Three recent releases from England explore the survival into the modern world of ancient mystical forces, illustrating different aspects of folk horror. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) a pagan entity brings tragedy to a family; in Robert Wynne-Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), villagers in 19th Century Ireland believe a farm girl is a witch: and in Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape (1972), scripted by Nigel Kneale, a research team believe they’ve found the mechanism behind hauntings.
A few more of the movies I’ve been watching this Fall – the feature-length versions of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse homages; David Fincher’s breakthrough thriller Se7en; David Wickes’ two-part TV movie about history’s most famous serial killer Jack the Ripper; Chuck Norris tackling an army of terrorists single-handed in Joseph Zito’s Invasion U.S.A.: John Carpenter’s disappointing remake of Village of the Damned; William Malone’s stylishly confused on-line thriller fear dot come; and Maurice Devereaux’s effective low-budget horror about the Biblical apocalypse End of the Line.
Recent BFI releases offer a selection of amateur and professional short films from the 1950s to the ’80s in volume 3 of Flipside’s Short Sharp Shocks series, as well as a provocative documentary lecture from filmmaker Nina Menkes which asserts that the apparatus of cinema itself is gendered and weighted against women.
Small Axe (2020), Steve McQueen’s five-part film series for the BBC, corrects a glaring omission in British film and television’s treatment of the post-war history of social and political struggle and change; while the lives of the working class became increasingly visible in the ’60s and ’70s, issues of race remained largely unaddressed until this belated project created something like a parallel history to go alongside the classic work of filmmakers like Ken Loach and Alan Clarke. Criterion’s three-disk Blu-ray set also includes Uprising (2021), McQueen’s powerful three-part documentary (co-directed by James Rogan) about the New Cross fire and the subsequent Brixton Riots, which gives added context to the stories told in Small Axe.
Hunkered down in the depths of winter, I spent a lot of December immersed in genre movies from around the world – it’s a dizzying mix of violence, perversion and unexpected cinematic delights.
A few notes about disks from a couple of companies I’ve previously had little experience with – 88 Films and 101 Films, both from the UK – plus three box sets from Arrow.
Revisiting some old favourites recently has taken in an eclectic selection ranging from a classic BBC television production to Spanish zombies, New York cops, a Las Vegas heist and an oblique alien invasion.
A quick survey of four dozen disks watched over the summer months.
A couple of things seen long ago have resurfaced on disk, tugging at vague memories: Network’s 11-disk set of all 52 episodes of the BBC’s classic series based on Georges Simenon’s novels about Superintendent Maigret (1960-63), and Brian Damude’s scrappy Canadian thriller Sudden Fury (1975) from Vinegar Syndrome reveal just how flawed my memory is.
I can now say from personal experience that watching horror movies a week after having a heart attack (even a relatively minor one) may not be the smartest idea – but I did enjoy these five eerie features.