Damned Kids

This chapter assesses the children in Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963). King's gang, if not actually orphans, are given no mothers or fathers to rail against. The children themselves, of course, are orphans, or at least motherless, and there is also an absence of the 'domestic', in the sense that one never sees a 'home' in the conventional sense. Yet parenthood, childhood, and generative power are strong themes in the film. Meanwhile, Bernard's children — well-spoken, precocious, innocent but deadly — have a lineage that is particularly British in origin. They also share with a handful of contemporary films the distinction of introducing something sinister into the cultural iconography of the child. So who, exactly, are 'The Damned'? Clearly, it is the young in general, consigned to an uncertain fate by nuclear proliferation and the Cold War, by the establishment struggling to maintain the vestiges of an empire, and by social attitudes that see them as a problem to be contained.

The Heart of Darkness

This chapter studies the bunker beneath the Edgecliff Establishment in Joseph Losey's The Damned (1963), which has properties reminiscent of other cinematic spaces that exert a strange influence beyond their boundaries. The Damned is a journey into the heart of darkness, all the darker for its location a stone's throw from the gaudy lights of a seaside resort. The hideout has to exist for the plot mechanics to operate, but it is as much a flaw in the script as the children's radioactivity. And it is this secret, irregular space that allows for the non-oblong, the ungoverned, and the fanciful. Like Freya's birdhouse, its rough-hewn surroundings provide a setting for expression and creation: here the children have 'invented' their parents using old magazine pictures, and tell stories about their situation. The hideout may be empowering for the children, but it has the opposite effect on the adults they bring to it.

The Journeyman

This chapter assesses whether The Damned (1963) is first a Hammer film or a Joseph Losey film. It argues that, although the auteur theory is so riddled with problems and contradictions that it cannot really be called a theory at all, certain directors, by dint of personality, distinctive traits, and sheer involvement in the countless elements of the process of film-making, can be considered the guiding creative force behind a film, and therefore an auteur. Losey, by all accounts, fits the bill. Whether The Damned is indeed a Losey film first is debatable; but it is as a Losey film that the chapter considers it first. And since Losey's status as an auteur is of relevance to how The Damned has been seen, the chapter also briefly looks at the auteur question.