Hammer Studios is famous for its period gothic horror films featuring garish colors, low budgets, wooden but well-meaning heroes, buxom and bouffanted damsels in flowing nightgowns, and its trademark bright crimson blood, with a weird viscosity that suggests it may have been purchased at Sherwin-Williams. But Hammer released other types of films as well, and some of them, including These Are the Damned, are neglected (semi-precious) gems.

Although it contains elements of horror, These Are the Damned, made in 1961 and released in 1963, is nothing like the films usually associated with the studio. Directed by blacklisted American Joseph Losey and with a screenplay by Evan Jones based on H. L. Lawrence’s novel The Children of Light, it combines science fiction, romance, apocalyptic nihilism, and social commentary. Beautifully filmed in black and white by Arthur Grant and with many scenes featuring the sea and the rocky Weymouth coast, it also lacks Hammer’s signature color-saturated, stage-set aesthetic. Because of its dark themes and bleak ending, it was deemed too controversial and challenging for Americans, so when it was finally released in the States in 1965, it was heavily edited and buried at the bottom of a double feature with Ghenghis Khan.

The film has two plot lines that seem separate but come together in a sucker punch of a third act. It begins as middle-aged American divorcee Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) meets a young woman called Joan (Shirley Ann Field), on the beach. Simon thinks Joan is a prostitute, and Joan lures Simon into a mugging on the orders of her controlling brother King (Oliver Reed), the leader of a gang of Teddy Boys. King and the gang beat Simon brutally.

Later Joan sees Simon on his boat and defies King by jumping off the pier and sailing away with Simon. They flee to a rustic house adjoining a military base on the cliffs, where artist Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors) has talked her scientist ex-husband, Bernard (Alexander Knox), into letting her stay to work on her sculptures. King and the gang catch up with Simon and Joan, and soon King, Simon, and Joan are trapped in the base, where they discover Bernard is experimenting on radioactive children bred to survive a nuclear attack.

Damned benefits from some sharp, clever dialogue, and Losey gets some compelling, sympathetic performances from his leads. Reed, as King, simmers with anger and is wound tight to strike without warning or provocation, but when he’s no longer in control, we see his vulnerability and fear. When one of the boys in the base befriends him, we also see he’s not much more than a terrified child himself.

Field, as Joan, isn’t as strong, but it’s easy to sympathize with her desire to get away from her sadistic brother and the desperation that pushes her to leap into the boat of a man twice her age whom she barely knows. Carey, as Simon, has been criticized for not being much of an adventure hero and for being too old for the part, but he provides a grounded counterpart to King, and it’s plausible Joan would see him as a source of stability and comfort.

Knox and Lindfors as Bernard and Freya provide perhaps the most compelling characters. The two talk about how the disparate directions they’ve taken in life have separated them. Bernard, whose utter conviction that nuclear war is inevitable drives everything he does, says he cast aside youthful passions in favor of pragmatism. Freya, on the other hand, is blunt and driven by her need to create her sculptures (“If I could explain them, I wouldn’t need to make them”), and refuses to dwell on nihilistic visions of the future. Despite her unwillingness to accept Bernard’s certainty that humanity will end, her sculptures strongly resemble charred bodies, and Losey makes good use of them to enhance the film’s sense of foreboding.

With Bernard’s benign, Tintin-like face, “true believer” faith in an impending apocalypse, and compassion for the children, it’s easy to assume he’s the less worldly of the two, and we might even buy his argument that if nuclear war is inevitable, we may have to do some unconscionable things for the greater good. When he meets Simon just after the mugging, he says (I’m paraphrasing), “You probably came to England expecting to see people like me. But we have thugs here, too.” But by the end of the film, in the blinding white sunshine on the Weymouth cliffs, we learn he’s far, far more dangerous than King.

Aside from the mugging, the film’s opening seems hilariously dated by today’s standards and viewers could easily assume the story has no relevance to modern audiences. King’s Teddy Boys are 35 going on 17 and wearing black leather jackets like a pack of Arthur Fonzarellis. In his houndsooth sportcoat and swinging an umbrella, King leads the gang whistling down the street in a jaunty little dance formation that looks like West Side Story choreographed by Monty Python by way of Mein Kampf. And although the song they’re whistling, “Black Leather Rock,” was probably meant to sound threatening—or at least swinging-sixties hip—it’s just a quaint (and insidious) earworm now, and belies the very real fears of the time that gangs of angry young men were a dangerous societal threat and nuclear war could break out at any time. But the film was one of the first about a government secretly plotting against its own people, and it builds a palpable sense of dread that resonates in world events of today. Once the whistling stops, it veers into unpredictable, unsettling, disturbing territory, and it will likely haunt you longer than even the best blood-soaked Hammer gothic.