The first, feral Lord Of The Flies film found power in unpredictability

The island full of first-time actors and inexperienced filmmakers made for moving chaos.

By Jacob Oller | May 5, 2026 | 11:00am

Photo: The Criterion Collection

Film Features Lord Of The Flies

The first, feral Lord Of The Flies film found power in unpredictability

From the opening photo montage of 1963’s Lord Of The Flies, a sense of off-kilter danger pervades the adaptation of a book many half-heartedly read on assignment. Eschewing an explanatory set piece where a plane crashes and maroons a group of young British boys on an island, Peter Brook’s original film adaptation of William Golding’s novel—released less than a decade after the book first hit shelves—was immediately unpredictable, uncanny, and undeniably powerful. Before introducing its cast of first-time actors, still images of proper English youth collide with ominous visions of war, set to an escalating timpani rhythm that evokes the dark hearts beating inside even the poshest children. While this year’s BBC miniseries from Adolescence‘s Jack Thorne finds fresh terror in the tale, that first film captured its feral heart.

It doesn’t feel so surprising when considering the production. Brook, predominantly known for being a stage director equally comfortable with Shakespeare and surrealism, wasn’t a prolific filmmaker either before or after Lord Of The Flies. His approach was decidedly theatrical, relying on improvisation, favoring workshops over a hard-and-fast script, and assembling a cast of 33 non-professional children. Cramming them all into an abandoned pineapple cannery in Vieques, Puerto Rico during the summer of 1961 (a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis would come perilously close to making Lord Of The Flies‘ visions of nuclear war a reality), Brook approached documentary when shooting the story of boys giving into the anarchic, animalistic natures that Golding’s book so famously assumes. “They were real boys, not professionals,” Brooks said in the reunion documentary Time Flies, “and were so close to the characters they had to play that directing was not trying to impose a characterization, it was making the boys feel at ease and believe in what they were doing.”

The close-up handheld camera and elliptical editing helped the striking black-and-white images (shot by Thomas Hollyman, a travel photographer who’d never used a movie camera before and who’d never use one again after this film) feel like moments the audience was experiencing alongside the boys, rather than observing from a distance. The voting, the division into factions, the conch, the hunt, the severed pig head—these potentially SparkNotes-like moments and familiar iconography are tightly captured with a hopeless, disturbingly stark mean streak. This sense of uncomfortable intimacy is actually heightened by the post-synced dialogue and awkward acting, where the little kids surrounding the moralistic Ralph (James Aubrey), punching-bag Piggy (Hugh Edwards), and entitled Jack (Tom Chapin) seem sheepish, stilted, and unsure.

Echoing the swift decline of civility into barbarity in the book, this stiffness melts away when the need to recite literature recedes and all that’s required is dancing around with spears. A bunch of boys on summer vacation in the Caribbean? They were just waiting to be cut loose. After hearing them fumble through famous passages, their contagious primal energy spreads like a brushfire, and the dramatically uncertain boys transform into a convincingly vicious gang. That it all happens in a ramshackle rush, barreling towards the finish of the film’s 90 minutes, adds to the jittery naturalism.

Though the classic beats of the novel are simple enough, this ineffable sense of danger isn’t so easily replicated. An Americanized 1990 version of Lord Of The Flies swapped in a group of military school students, the pottymouthed delinquents boasting Balthazar Getty among their ranks, and added more intrusive filmmaking elements. Though the cast was again primarily composed of newcomers and director Harry Hook only had one prior feature to his name, a few of its adaptive changes (this is a decidedly British tale) and those glossier stylistic choices remind the audience of its artifice—even the grisly gore effects on spear-riddled Simon and boulder-slain Piggy draw attention to the explicit Hollywood feel. No amount of blood or slow-motion jungle photography could recreate or surpass the nervous chaos of Brook’s tropical experiment three decades earlier.

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