2The Village of the Damned (1960)
Children can be terrifying all on their own—their youth and naivete make them almost naturally disposed to voicing ideas that society would prefer they didn’t. It only gets worse if children have psychic powers and a hivemind enacting all sorts of horrible ideas. That’s the premise of Village of the Damned, a movie in which a group of children emerge from the womb with eerie hair and psychic powers.
The children’s’ lack of emotion as they kill is frightening enough, but the real horror comes from the question of why they’re doing it at all. Their whims are as difficult to understand as most children’s behavior, except significantly more bloodthirsty. With their strange hair and powerful abilities, they almost seem like the next step in human evolution, but they’re decidedly more Magneto than the X-Men in terms of mutants.
