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The Pale Horse – Lost Amongst Spells and Urban Wyrd Nightmares: Wyrd Explorations 21

The Pale Horse (2020) is a television mini-series adaptation, written by Sarah Phelps and co-produced by the BBC and Amazon, of billion selling author Agatha Christie’s novel of the same name that was originally published in 1961 and which has been described as the most supernatural of her 66 detective novels.

Due to its inclusion of a number of folk horror-like scenes, themes etc the adaptation could be considered an example of what I call “Albion in the overgrowth”, which is a phrase I’ve tended to use to describe mainstream television dramas etc which to various degrees explore, utilise and express an “otherly pastoralism” or rural wyrd and at times variously contain elements of, or are fully intertwined with, folk horror.

Both the novel and the 2020 adaptation centre around a man called Mark Easterbrook and his encounters with a trio of women who are possibly witches and both are also set in early 1960s London and a fictional rural town called Much Deeping but a considerable number of the other details etc of Christie’s novel have been changed in the adaptation.

In the 2020 adaptation Mark Easterbrook is a suave urbane city dwelling antiques dealer whose name is found on a list of people in the shoe of a dead woman. A number of people on the list subsequently die or are discovered to have died and the series tells of Easterbrook’s attempts to discover the truth of why they have died and if he is next. As the series progresses it shows him struggling with his belief that there is a rational explanation for events which conflicts with evidence that often appears to point towards the deaths being the result of the actions of the above-mentioned trio of women who are fortune tellers but as said above may also possibly be witches and who live at The Pale Horse, a former inn in Much Deeping.

It is far from the cosy family viewing experience that can be found in some popular murder mystery television dramas, where the death/s are often merely a puzzle to be solved and, other than to the actual victims, seems to cause little truly disastrous direct nor collateral damage. In contrast with such dramas, The Pale Horse is an at times near hallucinogenic and often unsettling tale but which smuggles its dark atmosphere and events under a distracting guise of urban style and glamour. At the same time, it does not rely on gore and sensationalist visual shock to unsettle and create its darkly hued atmosphere but rather the sinister aspects of the story and events are more subtly and even ambiguously shown and implied which marks it out as somewhat unusual in today’s cultural landscape.

The just mentioned cosy murder mystery aspect of some television drama is something which has come to be associated with Agatha Christie’s work possibly in part because of the success of the various television adaptations of her Miss Marple novels, which centre around an elderly spinster who lives in a quiet village and who stumbles upon murders before going on to help the police to solve them and which often have a twee rural character. In contrast with these, Phelps’ adaptations have been said to “[reveal] the clenched fist of terror at the heart of Agatha Christie’s novels… [and] deconstruct the cosy image that has grown around the Mother of the Whodunnit, like lichen around a headstone” and to acknowledge the dark character of her source material of which she has said when she returned to it that she was:

“Profoundly shocked by [it]… That’s what I really hope comes across [in my adaptations, that Christie’s books are] brutal… [she] plants these little clues in her books and I pick them up and run with them… I’m honouring the secret, subversive Agatha… There’s something dangerous about her – and there’s a lot of academic work to be done on the tension in the novels between the book she knew the public wanted to read and the one she wanted to write.” (Sarah Phelps quoted in “ABC Murders writer Sarah Phelps to adapt another Agatha Christie novel”, David Brown, radiotimes.com, 6th February 2019.)

Accompanying which the darker character of Phelps’ adap- tations may also in part be a reflection of the contemporary popular culture landscape which allows for and often contains more overtly dark themes, atmospheres and so on than was the case when Christie originally wrote The Pale Horse.

In a number of ways Phelps’ adaptation of The Pale Horse is very much an urban wyrd tale, as it connects with this loosely interconnected mode or form of culture which, as I also in part refer to in the Preface, has been described as having:

“A sense of otherness within the narrative, experience or feeling concerning a densely human-constructed area or the in-between spaces bordering the bucolic and the built-up or surrounding modern technology with regard to another energy at play or in control; be it supernatural spiritual, historical, nostalgic or psychological. Possibly sinister but always somehow unnerving or unnatural… [and] that taps into the undercurrent of the city. In a similar way to psychogeography, it can find new narratives hidden below the top-layer; of dark skulduggery and strangeness beyond the reasonable confines of what we consider part of city life.” (Quoted from “Urban Wyrd: An Introduction”, Adam Scovell, Folk Horror Revival: Urban Wyrd – 1. Spirits of Time, 2019.)

However, rather than being purely “urban” wyrd, which might well imply that the supernatural forces emanate from and are contained within the series’ urban set scenes and locations, The Pale Horse often plays with a sense of the city and ordered sophisticated urban life being invaded and overpowered by a form of long-distance supernatural power that is controlled by rural dwellers.

The series is visually striking and intertwines a stylish 1960s, almost populuxe-esque aesthetic with the tropes of folk horror; its main character Easterbrook dresses in sharply tailored suits and has a high living affluent way of life and an, on the surface at least, picture-perfect wife and flat. However, there is a sense of a rottenness at his core, of something that is eating away at him, coupled with a controlling, self-serving nature and amorality of which Mark Sewell who plays the character has said:

“There’s something about the exteriors of [such] people, that in order to support that level of luxury there’s an underbelly of brutality to maintain it… That seemed to be really reflected in [Easterbrook’s] character’s story.” (Quoted from “TV: Agatha Christie adaptation stirs up a witch’s brew of woe”, author unknown, theherald.com, 8th February 2020.)

However, that “brutality” and the sense of control Easterbrook has in his urban life proves to be far from invulnerable and in a sequence where he and his wife visit a traditional rural fair at the town of Much Deeping where the trio of witches who may be involved in the deaths live, when he crosses fields to spy on them, they seem to preternaturally sense that he is there and there is a palpable sense that he is out of his depth and faced with powers he does not understand and cannot control.

It is during the fair that the drama becomes its most overtly and even orthodoxly folk horror-like: during it there is a folk ritual procession which features locals in surreal animal heads and masks, ghostly looking shrouded children in white dresses and people dressed in sack cloth costumes bestrewn with wheat eaves and wearing cloth head masks with ghastly simplistic features possibly burnt into the fabric.

When the procession stops the gathered crowd shouts “Cut the king” and one of the townsfolk is selected to chop the head off a towering figure with a shock of hair made from crops that had been carried during the procession. When the head is cut off, in a manner that seems somewhat grotesque and bizarre, members of the crowd swoop in to pluck parts of the head and eat them. However, the king’s head is made of bread and this “cutting” is part of a harmless traditional harvest ritual but that is not revealed in the series nor is it known by the urban outsiders Easterbrook and his wife and they find it unsettling, particularly his wife who sarcastically thanks him for a fun day out, before declaring she is going to find a stiff drink and leaving him alone amongst the locals.

Unlike much of horror however this takes place in bright daylight and amongst bucolic beauty, which gives it the air of a waking daytime nightmare, where something very untoward is happening but the outsider watcher does not know quite what it is:

“[There is] great sunshine, beautiful greenness and the corn is growing and everything else. And there’s this shiver that runs through the blood because even in bright sunshine, there’s something scratching at the back of your neck. And you might see it if you turn your head quickly, or it might’ve disappeared by that point… [it] happens, just out of the corner of your eye.” (Sarah Phelps quoted in “The Pale Horse writer interview: ‘I’ve changed elements of the end’”, Rosie Fletcher, denofgeek.com, 18th February 2020.)

Adding to the folk horror-esque character of the series for viewers who have seen Nicolas Roeg’s 2007 supernatural folk horror-esque drama film Puffball is that Rita Tushingham plays one of the witches and whose character’s piercing stare, straggling hair and possible use of supernatural powers in The Pale Horse seem to almost be a revisiting of her part in Roeg’s film in which she plays an elderly matriarch with a not dissimilar appearance and witch-like character who lives rurally and uses dark folkloric magic to achieve her aims.

The Pale Horse is the fifth adaptation of Agatha Christie’s work by Sarah Phelps and each have had recurring images or hidden “easter eggs” which include a painting of a trussed lamb by Agnes Dei and a stuffed polar bear. In the above interview with Den of Geek, Phelps talks about how in the painting you do not know if the lamb is alive or dead and that it has no free will:

“The way I think about the Agatha Christie universe is you have a hero or the antihero, the main character, and there was a point at which they put their foot on a position and that point comes way back… they have no choice. They had a choice a long time ago and they didn’t take it.”

Stuffed animals often have an inherent creepiness to them and the stuffed polar bear in The Pale Horse is no exception and this is coupled with the bears’ fiercely threatening apex predator appearance and position in the natural world.

Easterbrook unboxes the bear in his antique shop in the first scene of The Pale Horse and there is something surreal and unsettling about it which seems to be an indicator that, as Phelps says in the above interview, causes the viewer to think “Something terrible is going to happen to this man”. It also subtly calls into question Easterbrook’s morality and personal moral compass as he is shown to be fully prepared to reduce this wild creature to being merely another decorative bauble.

These recurring easter eggs in Phelps’ Christie adaptations are also accompanied by her repeated use of real-world historical dates, events, newspaper stories and so on, with for example a murder taking place on a prominent date connected with the rise of political extremism in pre-Second World War Germany and Easterbrook reading a newspaper which reports on the trial of a related captured extremist.

The flat Easterbrook shares with his wife is full of mod cons and every inch is perfectly styled but it is very much, to quote the title of the Roxy Music song, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”.

His beautiful and stylish wife suffers from mental health problems, which are exacerbated by his womanising, related deception, mind games, and cold-hearted treatment of her.

At points the isolation and emptiness of his wife’s life is shown in a subtly brutal manner, as she sits alone and motionless in their stylish flat which could well have tumbled from the pages of a glossy aspirational lifestyle magazine. At other times she is shown as being little more than a harassed skivvy at social gatherings in their flat, with her supposed friends denigrating and being dismissive of her relationship with Mark.

It becomes apparent that Easterbrook’s former wife died in the bath at the flat, possibly due to some kind of electricity related accident, and he wakes repeatedly at night after reliving the time around her death. These dream sections, which take place in the flat’s corridors, are reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic horror film The Shining (1980) in which scenes that take place in a hotel’s empty corridors have an almost unbearable and unsettling tension and in both The Shining and The Pale Horse these relatively ordinary and prosaic settings are transformed into nightmarish places.

The Pale Horse is also in part reminiscent of Basil Dearden’s film The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970) as in both a comfortably affluent urbane city dweller finds his grasp on and understanding of reality fracturing, possibly due to some preternatural and unknown force or events. As The Pale Horse progresses Easterbrook’s self-possession, control and sanity seem to increasingly crumble; he always maintains his stylish exterior but it increasingly becomes merely a well-presented, finely tailored and manicured shell, while his inner life in turn becomes a hellish and hallucinatory one as he repeatedly tries and fails to discover whether he is the victim of a supernatural curse placed on him by the trio of witches.

The crumbling of his psyche is often subtly implied rather than overtly visually expressed but it is more overtly depicted in one of the most conventional horror-like sequences in the series during one of his nightmares about his first wife’s death during which he is shown walking down the eerily blue lit corridor of his flat at night. When he opens the door, he falls back terrified and his silhouette is shown cowering in front of the folkloric “king” from the town fair and at this point it seems as though the “otherly” rural and its powers have fully invaded and conquered his well- ordered and affluent urban life and home.

Interconnected with which his flat is stylishly contemporarily decorated but there are three out of place seeming antique ornamental faces displayed in the main fireplace which have an unsettling air to them. One appears to be horned or be of a man wearing a creature’s horns, while the other two appear to be bellowing or in pain and they could be seen as accidental totemic links to the folkloric rituals at Much Deeping or perhaps to even be a conduit for the possibly supernatural powers of the trio of rural witches.

Alongside which when Easterbrook and his wife drive to the fair at Much Deeping, they pass the town’s contemporarily produced metal name sign on the road that is surrounded by and draped with folkloric red ribboned doll-like figures as part of the fair’s celebrations. As with some of the costumes and rituals at the fair, although the dolls are nominally harmless, in the context of the story and its events they assume the air of a warning and seem to indicate that those who pass them are leaving behind the norms and safety of urban life. There is also an interplay between modernity and the old ways in this scene, with modernity seeming to be literally subsumed by the folkloric figures and therefore the “old ways”, and this interplay or conflict is one of the constant undercurrents in The Pale Horse, as it also is in much of folk horror orientated work.

Throughout the drama Much Deeping’s rural area and country dwelling inhabitants are depicted as the threatening “other” and to have an unknowable alienness to city folk, in a manner which is often found in folk horror related work, such as the insular, pagan and at times wanton ways and rituals of the locals in the iconic folk horror film The Wicker Man (1973).

However, eventually it is revealed that the trio of witches may well not be the source of the deaths but rather they have merely been pawns used in nefarious plans by somebody in the city, who has been using information given to the witches when they tell urban visitor’s fortunes to discover those who have a wish for certain people in their lives to be killed in order to inherit, prevent scandal and so on. He does this for financial reward and has merely been playing mind games with Easterbrook by leaving corn dollies on his car and filling his head full of supernatural and near deranged Biblical portents.

Ultimately though the drama ends on an ambiguous note; Easterbrook appears to be trapped in some form of purgatory where he will have to endlessly relive the death of his first wife, who it has been revealed that he killed in a moment of jealous rage, and it is unclear whether the trio of witches have used supernatural powers to place him in this state of damnation or even if they do actually have such powers. The story finishes not so much with a sense of a conflicting duality between urban dwellers and a threatening, supernatural rural other but rather that evil, corruption and rottenness springs from Easterbrook himself.

 

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John Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s “Halloween III: Season Of The Witch – Main Title” from Halloween III: Season of the Witch’s Soundtrack: Songs for A Year In The Country 20

For myself Halloween III is possibly the most “Carpenter-esque” John Carpenter soundtrack… The film itself is an intriguing and curious piece of work that via its plot’s use of fragments of stone from Stonehenge that contain an ancient mysterious power still reverberates with echoes of Nigel Kneale’s apparently considerably revised original script.

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Shadows, Josephine Poole and the Layering of Folklore and Myth: Wyrd Explorations 20

Shadows was a supernatural and fantasy young adult- orientated British television anthology drama series which featured 20 approximately half-hour long stand-alone episodes and was produced by the commercial broadcaster Thames Television and broadcast for three series between 1975 and 1978. In more recent years it has been broadcast by archival British television channel Talking Pictures TV and released on DVD by film and television releasing company Network.

It is part of the strand of late 1960s and 1970s British children’s and young adult television drama that also included the likes of The Owl Service (1969-1970), The Changes (1975), Children of the Stones (1977) and Raven (1977), which often contained and explored surprisingly complex, challenging and at times dark or unsettling themes and atmospheres, particularly considering its intended younger audience, and which in part due to these characteristics has become a reference point for hauntological related and/or otherly pastoral or wyrd culture.

The Inheritance episode, originally broadcast in 1976 as part of Shadows’ second series, and written by Josephine Poole  involves a son called Martin, who is on the threshold of adulthood and though he lives in an urban area he wants to work in the countryside. As with a number of other episodes in the series it explores issues around youthful autonomy as he is at odds with his mother, who wants him to take up an office job in insurance.

Martin’s aged and ill grandfather, who has spent his life working rurally as a deer harbourer, comes to stay with them and shows him a deer antler he once found, which is from a type of deer he had never seen and which mysteriously left no tracks. The grandfather, who very much seems as if he belongs to another era and has little time for modern ways nor the mother’s wish for her son to work in an office, goes on to tell Martin of how in the old days antlers were worshipped and people used to do a horn dance, the meaning of which he says went back to “the dark days”. He also tells Martin of how a close bond grows between the harbourer and the deer, who seem to know when one of the harbourers has died or will do soon, and come to pay their respect.

His grandfather’s tales and connection with the land further fuel Martin’s desire not to work in an office, and they both set off to a nearby park early in the morning in order to watch the wild deer. When Martin subsequently wanders through the park on his own, he sees a group of five men in medieval-style costumes, who are wearing deer skull and antler horn headdresses, and who undertake a form of folkloric ritual dance to also medieval-style music before fading away, after which he finds a similar rare antler to the one his grandfather has.

The horn dancers seem to be an intrusion onto the mortal plane of the spirit world and curiously Martin seems largely unperturbed by seeing them, or even to find it especially unusual, and after telling his grandfather about it, his grandfather replies by saying the dance was incomplete as there should have been six participants, and that he wishes he could have seen the dance before he died.

Following this, the episode features a very visually-striking sequence where it steps away from realist aesthetics when Martin has an unsettled night’s sleep and has fever dream-like visions of the horn dancers but this time they are depicted via a form of tinted negative. As the sequence segues into colour it is revealed that one of the dancers is his grandfather, who says his grandson’s name as Martin awakes.

The grandfather has died in the night, apparently not being able to see the horn dance before he died, but rather to have joined it in the afterlife. Martin’s mother gives Martin his grandfather’s inheritance, which is the key to his harbourer’s cottage, and therefore a way for Martin to more easily fulfil his wish to work in the countryside.

In a final discussion, or relatively mild-mannered showdown, between Martin and his mother over his futures plans, she talks about how she grew up in the countryside and just wanted better for her children and to “get away from the mud”. Martin’s reply is that he has to make his own choice and that he is “opting for the wind”.

Martin’s wish to work in the countryside in the episode connects with the back to the land movement which gathered pace after the late 1960s  as part of which people wished to reconnect with the basics of life, nature and agriculture and were drawn to a rural way of life. As with Martin’s similar desires, this was not so much a strictly counter-cultural movement but it overlapped with it in terms of participants and inspiration, such as a rejection of rampant consumerism and careerist defined lives.

As previously mentioned, the episode was written by Josephine Poole, who since 1961 has published more than two dozen books for children, young adults and adults. These include the young adult novel Billy Buck (1972), which shares some similar themes with The Inheritance, in particular the way it revolves around an ancient horn dance. However, whereas in The Inheritance the folkloric dance is depicted in a positive light, in Billy Buck it is used in conjunction with bonfire night revels as a way of exploiting a rural village for sinister purposes by driving the locals to hysteria and tapping into their appetite for persecution in order to destroy an ancient family.

Billy Buck can be grouped with two other young adult books published in the early 1970s, William Rayner’s Stag Boy (1971) and Penelope Lively’s The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy (1971), all three of which draw from similar mythical and folkloric associations with deer and related real-world folk rituals:

“[These books] share the setting of Exmoor and the Devon/ Somerset border, where a deeply-buried folk heritage rises from the landscape – [including] a horn dance of the type still enacted today at Abbots Bromley, a wild hunt, [and] an ancient antlered helmet.” (Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature”, Jem, Whistles in the Wind (whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com), 2012.)

Alongside sharing these folkloric themes, the books also connect with a wider trend in 1970s literature:

“The invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present is a feature of many novels for ‘young adults’ of the late sixties and early seventies. There had been… the Alan Garner effect: in 1967 [his novel] The Owl Service redefined the remit of this type of writing, beyond ‘writing for children’, ambitious in the way it dealt with human emotions against an older, wiser and more powerful landscape. The stories were different because they were as rooted in everyday realism as the kitchen-sink dramas of British film… They existed against a particular sense of modernity at the time: heritage culture hadn’t really begun; things were either ‘old-fashioned’, or they were ‘modern’… [A possible name for this type of story could be] ‘British Ancient Landscape Hauntological Domestic Realist Wilderness’” (Quoted from “Running with the Deer – 1971 in Children’s Literature” and “Appreciating Josephine Poole – Moon Eyes”, Jem, Whistles in the Wind (whistlesinthewind.wordpress.com), 2012.)

This “invasion of ancient folklore and myth into the present” in fictional young adult-orientated work was also a feature of 1970s British television including the likes of the previously mentioned The Changes and Raven, that draw from Arthurian legend,  alongside both The Inheritance and Dark Encounter episodes of Shadows, the latter of which I discuss in another post.

 

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The Stone Tape – Nigel Kneale’s Unearthing of Tales from Buried Ancient Pasts: Wyrd Explorations 19

Writer Nigel Kneale’s work for film and television has been something of an ongoing touchstone, point of reference and inspiration for those interested in or creating work that takes in a wyrd sense of the uncanny or unsettled in the landscape and the spectral concerns of hauntology.

The Stone Tape is a 1972 television drama written by him which features a team of British scientists holed up in a country mansion while they attempt to create a new recording technique (and presciently to compete with the Japanese at such things). They discover a form of historic, spectral recording which exists within the substance or literally the stone of the house itself and attempt to study, initiate and possibly capture it as part of their research and development process.

The programme mixes and layers scientific techniques along with an interest in preternatural or supernatural occurrences and while it is set in a country mansion it is not overtly concerned with depicting a rural setting but has nonetheless come to be connected with an interest in folk horror.

This is commented on in reference to The Stone Tape by Andy Paciorek in his article “From the Forests, Fields and Furrows”, which acts as an introductory essay to the loose genre of folk horror at the Folk Horror Revival website:

“Some consider that the setting should be rural for the film [etc to be considered folk horror], but I think a broader view may be considered. The tradition of the horror may indeed have rustic roots and pastoral locations may provide the setting for many of the stronger examples [of folk horror], but people carry their lore and fears with them on their travels and sometimes into a built-up environment. Also, below the foundations of every town is earth with a more ancient past.”

The premise behind the programme comes from stone tape theory, which speculates that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings and that electrical mental impressions released during emotional or traumatic events can somehow be “stored” in moist rocks and other items and “replayed” under certain conditions.

This was an idea that was first proposed by British archaeologist turned parapsychologist Thomas Charles Lethbridge in 1961 (philosopher H. H. Price also formed a similar concept in 1940). Lethbridge believed that ghosts were not spirits of the deceased but were simply non-interactive recordings similar to a movie. The Stone Tape television drama helped to popularise the idea and the phrase and as with the recordings in the walls of the mansion featured in it, has continued to echo down the years.

This is particularly so in terms of its title that has been used as the name of record label Stone Tape Recordings, which was founded by Steven Collins who was also the founder member of folk rock band The Owl Service, as the title of an album of site specific spoken word recordings by Iain Sinclair called Stone Tape Shuffle released by Test Centre in 2012 and the name of hauntological otherly folkloric explorers duo The Stone Tapes.

In 2015 there was also a radio play version of The Stone Tape which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 as part of their Halloween Fright Night season. This added extra layers of cultural intertwinings with hauntological related culture; it was directed by Peter Strickland who wrote and directed the 2012 film Berberian Sound Studio, which in itself has a number of hauntological intertwinings, not least its depiction of an imagined folk horror-esque giallo film and sound recording studio and the inclusion of film and design work by Julian House of Ghost Box Records.

The radio play also featured music by James Cargill of Broadcast (who also created music for Berberian Sound Studio). The soundscape was by Andrew Liles, who has worked with a number of musicians/performers that through the title of a 2003 book by David Keenan which explored such areas of at times culturally subterranean music, have become known as England’s Hidden Reverse, including Current 93 and Nurse With Wound.

Further connections to hauntological points of interest include that the script was by Matthew Graham who was also the writer and/or co-creator of mainstream hauntological-esque timeslip television drama series Life on Mars (2006-2007) and Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010), alongside post-apocalyptic accidental cryogenic time travel science fiction series The Last Train (1999).

Andy Paciorek’s mention of an “ancient past” below the earth in relation to Nigel Kneale’s work connects with one of the recurring themes in his writing; that of the existence of echoes or artifacts from far distant times that may be hidden from view, or literally buried beneath the ground.

In The Stone Tape this takes the form of the spectral recordings in the material of the house, while in the television series and film Quatermass and the Pit (1958-1959 and 1967 respectively), which were also written by Nigel Kneale, it is depicted via the discovery of an ancient alien spacecraft under London which is found to have a malign influence and be part of an alien experiment in genetic modification and manipulation of humans over hundreds or thousands of years, which has been responsible for much of the war and conflict in the world.

As an aside and returning to a sense of echoing down over the years, the main location in Quatermass and the Pit is used in the 2001 album title The Séance at Hobs Lane by Mount Vernon Arts Lab. This album was created by Drew Mulholland and is in itself an exploration of the echoes of society and culture, being a psychogeographic exploration of London’s hidden and underground spaces, eighteenth century secret societies and Quatermass itself. It is seen as a forebear of hauntological work and in what could be seen as an acknowledgement of the pathways it helped to pioneer was reissued by Ghost Box Records in 2007.

 

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Marion Adnams, Paul Nash and Unsettling Landscapes – Wyrd Art Forebears and Pathways Through Time: Wyrd Explorations 18

From time to time, I discover work that seems like an accidental forebear of wyrd culture, and which was created long before the contemporary upsurge of interest in the uncanny, eerie flipside of rural, folk etc orientated culture. An example of this are some of the paintings by Marion Adnams, who lived and worked in Derby from 1898 until her death in 1995. Her work found recognition during her lifetime but for an extended period she became semi-forgotten, and there was not an exhibition devoted to her work for fifty years, until one took place at Derby Museum and Art Gallery in 2017-2018.

Adnams never provided explanations for her work, believing that it should be interpreted as people wished. This non-explanation continues with her painting’s titles, which are often both evocative and intriguingly cryptic (and also at times somewhat presciently wyrd-like), and which include For Lo, Winter is Past and Monkey Harvest.

There is a notable 20th century “classic” surrealist style to some of her paintings, one of which features three wizened and largely leafless trees that seem to be almost dancing in a flat untextured landscape and to have flung their leaves up into the air, while another shows three enigmatic oddly shaped stones again in a flat largely textureless landscape and which are also somehow imbued with human-like qualities as though they are alive and twisting, perhaps talking to one another. Each has a similar sized round hole through its centre and it isn’t clear if these have happened naturally, if they have been created by humans and the stones are a form of ritualistic structures or if the holes have been created by the stones themselves in an unexplained preternatural manner.

When I first saw Marion Adnams’ work, it put me in mind of the work of British surrealist painter, war artist, writer, book illustrator, photographer and fabric, poster and stage scenery designer Paul Nash (1889-1946), who has tended to have a higher profile than Adnams.

Nash is said to have found inspiration in “landscapes with elements of ancient history, such as burial mounds, Iron Age hill forts such as Wittenham Clumps and the [henge and ancient stone circles] at Avebury in [the British county of] Wiltshire”, and this in turn seems to presage some of the inspirations and reference points for wyrd or otherly pastoral culture today.

The majority of Nash’s painting are devoid of people, but curiously at times their simplified geometric style, curves etc seem reminiscent of some of artist Tamara de Lempicka’s distinctive and seductive Art Deco portraits and nudes which connects with Nash’s comments in a letter he wrote to a friend in 1912, where he said “I have tried… to paint trees as tho’ they were human beings… because I sincerely love and worship trees and know that they are people and wonderfully beautiful people”.

Nash’s 1911 painting His Vision at Evening features a rolling rural landscape which has a portrait of a woman’s face floating above it whose hair flows outwards to the sides and seems to have become one with or be part of the clouds and sky.

Due to its mixture of mysticism and landscape elements it could be seen as a forebear of some of the more new age and mystical aspects of contemporary wyrd and otherly pastoral culture. It also seems to capture the “visionary” pastoral spirit of music, culture and the landscape that is explored in some of the earlier sections of Rob Young’s 2010 book Electric Eden, where he focuses on, amongst other things, creative work from the 19th and earlier twentieth century. This includes William Morris’ bucolic utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890), and early twentieth-century composers including Vaughan Williams and Holst, of whom Young says, in a manner that connects their work with Nash’s war related artwork which is discussed below, that their work was inspired by “thunderbolts of inspiration from oriental mysticism, angular Modernism and the body blow of the Great War”.

In contrast to the more oblique titles of Marion Adnams’ work, the title of Nash’s war painting We are Making a New World which he created in 1918, appears to be a comment on the destruction wrought by the First World War due to the contrast between its optimistic title and the war-scarred landscape depicted in the painting.

While Nash’s war paintings often have a hellish quality, as in part mentioned above, some of his other landscapes contain a bucolic, gentle, warm atmosphere, while both often feature a sometimes subtle, and at times overt, surreal, Modernist and/or softly geometric aesthetic.

The notable geometric style in some of his work could also be considered a forebear of what I have called the “otherly geometry” of some hauntological and wyrd orientated graphic design and art, including some of Julian House’s artwork for Ghost Box Records, David Chatton Barker’s for Folklore Tapes and some of Nick Taylor’s Spectral Studio work which I have previously described as being “work which often seems to make use of geometric shapes and patterns to invoke a particular kind of otherliness [and allows] a momentary stepping elsewhere”.

Accompanying which, Nash has come to be seen as playing a key role in the development of Modernism in English art, which has been described as:

“…both a philosophical movement and an art movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped Modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by reactions to the horrors of World War I.” (Quoted from the Wikipedia.com page on Modernism.)

The manner in which Modernism was both a “reaction to the horrors” of conflict and also the modernisation of society, cities, industries etc could be considered part of a cultural and philosophical lineage which in recent years has included hauntological related work’s utilising of Modernist related iconography and culture, such as Brutalist architecture, often coupling this with a sense of Cold War Dread and/or a sense of melancholia or mourning for lost progressive post-Second World War futures.

Interconnected with which Paul Nash’s work and its intersections with wyrd cultural themes etc are included and discussed in the 2021 book Unsettling Landscapes: The Art of the Eerie, written by curator Steve Marshall, writer and former academic Gill Clarke and author and academic Robert Macfarlane. This accompanied an exhibition of paintings, photographs, sculpture etc at St Barbe Museum and Art Gallery in 2022 curated by the book’s authors:

“[The exhibition looks at] the unsettling, strange, gothic and eerie in British landscape art and examines how these ideas have influenced generations of British artists, Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism and on to current pre-occupations with conservation, belonging and hauntology.” (Quoted from text which accompanied the release of Unsettling Landscapes.)

The book includes the below quote from Paul Nash on his 1935 painting Equivalent for Megaliths which has an intriguing “otherly geometry” landscape meets 1980s cyberspace quality and was inspired by the previously mentioned henge and ancient stone circles at Avebury:

“In the fields a few miles north of Marlborough, standing or prone, are the huge stones, remains of the avenue, or the circles of the Temple of Avebury. The appearance of one or more of these megaliths, blotched with ocreish lichens, or livid with the bruises of weathering is sufficiently dramatic in a field of stubble, or in the grass meadows … These groups are impressive as forms opposed to their surroundings… and in the irrational sense, their suggestion of a super- reality. They are dramatic, also, however, as symbols of their antiquity, as hallowed remnants of an almost unknown civilization.”

This in turn provides further lines through the eerie and “unsettling landscapes” of wyrd and hauntological culture as it forebears and interconnects with one of hauntology’s most prominent theorists Mark Fisher’s comments in his 2016 book The Weird and the Eerie on how:

“[Because] the symbolic structures which made sense of [ancient monuments and stone circles] have rotted away… the deep past of humanity is revealed to be in effect an illegible alien civilisation, its rituals and modes of subjectivity unknown to us.”

 

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Berberian Sound Studio – Arthouse Evolution and Crossing the Thresholds of the Hinterland Worlds of Peter Strickland: Wyrd Explorations 17

Director, screenwriter and musician Peter Strickland’s films tend to create their own immersive worlds, often self- contained and separate from wider reality and its markers.

Berberian Sound Studio (2009), his second full length film, is perhaps the most hermetic of his films; it is set in the enclosed world of a recording studio in 1976 and could be considered an homage to and a possible comment on that period’s “giallo” and Italian horror film genres and their sometimes-questionable excesses.

As a loose definition, within cinema giallo generally refers to a sub-genre of work made largely during the 1960s to 1980s, normally Italian in origin and much of which has gone on to gain a cult following. It usually has mystery or thriller elements, often combined with slasher and sometimes supernatural or horror themes and is known for having distinctive, stylish aesthetics.

Berberian Sound Studio involves a garden shed-based British sound effects expert, played by Toby Jones, who travels to Italy to work on a film which turns out unbeknownst to him to be a disturbing giallo horror.

As time passes at the recording studio life and art implode and fall into one another and apart from going to his bedroom he does not seem to leave the studio complex. His sanity crumbles and he becomes increasingly both part of and complicit in a culture and celluloid of misogyny, one which is masked and masquerading as art and the barriers between reality and unreality become increasingly blurred.

Alongside the link to giallo it shares a number of similar themes with David Cronenberg’s science fiction horror film Videodrome (1983); the stepping into an altered reality via recorded media and the degradation of its listeners, watchers and participants.

However, whereas Videodrome has a certain ragged, driving, visceral, hallucinatory and at times street-like energy, Berberian Sound Studio has and creates a more subtle, phantasmagoric dreamlike atmosphere.

It is not a film which intrigues and draws you in through a plot arc, rather it is the imagery, experimentation, atmosphere and its cultural connections. Indeed, plot in a conventional, progressive narrative manner often does not seem to be an overriding concern or intention of Peter Strickland’s. Rather, as referred to previously, his full-length films tend to more be exercises in conjuring and creating particular worlds and atmospheres.

With Berberian Sound Studio the cultural connections include a soundtrack by Broadcast and design/film work by Ghost Box Record’s co-founder Julian House (both of whose work is in various ways interconnected with hauntological and/or wyrd culture) with striking elements of its visual character being created by him. These include the tape packaging, edit sheets etc for the studio setting and as a film it is deeply steeped within such pre-digital recording technology, with its physical form and noises becoming an intrinsic part of the story and its enclosed world.

Julian House’s work also includes an intro sequence for the film within a film called The Equestrian Vortex, which is the one Toby Jones’ character is helping to create the sound effects for. Accompanied by Broadcast’s music this uses found illustration imagery and creates an unsettling, intense sequence which draws from the tropes of folk and occult horror.

The film within a film in Berberian Sound Studio is only shown visually by the illustrated intro sequence, with the violence and excesses of the live action parts only being expressed and implied by the sound effects that are created within the studio setting, guidelines given to the studio engineers or Toby Jones’ character’s repulsion or surprise at them.

Although he demurs at the extreme nature of some of the sequences he is expected to work on, this appears to be only in a British rather polite way. Alongside which, his only connection with back home and a more morally grounded world are the letters from his mother which are initially descriptions of bucolia but which later become their own form of dark horror.

Accompanying which during the film the interior world of the studio is only left when the film breaks through into the British countryside, which provides a brief relief via greenery and daylight. This is in considerable contrast to the corridor, studio, bedroom and night-time courtyard where the remainder of the film is set.

As the film progresses, the nature of the work, the self- contained world of the studio and the manipulative coercion, persuasion, denial or recalcitrance of the other staff seem to combine to corrupt him and they weaken and eventually remove any resistance he has to the nature of the work.

By the end of the film and as a sense of the demarcations between reality and fiction erode Toby Jones’ character becomes as much a facilitator and collaborator in the imagined film’s excesses as those around him.

The themes, actions of the characters etc in Berberian Sound Studio could be seen as questioning the reasoning and motives behind the making of giallo and related horror film, its subsequent cult following and raising up as a form of artistic rather than possibly purely sensationalistic exploitation cinema.

If this is the case then it can be seen as a film which explores and debates viewers’ and makers’ complicit creation and enjoyment of such areas of film, ones which without that elevation could be considered in part to be curious and questionable forms of culture…

Peter Strickland’s films bring to mind those kind of arthouse, sometimes transgressive films that have often gone on to find a cult following but have not always become mainstream critically acceptable.

For example, films that would have once appeared in the pages of Films and Filming magazine which was published from 1954- 1990; often European cult arthouse independent cinema, with leftfield, exploratory and sometimes transgressive or salacious subject matter and presentation.

Both when discussing his own work and in writing by others, there have been numerous mentions of such earlier films which are said to have fed into his and also of a sense of homage that his work contains.

For example, the BFI’s Sight and Sound film magazine called The Duke of Burgundy a “phantasmagoric 70s Euro sex-horror pastiche” and as referred to previously the likes of prolific fringe film maker Jesús Franco are often referenced when writing about the film.

This sense of homage within Peter Strickland’s films can sometimes be quite overt; in his film The Duke of Burgundy the night time dreamlike sequence which sees the screen and one of the main characters consumed by a rapidly layering collage of lepidoptera seems to quite directly visually reference experimental film maker Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight film from 1963 in which layered natural elements and insects to create a rapidly moving montage.

The connections to and lineage of such films via degrees of homage in his work can provide an intriguing cultural layering, acting as pointers to other areas of exploration and on this topic, he has written the following:

“The inclusion of an obscure reference done in an obvious fashion can be precarious in terms of what that reveals about a director’s motivations. At worst, the act of homage is merely posing and diverting attention onto the director rather than the film, but when done organically and effectively, as with both Greenaway at his best and Tarantino, it enriches the film and places it within a wider (albeit self- imposed) lineage that can be rewarding for the curious viewer.” (Quoted from “Peter Strickland: 6 films that fed into The Duke of Burgundy”, bfi.org.uk, 13th February 2015.)

Such earlier films as Mothlight and those of a Scala-esque nature can be culturally and/or aesthetically interesting and intriguing, they may also possibly have a great poster or soundtrack but they are not necessarily always all that easy to sit through in terms of also being forms of entertainment.

However rather than homage, Peter Strickland’s films often seem to more be an evolution of them, taking previous work as some of its initial starting points but then recalibrating their themes, tropes and aesthetics to create work which alongside it containing layered cultural points of interest can also work as entrancing entertainment (albeit that may also at times be more than a little unsettling).

 

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Judy Dyble and Andy Lewis’ Summer Dancing – Acid folk Meets Acid Jazz via a Left-Field Pop Parallel Universe: Wyrd Explorations 16

The 2017 album Summer Dancing by Judy Dyble and Andy Lewis is something of a fine cuckoo in pop’s nest which has a curiously contrasting cultural background and set of connections that make it seem as though it should perhaps only really exist in a parallel world left-field pop universe.

Andy Lewis was one the original DJs at Blow Up which is a club night in central London founded in 1993 that had connections to mod and easy listening culture and also in the mid-1990s was a pivotal and notable venue in the development of the Britpop music scene. From 2002 onwards he released a number of number of records on Acid Jazz, alongside collaborating with Paul Weller on the 2007 single “Are You Trying to Be Lonely” which charted in the UK Top 40, after which until 2016 he performed in Paul Weller’s band, who in turn is known for his strong connections with mod culture.

In the 1960s Judy Dyble was the original vocalist in the folk- rock stalwart group Fairport Convention, after which she worked with a group of musicians who in 1968 formed the progressive rock band King Crimson before she made the 1970 album Morning Way as Trader Horne with ex-Them member Jackie McAuley, a record which could be loosely classified as acid or psych folk.

In 1973 she stopped performing and for a number of years ran an audio cassette duplication business before working as a librarian. In more recent years she was featured in an article by Andrew Male and Mike Barnes called “The Lost Women of Folk” in the November 2013 issue of Mojo magazine, alongside Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs and Shelagh Macdonald all of whom for various reasons after the early 1970s largely disappeared from public view for a number of decades.

She made a few guest appearances with Fairport Convention in the 1980s and 1990s but did not begin recording and releasing her own music again until 2003 after which she released a number of albums before passing away in 2020.

Trader Horne’s song “Morning Way” was included on the 2004 compilation Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974 which was compiled by author and musician Pete Wiggs, and as I in part discuss in the Introduction both that album and the Trader Horne track on it have a notable position in the history of A Year In The Country; the reimagining of folk on them showed me that folk and rural orientated culture could undertake and explore new, unexpected and even otherworldly journeys and pathways and seemed to open up something in my mind which in turn helped to inspire A Year In The Country.

Judy Dyble and Andy Lewis’ cultural backgrounds are not necessarily ones which you would naturally think of as coming together but rather fortuitously they did in the parallel world left- field pop universe of Summer Dancing and have combined and melded cohesively to produce an album which, while it subtly reflects their joint differing cultural backgrounds and history, has an individual and charming character all of its own.

In text which accompanied its release the album was described as being:

“Made of the very stuff of British psychedelia, an obsession with childhood, the country and the city. It emerges from a place somewhere between Broadcast, the soundtrack to The Wicker Man and Stereolab.”

And on the album’s sleeve it is commented that:

“[The album] began with a chance encounter… [between] two seasoned artists – she a voice of folk and experimental pop past, he a player-producer polymath with ties to the sharp-dressed 60s influenced present… [Although they were born] either side of the 60s, it’s the same culture, history and open attitude that unites the two, as well as rural-urban backgrounds. Church bells, red kites and the stories of E. Nesbit swirl gently in the imagination beside lost loves, London lives and an evergreen… otherness.”

That mention of Broadcast and “an evergreen… otherness” offer a sense of some of the themes and areas which the album explores; as with much of Broadcast’s work, accessible left-field avant pop might be an appropriate genre title and Summer Dancing could be considered to be a more pop orientated accidental counterpart to the psychedelia meets experimental pop “milling around the village” of Broadcast’s 2009 album Mother is the Milky Way.

Alongside both albums exploring some similar musical atmospheres etc, there is also a connection in terms of artwork as Liz Lewis’ cover art for Summer Dancing uses abstract cut up geometric forms which have similarities with Ghost Box Records co-founder Julian House’s artwork and design for Broadcast.

Summer Dancing contains a very English, subtle and charming eccentricity in ways that are difficult to fully define, although it could possibly be in part connected to Judy Dyble’s almost clipped, received pronunciation-esque singing on the record; a description which makes her singing style sound cold or detached but it is in fact anything but.

That subtle, charming eccentricity is also present in An Accidental Musician (2016), a biography that Judy Dyble co-wrote with the prolific author Dave Thompson and which along with the retrospective collections of Judy Dyble’s music Gathering the Threads (2015) and Anthology: Part One (2015), would make a fine companion for Summer Dancing.

In connection to the “lost loves” mentioned on the album sleeve, there is a sadness and even melancholia present on the album, particularly on “A Message” but neither it nor the album as a whole are maudlin, rather they at times contain a joyous remembering and yearning for those who have departed.

While “A Net of Memories (London)” is a psychogeographic wandering in song form around the capital city and connections to it, which tails off into a montage of music and sound where its isolated tones and reversed recordings accompany a radio travel report about swans who have mistaken the road for a river (!)

 

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Nicolas Roeg’s Puffball and Hidden Reverses: Wyrd Explorations 15

Nicolas Roeg’s 2007 supernatural horror thriller film Puffball contains a number of different tones in a somewhat intriguing and possibly even surprising manner, including combining a graphic, almost dissolute sexuality with its more realist aspects and it is not an easy film in parts: it is both unsettled and unsettling in various ways.

Set in a remote part of the countryside, it is a television-esque kitchen sink folk horror film that mixes Grand Designs with the music of Kate Bush and what author David Keenan has called England’s Hidden Reverse.

In the film new age-ish imagery intermingles with “Are- they-real or not?” folkloric and witchery shenanigans, tales of fertility battles, fertility ending with ageing and slick yuppie-like outsiders gutting and rebuilding a cottage that was previously the site for intense local loss in a possibly inappropriately modern, minimalist, over-angled style.

In some ways it feels like the story of the old ways battling with the new: of the arrogance of money and man trying to push out the mud and nature of the land. It is also reminiscent of the folk horror-esque Play for Today television drama Robin Redbreast from 19703 in the sense of rural locals entrapping an outsider in fertility rites and rituals and the use of a slightly simple man of the land for those ends.

As an aside, it is loosely connected back to early 1970s folk horror by the appearance of Donald Sutherland, and being directed by Nicolas Roeg, it is but a hop, skip and jump from them to The Wicker Man via Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film Don’t Look Now, in which Donald Sutherland stars and which was released cinematically in the UK as part of a double bill with The Wicker Man. In Puffball he makes for a striking figure, appearing as an almost slightly deranged happy old owl, albeit one in respectable business garb.

Further connecting Puffball to kitchen sink film and aesthetic, it also features the bird-like late beauty and fascinating screen presence of Rita Tushingham, who appeared in A Taste of Honey 1961), which is known as one of the classic 1960s kitchen sink/ British new wave films; here she is all staring eyes and grasping country ways.

Throughout the film Kate Bush’s song “Prelude” from her 2005 album Aerial, which features the angelic voice of her son accompanying her piano playing, appears and reappears, interconnecting the themes of the film and its stories of progeny to come and those lost.

Puffball is also further connected to Kate Bush’s work through two of its actors: Donald Sutherland appeared in the video for her 1985 single “Cloudbusting”, while one of the film’s lead actors is Miranda Richardson, who was also one of the main cast members in Kate Bush’s The Line, the Cross & the Curve film which accompanied her Red Shoes album from 1994.

The film was also released under the more exploitation friendly title The Devil’s Eyeball (puffballs are large round white fungi, also known by this other name).

The imagery which accompanies The Devil’s Eyeball version of the DVD release makes the film look nearer to a cheap b-movie, teenage friendly take on say the 1984 gothic fantasy-horror film The Company of Wolves, which is in part an adult take on the fairy story Little Red Riding Hood and could be considered an early(ish) example of folk horror due to its tales of deceitful ravenous wolves in the wood.