Robert Aickman Double Feature: "The Cicerones" (2002) & "The Swords" (1997) dirs. Jeremy Dyson; Tony Scott

Robert Aickman (1914-1981) is the master of a sort of fiction that remains nameless. You could brand his collected stories as 'horror,' but beyond the rare tale or two (like the prosaic vampire yarn "Pages from a Young Girl's Journal" (1973)) you'd be far off the mark. His fiction lacks the visceral blood and guts, the outright breathless terror, and the classifiable supernatural presences of his contemporaries' work. Some of his tales first saw American publication during the early 1970s in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but neither of those genre labels feels somehow complete either. (Or do they? In a sense, Aickman's stories probe the boundary between mundane reality and horrific fantasy. And there's also no denying that his plots and fictional contrivances often disregard the laws of physics, of space and time.) Aickman himself termed his work "strange stories," and that appellation-- as oblique and indeterminate as it may be-- is the one that fits best. What else to call his quietly surreal tales but strange? 

The majority of Aickman's collected fiction (nearly 50 stories and two novels, published from 1951 until his death at the dawn of the 1980s) explores the modern human psyche through routes obscure in origin and destination, producing personal insights for and about its characters that are paradoxically ambiguous and trenchant. During this slow, queer process of narrative intensification, the reader of Aickman's strange stories is left in a state of inexplicable anxiety and mounting unease. What, precisely, is awry in the fictional world or what dilemma begs to be resolved remains unclear: all the reader knows is that escape (if one can call it that) will come only with the placement of the final period on the page. Reading one of Aickman's stories is to invite equal parts mystification and inarticulate understanding of the revelations held in store. The many narrative breadcrumbs he leaves for the reader ushers one into a forest vast and dark and nearly impossible to conceive of as a rational, coherent object. But only nearly so: blind as we may be, we catch the scent in the air of a candied house of horrors somewhere near the forest's center and know instinctively that all paths, no matter how labyrinthine, lead there.

Undeniably consequent of their elusive nature, Aickman's fiction has seldom been adapted for the screen. Though Aickman's prose is often clean and direct (in contrast to his story's themes and events), they almost entirely lack the sort of action that would render them so obviously enticing for a visual storyteller. His stories beg adaptations as cinematically complex as they are on the page, and a less talented artist runs the certain risk of  obliterating the singular subtleties inherent within them during the transition. Thus, Aickman's IMDb page remains sparsely populated. But those few courageous stabs at adaptation deserve examination, if for nothing else than their ability to help express in whatever small, circuitous way the unique quality of Aickman's perhaps unadaptable fictions.

"The Cicerones"

(2002)

dir. Jeremy Dyson

One of the briefest tales in Aickman's oeuvre, "The Cicerones" is nevertheless ripe with the sort of mind-bending suggestion and delirious ambiguity that defines his best longer work. First published in 1967, the story has since cropped up in numerous anthologies devoted to ghostly tales of the supernatural (including one edited by Aickman himself, The Seventh Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories (1971)). But, as is often the case with Aickman's fiction, such an easy paranormal explanation for the tale's strangeness is woefully insufficient. An initially straightforward account of a man taking a walking tour of an ancient Belgian cathedral after hours quickly devolves into an oppressive trip through another dimension, a plane of existence where silence reigns and time runs backwards or not at all, where the sacred and the demonic are one in the same, and where pagan saints are made and preserved in life and in art. Whatever it ultimately may be, "The Cicerones" is far from a simple Dickensian or Jamesian ghost story.

The tale's otherworldliness is preserved and expanded upon in a 2002 short film adaptation by The League of Gentlemen's Jeremy Dyson and Mark Gatiss for BBC Channel 4. Both Dyson and Gatiss are avowed fans of Aickman, and their appreciation and understanding of his peculiar sensibilities is evident throughout the short's chilling thirteen minute running time. Gatiss assumes the role of Trant, an English tourist in a foreign land eager to gawk at the pieces of religious art written about in his guidebook. However, when he arrives at the Cathedral of St. Bavon he finds his printed guide superseded by a set of progressively younger human guides (or 'cicerones') who are eager to set Trant on a path of their own devising. Dyson and Gatiss's short is faithful to the letter, rendering many minute details of the original story with visual aplomb. The aesthetic palette on display places the film in line with the BBC's classic A Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations, but the inexplicable foreignness of Trant's surroundings (cobbled together from the interiors and exteriors of several monstrously Gothic English churches) and the inscrutable demeanor of his guides unsettle any sure footing we might try to find for the film in the common cinematic lore of the British supernatural.

The film, like the story, is wide open to one's most devious or sinister interpretations. However, a deliberate intensification of one of the story's elements through the addition of an original prologue does serve to tip our worst thoughts in one particular direction. The added opening finds Trant travelling on a train through central Europe to his destination at St. Bavon. He has a brief but significant encounter with an old woman and her two young, to-be married companions sitting across from him. He reveals his nationality and status as a bachelor to the woman before asking her for any info she might have about the cathedral. She quickly snaps at him that the cathedral is "a holy place" and then beckons him to say a prayer for the young couple on the eve of their wedding. Why would she desire Trant's particular blessing when he's a foreigner possessing a different belief system? In the corridors and secret galleries of St. Bavon we learn of the dark mixture of Christianity and pagan superstition worshiped within, of the virgin saints and martyrs dragged to hell by demons and venerated through transcendent portraiture, and we begin to suspect that the blessing of a sacrificial saint to-be is a valuable thing to have.

"The Swords"

(1997)

dir. Tony Scott

An earlier adaptation of Aickman's work is "The Swords" (1997), directed by the late Tony Scott as the inaugural episode of a British/Canadian anthology TV series loosely derived from the themes of and bearing the same name as his 1983 Whitley Strieber adaptation The Hunger. Its source material is the lead story in Aickman's 1975 collection Cold Hand in Mine, and it's among the author's most subtly repulsive. As written, "The Swords" concerns a young travelling salesman who is as-of-yet unacquainted with carnal activity. Attending a carnival in a small town, the young man witnesses a bizarre stage show in which a man in a seaman's outfit invites men from the audience on stage  for the chance to pierce with a ceremonial sword, for a small fee, the abdomen of a beautiful but silently obedient woman named Madonna, leaving her unhurt and the men perversely stimulated. The young salesman, refusing (out of bashfulness?) to participate in the communal act, is later approached alone by the woman's handler, who offers her total services and a private show to him for a reasonable price.

Aickman's protagonist acquiesces, and what follows-- his first sexual encounter, occuring in a cheap lodging house-- is punctuated by a peculiar bit of nastiness: his violent thrust for a greedy kiss wrenches the woman's arm right out of its socket and from her body, again without causing her any pain or bloodshed. Madonna, perhaps used to such an occurrence, merely snatches up her discarded arm from the floor and flees, leaving the seaman to return and collect her (or is it his?) fee. Through its morbid surrealism, "The Swords" acts as a melancholy but pointed social criticism of the way men use and violate women as if they were bloodless, fleshy objects. It illustrates how this attitude is enculturated through communal forces, and also how such an attitude's grim results-- loveless, violent, queasy, and crushingly lonely-- may dispirit or shame a young male like the story's protagonist, but only for a brief beginner's moment: "After the first six women, say, or seven, or eight," the narrator tells us, "the rest come much of a muchness."

Scott's adaptation of "The Swords" takes the basic skeleton of its source story and seals it into a flesh of its own devising. Aesthetically (and sonically, as evidenced by the tropical island score, despite a metropolitan English setting), Scott is working in his True Romance (1993) mode: all the bad boys and bad girls are dressed in candy colors and waxing purple poesy. And yet this half hour short would be better thought of as an antidote to True Romance's Love Conquers All (Even, If Not Especially, Death) mentality. The love (or whatever you'd call it) between James Chandler (Balthazar Getty) and Musidora (Amanda Ryan) ends in a tragedy bred not of too much affection but of too little, hinting at (though never quite achieving) Aickman's grasp of the cold detachment we sometimes feel towards other living bodies. Balthazar Getty's Chandler is a too-cool-for-anything recovering addict (of women and other substances) who floats into town to take a job selling cosmetics (for his boss, played by the great Timothy Spall, who comes off like an alternate dimension version of Alec Baldwin's Blake who quotes Naked Lunch during his sales pep talks). He encounters Musidora's stage show at a garish night club he attends with a couple of co-workers, and soon after his first viewing of her act he finds himself courted by her handler, Dean (Jamie Foreman), for a private show. 

It's at this point that Scott's film departs from the ghastly trajectory of Aickman's story and instead angles for overblown romantic tragedy. Chandler and Musidora have their hotel date, and-- one supposes because no limbs were lost the first time out-- proceed to go one several more dates. Musidora admits to falling in love with Chandler the first moment she spied him in the club; Chandler stares blankly ahead. She tells him that her growing affection puts her protective spell-- the one that keeps her from being skewered by the lusty swords of men-- at risk of being broken; he remains mute. Chandler's refusal to reciprocate emotional passion leads to an obvious rift between the lovers. However, he of course happily reciprocates physical passion until the bitter end, culminating in an aggressive, emotionless sexual encounter mirrored by the show-stopping stage stabbing she receives in the next scene, leaving her bloodied and (finally) wounded. Scott's thesis is plain: nothing spurs a man's crisis of masculinity quite like the notion of vowing commitment. Filmed in Scott's quick-cutting, whirling dutch-angled, operatic style, the sentiment appears a bit pat, but in truth it's not wholly removed from Aickman's own. Musidora, unlike her resigned and objectified literary counterpart, hungers for a connection deeper than the random, impersonal, and violent encounters with men that she's used to, and-- being disappointed by her one grasp outside of those confines of male-female relationships-- falls upon her sword. Chandler, precisely like his literary counterpart, takes only a moment to mope and weep crocodile tears before the numbness returns, coming much of a muchness.

The Tractate Middoth (2013) dir. Mark Gatiss

Logline: A library assistant, William Garrett (Sacha Dhawan), has a frightful supernatural encounter in the stacks while attempting to locate an old Hebrew text for the cagey John Eldred (John Castle). While on leave to recover from his attack, Garrett makes a new acquaintance and soon thereafter becomes embroiled in a mysterious and possibly diabolical inheritance treasure hunt that will leave cold corpses in its wake.

M. R. James or his editor was wise in sequencing "The Tractate Middoth" immediately before one of James's most famous stories, "Casting the Runes," in his 1911 collection More Ghost Stories: read after one had read "Runes," the former would feel a pale imitation. Read in the desired sequence, "The Tractate Middoth" instead feels like a sketchy, if furtively satisfying, trial run for "Runes," with James taking his favorite ghost story elements (musty libraries, antiquarian research, undefined demonic or supernatural curses) and wrapping them in the trappings of an adventure story (or at least as much of an adventure story as his mannered Edwardian sensibilities could bear). Consequently, the tale seems a bit slight when compared to the bulk of James's prior body of work, leaving behind as it does much of its author's signature slow-burn dread to revel in time-pressed puzzle-solving, breathless chases, and ironic twists of fate. The story even has a happy ending, which is an occurrence in the James oeuvre as rare as being introduced to a character who doesn't spend his weekends hunkered down in church libraries. All of these deviations from the supernatural norm result in "The Tractate Middoth" existing as an atypical James ghost story, though perhaps not a particularly uncinematic one.

The uniquely adaptable quality of the tale can be evidenced through the fact that as of 2013 it has now been adapted three times for television-- once in 1951, again in 1966, and lastly in 2013-- and so boasts the most adaptations of any of James's tales. Its simple, pacey plot and minimal production demands give "The Tractate Middoth" a certain televisual appeal, bolstered by the possibility that it might catch the interest of a general audience seeking easily digestible thrills (even if, again, James's sense of adventure consists only of someone searching tirelessly for a missing library book). Yet, unlike most of the James ghost stories that have been adapted for the screen over the decades, "The Tractate Middoth" is, along with "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," one of the few tales with the potential to be improved upon by an adaptation that colors in the frustrating, slipshod blanks of character motivation and supernatural manifestation left by the text. In this light, the quiet and moody 2013 adaptation of the story for the BBC, written and directed by Sherlock and Doctor Who scribe Mark Gatiss, is an obvious success, if one that remains somewhat tempered by its lackluster textual origins.

Unlike Lawrence Gordon Clark's liberal adaptation of "The Treasure of Abbot Thomas," Gatiss decided that he need not change much of the story's fundamental details or plot progression in order to craft it into a more successful supernatural treat than its progenitor. Instead, he presents a rather literal adaptation of the tale, often adopting the exact dialogue of the source text for long stretches of the short film's running time. What Gatiss does to advance his film beyond the original story is to make clear or prescribe those details that are only loosely implied within the text. That he manages to do this without over-explaining the supernatural elements-- and thus eradicating its Jamesian quality of undefinable unease-- is to its credit. Problems inherent in the source text-- such as how the mysterious clergyman John Rant became capable of placing a curse on his hidden will or why Rant then sends his heirs off to discover it-- are disposed of with a quick image or line of dialogue. (With regard to those aforementioned queries, we glean from a quick glance of a religious-themed stained glass window in Rant's mansion, proudly featuring the images of several menacing spiders, that he serves a very different deity than the one you'd expect, and we then learn from Rant's deathbed cackling that his manufactured treasure hunt is merely a cruel man's dying joke, dangling a false carrot over the heads of abhorred heirs.)

In this vein of addressing the story's unresolved issues, Gatiss's adaptation departs the most from its source material in its denouement, which alters the text's original happy ending (featuring a marriage and the acquirement of vast wealth) into a sinister and ambiguous question mark (featuring a marriage, the acquirement of vast wealth, and the implication that all involved will soon be scared to death by a spiteful ghost). This downer of an alteration feels quite appropriate to the tale. The most glaring problem with the original text's conclusion is the uncertainty as to why Rant's curse seeks only to punish one of his heirs, when it's made clear that he has a profound dislike for them both. If Rant honestly wished to bequeath his estate to his niece Mary Simpson (Louise Jameson) and deprive his nephew John Eldred, why arrange for his bizarre and counter-intuitive treasure hunt for the hidden will? Why not simply give her everything and forgo all the cryptic effort? 

The curse's punishment of Eldred alone feels undeserved in the text (after all, he "wins" the inheritance game that Rant has set up), and so Gatiss's film seeks to solve this error of resolution by deciding that Rant's intention was to destroy both of his heirs out of spite. The adaptation's Rant is, as his housemaid warns Mary Simpson, not to be trusted in life or in death: "Others have a soul. He had a corkscrew," the maid informs her. We surmise in this adaptation that Rant presented his heirs with his goose chase in the hope that their greed would compel them both to participate in it, and thus spell their mutually assured dooms by activating the ghostly vicar curse against them. Though because even one of the two discovering the will would inevitably set the curse against both named within it (as they would both have to then come in contact with the cursed will), it becomes obvious that Rant made certain that the likelihood of declining to participate in (and thus surviving) his game was quite nonexistent. Gatiss's adaptation's denial of Mary Simpson's happy ending (or at least its unsubtle hint that it will deny that happiness) forms a cynical, ironic dimension of the story that's absent from the source text. The story feels, for once, downright Jamesian.

As the pre-title card informs the viewer, Mark Gatiss's "Tractate Middoth" continues the BBC's classic A Ghost Story for Christmas tradition. A revival of the occasional series was last attempted in earnest back in 2005 and 2006, with disappointing results. "The Tractate Middoth" is a great lunge in the direction of rectifying those errors and revitalizing the series. Gatiss has long demonstrated his passion for classic supernatural fiction-- see his 2008 mini-series Crooked House, or his starring turn in a short film adaptation of Robert Aickman's "The Cicerones" (2002), or his new documentary special on James himself-- and his handling of James's tale as both screenwriter and director shows that the series (were it to continue) is being shepherded by the right fellow. While the production design and general glossy look of "The Tractate Middoth" recalls the earlier 2000s adaptations of James's work, Gatiss's adaptation nonetheless retains the subtlety of the more successful 1970s films, and with a keen directorial hand also captures something particular to James's fiction itself: the slow, soundless, agonizing haunting, in which the ghosts do not rush their victims' ends, but take the time to embrace them and laugh.

The Stone Tape (1972) dir. Peter Sasdy

Logline: A group of audio recording engineers and scientists move their operations into Taskerlands, an abandoned Victorian mansion, in order to continue in isolation their research into a new recording medium. What they soon discover is that the crumbling stone walls of Taskerlands have their own ancient recording techniques: those that will pipe the ghosts of a thousand years through their screaming headphones.

Though the great English scriptwriter Nigel Kneale is probably best known abroad for his feature work (particularly for his stint with Hammer Films), it's no big secret that his best work was for television. The Quatermass serials (1953-1979), Beasts (1976), The Year of the Sex Olympics (1968), Murrain (1975), and The Woman in Black (1989) all bear his credit, and each is a distinct classic of British television drama. Chief among those small screen wonders, and the smartest, most perceptive piece of horror Kneale ever wrote, is The Stone Tape, scripted by Kneale and directed by Hammer regular Peter Sasdy (Hands of the Ripper (1971)). Though originally produced for inclusion in the Dead of Night series, The Stone Tape was ultimately broadcast by the BBC independent of that series banner (Dead of Night had been canceled by then) on Christmas day, 1972. (That evening so happened to be the one immediately after Lawrence Gordon Clark's A Warning to the Curious premiered on the BBC, which makes Kneale and Sasdy's film a sort of unofficial second entry in the A Ghost Story for Christmas series that year. It also makes December of 1972 a damn good year for British television horror). The film is an expertly crafted variation on a theme that Kneale had been working through in pieces like Quatermass & the Pit (1958-9; 1967) and his now-lost TV play The Road (1963): those shadowy, elusive junctures in which science and the supernatural butt heads. Kneale's particular breed of scientific horror and his theme of Ancient Superstition vs. Modern Technology can be traced back in print as far as Dracula (1897) but can be witnessed growing contemporaneously in cinema with the likes of simpler scientific-superstitious fare such as The Werewolf (1956) and The Vampire (1957) in the States. But Kneale's interest in these concepts goes far beyond the novelty inherent in melding the science fiction and horror genres: his efforts in placing the two side by side strive to demonstrate the essential similarity of modern science and ancient superstition through their shared inability to explain what goes bump in the night.

The Stone Tape is in many ways a typical ghost story. The struggle of methods between Peter (Michael Bryant) and Jill (Jane Asher) in provoking the ghost into action contrasts technological brute force with natural sensitivity to the supernatural, as these tales often do (see: The Haunting (1963), The Legend of Hell House (1973)). Furthermore, the film also features the same sort of precognition of a character's fated death and eventual ghostly afterlife as seen in tales as far apart as The Signalman (published 1866; filmed 1976) and The Innkeepers (2011). (Even then, the story doesn't fall totally into the recognized ghost story patterns: the revelation that underneath the surface haunting lurks a formless, prehistoric evil is downright Lovecraftian.) But the film's satisfying if traditional story and predictable plot progression belie the much more fascinating aesthetics that Kneale and Sasdy fuse into its production.

The setting is the most apparent visual signifier of the film's atypical themes. Taskerlands is a disquieting marvel of incongruous set design, all the more impressive for being constructed on a limited television production budget. The old Victorian mansion (which, as we discover, is built on even older Saxon foundations) has been partially renovated by our research team, creating sterile modern laboratories of some rooms while leaving others down the corridor in their weathered, dilapidated original states. This results in the feeling that as we travel from one room to the next we're being led back and forth between modernity and antiquity: the researchers are toiling over their inscrutable machines and printed data while next door a ghost is screaming in an unlit stone room. The building becomes a structural anachronism, a large-scale palimpsest in which the past may be written over but is never truly erased. This deliberate commingling of the old and the new extends also to the film's musical score, produced exclusively by aide of an electronic organ playing dated melodies. 

Writing of the film's deliberate aesthetics, it's also important to note the obvious: The Stone Tape is shot on video for television broadcast. Shooting a traditional ghost story with a relatively new technology produces a curious effect in the viewer when the action takes a turn for the spooky: the ghost appears at the top of a staircase as a flickering video artifact, pulsating with static as the recording progresses, and later, during the climactic events, Jill is tormented by a coterie of demonic, video-derived special effects. The fact that this visual style appears dated from our twenty-first century perspective is curiously appropriate considering the film's characters' assertions that magnetic tape is a fragile, obsolete medium. But, seeing what we've seen, can we call it obsolete, or merely the latest iteration of a recording technology that has always been with us? The film's core concept of stone (specifically, common ragstone) acting as a magnetic tape-like recording medium that can preserve and replay moments of high emotion (or unfathomable evil) is beguiling in its implications. 

In one sense, the notion of the stone tape reveals the illusion of technological progress in understanding reality. The film argues that contrary to popular thought, technology has not allowed us to escape superstition within modernity, nor does it really grant us the ability to explain or interpret the supernatural (much of the science behind the haunting and its recording remains unclear by the film's end). The conclusions drawn from all of the research team's efforts are no more illuminating than those that could be derived from a spirit board, and the discovery that the new technology the team is seeking is several thousand years old (and obstinately untechnical) provides a sobering evaluation of the group's work (the company that employs them ultimately decides that research into the development of a new washing machine is more valuable). Moreover, the revelation of ghosts being recordings rather than sentient non-physical entities says something very profound about horror cinema itself: whether in drawing, text, or film, recordings of horror have always been with us and always will, replaying themselves endlessly to those poor or sick souls most sensitive and receptive to them. As The Stone Tape itself demonstrates with its sly employment and update of the traditional English ghost story, these recorded horrors may be written over in history with seemingly newer and fresher horrors as time progresses, but the old models of fright are always shambling, fuzzily, with a horrific lack of definition, somewhere beneath the tape's layers.

Robin Redbreast (1970) dir. James MacTaggart

from the BBC's A Play for Today

Logline: Unmarried, upper-middle class urbanite Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) moves into the country home she acquired in a recent breakup with a long-term partner. Once settled in, Norah begins to meet the village's few eccentric inhabitants who, despite their seemingly benign intentions, have something sinister planned for their new neighbor.

The shot opens on the exterior of a great stone church in the country. The camera zooms in towards the church's massive front window, inviting us inside the building as its bells chime over the soundtrack and a ponderous priest prattles away, extolling the grace of the Lord and his beneficence in allowing the town the bounty of its spring harvest. When the camera enters the church for us, and the priest continues his prattling, we're greeted by a most curious sight: there is no priest (though his voice continues to echo), nor are there any parishioners. The pews stand empty, as does the altar. This ghostly sight shifts into a montage as the frame cuts to static images of various items displayed in the church in honor of the village's Harvest Festival. Images of bounteous fruits, vegetables, and eggs then give way to close-ups of dead animals-- rabbits and chickens, specifically-- fading like spirits in reverse into existence on the bare white altar. The screen cuts quickly between further close-ups of these animals' vacant, bloodied faces as the priest wraps up his prayer of thanks to the Lord. In this moment, we see this food and these corpses not as a celebration of a higher power's gifts to the village, but as an offering of appeasement to that higher power, in hopes of attaining a similar harvest next spring. Almost precisely at the midpoint of director James MacTaggart's Robin Redbreast, the seemingly typical and unremarkable face of drab organized modern religion and culture collides with ancient pagan ritual in a macabre visual paean to sacrifices and offerings, to ghosts of seasons long past, and to death and the life it brings.

Broadcast in 1970 during the inaugural series of the BBC's long-running A Play for Today, Robin Redbreast is one of the great neglected gems of '70s English TV filmmaking. Starring Anna Cropper (of "The Exorcism") and written by John Bowen (who would go on to write two installments of the BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas as well as one of the other surviving episodes of Dead of Night, "A Woman Sobbing"), the film should be of immediate interest to any admirers of English TV horror. However, the previous commercial unavailability of Robin Redbreast has made the film one more frequently written about than actually seen, a status shared by far too many English TV productions from the 1960s and 1970s, of which some have been lost outright. Though the original color print no longer exists, the film was preserved as a monochrome 16mm print in the BBC's archives. Recently restored and released by the BFI in the best condition possible, this subtle and menacing tale of rural folk horror is now available to the public for appreciation of both its unique sense of dread and its influence on later English horrors.

At its opening, the film introduces us to its heroine, Norah Palmer, as she converses with her snooty London-based friends about her plans to move into a country cottage for a stay of undetermined length. Her move is motivated by her desire to learn to live on her own in the wake of the breakup of an eight-year-long relationship. Wealthy, middle-aged, childless, and unmarried ("sex-starved, as they say," she sighs), Norah looks at her temporary residence in the country as a chance to adjust to her new existence. Although she clearly values independence in her personal life and career, we sense that the dissolution of her steady relationship has created a certain mid-life desperation within her. She recognizes that her unconventional lifestyle will inevitably bestow upon her a social stigma that her relationship previously obscured; she'll be judged by her friends and acquaintances as a woman who sought to avoid the constraints of marriage and thus suffered for it. Despite her obvious upper-middle class self-absorption, Norah is a progressive woman-- career-minded and contraceptive-popping-- and thus sympathetic for her refusal to conform to society's expectations for her. While she wouldn't want to live any other way, she also recognizes the need for self-reliance when faced with the potential loneliness and scorn such a lifestyle may bring. 

Therefore, her choice of the country as the location in which to build up this tolerance is one based in naivety about the countryside's population and its acceptance of modern sensibilities. Like her fellow city-dwellers, Norah imagines the rural villages of England to be peaceful, serene, and almost entirely devoid of human life and contact. The country, she figures, is a place where one can escape society's leering eyes and disdainful judgement. Her friends back home laugh to themselves about how she'll have nothing to do in the country but sit around  all day and develop a drinking problem. Whether the countryside heals or drives one mad, it's clear that these urbanites consider it a place of total isolation. It is this misapprehension of the rural sphere and the slow realization of the country life's sinister complexities that provide much of Robin Redbreast's horrific appeal.

It's not long after Norah arrives in her new home that she's intruded upon by the village's fellow residents. Her housemaid-- Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford)-- stands never far out of earshot, the stoic and scholarly Fisher (Bernard Hepton) invites himself into her garden looking for bits of archaeological interest, and her perpetually axe-wielding neighbor-- Peter (Cyril Cross)-- swings his tool incessantly just outside her window. The only village resident she takes a liking to is the young, hunky Robin (Andy Bradford), who is an appealing physical attraction for her but an intellectual bore. And, as with the other villagers, her unambiguous rejection of Robin does little to deter him from lurking outside her abode at all hours of the night. Everything Norah says or does is soon common knowledge among all of those who live in the village, the network of communication surrounding her being eerily comprehensive and instantaneous. The countryside may not provide the all-encompassing isolation that Norah imagined, but the lack of privacy she discovers is still enough to push one into madness. 

What becomes apparent through Norah's interactions with her new neighbors is the quiet menace of rural hospitality. All of the villagers she encounters are ostensibly friendly and helpful, but it's impossible not to perceive a forced ignorance in their words and actions, as if they could have predicted her various troubles-- rats in the walls, an unattached drainpipe, a bird in the chimney, missing contraceptives-- before they occurred and are attempting to conceal that knowledge. Their selfless, nearly patronizing generosity feels perfunctory and full of secret meaning, with every action they take part of a familiar routine that they're all silently chuckling over. Our suspicions develop along with Norah's, and by the third act she's spouting aloud the same mad notions about the villagers' motives that have been silently forming in our minds from the start. By that point, the villagers' hospitality has evolved into a smiling imprisonment. They cut Norah's phone line and disable her car all while pretending to be of assistance in remedying both. Their slow but deliberate seizure of the concerns of Norah's daily life wrests away the very control and self-reliance that she sought by moving to the country. They maintain their ruse of generosity up until the point that they're breaking down her door and dropping down through her chimney brandishing weapons. These country folk are an unflappable lot, totally committed to seeing their wicked plan through in as ironically benign a manner as possible. 

But it's the reversal of Norah's fortunes with regard to the villagers' intentions for her that provides the film's most ironic twist. The fact that, as it turns out, the villagers don't intend to sacrifice her to their pagan gods appears oddly disappointing to both Norah and the audience. Her self-absorbed Me vs. Them urban paranoia of country folk and their ways is somewhat deflated by her relative uselessness in their ritualistic scheme. She's demoted from the sacrificial victim, or the "prized bull," to the fertile earth that grows the next offering through an orchestrated pregnancy. In the villagers' patriarchal worldview, it's the blood of men that blesses the earth, with women as mere wombs employed to bear such useful kings. For a woman who thrives on her own status as an autonomous subject, the notion of being considered as little more than a reproductive vessel is a horrifying prospect. In this way, the villagers' vaguely sinister actions resemble a Paganist variation on the Satanists' coddling of Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby (1968). The ancient conservative practices and beliefs of country society prevent any possibility for a modern woman like Norah to establish her own female identity. From the villagers' perspective, a woman of her type is disposable, but also far from their definition of a worthy sacrifice: they'll use her, but they won't glorify her.

With all revealed, Norah sees no choice but to hop into her miraculously repaired automobile and speed away from the village back towards the city she previously fled from. A final glance she casts behind her from the comfort of the driver's seat catches a momentary image of the assembled villagers in their true forms: they appear to her in ancient ceremonial garb, as emblems of a repressive society of superstition and tradition that's horrifying not for its explicit violence but for its patriarchal lack of interest in the individual woman. For them, Norah is the old hen that lays the egg to be offered on their sacrificial altar. If she refuses to lay it, they can always find another chicken. But, most chillingly, they're certain she'll lay the egg for them eventually: what's a woman like Norah to do, raise a child on her own in the big city while those around her silently cast judgement? The grinning, folksy paganism of Robin Redbreast would be revisited a few years later in Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man (1973) (and then again, more specifically, in The Wicker Tree (2011)), but neither film explores this singular horror of gendered insignificance.

The Exorcism (1972) dir. Don Taylor

from the BBC's Dead of Night

Logline: Two upper-middle class couples retreat to a refurbished country house for the weekend. All seems well until the lights go out and the wine begins to taste like blood: for this house had a previous occupant, and she's not soon to let her and her children be forgotten.

"The Exorcism" was the first short film to be broadcast in the fall of 1972 under the masthead of BBC2's short-lived horror anthology series Dead of Night. Of the seven episodes produced for the series, only three have survived past their initial broadcast, the rest having fallen victim to the BBC's reckless tape scrubbing practices of the era. (These three are now available on home video thanks to the tireless efforts of the BFI.) If "The Exorcism" is in any way indicative of the relative quality of those lost episodes, then their deletion is a tremendous tragedy. Written and directed by Don Taylor (who would go on to direct "During Barty's Party" and "Buddy Boy," the two most peculiar and formally innovative installments of Nigel Kneale's Beasts (1976)), this inaugural entry balances its creeping supernatural unease with damning (if slightly blunt) social criticism of the middle class for their ignorance of the history of England's rural strife and for tastelessly encroaching upon the land and homes that now serve as those poor folks' mausoleums.

It begins with a set-up as familiar to English psychological and supernatural horror as teenagers at a summer camp is to the American slasher: near Christmas, a well-off middle-aged couple, Rachel and Edmund (Anna Cropper and Edward Petherbridge), decides to spend the weekend at their country home far outside of London, inviting another couple, Margaret and Dan (Sylvia Kay and Clive Swift), to join them for the usual entertainment of copious food, wine, and banal conversation. Once they have safely arrived, the drab talk commences, revolving exclusively around Rachel and Edmund's blathering about their attempts at renovating the musty old house while Margaret and Dan offer snide compliments and condolences over having picked up this obvious bargain of a property. (Margaret snaps about her distaste for those couples she knows who live in posh London flats during the week and then insist on "living like cavemen on the weekends" in the rustic country without the amenities and modernization that Rachel and Edmund have at least attempted to install in their new rural getaway.)

As the inane conversations progress, we then hear Edmund and Dan trade off pithy quips about their skewed notion of Marxist theory and their mutual adherence to the notion that they must "concentrate on how to be socialists and rich." Because if you're thrust into a bourgeois society (and happen to land near the top of the social heap), you may as well make the most of your situation, however much you may resent it on philosophical grounds, right? The hypocrisy and bizarre but "rational" cognitive dissonance of this cast of pampered buffoons would be sickening if it weren't so comedic: we learn at dinner that Edmund has installed a spotlight above the dining table that shines directly down onto his carving plate, imbuing the feast with an opulent dramatic flair. The sight inspires Dan to guffaw at the difficulty Edmund should have in calling himself a socialist when in possession of such an extravagant set-up, immediately before uncorking his own expensive, decades-old bottle of Burgundy.

When the house's lights and phone die out for no discernible reason, the slow burn of audience irritation with these couples evolves into a darkly comedic pathos as supernatural happenings begin to spoil their enjoyment of their privileged luxuries: Edmund describes the wine as tasting unmistakably like blood, Dan and Margaret find the turkey to feel like fire in their guts, and Rachel discovers the skeletal corpse of a child soiling her bed's linen before vanishing. Ever the narcissists, the foursome attempt to rationally explain away the paranormal activity as individualized mass hysteria, or a shared distortion of perception affecting each of them in different ways. "We must be a very strong-minded lot," quips Dan after their "mass hallucination" prevents Edmund from being able to shatter a glass window pane with a hammer. The house and its ghost, frustrated with the couples' exceedingly "rational" inability to take a hint, decide to make their displeasure glaringly apparent. Tremors shake the set, causing the recently installed plaster walls to crumble and fall, revealing the cold, ancient brick that lies buried underneath. In this moment, the house physically rejects the structural improvements that Edmund and Rachel have used to conceal and ignore the history contained within. In another sense, the house is also rejecting the abhorrent presence of its new owners, making the exorcism of the film's title an ironic reversal of genre expectations: sometimes the spirits need to exorcise us.

Refusing to have its story erased along with the house, the film's ghost comes forward to address the intruders, taking momentary possession of the psychically sensitive Rachel to tell its sad tale. Through her medium, we learn that this phantasm was a poor widow of a past century who died of starvation in the house along with her children. The fortunes of the once modestly prosperous country town they lived in took a harrowing turn for the worse after the richer citizens packed up and moved their homes and business to the cities, leaving poverty and famine to wreak havoc among those unfortunate souls unable to follow suit (the woman, her soon-to-be late husband, and her children included). After her husband was executed for stealing food to feed his family, the woman ran to the town's squire (who was one of its remaining vestiges of affluence) to plead charity for her starving children. She was yelled at and chased away, but before leaving the property she crept around the squire's house and spied through a window the sight of him and his family partaking of a gluttonous feast, filled with meat, wine, and music (and so resembling that being held by our contemporary characters). What possible excuse, the ghost wails through Rachel, could justify the feast when "on the same planet, in the same village, people are starving"? Though this monologue veers into heavy-handedness-- overlong as it is and with its proclamations of the world's injustices as proof of the absence of God-- it also possesses a curious and affecting poetic power. The characters' upstairs discovery of the ghostly sunken corpses of the dead woman and her starved children locked in a dying embrace, along with their subsequent understanding of their personal karmic ills and the hunger-for-a-hunger retribution they must receive from beyond the grave in recompense, gives credence to the vengeful ghost's despairing words (as spoken through her medium) about the the earth's perpetually divided and violent social foundations: "This world is man's work. I recognize it by the bloodstains."

Yet as often as the script tips its hand, the film itself remains restrained and elusive. Largely without an ambient soundtrack, the setting is engulfed in a sense of emptiness and vacancy, befitting the characters' pronouncement after the supernatural force has taken hold of them that the world outside is nothing but darkness and silence. The only pieces of music played throughout the running time are those that are occasionally played on the modernized parlor's anachronistic clavichord, its antiquated strains of baroque melodies underlining the lingering presence of the home's ancient history despite the new tenants' every effort at "improvement." 

Featuring a small, single-set location, a limited cast of actors, and a preponderance of dialogue over action, the film's visual style (like much of '70s British TV drama) takes its cues from the theatre by using the camera to capture long, largely static takes of the various conversations that transpire, the frame alternating between close-ups and long shots depending upon where an audience member's gaze would naturally be drawn. The few violations of this visual approach are striking for their difference and impart an amusingly cynical import to those unexpected images captured. Chief among these illuminating visual surprises is a cut between the climax of the ghostly action and a slow zoom into the face of the parlor's television set, that (at the time) prime symbol of middle class frivolousness and excess in contrast to lower class poverty and starvation. The implication for the audience watching "The Exorcism" in 1972 on their very own television sets in their comfortable English households was, of course, the complicity and guilt they share with those drab, superficial characters they were just recently snickering at on screen. We all tune in to tune out the rest of the world, the film reminds us privileged few, but those abused, hungry masses of history outside preparing to claw at our doors certainly haven't forgotten about us.