Trails and Influences: Electronic Ether. Case #14/52.
“Landscape-based anxiety… rendering strange and dangerous what many think of as the ideal community… the first great ‘strange village’ movie in British cinema… secrets lurk in the Cornish countryside, atmospherically presented even though the filmmakers never went anywhere near Cornwall… a skin for dancing in… it is not the landscape itself that is the source of unease but rather the savagery of the people who occupy it… takes place entirely in France, yet it presents a rural setting as alienating as anything presented in other rural horrors and refracts it through a distinctive English sensibility… A desolate and appalling landscape… for here there really are witches and demons on the loose in the English countryside… This is still Britain but it is also something else… I will never forget the way I felt when I came out of that film…”
Now if any of that intrigues or draws you in for a night of stealing glances away from the flickers of the screen, out of the windows at a landscape full of a darkness unlit by sodium orange… well then a visit to the BFI’s 10 Great British Rural Horror Films may well be on the cards (as may be a debate on what you would’ve/should’ve been included etc).
