CREDITS VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED, 1960 dir: Wolf Rilla George Sanders Barbara Shelley Michael Gwynn Richard Vernon Peter Vaughan Laurence Naismith

“A brick wall... a brick wall... I must think of a brick wall...”

This genuinely creepy sci-fi horror, from John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos, has a clutch of unemotional, super-intelligent kids born simultaneously in a small English village. The damned village of ‘Midwich’ is Letchmore Heath, just east of Watford and, conveniently, within four miles of MGM’s Borehamwood Studios.

This area of southeast England is so convenient for studios that it is jam-packed with filming locations. In fact, so many TV series of the 60s and 70s were filmed around here that it's been dubbed Avengerland. TV fans, check out the excellently detailed Avengerland site.

Among the many other films shot in the immediate area are The Abominable Dr Phibes, The Vampire Lovers, The Devil Rides Out, and Stanley Kubrick's Lolita.

John Carpenter’s disappointing 1995 remake of Village of the Damned, with Christopher Reeve and Kirstie Alley, transposes the action to Northern California.