sac territory.  Then we slowly realize that the film is transitioning into its second half, which has a slightly different flavor, and steps into genre territory.  The change is less awkward than it might have been because the mystery is so intriguing: we know that something is going on in that quarry and we want to decipher just what it is.  Indeed, there is little reason for the first half of this story to be scotch-taped to the second, except, perhaps, to ratchet up the tension when King is thrust into the mix, now that we know what he’s capable of. 

Critics in 1963 might have seen the story’s structure as a flaw, dismissed the film as a curiosity, but almost fifty years later it sets These Are the Damned stunningly apart from the other films Hammer was making during this period, be they monster movies, pirate films, or Jimmy Sangster-scripted Diabolique homages.  It now can be seen for what it is: a complete original, a brilliant Cold War parable, and much more hauntingly effective than Hammer’s standard output.  (I should warn you that this is one of the most outrageously downbeat endings you’ll ever see.)  Restored and uncut on the new DVD, the film can now take its place as a classic of 60’s British cinema.