Depictions of children in British science fiction and horror films in the early 1960s introduced a new but dominant trope: the ‘extraordinary’ child. Extraordinary children, I suggest, are disturbing because they violate expected developmental norms, drawing on discourses from both the ‘psy’ sciences and early neuroscience. This post-war trope has been considered by film and literature scholars in the past five years, but this existing work tends to present the extraordinary child as an American phenomenon, and links these depictions to adults’ psychoanalytical anxieties about parenthood and the family. This article, considering Village of the Damned (1960), Children of the Damned (1963), The Damned (1963), and Lord of the Flies (1963), will contend that the extraordinary child was British before it was American, and tapped as much into nuclear anxieties generated by the early Cold War as fears about the ‘permissive society’, especially given that many of these films preceded the peak of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and were based on British science fiction of the 1950s. The ‘psy science’ that was dominant in these films was developmental psychology, not psychoanalysis. Moreover, adolescents as well as adults were key audiences for these films. Drawing on self-narrative essays written by English adolescents aged 14 to 16 between 1962 and 1966, I will demonstrate that this age group employed their own fears of nuclear war and their knowledge of psychological language to challenge adult authority, presenting a counter-narrative to adult conceptions of the abnormal and irresponsible ‘rising generation’.

1960年代初期，英国科幻小说和恐怖片中对儿童的描述引入了一种新的但占主导地位的比喻：“非凡”儿童。我建议，非同寻常的孩子们会感到不安，因为他们借鉴了“间谍”科学和早期神经科学的论述，违反了预期的发育规范。过去五年来，电影和文学学者一直考虑使用这种战后的望远镜，但是这项现有的工作倾向于将非凡的孩子呈现为美国的现象，并将这些描述与成年人对父母和家庭的心理分析焦虑联系在一起。本文考虑了该死的村庄（1960），该死的孩子（1963），该死的孩子（1963）和苍蝇之王（1963年）将认为这个非同寻常的孩子在成为美国人之前是英国人，并且像对“宽容社会”的恐惧一样，充斥着冷战初期产生的核焦虑症，尤其是考虑到这些电影中有许多是在电影的顶峰之前。 “摇摆六十年代”，是根据1950年代的英国科幻小说改编而成。这些电影中占主导地位的“心理学”是发展心理学，而不是精神分析学。此外，青少年和成年人都是这些电影的主要观众。我将利用1962年至1966年之间14至16岁的英国青少年撰写的自我叙述文章，来证明这个年龄段的人会利用自己对核战争的恐惧和对心理语言的了解来挑战成人的权威，