Lord of the Flies is a 1963 British survival drama film based on William Golding's 1954 novel of the same name about 30 schoolboys who are marooned on an island where the behaviour of the majority degenerates into savagery.

In the prologue, told through photographs, a group of schoolboys are evacuated from England following the outbreak of an unidentified war.

Singing is then heard and a small column of school choirboys, wearing dark cloaks and hats and led by a boy named Jack Merridew, walk towards the other survivors.

Events reach a crisis when Simon finds a sow's head impaled on a stick, left by Jack as an offering to the beast.

Simon runs down in an attempt to tell the others the truth but the frenzied boys, in the darkness, mistaking him for the beast; stab and beat him to death.

Ralph runs and hides in the jungle, later returning to visit Sam and Eric, who've been forced to join Jack's tribe by Roger.

Stumbling onto the beach, Ralph falls at the feet of a Royal Navy officer and landing party, who stare at the painted and spear-carrying savages that the boys have become.

As with Golding's book, the pessimistic theme of the film is that fear, hate and violence are inherent in the human condition – even when innocent children are placed in seemingly idyllic isolation.

[4] The parents of the boys chosen as actors were reported to have been provided copies of the novel, from which a commentary had been physically removed; those pages included describing the culmination of the hunt of a wild sow as an "Oedipal wedding night".

Brook noted that "time was short; we were lent the children by unexpectedly eager parents just for the duration of the summer holidays".

[4][7] Life magazine journalist Robert Wallace visited them there and observed one of them amusing himself by feeding live lizards into the blades of a rotating fan.

[8] Although none seemed damaged by their time working on the film, Simon Surtees, one of a pair of twin brothers who played Sam and Eric, "put his finger unerringly on the ethical dilemma.

"[8] Tom Gaman, who played Simon in Brook's film, remembered that "although I didn't think much about it at the time, in hindsight my death scene scares me.

I really did emerge from the bushes into the centre of a raging crowd, screamed in terror, was stabbed by boys with sharpened sticks, and staggered to the water.

"[9] The song, heard throughout the film, of the boys singing is Kyrie Eleison which, translated from Greek, means "Lord, have mercy".

This practiced, well-honed craft aids Brook's vision of a fly on the wall approach that pulls the viewer into each scene.

"[12] Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times that "the picture made from it by the writer-director Peter Brook is a curiously flat and fragmentary visualization of the original.