Directed by Joseph Losey and written by Evan Jones, These Are the Damned is taken from the novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence. It has Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) arriving in England, fresh off a failed marriage, and meeting Joan (Shirley Anne Field), who lures him into a mugging by her brother King (Oliver Reed). Not the way to start a romance, but still, it’s a start.

Simon gives Joan another chance and they stay a step ahead of King and his motorcycle gang but running into some caves. They finally make love in an abandoned house and are chased again, finding a military base where nine 11-year-old children live, all cold to the touch and highly intelligent. Held by a man named Bernard (Alexander Knox), they are observed at all times as they have survived a nuclear blast that killed their parents. They are all born on the same day and perhaps the next step in evolution.

While Simon, Joan and King try to help the children escape, they are all overwhelmed by the radiation that lives inside them and Bernard wipes out the evidence, even killing his girlfriend Freya (Viveca Lindfors) when she refuses to be part of his plot to raise the children to survive the war that he knows is coming.

Losey was an anti-war director blacklisted by Hollywood, working for Hammer in England. They made him tone down the incest between King and Joan, as well as changing the end where a helicopter would kill Freya and not Bernard. Cut to 77 minutes when it played in the U.S., it’s an incredible film that was inside the guise of a simple horror film.

You can watch it on YouTube.