MovieChat Forums > Village of the Damned (1995) Discussion > should blonde haired, blue eyed people b...

should blonde haired, blue eyed people be offended?

posted 16 years ago by scipher
23 replies | jump to latest

let's face it, if the children came out asian or arabic or black or hispanic looking, those "races" would be offended, would they not? shouldn't people who have blonde hair and blue eyes be offended that the evil monsters in this movie all resemble their breed? i mean, that is what we teach people they should be offended by, is it not? or maybe people shouldn't be offended by stuff like this (including other races who get offended over things not nearly as blatantly stereotypical as this movie was).

[–] LoupGarouTFTs 16 years ago

eyes glow red when they get mad, then sure. Getting mad over stupid things like that is just silly. People are way too sensitive these days. If people had to worry about offending someone every time they wrote a book or made a movie, then we'd have no books or movies left.

[–] scipher 16 years ago

i agree. that is why i made the topic. i have blonde hair and blue eyes. in fact, i looked very much like the children in this movie when i was a child (very white hair and fair complexion). i'm not offended by this book/movie. in fact, i'm not offended when people tell me that blonde haired, blue eyed people are evil (which i hear a lot. maybe they are joking or maybe they genuinely believe it, who knows?). however, people get offended on a daily basis by things that are much more mild than this movie in their implications. i don't understand. people who are so easily offended need to get over it.

[–] twacy_anne 16 years ago

If blonde-haired, blue-eyed people are going to be offended by this, they should just remember they were considered to be superior specimens by Hitler- that should cheer them up.

[–] uday-opal 16 years ago

Its probably inspired by the master race concept of the nazis.. so they all have those features.

[–] joe_538 8 years ago

Ever notice how many bullies in 80s movies are blonde guys? It was not unintentional.

[–] Noone222 8 years ago

Obviously you are offend and had to put down other ethnic groups/races to feel better about the movie.

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[–] hawaiigopher 16 years ago

Yeah, the 'Aryan race' was intentionally used. As previously mentioned, it's what Hitler considered the superior race. In this movie, there is a notable seen in which one of the children states that if humans and their race were to coexist, they'd come out to be the superior race.

[–] Bowserb46 16 years ago

The base work, The Midwich Cookoos, was written by John Wyndham, an Englishman who lived through the WWII German Blitz and also participated in the Normandy landings. It was probably intentional that he gave the alien children that look. It made them easier to fear and hate.

Of course, the original movie in black & white made it difficult to determine eye color.

[–] Gina_Riley_Admirer 16 years ago

For a start, the children didn't have blond hair - they had platinum hair. A bright white-ish silver. I believe the original creator chose it because it is such an unnatural hair colour for young people to have, plus it looked bleak, which matched their clothes and their dead-pan lack of humanity. Gray. Drab.
Also, not all of the children had blue eyes. Some had hazel, brown and green.

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[–] jeuk 16 years ago

Why should they be offended? This makes fair skinned people look like powerful intellectuals! I only wish I was one of them, but I'm not fair skinned! The original kids were far creepier though!

[–] kendotec-1 15 years ago

Concerning this movie, I was not offended.
First as mentioned they were platinumblonde which looked very unnatural for children to have as a haircolor, also the director wanted them to look alike and blonde is a scarcer haircolor, he could have given them blue hair but then the alien roots would have been to obvious, same if they had antenna or looked like E.T. ;-)

I guess blonde people, just with their looks, inflict fear or anger to narrow-minded nonblondes as they look different and there are few in comparison.
Probably the reason why Hollywood movies quite often use blonde males as evil or mean guys, blonde females as dumb chicks is for all the darker haired viewers to make it easy to identify with the 'good' characters.
I just noticed that a few weeks ago when it occured to me I'm watching a movie where - again *eyesroll* - the blonde guy turns out to be the villain, or at least not likeable in some other way (hits women, egoistic behaviour, greedy etc).
I must admit that I don't like it, because it seems to be stereotypical, not to mention racist.
But, as I am german I am used to being portrayed as the 'evil (german) one' in movies, so I can handle that too I guess. :-)

[–] what_will_you_say 14 years ago

blonde hair/blue eyes aint a race....

[–] LextheXFile 13 years ago

They have platinum hair but they aren't by any means fair-skinned. Just because they are "white" doesn't mean they are fair skinned.

I think they would have been even creepier looking with fair skin, but all the kids in this movie (except perhaps for the toddler who plays David at the beginning) had dyed hair. It's much harder to find enough kids with naturally pale skin, and using make up would've looked like makeup. Their hair was obviously already dyed (which took away from it a bit- I wish they would have selected children with naturally white-blond hair and forgotten about the silver undertone).

When I pull the wings off of the fly/ The fly never wonders why I did it.

[–] bluerisk 15 years ago

The children were far superior...so why should blonde haired and blue-eyed people feel offended?

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[–] arijanian 14 years ago

Well, those races have a long history of being treated horribly because of how they look. Blond-haired, blue-eyed people have a long history of being treated /well/ because of how they look.

Your argument only stands if you treat racist casting as a totally abstract concept ("if a bad person is of any particular racial group, it associates that group's looks with badness in that particular case and is an insult"), as opposed to a real, gritty, long-established behavior with an old history and a specific prejudice against certain /types/ of people ("if there is a bad person, they "ought" to be black because blackness in general has /already/ been associated with badness in American media and culture for centuries").

I'm sorry, but white people have no leg to stand on when it comes to racial discrimination, and (as much as I hate to have to point this out, since it shouldn't add weight to my opinion and it certainly doesn't "prove" my objectivity) I'm a white person.

Making a white villain or a nonwhite hero is breaking that real-world pattern of real, historical discrimination in film. Making a nonwhite villain just reinforces that ugly old pattern.

[–] Hildovar 14 years ago

White people are generally not nice, and i say this as one.

[–] LextheXFile 13 years ago

I looked like one of those children when I was a child. My hair was the same white color and visually I could have passed for one of them especially if I had been dressed similarly (and I would like to inform you that not all of them had blue eyes- what I did find funny was that Mara, as an infant, has dark brown eyes and at around the age of 10 is depicted as having blue eyes... that was a big slip up).

No, I am not offended. Why should I be? It's a movie. I am also half German and movies and TV shows which make fun of Germans don't offend me either.

I don't think the children were meant to appear Scandanavian or of Germanic origins. Blue eyes (and again, they weren't all blue-eyed) and blond hair are recessive traits, and they were supposed to be an alien species. There hair has to be SOME color and it would looked pretty stupid if they had had, say, naturally purple or green hair (besides, the novel the movie is based on, the Midwich Cuckoos, goes into greater detail).

Their hair is also shaped like a "D" under a microscope and their fingernails, if I remember correctly, are narrower and thinner. I always thought it would have been interesting if they had all had some as-of-yet-unknown blood type or a mutated rhesus factor or something.

No, I am not offended. :)

When I pull the wings off of the fly/ The fly never wonders why I did it.

[–] mson-3 12 years ago

The children aren't fair skinned with blonde hair. They have tank skin and silver looking hair.

They looked nothing like the blonde Nordic people you describe.