Bell Book and Candle (1958)

Village of the Damned (1960)

Stirling Silliphant interview via Go Into The Story:

"I never intended to be a screenwriter; since childhood I had aspired to become a novelist and/or a poet. But I found films interesting, since I made my living publicizing them. When I met Joe Louis and learned that I could acquire the rights to his life story, it never occurred to me to write the film, only to produce it [The Joe Louis Story], I hired Robert Sylvester, a friend of mine who was a columnist for the New York Daily News and a big fight buff, to write the screenplay. Only when Bob failed to give me some of the scenes I felt were essential to the film, did I step in and write them myself. Later, when I watched the completed movie, I saw that the several scenes I had written were far and away the best ones in the flick--at least to my considerably prejudiced opinion. But, even more, I had discovered the pain of having to sit there and WAIT--as a producer--for the writer to deliver. What the hell, it struck me, why not be the guy everybody's waiting for, rather than the guy who's going crazy waiting?"

"Things in TV were immeasurably different than they are today. In the sixties and seventies, for one thing--and this is KEY--the network commitment to a producer was for a far greater number of episodes than the networks now allot. Half-hour shows usually scored a thirty-six-episodes season. Hour shows seldom less than twenty-four episodes. For this reason, when a producer turned up a writer with whom he resonated, he was more likely than not to ask, even beg, that writer for multiple commitments. Apparently, I was such a writer when I was freelancing.

"I have always felt that the most original writing I have done in the filmed medium was done in the period of 1960 to 1964 when I wrote the majority of the one-hour Route 66 filmed-on-location shows for CBS. These shows caught the American psyche of that period about as accurately as it could be caught. I wrote all of them out of an intense personal motivation; each was a work of passion, conviction, and, occasionally, of anguish."

"My single meeting with Hitch: Joan (series producer) told me the master was actually going to direct one of his TV shows--this one his very favorite story--"The Voice in the Night," to be the flagship episode for his one-hour Suspicion series. Joan drove me to his home up Bellagio Road, one of those canyon streets off Sunset Boulevard where you drive in through a gate.

"Hitch was charming. Congratulated me on the scripts I'd done for the half-hour Alfred Hitchcock Presents shows, personally made me a scotch and soda and sat me down with my yellow pad.

"I wouldn't trade the hour that followed for anything I can think of at the moment... The man was BRILLIANT. He fucking dictated the script to me--shot by shot, including camera movements and opticals. He actually had already SEEN the finished film. He'd say, for example, 'The camera's in the boat with the boy and the girl. The move in is very, very slow--while we see the mossy side of the wrecked schooner. Bump. Now the boy climbs the ladder. I tilt up. i see him look at his hand. Something strange seems to have attached itself. He disappears on deck. I'm shooting through this foreground of--of stuff--and I'm panning him to the cabin door. Something there makes him freeze. He waits. Now the camera's over here, and I see the girl come to him. Give me about this much dialogue, Stirling.' He holds up his hand, thumb and forefinger two inches apart. I jot down--'Dialogue, two inches.' As I say, the whole goddamned film--shot by shot, no dialogue--just the measurements of how much dialogue in the entire short story. It's all introspection and the memory of horror, and the writer didn't want to spoil it with dialogue. Lotsa luck, screenwriter. 'Give me two inches of dialogue right here.'"

Wolf Rilla obit from The Independent:

Piccadilly Third Stop (1960) was a disappointment, a routine tale of an embassy heist, but it was followed by his finest film (the first of two for MGM), Village of the Damned, with Rilla extracting every chill to be found in Wyndham's eerie tale of a country village where 12 of the women are impregnated while asleep - it is theorised that the aliens deposited the children in the women's wombs, the way cuckoos lay their eggs in the nests of host birds. Although the children are lovingly raised by the women, it gradually becomes apparent that they are wicked beings with plans to take over the planet. Rilla said,

What interested me was not to make a fantastic film but a film that was very real. To take an ordinary situation and inject extraordinary events into it.

The children's power is first indicated when one of the babies compels his mother to put her hand repeatedly into boiling water because she has given him a bottle that is too warm. Costing only $82,000 to make, the film grossed $1.5m in the US and Canada alone. "That film has become a classic," said its star Barbara Shelley a few years ago: It's shown - I've never been invited - in places like Brazil; I know that Wolf Rilla goes off, all expenses paid, as the director.

Its minimal budget meant that special effects were few, but particularly unsettling was the way the children's eyes glowed when they were using their powers. "Beware the eyes that paralyse!" warned the advertisements. Tom Howard, a photographic effects specialist, created the effect by cutting a negative print in over the positive, turning the irises nearly white. The children's leader was effectively played by young Martin Stephens, now an architect and meditation teacher, who later described Rilla as "a very good director. A very clear director, and a patient one." Rilla said later, in conversation with his former child actors,

People always ask how did I get such good performances out of you lot. Simple - I asked you to do nothing except be still and stare. Children fidget and are never still, and I wanted you all to be absolutely still and steady and just stare. Very unchildlike, and, of course, very unsettling.