Robin Redbreast (1970)

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Director: James MacTaggart

Screenplay: John Griffith Bowen

Cast: Anna Cropper as Norah Palmer; Julian Holloway as Jake; Amanda Walker as Madge; Freda Bamford as Mrs Vigo; Bernard Hepton as Mr Fisher; Andrew Bradford as Rob/Edgar; Cyril Cross as Peter

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Shows) #25

The desire to flee from the city to the countryside has always been a curious concept for me. Within a village effectively sucked up into the nearby town but still connected to woodland for all my life, I have a drastically different reaction to the natural British countryside than urbanites. At the same time, I'm also not from a tiny rural community like a hamlet, having still lived next to a town, still making me an outsider to a old, countryside culture from my home region of the Midlands of England. Ever since cities came into existence, even large towns, there's been the channelling of people back and forth between them in a strange circular cycle, from the young travelling to the city for work and to experience their glitz, to them as older people or families becoming sick of the bustle when they get comfortable and retreating back to the countryside they came from. When cities became material to set urban legends or literary material for horror,  especially by the time of the Industrial Revolution, there was also the foundations for rural or folk horror, where the countryside and old pagan traditions elicited as much fear from the urbanites as the cities' back streets became a place the likes of Spring Heeled Jack or real life figures like Jack the Ripper were feared to skulk around. The absurdity of all this emotional baggage, and the subtext of a language and cultural barrier between them, being reduced to living in the countryside to let one's hair loose stands out for me as a result as farcical. The kind of reality television my parents watch where Wales, despite being part of the United Kingdom, is seen as an alien paradise like the coast of Spain comes off as a trite joke next to material like Robin Redbreast from a period, the "Hauntology" era of the seventies, where there was a clear existential issue at hand looking at the countryside and the cities, and trying to grapple with both of them existing. Robin Redbreast's DVD release in the UK, from the British Film Institution, reminds you that it's not just a horror film about evil villagers but part of an entire cultural language haunting the viewer as the physical disc includes Around the Village Green, a short 1937 documentary where a village community is being slowly urbanised whilst still trying to hold onto local customs.

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A large portion of the folk horror subgenre, one which feels like it's only been canonised within the modern day as a term, is entirely about the gap between the old traditions and that which is lost in the modern city and town environments. The Wicker Man (1973) is the ultimate example of this with Robin Redbreast its proto-template on similar ideas. Redbreast was a Play for Today story for the BBC, a legendary 1970-84 TV play series which was as capable as causing controversy for the likes of Alan Clarke's Scum (1977) as it was with one of its earliest entries here being a full blown psychological horror tale. Following a city socialite named Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper) who, after a messy divorce, takes over a country cottage left to her during the separation, what should be an escape for her immediately gets weird when a suspicious bespectacled man named Mr. Fisher (Bernard Hepton) randomly stumbles into her garden and says he knows everything with an immediately sinister tone to his voice. Whilst a film like this portrays the villagers as hiding a dark secret, wanting to keep Norah in the village when she inexplicably becomes pregnant to the empty headed, handsome jock of the area Rob (Andrew Bradford), stories like this have a lot more going on in terms of what they reflect between the lines rather than inherent messages spelt out to the viewer. As with a lot of horror, the dumbest as well as the smartest written as is the case here with screenwriter John Griffith Bowen's penmanship, even the clichés from repetition tell you a lot of what people fear and think about constantly.

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More so this story as sexuality and gender politics of the period are explicitly being talked about within the narrative. Following an older woman as our protagonist, you immediately have a poignant snapshot of the country in 1970 when she's a well off, middle journalist who is confident and sexually open, only for a conspiracy to transpire where she is pregnant without her having any desire to become a mother and that to be part of the sinister machinations for her. Neither is it merely as black and white as the monochrome images, as her dialogue at one put bluntly puts how trapped she is in neither wanting to be a mother or have an abortion, Bradford's  Rob irritating to her with his obsession with his "seed" and complete lack of social skills to be an appropriate father as his connection to the conspiracy inducing fear for her. As the exact purpose of why she's kept in the village becomes more complicated, the TV play adds paranoia from the Roman Polanski school where her internal conflicts are matched by something completely out of her control and keeps options of leaving the village out of her reach. That the explanation behind it all is pagan mythology that's as complex and exists outside of modern morality, neither good or evil in the traditional sense, becomes as much a conflict for her as the mystery itself ultimately, a woman against the old ways of the country especially in terms of fertility goddesses.

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Robin Redbreast is a television production. Minimalistic in production - still scenes rather than moving, elaborate cameras, emphasis more on the performances than the visual style - but from this period in British television production especially from the BBC utterly efficient. This is the "television style" as its own perfect aesthetic, so much so that even of a cineaste like myself cannot complain about said realistic minimalism, managing to replace what is not there from the economy of this television cinematography in favour of an incredibly well written script and great performances. It neither prevents moments of style suddenly spring out and stand out. From the exterior woodland and village scenes which have a verisimilitude to them, to the harvest festival sequence which feels like actual documentary footage of such a real event in montage, a harvest prayer over the top of it adding to the sense of the film briefly stepping away from its sinister rural horror tone to examine real British heritage. And that's not to mention the sole, eerie dream sequence shot at night that, due to the black and white film, has an inky darkness to the images alongside a haze to the strange images it shows, such as Bernard Hepton with eyeglasses shining in the dark like an old world necromancer. British television from this period in general has proven itself to be a dream for a horror fan like myself for this reason, constantly discovering new surprises to which Robin Redbreast can sit next to the likes of The Stone Tape (1972) or Schalcken the Painter (1979). For years I've complained about certain canonical British horror films being average and disappointing, the likes of House of Whipcord (1974) possessing far less cinematic style and grace even next to these television products which are stealing the spotlight for me for how good they are. That this was commonplace for BBC television as well at the time, I can't help but also feel jealous of my parent's generation having material like this constantly on their TV sets that could be taken for granted.