Folk Horror Festival 7 – Home For the Harvest

Time for the penultimate entry in my trawl through All the Haunts Be Ours, Severin’s expansive boxed set of folk horror treats. One thing the box does a good job of establishing is that the genre’s an old and fairly diverse one in the cinematic medium, with examples drawn from all over the world from as far back as the 1950s.

Nonetheless, the three movies most often cited in connection with the genre – those which have regularly been presented as being the cornerstones of the genre, having been identified as such by the likes of Mark Gatiss – all hail from the UK from the late 1960s and early 1970s, these being Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man.

It’s perhaps to be expected, then, that the box includes no less than 4 British productions – two from the early 1970s heyday of the genre, two from later decades, three of them fairly hard to find and one of them a major recent release. After roving all over the world seeking folk horror thrills, let’s see what we’ve got in the pantry back home.

Robin Redbreast

Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) is a recently-dumped woman who’s feeling her age, particularly since she isn’t getting the amount of attention she wants from men. In her split from her boyfriend she ended up with ownership of a cottage in the country she and her ex-husband had bought up to renovate. She decides to get away from it all by moving into the cottage for a while, to have some time to herself and to get the last of the renovations ironed out. Early on she encounters Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton), an odd local man who claims to be an archaeologist, and talks about how his family haven’t left the village even for a trip to the seaside for hundreds of years, except in times of war, and mentions that the house’s Anglo-Saxon name is the Place of Birds.

Mr. Fisher mentions in passing that if Palmer has been having trouble with vermin in the place – as she has – she should go for a walk past the gamekeeper’s cottage and see what she finds there. What she encounters is Edgar (Andrew Bradford) – a muscular young man prone to stripping down and doing karate practice out in that lonely part of the woods, and who apparently is skilled at pest control and other land management tasks. Edgar is a twitchy sort, a little discontent with life in the village, and particularly perturbed by the way the villagers call him “Rob”, not Edgar, having renamed him when they adopted him at the age of six.