is there a name or a phrase for or anything much written about that distinctly British CREEPY VIBE prevalent in TV shows and movies of the '60s/'70s? (e.g. The Prisoner, Sapphire and Steel, Baker-era

Oops, over-ran the thread title. Meant to say Baker-era Dr. Who, obv.

In rewatching some of these things in recent years -- Sapphire and Steel most recently -- I'm surprised by how scary they can be. I was pretty much terrified by S&S and some Dr. Who episodes as a kid, but they still seem pretty creepy to me. Because it's about this pervasive vibe of dread and things-not-being-right, more than overt shocks or scares.

The uncanny or unheimlich?

It overlaps with a lot of the stuff Ghost Box records are doing. There's a sense that, even if it's not referred to explicitly, there's something elemental and folkloric hidden just beneath the surface of a lot of sixties and seventies television. It's much scarier than effects-heavy horror. Nigel Kneale was the master at exploiting it but Brian Clemens was very good too.

I've seen some good BFI pieces about individual shows but i've not come across a comprehensive overview or name given to the wider concept.

Well, I was thinking of referencing the hauntology phenomenon, but I think the OP is attempting more to consider what the similarity was at the time rather than in modern reception theory. So I'd place it more in the general tradition of the uncanny myself.

The folkloric element is interesting. Obviously The Wicker Man makes that explicit, but some S&S episodes have it (the first one especially, with the nursery rhymes).

And it definitely is a form of uncanniness, but it has what seem to me (from the outside) like specifically British parameters and forms of expression. I can't think of American movies or shows with quite the same feeling -- I think because it so often draws on British history and the subversion or inversion of British cultural norms.

emil.y otm, it's unheimlich/uncanny

think it has a lot to do with the style of these shows, the location work, on 'the prisoner' in particular -- and that wasn't a spartan production

Well, much like hauntology, the uncanny often manifests itself in ways which are quite parochial, surely? Not wanting to get all Theory 101 but the 'unheimlich' stemming from 'unhomely' is a fair indicator. That sense of danger must arise from something known but transfigure it into the unknowable. Also, I guess, consider the Uncanny Valley - those figures that most closely resemble the human are the most fearful. Which is a long way of saying that British uncanny will by definition be different from the American uncanny, for our homeliness is different to yours. How that affects your reception is unknowable to me, being from the country under discussion.

But I do agree that there is more to these pieces than just a hand-waving 'oh, it's uncanny'. How to describe it further I'm unsure.

(that took me longer to write than it should have, being a 6-minute xpost)

1981 version of Day of the Triffids fits in here I think

And I suppose by extension the whole "cosy catastrophe" genre.

Ha, maybe John Wyndham is a sort of patron saint of this. I was thinking of Village of the Damned as an early example.

(which of course has lots of similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- comparing the two would probably point up some nice differences in postwar British and American anxieties.)

understand that you guys are talking about british television and culture, but i recently watched a few episodes of the invaders, an american television series from '67/'68 and was struck by the by its pervasive, unheimlich creep. it functioned mostly like a western and seemed to concern one man's attempts to uncover and spread awareness of a secretive alien invasion. an example of post-mccarthyite cold war paranoia taken to psychedelic extremes, old-fashioned in its small town good guy stoicism, but set adrift in an unknowable and morally ambiguous dream world. dug it quite a bit.

that said, it lacks the weirdly mythic/folkloric resonance that seems present in (for instance) the prisoner, the sense that everything you're seeing is an occult parable of a particularly sinister sort.

Which is a long way of saying that British uncanny will by definition be different from the American uncanny, for our homeliness is different to yours. How that affects your reception is unknowable to me, being from the country under discussion.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'm a huge fan of this kind of stuff and immediately knew what the OP was talking about. But I always chalked it up to anglophilia + '70s-philia + radiophonic workshop fandom. But maybe there's something deeper to it that makes it a uniquely British sort of expression and yet for some reason doesn't affect the reception for some Americans.

Part of it may be some kind of weird axis of synergy between cosiness, creepiness, and low production values, where the sort of rough, homemade feel enhances both the cosiness and the creepiness. American TV shows and movies of the era explore some of the same territory but usually in a much slicker way.

Just like WK, I'm a huge fan of this as well and thought 'hauntology' immediately (in its un-'lol'-ed, original version, it seems to be made fun of recently, or not taken seriously anymore?).

I do think it goes beyond a mere fondness for sci-fi/occult/bbc radiophonic workshop et al. As a non-English person (though living with an English woman) I've always been attracted to the particular atmosphere of those tv shows and movies (The Witchfinder General, Wicker Man, the superb Stone Tape series etc) and the creepiness for me definitely lies in that in the English shows/movies (part of) the source of the eeriness is left undefined and unexplained. American counterparts have always seemed to rely more on explaining, polishing, rounding off a story nicely.

Image-wise England is way more gritty and raw, too. The landscape and the age-old history it encapsules seeps through any story you set there, whether it's one meant to have that certain 'creepy vibe' or not. It cannot be denied, even if it's not on the surface, it is there. Which is what I endlessly adore about England, too.

Maybe one difference in American and British manifestations is that U.S. paranoia seems to be always about malignant outside forces (invasion of the body snatchers, invaders, etc) where in the U.K. iterations it's often something already-present but hidden or forgotten.

I love this stuff, but analyzing what I like about it and why in excruciating detail doesn't make me (personally) like it any more. It's part costume party, part ghosts, part human ritual trying in vain to control our violent natural environment and the rest may have something to do with the general aesthetic of the 60s/70s big hair/boobs + gunne sax dresses.

See also:

http://images.etsy.com/all_images/b/b9b/fb5/il_430xN.20355567.jpg

(interesting that the U.S. doesn't have more of a tradition of ancient-Indian-curse stories --Poltergeist aside I guess. Wonder if that storyline's just too uncomfortable for the culture to handle)

...U.S. paranoia seems to be always about malignant outside forces (invasion of the body snatchers, invaders, etc) where in the U.K. iterations it's often something already-present but hidden or forgotten.

OTM, especially the "or forgotten" bit

while i'm OTM-ing, also to le bateau for the similar/different point about landscape and history. american popular imagination, especially during the 60s & 70s when the imprint of the western was still so clear in everything, demands that landscape be seen as devoid as history, as "nature," the undiscovered country. this makes humans and their social spaces a sort of flotsam bobbing around on the surface of landscape, not really woven into it. humans are either with or against nature, but nature's aims are hardly secret.

They also served:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5e84T5MSuk&NR=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc46Gk-6qrA&feature=related

OTM, especially the "or forgotten" bit

https://www.assignmentx.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/AX-Five-DoctorWhoSeries6-01Silence-254x300.jpg

there was also a kind of creepy sub genre for kids in which you could include say:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xez4o1ujOPI

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFUQpCqwCOU

and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoazQwVyzCs

and even

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJmF97aDwIM

all terrifying to me at pre teen age. especially The Book Tower.brrr.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLpcr7KTi9I

Children of the Stones: Like The Wicker Man, but with ancient stone circles... for kids.

Image-wise England is way more gritty and raw, too. The landscape and the age-old history it encapsules seeps through any story you set there,

True, which also has a lot to do with the vast bulk of '60s and '70s American film and TV being shot in LA. There's definitely a sort of "sickness beneath the sunshine" vibe to some Hollywood productions that England can never hope to capture. Maybe more American horror would have had a gloomy pagan Lovecraftian feeling if the industry were centered in Boston. Cronenberg may have come the closest to capturing that English feeling in some of his '70s work, since Canada is a lot greyer.

(interesting that the U.S. doesn't have more of a tradition of ancient-Indian-curse stories --Poltergeist aside I guess. Wonder if that storyline's just too uncomfortable for the culture to handle)

Really? The ancient indian curse seems like such a cliche that it would be impossible to list how many times it was used. But again to the question of geography and architecture, there's something fundamentally different about it due to the lack of permanent native american architecture in the midst of big American cities and suburbs. It's one thing to have some Indian artifact or the land beneath your development be haunted, but it's not quite the same as your local church or pub, or entire village being taken over by a lurking evil.

So, lots of ancient architecture with pagan historical connections within easy filming distance of London, plus wartime experiences of actual invasion combined to create a fertile ground for exploring all sorts of themes of invasion and corruption from both outside and in.

As a kid, The Omega Factor used to scare the living shit out of me. My friends and I used to reference bits of it out and it was shorthand for the shitting-your-pants-scary-creeping-through-derelict-house adventures we would occasionally have. Because this was only broadcast in Scotland (to my knowledge) not many people remembered it. A few years ago it came out on DVD and I snapped it up, of course it wasn't a tenth as scary, and it's so damn *slow* and everything in the sets seem to be different shades of brown, but it's still faintly eerie.

Seems like the filter of childhood remeniscence contributes to this feeling, it's always retropective but it's very attractive, for instance when I see those Ghost box covers that Julian House designs I get such a strong notion of school textbooks and suchlike from my own past.

Anyhoo, check out the titles and the relentlessly brown colourscheme

http://youtu.be/HPXgQv6pwss

it's in my wish list, they def broadcast it in England too

imo a good part of the creepiness is yr exposure to it a certain point in childhood/young adulthood - the supernatural is a metaphor for the not-quite-fathomed mysteries of sex and mortality that are nagging away in yr head at that point in life. of course those mysteries never quite get fathomed which means that creepiness is always going to hang around

there's some old good k-punk posts limning this stuff, aren't they? or maybe it was just a long parenthesis whilst talking about the Fall again. but mentioned the stone tape and the later quatermass.

one wonders if you could include: those creepy public info spots ('apaches' etc); the wicker man; i had a third, but i have forgotten whilst writing this sentence. m.r. james? enh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xur13R23Qlk

In a similar vein: never saw the second half of this because my dad sent me to bed on account of it being "a right load of old rubbish". He may well have been right but apparently thanks to the magic of Youtube i can find out.

xp I think the stories of M.R. James play into this but the production values on the stories they filmed make them not quite the same thing maybe?

xpost - sorry -

oh, my original third was dennis potter

op: 'characterized by spartan production values (which are generally made a virtue of)'

i was just trying to work out whether you could draw a line around the era being talked about in terms of whether the bbc was using video or film but i don't think it quite works

but i think mb. the organising principle is that (if we accept for the moment that a lot of the effect of horror -- well, of this sort of creepiness -- is the whole unheimlich palimpsest thing, the idea that this stuff underwrites quotidian experience) this is a period where people in tv are starting to know how the conventions of tv drama have settled down, and are willing to game them -- tho not to the level of, say, the totally silly baker stories with the candy monster, or of 'ghostwatch'

so the formal characteristics of this particular vibe are on some level identical to their thematic ones, is what lends it its odd power

however i am mostly familiar with this stuff at second hand so i may well be talking out of my arse here

I've mentioned this before on other threads, but the Open University mnemonic is my all time pant crapping childhood memory and for what reason I still don't know.

The flatness of 70's video cameras goes a long way towards the vibe imho.

yeah I thought about Potter, particularly Blue Remembered Hills. Altho he is arguably working in a less explicitly supernatural way - even in something like Brimstone and Treacle - i think he is exploiting similar themes of the uncanny. Rather than Invasion, which the UK didn't really experience during WWII, I wonder how many of the writers were expressing anxieties about displacement, and specifically the displacement of city kids evacuated to a sinister-seeming countryside during the war. as well as the rearrangement of the cities caused by bombing etc.

and I suddenly remember Penda's Fen which again is a deal better than the campier end of this stuff but rocks the England's Ancient Evil line to brilliant effect. No DVD apparently and i seem to have agonisingly lost my avi of it but copies are out there i think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_m5To7_kzvs

and a quick wiki search reveals that it was written by the guy who wrote Artemis 81 and the adaptation of James' "The Ash Tree" so duh

i was just trying to work out whether you could draw a line around the era being talked about in terms of whether the bbc was using video or film but i don't think it quite works

Well, a huge part of this aesthetic for me is the use of video for interiors and film for exteriors. When I saw Doctor Who on PBS as a kid that was one of the most immediately jarring and almost distancing elements for me. I obviously didn't know technically why it was happening but I remember that distinct feeling that parts of it felt like some kind of old educational documentary and other parts felt like a really bad public access TV show.

Or actually, a soap opera is a better point of reference for that weird live video look.

If you want something scary from the 1970s, you can't beat public service information films. This still gives me the creeps, 38 years after seeing it for the first time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sg6IVUvVsAs

I wonder how many of the writers were expressing anxieties about displacement, and specifically the displacement of city kids evacuated to a sinister-seeming countryside during the war. as well as the rearrangement of the cities caused by bombing etc.

Interesting idea. One thing that strikes me is the sinister sort of cuts both ways -- you get this sense of lurking pagan forces, but also the idea that "normal," middle-class postwar life is fundamentally hollow, covering over all this other stuff. Which is just normal suburban anxiety in a way, but takes a different form in a country and culture with so much history (as opposed to American suburban anxiety, where the suburbs are hollow because there's nothing underneath, no history, no anything -- or if there is, it's something recent and specific, like the Amityville Horror).

This still gives me the creeps, 38 years after seeing it for the first time.

Jeez, yeah.

but takes a different form in a country and culture with so much history (as opposed to American suburban anxiety, where the suburbs are hollow because there's nothing underneath, no history, no anything -- or if there is, it's something recent and specific, like the Amityville Horror).

yeah, that's what i was getting at earlier. occurred to me when thinking about the 70s-era US boom in occult-themed horror - for example, the brotherhood of satan, which i watched just a few days ago. it's set in a small, isolated town that seems to be collapsing in an orgy of unmotivated violence. turns out that a secret satanic coven is behind things, no surprise, but you never get the sense that the looming evil, however ancient the forces it might draw on, has any real history or deep connection to place. it seems, in fact, more like a foreign invader - or a commie/druggie plot from within, not to put too fine a point on it...

rosemary's baby, perhaps because it was directed by an "old world" european, positively reeks of occult history, but here even history becomes a sort of threat from without. the movie consequently seems like a battle between a placeless and superstitious anciency and the ostensibly rational modern world. to pare it down even further: between corrupt wisdom and innocent naivete, age and youth, europe and america.

upthread, wk says that, "the ancient indian curse seems like such a cliche that it would be impossible to list how many times it was used," but i'm not so sure about that. it's certainly a familiar device, but i'd hardly say that it's dominated the imaginations of american horror filmmakers over the last 50 years. and films like pet sematary and creepshow 2 (both stephen king adaptations, oddly) have often used the idea of the "indian curse" without any perceptible investment in the significance of history or landscape. poltergeist seems more interesting in this regard, given the political implications and the eventual eradication of suburban property as a sort of penitential sacrifice. then there's the shining, which allows any number of readings, but remains maddeningly vague.

i like the idea of an american horror film in which a presence or purpose coded into the landscape, something that predates european settlement, enacts itself in ways that destablize "ordinary" american life. maybe not because the presence/purpose is evil or aggrieved, but simply because its ends are different. there must be examples of this, but i can't think of any offhand...

i dunno. maybe i'm giving pet sematary short shrift. though it's not as direct as poltergeist in its suggestion that american comfort is built on genocide, it does invite similar interpretations. the contemporary nuclear family existing in a state of constant existential peril, threatened from one side by the very things that supply its material comforts (the road with its long-haul trucks), and from the other by a terrifying forest that conceals an explicitly forbidden history, stinking of death.

The Dark and Lonely Water, Billy Dods up here is sending shivers down my spine... Perfect example!

voiced by donald pleasance too...

Even Disney got in on this -- Watcher in the Woods is probably the first movie like this that I saw growing up in Ohio. It was really really scary at the time.

Also, The Shining to thread (re: uh oh burial grounds).

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_D1ZZyTOG7tQ/SureA53-vvI/AAAAAAAAFwU/5eUKUJ9Tg8s/s400/Watcher+in+the+Woods+Lynn-Holly+Johnson+Bette+Davis+Kyle+Richards.jpg

Oh, and speaking of Bette Davis, what about The Dark Secret of Harvest Home?! (The book was really good, too btw)

http://www.go4film.com/thumbs/586ec9539c37d994933f50b051181b96.jpg

The cover is pretty cool -- has the same most dreadful sacrifice theme as Wicker Man, only it's set in a quasi Peyton Place sort of atmosphere. The Widow Fortune is sort of like Lord Summerisle, I guess?
http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/harvest-home-208x300.jpg

Haha, we own so many of these things. In fact, just watched Penda's Fen again last night for film club. Such a strange and beautiful film.

I think the Britain = internal/forgotten histories/nature and USA = external/eradicated history/urbanity thing is spot on, actually. I want to agree that the Indian burial ground plot is a very common trope but can't think of many more examples than those already mentioned. I guess America does also have the natural spookiness of vast desert landscapes etc but I'm unsure if that's *uncanny* or something different. I guess it's less centred on the homeliness of the small British island and more on exploration of the unknown?

feel like the vibe y'all are talking about got expressed in the US via dystopian future fantasies like phase iv and the like

for some reason equivalent US examples I can think of are TV movies

dark night of the scarecrow
don't be afraid of the dark
crowhaven farm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgZ-0hTPdM

thinking of some other "ancient evil" type US films of the 70s

burnt offerings
let's scare jessica to death
the other
lemora: a child's tale of the supernatural

Sapphire and Steel is slow and of its time, yes, but it's wonderfully weird and entertaining. If you don't like the first episode, you can safely bail on the rest.

I would actually say that if you don't like the first episode, try going straight to the second season. The first season is good fun but a bit shonky, the second season is amazing imo. I can't remember quite how much you need to watch to get the 'lore' of the show, but I think you can do it this way without missing too much.

Just finished EoD. Extraordinary - thanks for highlighting it!

on reflection I think emil.y is right ... S1 of S&S is scary but has two cute kids getting lots of screen time; many would prefer the child-free horror of S2

Lots of quibbles about stuff but I would simply like to say I watched the first 2 stories at time of broadcast and the second one was the one that stuck

second one is extraordinary i think. it’s worth watching the first just to experience how deep and hard the second one goes. it’s pretty long.

I often wonder if this is why Space: 1999 failed to catch on. Lew Grade's business model involved selling UK shows to the US audience, which worked with The Saint and Danger Man because despite starring British actors and being written by British people everybody knew the brief. Meanwhile Gerry Anderson wanted to get into live action.

So his first show was UFO, which was a weird mixture of dayglow wigs and downbeat plots where the heroes always lost. And the Space: 1999, which had some awesome spaceships but every episode consisted of Martin Landau looking worried and Barry Morse looking worried and at the end of Landau would look at the camera and say "there's no hope for any of us, or for the people watching at home, because it's 1975 and there's just no hope, no hope at all".

Every single episode. They just couldn't suppress their Britishness. The Britishness leaked through. To this day I haven't seen Moonbase 3 but from what I've read it was much the same but without even aliens. Like Star Cops but ultra-70s.

I remember reading about a show called The Nightmare Man, which had Celia Imrie, and was one of those six-part one-offs made by the BBC. But with four parts. Adapted by Robert Holmes from a novel and shot on location with murky, creepy videotape:
https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/a-halloween-blast-from-the-past-the-nightmare-man/

I would have been five when it was on TV so my parents would not have let me watch it. I wasn't allowed to watch The Day of the Triffids either, although it was apparently marketed as action-packed fun for the family (with a Radio Times cover). Apart from the shot-on-video-in-the-rain look I think the complete lack of irony, the utter seriousness of it all, was the key thing that made shows like that work. The portentousness. And in the case of Sapphire and Steel, the measured pace.

Taggart. I remember that being unusually grim as well. It wasn't sci-fi or fantasy, or even set in an alternative world, but it was nastier than other detective shows.

I remember being aware of Edge of Darkness. It was apparently repeated on BBC1 almost immediately after it was broadcast on BBC2, which didn't happen often. I would have caught a repeat in the 1990s, by which time it was famous. I remember that beyond the subtext it also worked as a pacy action thriller - it felt cinematic in a way that stood out. I still remember the cliffhanger where Craven tries to find a working telephone. Wasn't the evil corporation's goal a space station?

The Nightmare Man is v good tho i recall being slightly underwhelmed. Got it on dvd somewhere, years since i watched it. Will dig it out and have another watch.

otm about the seriousness of it all. that isn’t a mode or tone you get so much These Days.

And! While I'm hyperactive I remember that Whoops Apocalypse - the TV show - was utterly unfunny but had a grim, almost joyless air to it. And given the casual racism and toplessness it now feels like an artefact from an alien planet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mwWhWtvJAw

Off the top of my head the ending was played completely straight as well, with Barry Morse - again - doing some acting. There was a film but it was basically slapstick.

second series of space 1999 was rejigged for an American audience - swapping out grumpy Barry Morse for the shape-shifting woman, slightly lighter, more romance.

first season is better imo

(did they ever explain where Barry Morse went?)

Back to Canada I assume.

So his first show was UFO, which was a weird mixture of dayglow wigs and downbeat plots where the heroes always lost. And the Space: 1999, which had some awesome spaceships but every episode consisted of Martin Landau looking worried and Barry Morse looking worried and at the end of Landau would look at the camera and say "there's no hope for any of us, or for the people watching at home, because it's 1975 and there's just no hope, no hope at all".

Ok, I've never had any desire to watch this before but now I'm sold!

Barbara Bain looks worried too.

'Black Sun' is my Space 1999 Series One go-to, absolutely batshit and bleak, until this brilliant 2001-style third act.

Really nice spooky feel to several season 1 eps in Space: 1999; there's the episode where Big Jim Sullivan is playing a coral sitar recital for the team, and that music underpins the rest of the show. Lots of ultra-wide angles, shadows and voids, and age-inappropriate scares. In season 2, the ambient lighting and colour palette get brighter, Maya solves everything by turning into an insect or whatever, and they all have a good laugh in the epilogue at Tony Anholt's homebrew. Not good!

xp

I'd have sold a kidney to own this. pic.twitter.com/NxmJUHQKWh

— Scarred for Life (@ScarredForLife2) March 20, 2023

^ all three of them looking worried

lol yes I love how despite all the attempts at HEY KIDS TOYS advertising that clip still feels bleak a f

Space 1999 is a good call, I can't think of too many contemporaneous U.S. shows that had something of that sinister vibe but that one did.

I watched the movie The Wonder (currently on Netflix) the other night on a giant TV with motion smoothing turned on, and the digital made it look very much like a low budget 70s or 80s BBC production. I thought it really added something, so if you're thinking about watching the movie, I recommend seeing it that way if possible.

Any good cultural studies type writing on the British archetype of the guy who knows more than everyone else and is a total asshole about it? Sherlock Holmes, old school Who, Saphire & Steel...

Henry Higgins …

finally trudging through The Omega Factor after being unimpressed with the first couple of eps when i first bought the DVDs years ago - it is pretty thin gruel, really terrible writing and blah characters - Louise Jameson's presence and outfits probably the high point - there SHOULD be an excellent show here, secret govt department investigating paranormal goings-on in 1979 ought to be a fuckin cracker but it just doesn't work, what a shame

Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland? was on bbc4 yesterday

I love this! I always associate in my mind with Spike Milligan's The Bed Sitting Room (I think Peter Cook is the only person who's in both?)

it's reminding me of Valerie and her Week of Wonders a bit

the Ravi Shankar soundtrack reminded me of this thing in some of Milligan's work where he was raised in India, and there was this idea of India as this exotic, foreign place with strange customs, and the UK as being 'home' and normality, but ofc from his point of view it was India that was home and the UK that was was the strange exotic place - this perspective of the UK as a weird alien civilisation with odd customs

I've known about the 'Dodleston Mysteries' of the early/mid 80s for a while, having come across a few mentions of a book about the events, but here is a very deep dive on YT that goes into a great deal of detail.

Very entertaining and well worth checking out, if an extremely English poltergeist story colliding with time-travelling, numinous beings from the past and future (and here is the best part) all communicating via a borrowed school BBC Micro sounds like your kind of thing.

It could have easily been a late John Wyndham novel.

And if it is a hoax, then it's a rather brilliant, complex and very creepy one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRh28A54HF4

I saw something about this a couple of years ago but I can't remember where - I don't think it was a six hour youtube series though.Time travelling poltergeist or hoax... hmm tough one. (Not to diminish the weirdness of the story!)

"100 Years of Horror" on talking pictures tonight. from 1998, fronted by Christopher Lee. no idea of contents.

watching Men which is decidedly creepy but the folk horror aspect seems a bit too knowing, like a formula has been applied.

the last hour of that, it turned into a different film almost. the supernatural thing saved it, i think. when it was possibly just men being men it was uncomfortable. when it all went cronenberg, it did that quite well.

and it made the tacked-on-seeming folk horror aspect less important

YouTube sidebar served me up some 80s Give Us A Clue episodes. There is a subtle creepiness to it, like everyone’s being forced to be jolly at gunpoint.

Eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKUvPSJfyn0 but mostly for Bruce Grobelaar’s cardigan

https://www.instagram.com/p/C6jsS60pxHQ/

Also, misread Dodleston upthread as Doodletown. #onethread!

I've been putting off watching this for months as mr kinder warned me it was a bit gruesome. but i liked it! it worked well at being unsettling.

I finally got around to watching David Gladwell's *Requiem for A Village*. What a strange and unsettling film. The closest analogues for me would be Penda's Fen and probably Stanley Spencer's resurrection paintings but it's much more impressionistic than Penda's. I'll be thinking about some of the scenes for some time.

It's on the BFI player.

I found the ending of that one a bit hard to take seriously - obviously there were bikers in the UK but using a biker gang as the symbol of violent modernity, it felt off and a bit like he was cramming something he saw in a Corman film into the setting.

i took it as a bit more capricious than “do you see” tbh. modernity just knocks this stuff out of the way without meaning or embodying any evil as such.

been a while since i’ve seen it, mind.

Not seen Requiem for a Village, will have to remedy that, but Psychomania is generally my go-to text for occult biker gangs as embodiment of all that's wrong with modern Britain circa 1973.

Ditto, plus Bill Pertwee puts in an appearance

Agree that the biker gang is clumsy and adds an 'old man shaking fist at clouds' element that belied the ambivalence of the rest of the film but it made a kind of narrative sense that I was fine with. I assumed the spoiler tags were going to be about the ugly intercut rape scenes which, if anything, felt a bit 'do you see?'

Agreed, though it does mitigate the old-man-yells-at-clouds aspect by showing these things always existed.