LEGEND OF THE MOUNTAIN (1979)

One of the things I hope for when reviewing the new Blu-ray and DVD releases is finding that what has dropped through the letterbox is a previously unsuspected perfect masterpiece that I hadn’t been aware of before. Legend of the Mountain is a film that falls into exactly that rare, much-appreciated category. It is an extraordinary fantasy-horror epic, made by wuxia supremo King Hu in 1979 -- and it now finds its way to UK shores in a definitive Masters of Cinema dual-format edition released thru Eureka Entertainment, having been fully restored to perfection in 4K back in 2016 by the Taiwan Film Institute.

The Chinese film industry had been mining its rich history of folk tales, legends and ghost stories since way before the release of this picture at the end of the seventies. Notably, King Hu’s first employers -- Shaw Brothers Studios -- from his days as a jobbing actor, had a run of successes in the Horror genre and even teamed up with Britain’s Hammer Studios in 1974 to co-produce The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires. But Hu’s film, produced, like most of his better known pictures in Taiwan, and starring many of the key names from his repertory of Taiwanese actors, belongs in a special category all of its own, despite deriving from the same literary source materials and incorporating similar shenguai elements as many of the earliest efforts in a genre that would in later years become better known to western audiences with Ching Siu-Tung’s 1987 hit A Chinese Ghost Story. In many ways, Legend of the Mountain represents a throwback to a more elegant cinematic past, and has more in common in its artful approach with classic Japanese arthouse supernatural cinema from the '50s such as Kenji Mizoguchi’s transcendent Ugetsu Monogatari, than it does with the increasingly sleazy materials that were being produced in China at the time under the Shaw Brothers umbrella -- like Ho Meng Hua’s Black Magic (1975) and Black Magic II, or his bizarre follow-up Oily Maniac (1976).

King Hu was a masterful filmmaker, noted for his blending of western film editing techniques with the choreography of traditional Chinese martial arts, the resulting aesthetics replicating the formalities of the Beijing Opera he had loved since childhood. King Hu’s retinue of skills as an editor, production designer, costume designer and visual artist facilitated a combination of influences that resulted in outstanding new school wuxia classics such as his breakout film Come Drink With Me (1966); the record-breaking box office hit Dragon Inn (1967); and its follow-up (in which the director’s style-conscious thinking-man’s-action-movie approach to direction reached its zenith), the critically acclaimed A Touch of Zen (1971): all of which married great artistic visual beauty with dynamic camera work and complex plotting. Although the latter also featured representation of the metaphysical as understood through Buddhist philosophy alongside the swordplay and intrigue, a straight ghost story in the style of China's traditional folk tales such as Legend of the Mountain represented new ground for King Hu’s cinema.

By 1979, though, Chinese horror pictures were, in general, becoming more exploitative. Yet King Hu’s uniquely beguiling, ambiguous yet baroque creation seems to display some affinities with the idiosyncratic ‘70s cinema of Nicolas Roeg and even takes inspiration from visual imagery found in Jack Clayton’s The Innocents over and above the high profile western horror pictures that had started to exert an influence on the direction of Chinese horror. Rather than following the pack, this film represents King Hu continuing to move away from mainstream commercial concerns. Like A Touch of Zen a full eight years before it, its extended run time -- in excess of three hours! -- worked against the film attracting a large audience; and in the west, its runtime was severely truncated. After spending so many years on A Touch of Zen, Hu made some effort with the work that followed to get back to producing the commercial hits of his early career by adapting to the new Kung Fu style pioneered at Shaw Brothers. But he found it increasingly difficult to attract funds for his favoured form of historical swordplay epic. Interestingly, the circumstances surrounding his decision to make Legend of the Mountain at that precise point in time, and the reasons it turned out as it did, had less to do with Hu's pre-existing artistic proclivities and everything to do with the  practicalities of his professional and personal life coming together to interact in a very specific way during this stage of his career.

Firstly, Legend of the Mountain was the second of two movies Hu was contractually signed up to make back-to-back on location over the course of a single year, requiring him to utilise largely the same cast and crew and shoot at the same locations in South Korea: a production method very similar to one famously employed by England’s Hammer Films in the mid-sixties for the purposes of cost-cutting. In this case, the approach was driven by Hu’s need to attain funds from the Korean Motion Picture Promotion Corporation: a body set up by the Korean authorities to make it attractive for foreign film production to come and invest in Korea by shooting on location there. A primary condition was that a minimum of two films had to be made in the county in order to qualify for this generous funding subsidy. So, with this in mind, King Hu wrote Raining in the Mountain: a film about life in a Ming Dynasty monastery, which he conceived after visiting a Korean folk village  - a kind of living museum that seeks to preserve historical monasteries, buildings and artefacts on site and in their original condition – while on a scouting mission in the mist-shrouded mountains, realising that the location could easily double as a Chinese historical setting since the architectural style showcased by its Buddhist temples was very similar to that which was developed in the 11th century by China’s song dynasty. This film was to be made for Hu’s usual Taiwanese backer. But Hu still needed to come up with a second film, which he would produce himself and own the exclusive distribution rights to. For this reason, Legend of the Mountain had to be made very cheaply by going straight into production on completion of Raining in the Mountain and utilising the same re-dressed locations and sets, as well as retaining largely the same cast and the same crew.

At around the same time, King Hu married a Chinese writer and scholar called Ling Chung, who had written extensively about Chinese literature and had been teaching the subject for several years at the State University of New York in Albany. Chung gave up her academic career in the States to come and work with her new husband -- and was delegated the job of writing the screenplay that would form the basis of the second film Hu planned to make after completing work on Raining in the Mountain. Hu nearly always scripted his films alone, so suddenly having someone else generate his material (even if it was his own spouse) was undoubtedly a new experience for him. Working from elements of legend found in the much-mined 18th century text Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio, by Pu Songling -- specifically the short story A Cave Full of Ghosts in the West Mountain, which provides the basic framework of the screenplay -- Chung came up with a tale that was very different from anything Hu had written and filmed before, presenting unique challenges for a filmmaker with a style underpinned by his talent for shooting complex action rooted in the real world.

Chung’s story, although an original variation on a traditional tale set in the culturally sophisticated Song dynasty, nevertheless remained true to the poetic spirit of Chinese folk tales and legends of the supernatural, while actually containing barely enough plot to fill a half-hour short. However, Ling Chung imbued her modern interpretation of the story with references to the many religious traditions that had co-mingled in China for centuries, informing its intellectual and spiritual life, its philosophy and everyday superstitions. This presented King Hu with the interesting conundrum of how to present such a context on screen with characters that largely stand for metaphorical ideas, and have motivations rooted in the indefinable abstractions of their historical milieu. For his solution, King Hu took the counterintuitive and daring approach of actually extending the film’s running time rather than reducing it, experimenting with duration to reinforce an ethereal atmosphere and create a concentrated  film texture full of poetic allusion that does not need to busy the screen at all times with concrete incident and complex plotting. A dreamlike state is induced by extending moments in which nothing much is happening while collapsing events that would normally take place over a great period of time (such as the courtship before a wedding) into mere seconds. The approach was in no way intended to provide padding to make up for the sparseness of the story source; Hu was attempting instead to give expression to the mixture of Taoist and Buddhist thought which provides an illustrative intellectual backdrop to the kinds of folk beliefs this story and others like it inherently rely on for their appeal.

This intent won’t perhaps be apparent to the unwary viewer who comes into this world without prior knowledge of it -- at least until some way into the film; and neophytes may initially feel bewildered by the apparent indifference to issues of pacing or plot development. Indeed, at first it seems all Hu is really interested in depicting at great length is his protagonist -- a naive clerical copyist played by frequent King Hu collaborator Chun Shih -- wandering a series of arresting otherworldly mountain passes and various landscapes of outstanding natural beauty, usually framed as a tiny fragment amidst the splendour, whilst serene Chinese woodwind musical cues float forth, interlaced on the audio track with the profound eeriness of wailing mountain winds. The film begins in this graceful, relaxed register and returns to evocations of such moods at several junctures to show how key narrative events and the characters associated with them also have profound implications for interpreting the landscape. Implicit in such an approach is the philosophical assumptions of the Taoist religion, where an enchantment with nature and its ineffable, ungovernable forces exists alongside a belief in the harmonious creative energy that lies unseen behind everything, connecting all living things and inanimate objects in a matrix of potentialities for transformation. Couple this with the ideas of reincarnation and karma that come from a pervasive Chinese Buddhist strain of thought, and you end up with a -- to western eyes – strange and idiosyncratic ontology, with everything having resonance with something else: animal spirits can take on a human form, and silent meditation or ritualistic incantation (even the act of playing a musical instrument and the creation of melody) express the modes of a life force that also regulates the development of ecosystems and the weather through an all-enveloping teleological wholeness functioning across multiple plains of existence. Even without any prevailing knowledge of Chinese religious thought, viewers will find they have soaked up this metaphysical context perhaps without even realising it, thanks to an extensive series of powerfully allusive montages, edits and pillow shots King Hu expertly weaves throughout the picture … not to fill out time, but to imbue the interactions of his characters with a textural spiritual resonance that’s embedded in a belief system incorporating an immanent supranatural agency.

The film’s hero, meanwhile, embodies the more practical, rationalistic traditions of Confucianism. Clerical scholar Yunqing Ho (Chun Shih) is a man with his feet planted firmly in the real world. He has been charged with a specific practical task he must travel a great distance to accomplish: to carry a scroll, containing a written sutra that releases the souls of the dead, to the Mudra Temple, high up on a plateau of the Gaya mountain, where he is to copy it for General Han in the wake of a great battle on the frontier that has resulted in the loss of many soldiers who, according to Buddhist belief, cannot pass on to the next stage of their existence without it. Ho does not reject the supernatural. Indeed, he leaves armed with prayer beads given to him by a monk to ward off any demons he might encounter along the way. They have been blessed in a sombre temple ritual, composed of elaborate hand gestures and earnest genuflection, treated with the same amount of gravity as later outright manifestations of supernatural power by way of a heightened and discordant audio design emphasising striking idiophonic percussive sounds. Ho assumes, though, that such realms are distinct and separate from the ordered rational world informed by the six senses, and so is surprised and disconcerted to find his lonely journey across the vast, overwhelmingly beautiful terrain, not so much interrupted by as infused with uncanny sights and unsettling encounters: a glimpse of a spectral woman in white who shimmers in the mist that perpetually floats above a mountain lake; ghostly flute music with no player, emanating from a deserted rest-stop pavilion; and an inscrutable Lama in orange robes who seems regularly to appear out of nowhere as Ho makes his way between eerie empty staging outposts (with their perfectly preserved but now-empty monasteries and religious statuary) and the serenely picturesque mountain trails across which he tenaciously treks inbetween.

This portion of the narrative echoes the opening act of many film versions of Dracula (as well as Stoker’s novel itself), and recalls Jonathan Harker’s journey into the wilderness of Transylvania, where he too is expecting merely to complete a straightforward clerical task, before finding himself immured by the irrational forces of a great supernatural evil. Here, though, Yungqing Ho's journey seems to find its resolution in a destination that appears at first far less threatening and uncanny than his route getting to it, despite initially falling foul of a shambling oddball mute manservant on the outskirts, called Old Chan (Feng Tien) -- the story’s equivalent of an Igor figure from James Whale’s Frankenstein. Arriving at General Han’s deserted fort compound to be told that his host (Yueh Sun) is in fact already dead, Ho is offered sanctuary in the already-prepared rooms of Han’s favourite concubine by the General’s smilingly friendly chief advisor Tsui Hung-chin (Lin Tung), and introduced to the only other residents of the complex: a raspy-voiced but voluble busybody housekeeper by the name of Madam Wang (Rainbow Hsu) and a young maid-servant called Quing; but most significantly, Wang’s beautiful daughter Melody (played with relish by Dragon Inn heroine Feng Hsu), a former court musician whom the cajoling housekeeper seems unusually eager to pair-off with the bookish visiting scholar. Instead of a horror story or fantasy epic, we appear to have stumbled into a domestic comedy of manners-cum- sex farce in which Madam Wang and her maid-servant conspire to have Yunqing Ho act as tutor to Wang’s daughter in the hope of getting the two close enough for long enough to marry them off. Rainbow Hsu, as the domineering Madam Wang, here provides the film with one of its more unexpected highlights thanks to her enjoyable turn as a comedy grotesque, but we soon realise (although Yunqing Ho does not) that supernatural machinations are afoot when Melody’s recreational drumming skills turn out to have hypnotic properties that allow her to put the young copiest into a memory-erasing trance, thus allowing her to claim the next morning that he has had his way with her while drunk and is now honour-bound to agree to Wang’s terms of marriage! This is particularly unfortunate, because no sooner has Yunqing Ho tied the knot and consummated his marriage to the sinister Melody for real (a love scene overlaid with nature imagery in a montage that combines scenes of sunsets and mountain lakes, and cuts from phallic images of fish swimming to a spider’s web being spun) than he falls in love with the daughter of the widow of a frontier magistrate, called Cloud (Sylvia Chang), who lives in a simple dwelling with her mother outside the fort.

The jealous love rivalry that ensues between Melody and Cloud unleashes a multitude of outlandish supernatural interventions, and it becomes more and more apparent to Ho that he is in fact surrounded not be people but by earth-bound spirits, who are the very souls he has been called here to help pass to the next stage of their existence. All the relationships that have heretofore been established between the characters are revealed, therefore, to be entirely false. In truth, Melody is the chief instigator of all preceding events: a serial murderer during life who killed Wang, Quing and Cloud before being tried for her crimes at General Han’s court where she was exiled to die alone. Seeking to settle her scores, Melody's wandering spirit was granted occult powers by a misguided Taoist priest (Hui-lou Chen) and she became a powerful demon who has enslaved the souls of Madam Wang and Quing to help her steal the sutra and use it to resurrect herself in the world of humans. The Taoist priest and his Lama assistant (the traveller who shadowed Yungqing Ho’s journey across the mountains) are trying to stop her, but her powers are growing too strong to resist. All of this is later explained by way of the priest’s prayer shrine, which has the ability to function as a cinema screen that explains to people what motivates their actions by reflecting images of events from their past lives back at them (thus allowing King Hu to deliver convenient info dump flashbacks to his own characters as well as to the viewer). These revelations also mean that Ho’s love for Cloud is as doomed as his marriage to Melody, for, as the laconic Lama magician points out: “an affair between a man and a ghost can never work out.”

But it can certainly leave a strong impression -- as Hu demonstrates repeatedly throughout the colourful three hours-plus of this by-turns visually poetic, awe-inspiring, comedic, and hallucinogenic audio-visual experience. (And that is, in the end, the best way to think of the movie – as an experience!) Lengthy digressions in the form of serene montages appreciating both the beauty and pitilessness of nature, also suggest oblique ties to the ghostly affairs that play out on the spiritual uplands of human relationships. There are several extraordinary hypnotic scenes in which religious and demonic forces battle each other with opposing rhythmic drumming and lots of coloured smoke. All the skills for shooting action Hu demonstrated in past full-throttle wuxia films are here brought to the service of bonkers gladiatorial supernatural showdowns between Melody and her various antagonists which, in other hands, could’ve looked rather weak given the poverty of the special effects budget. Here, through a combination of effective editing, precisely choreographed gesture, showy camera movement and lots of that coloured smoke, alongside a clamorous audio track of thunderous drumming and discordant janglings, they are rendered utterly strange and compelling.  Only one short sequence relies on the sort of wire work more usually prevalent in the wuxia genre, but it’s a good one – and infused with a peculiar fantastical mood that’s equal parts fairy tale and nightmare. It involves Quing the maid emerging from a sort of earthworks in the middle of a sunlit clearing that Ho and Cloud encounter after having trekked through a darkened gothic forest of crooked burnt tree trunks while trying to escape the malign influence of Melody. With the uncanny sound of fluttering feathers high up in the audio mix, the evil spirit swoops and acrobatically dive bombs the couple from above like a bird of prey, at the same moment demonstrating all the fragile grace and beauty of a gravity-surfing butterfly. Astonishingly, this sequence was one of the things cut from the film when it was originally released in the west in a shortened even more incomprehensible form!

 It is not until the concluding act, though, that King Hu finally allows the film to register a fully recognisable Gothic mode that fully embraces the irreducible irrationality of its subject matter; by which point, because of its now total disdain for anything approaching narrative logic, combined with a determination to bombard the viewer with a full sensory overload of uncanny supernatural stimuli, the movie begins to resemble, in both visual style and textual tone, the neon-soaked nightmare fairy tale of Dario Argento’s Suspiria: with a delerious coloured light-drenched showdown that involves multiple doppelgängers and plentiful psychokinetic pyrotechnics, it concludes with a splendidly gooey body horror meltdown, at which point the film apparently cycles back to the beginning in a Dead of Night-style coda.

This amazing piece of work gets a very nice treatment for its UK outing, with extras featuring a video essay by David Cairns, an insightful talk by former King Hu associate and Asian cinema expert Tony Rayns, and a noteworthy booklet featuring informative writings by King Hu and screenwriter Ling Chung, a splendid essay by Glenn Kenny, and a plethora of behind-the-scenes photographs featuring the cast and crew filming on location in South Korea.      

THE HOUSEMAID (2016)

It is no surprise that colonialism should have such an important role to play as the thematic lynchpin in Derek Nguyen’s debut feature The Housemaid (Cô Haû Gaí). The film, set in Vietnam in 1953 during the French Indochina War, positions itself as a traditional Gothic romance, a genre with many established literary antecedents in the 19th century that set a textual precedent for dealing with issues that arise from the fact of colonialism and the social dynamics of Empire -- including Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or even Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. When it comes to the Gothic in cinema and on screen, none have mined the post-colonial guilt of a faded empire nation more effectively than Britain’s Hammer films in the 1960s and ‘70s, especially when it could find ways to combine the theme with Freudian notions of the return of the repressed; for example, in the sexually charged exoticism that underscores Jon Gilling’s The Reptile. However, Nguyen’s approach to the Gothic and to colonialism have much more in common with the work of Guillermo Del Toro in his films The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth and, more recently, Crimson Peak which set creepy, fantastical goings-on in a closed location defined by a particular milieu, and use familiar tropes related to the Gothic genre to provide metaphorical context and commentary on specific historical events.

Writer-director Nguyen was born in what was then Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in 1973. His family left South Vietnam for the United States two years later, along with 130,000 refugees who also fled the country during the US evacuation, fearing retribution from the forces of the invading North Vietnamese. In The Housemaid, Nguyen reaches back several decades to before the Geneva Accords and the ensuing communist insurgency, to when the Viet Cong’s predecessors, the Viet Minh, were fighting a war which had been raging since 1946, for independence from French colonial forces. The complexity of the historical detail matters little to the arc of the story but is used merely to provide an anchor for a tale that seldom strays beyond the borders of a once grand but now gone-to-seed French colonial estate on the grounds of a rubber plantation hiding a very dark and violent history of abuse and oppression. This decaying mansion and the forbidding forest of rubber trees on its outskirts provide all the Gothic menace one could hope to derive from such a tale, as Nguyen turns for his Gothic model to a recent successful update of the recipe that recently helped revitalise Hammer Films: namely the 2012 adaptation of The Woman in Black. 

Originally, that story took the form of a novella by writer Susan Hill, and aimed to capture the essence of traditional fireside ghost stories like those that once might have been told by M.R. James to his Cambridge students over a glass of Christmas sherry. For the updated film iteration, imagery and more forthright jump-scare techniques borrowed from modern J Horror were also brought to the table. This is the style The Housemaid slavishly seeks to imitate, although after commencing with a strong but imitative prologue that reproduces a vision of the threating, darkly veiled spectral entity familiar from the source of its inspiration, the film later drifts into waters apparently more sedate, but with a stronger focus on areas of dark romance and sexuality. It becomes a fable-like exploration of the unequal but ambiguous erotic power dynamics that lie behind the master and servant, oppressed and oppressor relationships so intrinsic to a colonial set up, but will probably mystify or bore western horror fans who aren’t also up on their Poe or Daphne Du Maurier -- although this aspect of the tale doesn’t appear to have harmed its reception at home. However, this "third-highest-grossing horror film in Vietnam’s history" (a nice publicity line, but how many horror films from Vietnam have there actually been?) can’t resist for long the urge to unleash its own budget version of a ‘kitchen sink’ finale, as the last act presents a veritable torrent of enjoyably over-the-top pyrotechnic set-pieces and unlikely plot twists in a bid to hold its own with contemporary western fright flicks along the lines of Insidious or The Conjuring and its ilk. 

Nguyen’s screenplay admittedly does an impressive job, though, of outlining a very specific period in Vietnam’s history and making its content perfectly fit the well-defined contours of an utterly conventional ghost story cum Gothic Romance. The film’s nervous young orphaned heroine, Linh (Kate Nhung), arrives at the Sa-Chat estate on a suitably stormy night, looking for work as a housemaid after her family has been killed in air raids that wiped out most of her village. Austere head housekeeper Mrs Han (Kim Xuan) and an affable cook who claims also to be a witch (Phi Phung) are the only occupants of the otherwise-empty mansion, which is being preserved like a museum relic until the eventual return of its master -- currently away fighting communist guerrillas as an officer in the French army. Meanwhile brooding groundskeeper Mr Chau (Kien An) lives alone in one of the outer huts on the rubber plantation formerly used to house the French overseers who once made life a misery for the poor indigenous workers tricked into coming from all over the country to toil on the estate on the promise of good wages and a decent place to live. 

The estate’s dark history is defined by its troubling mixture of public exploitation and a very private, domestic form of grief: the imperialist cruelty and violence meted out to the plantation workers and their families – in the form of whippings, beatings and rapes – exists alongside the mental disintegration behind closed doors of the French estate manager’s tragic wife Madam Camille who, suffering from post-natal depression, reputably went mad with loneliness when her husband was called away to fight in the war: she drowned the couple’s baby in the bathtub but continued long after to administer to its rotting corpse in its crib, until finally drowning herself in a nearby lake. These macabre legacies of Empire (according to the kitchen cook, who tells Linh all about them) each leave their own imprint on the house and its surrounding grounds: Madam Camille’s black-shrouded ghost apparently haunts the hallways, staircases and recesses of the now-neglected mansion; while the spirits of the many hundreds of workers, murdered when the war for independence first broke out, allegedly now wander the forest of rubber trees under which their bones still lie buried in hidden mass graves.

The first act establishes Linh as a new and disruptive presence at the empty Sa-Chat estate -- with its grisly retinue of stirred up secrets and its still-uncertain future -- and falls into a pattern familiar to many traditional spook fests in which long, slow, moody sequences, where the young housemaid explores the mansion’s dark corridors by lamplight, are followed by the tension-release of a sudden jump scare. This is where the film is at its most Woman in Black-ish, with briefly glimpsed ghostly figures swishing into the frame, just beyond the protagonist’s eye-line as she wanders rooms and landings designed to showcase lush production design and set dressings highlighting a mix of Vietnamese and Western architectural and ornamental influences. These early forbidding explorations of Linh’s are also disturbed by the hollow, echoing, insistent cries of an unseen mewling baby, heard in some far-off, unidentifiable section of the house; and the inexplicable sight of a self-rocking crib, swathed in cobwebs, from which grabbing phantom hands suddenly emerge … only for Linh to wake with a fright from what turns out to have been merely a haunting nightmare. 

Such imagery is throughout complimented by Sam Chase’s rich and deeply textured cinematography, layering evocative details -- like the House of Usher-style family portraits lining the walls of Sa-Chat, or the estate's imported 1920s furnishings, both of which subliminally remind one of its rootedness in French imperialism -- in a blossoming mantle of atmospheric gloom and shadow seen enveloping the storm-lashed mansion. The estate's mix of east and west influences on its interior design can arguably be seen as a metaphor for the film itself, which has its own mosaic of influences that take on the history and unique geography of the regional setting and use them as the basis for an exercise in pure mainstream genre filmmaking that relies on story beats and filming techniques for its stylistic dressing that are indicative of the popular western forms of cinema its US-raised writer and director grew up on.

The middle section of the film is based around what happens when the estate’s French master, Captain Sebastien Laurent (Jean-Michel Richaud), turns up out of the blue, badly wounded after being ambushed by independence fighters, and in need of urgent medical assistance. He and his family have always insisted that local customs, such as the beliefs and practices of Eastern medicine, be ignored as a matter of principle and, in defence of that stand, Mrs Han forbids the witchcraft-practising cook from administering any of her potions and spells while they wait for a western doctor. However, when Han is called away to visit her sick mother, leaving Linh in charge, the young housemaid feels unable to resist when the Captain’s condition deteriorates to such an extent that death seems certain, and cook persuades her to let her try her own methods as a last resort. Here the film takes a detour away from the suggestive atmospherics of a traditional Gothic ghost story and into areas of more outright fantasy horror, as the cook’s ritualistic spell to accompany her remedies not only facilitates a miraculous recovery in the Captain, but appears also to raise the zombie-like cadaver of Madam Camille from its watery grave! 

This development (as well as the ensuing instances of poltergeist-style activity inside the mansion) at first suggest we are about to be given a straight up rollercoaster ride of spectacle-based horror, but instead the story slows down to become almost exclusively centred on a developing romantic relationship between Laurent and Linh. When the two remaining impediments to the couple embarking upon a full-blown romance – namely the cook and Mr Chu – leave for their annual holiday and hand the house and estate over to the sole care of Linh, she gradually goes from being nurse and carer for Laurent to becoming his lover, which eventually leads her to the role of mistress of the house. By the time a disconcerted Mrs Han and the others have returned, Linh has fully replaced Madam Camille in that role!

Here the film indulges in a minute examination of the shifting power dynamics at play in the relationship, making plain the exploitative aspects inherent to this historical context, and the social obstacles likely to crop up for the two lovers, which are looked at from both sides. When Laurent’s army colleagues visit the estate, they view Linh as almost subhuman; one of them even attempts to rape her – forcing Laurent to stop turning a blind eye to his countrymen’s abuses and put his cards on the table, renouncing his affiliates by kicking the group out in a fury. An even greater choice has to be made when Laurent’s English fiancée Madeline (Rosie Fellner) turns up wishing to resume their broken alliance, which leads to the melodrama of a bitter love rivalry that cuts across both class and racial barriers. 

But other class-related complications occur for Linh, too, when her employer Mrs Han returns, only to find that it is she now who has become the employee, while her former housemaid is now the mistress of the estate and her boss. Both Laurent and Linh have to face the accusation from their respective social peers that they have become “the enemy”, with Linh also having to confront the same predicament as that which once faced her predecessor, when she falls pregnant just as Laurent is about to be called away again to fight. There’s some justification to accusations that the apparent departure from straight ghost story and more upfront horror content for large stretches of the middle section of the film results in a slowness of pace, but the issue of the threat that the relationship poses to Linh’s cultural identity and the questioning of her suitability and authenticity in the role she has been called upon to assume at Sa-Chat is eventually explored through a possession subplot kicked off when Laurent opens up his former wife’s wardrobe to Linh in order to help her look more comfortably the part in her new high-status role.

There is eventually a huge twist to come that makes use of unreliable narrator tricks that are based on an ambiguity that's inherent to the status of the point of view from which we’ve been following these entire events; and the final act turns into something of an Evil Dead styled supernatural bloodbath, as bodies start piling up at the hand of the revenant Madam Camille, while the rotting corpses of the dead also rise up from their plantation ossuary in scenes highly suggestive of similar ones that were depicted in Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh-Eaters. Scary pay-offs such as these ensure the film eventually delivers on its early promise, but it will be the fans of more traditional gothic fare who will be most likely to appreciate the thoughtful ruminations that lie at its heart, on the possibilities (or lack thereof) of rapprochement after colonial rule and the privations of war. This is an accomplished feature debut, with strongly committed performances from the small but convincing cast. It’s well worth a watch and is currently available in the UK on the Montage Pictures label, a sub-division of Eureka Entertainment, in a dual format double-disc edition with no extras.  

       

THE CHILDREN'S FILM FOUNDATION COLLECTION: Scary Stories (1976/1984/1985)

 After having showcased some strange, unusual and deeply wonderful adventures a few months back in Weird Tales -- the BFI’s third collection of recently restored and re-mastered Children’s Film Foundation classics -- events now turn from the fantastical to the unsettling for the next treasurable instalment in this on-going DVD range, which also incorporates some later entries from the re-christened Children’s Film and Television Foundation. With this fourth volume, three memorable short features produced between 1974 and 1985 have been brought together under the Scary Stories banner -- offering a slightly different kind of perspective on the Foundation’s typically jolly adventuring fare. This time we’re provided with a trio of chilling tales that each, in one way or another, involve youngsters in encounters with the uncanny that suggest the past of centuries gone by can never be entirely quieted, and sometimes returns to haunt the uncertainties of the present day. Only the first of these films, The Man from Nowhere (1974), is actually given a period setting and appropriately summons Gothic atmosphere in a form mimicking the traditional Dickensian ghost story, as well as the look of the BBC’s best ‘70s Ghost Story for Christmas adaptations, incorporating lashings of period Victorian gloom set around creaking imposing mansion houses, eerie woodland settings and a mysterious death-like apparition in black.

 Perhaps one of the most noticeable aspects of the entire CFF venture during its glory years was its capacity for eliciting some extremely high quality work from the succession of small independent producers, who queued up to apply for its modest funding opportunities during times when the going was often extremely tough for the British Film Industry -- especially in the mid-seventies, when the first of these three films was made under CFF patronage. The money ultimately came from The British Film Production Fund, a body set up to divvy out the grants derived from a small tax -- known as the Eady Levy – which was at the time still being collected on all cinema tickets bought in the UK. Charles Barker Productions appears to have been a somewhat short-lived beneficiary of this set up (The Man from Nowhere is Barker’s only recorded work according to the IMDb), yet it managed to produce this elegant period fable, after being teamed up with director James Hill of Born Free fame on a storyline that successfully places elements of Victorian Gothic literature from works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Uncle Silas”, Wilkie Collins’ “The Woman in White “and Charles Dickens’s famous ghost story “The Signalman” alongside the kind of material that was much to be expected from standard CFF narrative formulations; such as, for example, the fact that the villains must always be seen to get chased at some point in the film by the young protagonists, with the story invariably ending just as the bad guys publicly get their comeuppance in a form which involves falling, or being pushed, into a muddy pool of water.

The Man From Nowhere glues all these elements together seamlessly, with a premise that feels slightly near the knuckle these days in that it involves the twelve-year-old orphan heroine being menaced throughout by a sinister adult stranger dressed in black, who follows her everywhere she goes and eventually even manages to invade the sanctuary of her adopted home. However, John Tully’s script sees the whole escapade carried off on a healthy mixture of intelligence lightly worn and easy charm, in a film which both imitates and comments on some of the most common tropes to be found in the classic Victorian mystery literature that it in part sets out to parody. It is also the beneficiary of some leafy locations in the South of England, so redolent of prestigious BBC period costume dramas of the day (as well as the output of a certain other producer of classic British Gothic fare), that they can’t help but induce a warm glow of nostalgia for this children’s variant of a now quaint form of British horror film-making.

Tully’s background in writing for children’s television enabled him with this likable little film to fluently distil for a young audience (but in a non-preachy manner) the essence of mid-Victorian social attitudes towards poverty, and their impact on and relationship to class, as well as illustrate the way in which this often came to be expressed in forms of philanthropy and patronage that were commonly portrayed by the popular fiction of the age -- especially in the works of Dickens. It also references the frequently made observation that Victorian belief in the supernatural underwent a revolution which saw a rise in the popularity of spiritualism, coincident with the industrial revolution heralding the advent of new forms of invention  centred on communication technologies like the telegraph, and new signalling systems created to facilitate the age of the steam train -- all of which were developments that helped make the claims of the paranormalists seem that much more  credible than they otherwise might have been, even though material science seemed to be conquering the landscape, both figuratively and literally. This was an idea that was picked up by Charles Dickens, and played a central role in his short story “The Signalman”. It was even more evocatively sketched out in Lawrence Gordon Clark’s eerie adaptation of the same story for his BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas strand in 1976 … except that The Man from Nowhere in some respects got there first, opening on a scene set in a village train station  (the significance of which will only be made apparent much later in the story) where little Alice Harvey (Sarah Hollis Andrews) arrives, clad in bonnet and shawl and looking like a perfect reproduction of one of Hablot Knight Browne’s and George Cattermole’s illustrations of Little Nell -- the tragic heroine of Dickens’ “The Old Curiosity Shop”.

Emblematic of the innocence and purity of the orphaned heroine in Victorian literature, Alice also evokes the magical world of her namesake from Charles ‘Lewis Carroll’ Dodgson’s famous 1865 work “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and its 1871 sequel “Through the Looking-Glass”. This association becomes more apparent when, upon being obliged to make her own way up from the village station to the imposing nearby mansion known as Tower House  – the home of her Great Uncle Harvey (Ronald Adam) – all alone after her Uncle’s housekeeper, Mrs Smee (Gabrielle Hamilton,) is held up while running errands in town that prevent her arriving in time to collect Alice off the train, the orphan encounters a mysterious threatening presence who emerges almost magically from the woodlands at the side of the winding country lane she has to traverse on her way. The figure is dressed in the imposing crape-banded top hat and sombre black suit of mourning common to one of the ‘mutes’ who would have accompanied a typical Victorian funerary procession. This ‘man from nowhere’ appears to belong to a strange supernatural realm, redolent of the woodland setting from which his voice is first heard to emanate in a disembodied form, his features gradually resolving themselves from a vague silhouette outline in the glare of sunlight glinting through the branches of woodland trees.

It’s an uncanny, almost fairy-tale surreal moment -- and one of many that reveal the class of director James Hill (whose pedigree in both children’s telly – Black Beauty; Worzel Gummidge -- and Victorian-set horror -- A Study in Terror – made him the perfect choice for such material) and the film’s cinematographer Desmond Dickenson (a veteran of many a enjoyable low-budget British horror flick in his time). This dark, Victorian representative of death comes with a stark warning: that Alice should not enter the environs of Tower House because grave danger awaits her there; she must go straight back to the orphanage from whence she came instead. The apparition becomes threateningly solid and corporeal when it suddenly materialises directly in front of her on the road and, terrified, Alice flees. Only the intervention of some raggedy homeless street urchins who hang out at the station gates looking for victims to harass for small change, and who are led by an Artful Dodger type called Spikey (Anthony McCaffery), stop her from immediately complying with the spectral visitor’s gruff demands. The boys befriend Alice after discovering she is an orphan too, helping her recover her clothes (which had earlier been scattered across the lane when she dropped her case in fright), and walking her to the gates of Tower House, supposedly her new home.

 Spikey, Nobby (Reggie Winch), William (Shane Franklin) and Jim (Robin Keston) are the prototypical gang of friends who you’d expect to find inhabiting a CFF outing during any period in the Foundation’s history. Yet they also fulfil the stereotypical Dickensian roles required of them in this particular period piece, acting as disenfranchised ragamuffin representatives of a hidden underworld of parentless child poverty to which Alice herself also belongs – just like the homeless band of young thieves from “Oliver Twist”.  Like any CFF gang, they have a secret den; but this one is secret because it’s on Mr Harvey’s land (‘he’d have us in gaol if he knew!’), and is in fact part of the wooded glade area out of which the man in black first appeared. The boys believe Alice’s claims about this figure without question, and set out to help her prosper in her new home; the adult members of the respectable small household, though, which has ostensibly taken her under its wing out of familial duty (and which only really consists of Mr Harvey and Mrs Snee, along with the family solicitor Mr Freeman) revile her "riff raff" friends from the street and increasingly fail to protect her from this dark menace, who claims at one point: ‘I know everything you’re doing, every minute of the day!’

This is a version of a scenario essayed countless times in a succession of thrillers penned by Jimmy Sangster for Hammer Productions in the early- to mid-sixties. Often termed ‘mini Hitchcocks’ and inspired by Henri-Georges Clouzot’s masterpiece Les Diaboliques they invariably hinged on someone -- usually a female protagonist -- finding themselves menaced by an macabre figure who may or might not be real, in what usually turns out to be a devious and far-fetched plot to drive them to insanity. As Alice attempts to adjust to her new life as the ward of a rich patron, her place in the household is put continually under threat by the unexpected materialisations of this man from nowhere, who threatens to cast doubt on her sanity while implying that the adults now looking after her are themselves suspect; for as the visitations become more frequent and increasingly threatening in nature, the intruder claims that Alice’s rich Uncle means ultimately to do her harm and to ‘get rid of her’ if she doesn’t leave the village and Tower House itself of her own accord.

Alice’s benefactor may well have pledged to look after his only living niece, but his motives do indeed remain unclear -- especially given the fact that he rarely willingly leaves the confines of the shadowy, wainscoted interior rooms of Tower House due to a mysterious illness (for which he must take special medication) and, according to devoted housekeeper Mrs Snee, is always ‘careful with his money’. The uncertain relationship between Alice and Mr Harvey is really at the core of the goings on in the story. Harvey is initially set up as a typical Dickensian Scrooge-like miser or a reclusive old fuddy-duddy like Sir Leicester Dedlock in “Bleak House”. His initial manner towards this poor relation of his, whose existence has only recently been brought to light by the efforts of his solicitor Mr Freeman (John Forbes-Robertson), is characterised by various attempts to control and to mould her through the act of buying her expensive dresses to wear, or by literally confining her to the house unless chaperoned by Mrs Snee, as Mr Harvey does not consider it ‘proper’ for a young lady to be seen out on her own.

 

On the other hand, Alice’s presence appears to gradually bring about a softening effect upon him as time wears on: he agrees to accompany her in a gig ride to the other side of the village to view the old church, and to see his friend the Reverend Potter, in a scene which plays like an extract from one of the BBC’s ‘70s MR James adaptations, where Harvey gets to play the part of a typical, harmless Jamesian antiquarian as he expounds to Alice on the history of the church’s construction, and the various additions and renovations that have been made to the building’s structure down the centuries.

But as Alice’s wild claims become more insistent after the stranger even manages to pop up behind a gravestone during the church visit, and then later stalks her through the woods after she visits them with Spikey to see the shelter that the young urchins have constructed to live in on Mr Harvey’s land during the summer -- her benefactor becomes more forceful, angry even, at the suggestion that he might wish her ill-harm. Angry, it seems, almost to the point of violence. This strong suggestion of threat and the implication that a sinister harm might come to Alice from an unknown, possibly even supernatural, quarter marks The Man from Nowhere out as a curiosity among its CFF peers, in which explicit murder plots against child protagonists rarely feature. Naturally, a reassuring order (in terms of both morality and rationality) must be reasserted at the end and Spikey and the rest of Alice’s young friends make good use of their street smarts to uncover what’s really going on, and also to concoct a plan to catch and expose the culprits behind what turns out to be a dastardly scheme dreamt up to disinherit the unsuspecting orphan girl.

While the signalling systems used by Victorian station masters in the 19th century were used as a metaphor by Dickens to explore the idea of ghostly spirit messages being carried to earth on an ineffable ether, here they play a vital role in perpetrating the illusion of the existence of an all-seeing spectral visitor from beyond, who always seems to be in possession of knowledge he could not possibly have come by through rational means. The children themselves, though, also use a piece of Victorian technology as their means to expose the plot against Alice: in this case a self-playing church organ that was actually a feature of one of the halls of the great house used by Hill for both the interiors and exterior grounds of Mr Harvey’s mansion. Finally, a traditional Dickensian conclusion is reached, in which all the former poor house children eventually find themselves in considerably better social and financial circumstances than those in which they started out. The film concludes with a theatrical flourish as each of the players take a curtain call as their name comes up in the end credits.

 

Although modern synthesiser-based instrumentation is used at one point by composer John Cameron (during an obligatory chase scene near the end) to create some ironic distance between the period setting and the conventions of the children’s adventure genre, circa 1974, by which the film still has to abide, the sombre harpsichord and flute score which characterises the incidental music for much of the rest of the film, perfectly captures the tense atmosphere of the story's idyllic yet crepuscular setting, over which a terrible shadow has been cast by such strange events. Furthermore, the film is beautifully cast: the child actors are believable (and, for once, there’s a good, justifiable reason for the boy gang’s 1970s long hair and scruffy clothes); Ronald Adam makes a particularly fine Victorian squire, who vacillates between the kindly old gent and the strict patriarch stereotypes in accordance with the uncertainties required by the plot; and Gabrielle Hamilton’s long string of roles in previous TV and film adaptations of many of the greats of Victorian literature (George Eliot’s Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford are but two)  stand her in good stead for her ambiguous role as the sole servant of Tower House, Mrs Snee. Recently the actress also appeared in a BBC adaptation of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White: another ambitious tribute to the great storytelling traditions of nineteenth century literature.

All these elements add up to make a modest but entertaining little picture, steeped in Gothic Victoriana’s virtues; but if there is one element that really makes a difference to the film’s successful implementation of a style and aesthetics very common to 1960s and 1970s British horror films, then it’s the marvellous locations it makes such fabulous use of. Children’s Film Foundation productions never had access to particularly big budgets, of course, and so often these films were made almost entirely on location and therefore  in real buildings rather than on studio sets.  Such is the case here; and indeed, horror aficionados won’t need to be told twice that the ornate exterior of Tower House is none other than Oakley Court!

Designed and built in an eccentric ‘French Chateau’ style by Sir Richard Hall Say in 1859, this grand mansion on the banks of the Thames, in the county of Berkshire near Winsor, is perhaps the most famous Gothic residence in British Horror, having appeared in countless films, particularly in the 1970s. Hammer Productions, who briefly used it as a mansion house studio from the late 1940s (when, appropriately enough, they shot The Man in Black there) up until the mid ‘50s, when they moved to their more famous Bray Studios complex at nearby Down Place, helped to make it instantly recognisable, frequently re-using it as an exterior for films such as Lust for a Vampire. But many other British movies, such as The Legend of Hell House and Norman J Warren’s Satan’s Slave, also made ample use of its striking exterior profile, and sometimes the grounds too -- not to mention the occasional appearance in Italian movies from the same sort of era, such as Sergio Martino’s All the Colours of the Dark and Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin.

The really interesting thing about The Man from Nowhere from the point of view of the British horror fan is that not only does it include plenty of shots in which the familiar Oakley Court house exteriors, gardens and surrounding lawns can easily be identified -- with even the nearby woodland areas (purchased as part of the deal when the mansion was sold into new ownership in 1919) making frequent and picturesque appearances (they may not be Hammer’s familiar Black Park territory but these locations might as well be … they certainly looks much the same), but the production seems also to have been given permission to film throughout the great house’s interiors, and it makes terrific use of the lamp-lit halls and authentically furnished rooms that were maintained by the new owners as a time capsule tribute to n oaky mid-Victorian splendour.

We get scenes set on the vast staircase and balconies, and in darkening wainscoted drawing and dining rooms; also there is a scene which takes place in one of the chamber-like Gothic bedrooms and – the site of a memorably scary moment -- the house’s back kitchen, where the menacing man in black materialises in front of Alice after the door has been locked from outside, trapping her in the room with him. Particularly notable is the use made in the plot of the vast pipe organ, which was, according to former Hammer stills photographer John Jay (quoted in Wayne Kinsey’s Hammer Films: The Unsung Heroes) an offbeat feature of the residence eccentrically fitted in the main entrance hall. Writer Mark Tully mentions in the short introduction to the film he supplies for the BFI booklet, that James Hill had him incorporate this bizarre furnishing into the screenplay after they discovered it while looking over the site just before filming started. The  adoption of aesthetic elements of BBC period drama, along with the British horror film’s best Gothic trappings, raise this piece well above its humble origins, and it becomes not just one of the best and most original works made for the CFF, but also a worthy if marginal entry in the annals of Britain’s heritage of horror. 

By 1984, the culture of the Saturday morning matinees at the local Odeon theatre which had supported the CFF’s work since the 1950s, had fallen away with the advent in the 1970s of weekend children’s TV magazine shows such as TISWAZ and SWAP SHOP. However the Foundation did manage to continue its work by making deals with BBC and ITV, since most of the TV companies’ children’s output was made up of a similar sort of mixture of cartoons, adventure serials and comedy as had supplied the formulaic programming kids would have likely encountered on a typical trip to the cinema. The renamed Children’s Film and Television Foundation (CFTF) was able to continue making largely the same sorts of films it had produced for the cinema in the heyday of the CFF and, as Haunters of the Deep reveals, make them to a similarly high standard.

Haunters of the Deep is set on the Cornish coast in the 1980s and has a charmingly accented young hero called Josh (Gary Simmons) who appears to be exactly the same kind of adventure-minded, bike-riding, scruffy-haired young tyke as would have been found in any of the classic period CFF adventures, except for his localised accent and a clearly less well to do background than his middle-class predecessors of old. Both this and the following Out of the Darkness -- the second offering from the CFTF on this disc -- involve boy protagonists with regional accents who come to develop a special sort of affinity with a long dead child of an equivalent age, who emerges from out of the murky depths of a mythologised local folklore. Here, young Josh plays among the ruins of Edwardian era mine shafts on the Cornish headlands, enjoying a half-term holiday in a romantic, windswept summer landscape of sandy bays, fishing harbours and rugged cliff crests from which the remains of old mining chimneys poke like blackened fingers amid the empty shells of abandoned engine houses, themselves suggestive of a long vanished era as they totter against a backdrop of waves pounding and crashing on jagged rocks that host hidden cave entrances from which, even further back in time, pirates and smugglers once plied their murderous trades.

These elements are all authentic components of the shooting location’s true history, the landscape of the Penwith Peninsula dictating both the atmosphere inspired by such picturesque Cornish scenery -- which director of photography Ronald Maasz (an experienced camera operator and second unit DP who’d been working in the industry since the 1940s) manages to capture so convincingly -- and the very subject matter itself, which story creator Terry Barbour and director and co-writer Andrew Bogle co-opt from local legends and myths attached to this evocative place -- where a documented history of industrial development and working class poverty share space in the imagination with folk beliefs about spectral lights in disused mine shafts, and the sound of ghostly tappings echoing through abandoned tunnels.

In the story, a tragic past involving the dangerous work that once used to be carried out in local tin mines by children as young as Josh is now, amid tunnels which stretch hundreds of miles below the surface of the sea, is reawakened when Bill Roche, the divorced American CEO of Aminco Mining (Bob Sherman) -- who happens to be holidaying in the region with his daughter Becky (Amy Taylor) -- finds his free time cut short after the discovery of a rich seam of tin ore in the infamous old Stranglers Head mineshaft compels him to investigate on behalf of the company. As he contemplates reopening the mine for business, the local community consider the prospect of more work coming to the region, in an area struggling with declining prosperity.

One family potentially affected by the news are the Holmans: Josh’s older brother Daniel (Peter Lovstrom) considers augmenting the living he and his father (Brian Osborne) have been making as fishermen and volunteers to help clear the rubble which has built up in the old shaft over the intervening decades since work originally stopped. Meanwhile, Josh is reluctantly drafted by his mother (former Hammer star Barbara Ewing) into spending the day with Becky while her dad is shown around the tunnels and shafts of the potentially profitable mine by a local employee of Aminco, accompanied by Daniel, and Jack (Patrick Murray – better known for his character Mickey Pearce in Only Fools and Horses) -- a friend of Daniel’s who’s also looking to find employment as a mine-clearing labourer. But the very suggestion of operations starting up again at the Strangles Head mine brings local ‘eccentric’ Captain Tregellis (Andrew Keir – Dracula Prince of Darkness) out of the woodwork with dire warnings of what might happen if this site “which is owned by the Devil” is ever reactivated.  “Too many souls have been lost in pursuit of its treasures,” old Tregellis warns the bemused American; “there are spirits entangled in its depths. Disturb them at your peril!”

The film plays up a contrasting imagery of light and darkness, as evinced by gorgeous summer coastal views that Bogle and Maasz conjure from Cornish cliff-top pathways and hills which gaze down on dramatic vistas and rocky coastlines, setting this bucolic vision against the dank, dark, clammy tunnel-ways stretching under the sea and now explored by Roche and the mine experts. Above ground is a region of play and exploration for the two child protagonists; below, the memory of a benighted past of industrial exploitation and poverty lies buried but ready to be exposed at any moment with the opening up of the mine for work once again. The link between the two worlds is Josh – who is the only person able to see the ghost of Billy Bray (Philip Martin): a child worker who perished during a mining accident in the early part of the 20^th century, and who now returns with whispered messages in an old Cornish dialect, and haunting visitations that warn of another disaster about to occur in the present. Bogle stages these ghostly sightings with real sensitivity and skill, bringing the blindness and disorientation of the circumstances surrounding the boy’s demise into the picturesque daylight world inhabited by his contemporary equivalent. Billy’s ghost often appears dimly set in a swirling bank of fog that partially envelopes him, creating imagery very reminiscent, in the mise-en-scène it establishes, to John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog.

With the spectral figure of Billy often inhabiting some haunted-looking landscape tableaux, and a memorable sound design of eerie wailing by ‘the Spriggins’ (dead miners whose souls have been trapped in the shafts they perished in), Haunters of the Deep contains plenty of chills to give its young viewers nightmares, but it also draws poignant parallels between the present and the past through Andrew Keir’s character Tregellis. He turns out to be a former mining Captain who started work in the tin mines as a young boy. As Josh and Becky bond over their fascination with Tregellis’s knowledge of the minerals to be found in the region as well as the history of Cornish mining (“the definition of a mine is any hole in the ground with a Cornish man at the bottom of it!”), overcoming the vast differences in their backgrounds while they discover this buried store of local lore (Becky’s is privileged but marred by the divorce of her parents; Josh’s family are poor but extremely close-knit), Josh notices a photograph on the wall of Tregellis’s cottage, depicting the spectral boy whose gravestone he earlier found himself facing, after having been somehow led to it through eerie mists until he arrived at a graveyard adjacent to a cliff-top chapel. It emerges that Billy was Tregellis’s boyhood pal.

The old mine Captain, consumed by survivor guilt for not having been able to rescue Billy, is able to assist in the translation of the dialect still being used by the boy for his whispered warnings, but is unable to see his former best friend now; he remains cut off from his boyhood past by the intervening years of adulthood. It is Josh who must in the end venture into the mine and confront the pain of the past in order to rescue Becky’s father and his own older brother, after a rock fall in one of the tunnels traps the mining party deep underground, just as Billy Bray and the Spriggins predicted. The second half of the film takes us into standard adventure/rescue CFF territory, yet is imbued with a sense of tragedy linked to the past as Josh experiences further encounters with more long-dead ghostly visitors, which become ever more intense as he and Becky (rather irresponsibly encouraged by Tregellis) venture down a tunnel they’ve been led to earlier by Billy which leads to a shaft that might eventually provide an escape route for the trapped men.

 

Haunters of the Deep effortlessly combines the history, folklore and superstitions of the actual region it was filmed in with a typical tacked on uplifting positive CFF message, in which young people are show to overcome their fears and in the process display moral fortitude and a spirit of adventure. Although there are pompous or cowardly minor characters in the film, unusually, there are no real villains portrayed -- with even the CEO of the mining company coming across as likable. And the Spriggins, initially set up almost as demonic spectres, intent on causing mayhem and disaster, are eventually proven to have been merely emissaries from a realm that brings only a warning from the deepest recesses of the landscape’s past about what the future might hold if one does not pay heed to what has been before.

The same potent mixture of folk horror that includes strong Gothic undertones continues with the third and last of the trio of tales included with this set. Out of the Past is yet another story rooted in a corner of history intimately tied to a surviving landscape in which many of the narrative’s events actually took place in some form. This time CFF veteran and TV director John Krish presides over one of the CFTF’s most haunting tales, based on the novel “The Ivy Garland” by John Hoyland. Tom (Gary Halliday) accompanies his best friend Mike Neil (Michael Flowers) and his family -- which is made up of Mike’s mother (Jenny Tarren) and his sister Penny (Emma Ingham) -- on a trip to the Derbyshire village of Stonewell, where the Neils have bought an old cottage in need of renovation as a possible holiday home.

They are intrigued to learn from local museum owner, folklorist and part-time paranormal investigator, Julian Reid (Michael Carter), that the cottage was once a 17^th century plague house, which had a particularly dark role to play in a piece of local lore which has haunted the village of Stonewell for three hundred years: an entire family who once lived inside these unchanged stone walls during the plague years of the 1660s  were buried within its confines, in the back garden, after succumbing to the Black Death, to try to halt the further spread of the disease – a common practice at the time, which is the reason why so many gravestones are scattered all over the villages of the Derbyshire countryside, so close to places that are still used today as residences. However, their deaths occurred soon after the family had taken in an orphaned boy: the son of friends in the neighbouring village of Eaym, who had been secretly sent to live with them by his parents just before they too fell to the infection decimating the population of their own village. The local history books tell that, fearing this lad to be a carrier who now risked condemning Stonewell to the same fate as that which had befallen the quarantined Eaym, the entire village turned on him, and forced him out into the woods, after having first commissioned the local blacksmith to forge an iron collar with a bell attached to it which they forced him to wear in order to warn them if he ever tried to venture back into populated areas of the village at night. When, driven to by starvation and the cold, the boy did finally attempt to come back, the entire community gathered once more as a mob … and murdered him.

Once again, although the legend related above is fictional, the makers of this drama were tapping into real events from the 1660s, when plague did indeed sweep many areas of the country, shaping in the process much of the character and feel of the Derbyshire locations shown throughout this evocative film. The story resonates historically because the village of Eaym is indeed remembered for choosing to isolate itself from the outside world rather than spread the plague elsewhere; and the scenery so evocatively caught on film here by director of photography Ray Orten -- the dry stone walls crisscrossing escarpments between pasture land and the unchanged 17^th century face of much of the village architecture itself (not to mention the numerous old gravestones seen sprouting up in unusual places) – suggests how the past envelops and dominates the present in this region; and this, indeed, is made the central theme of the film. It is as if the collective consciousness of the present population of Stonewell is unknowingly trapped in a time-warp of ancestral guilt over the actions of its forebears, preserved by its local legends for historical posterity.

 

 Again, one boy proves especially attuned to the past’s plaintive call: perhaps because Tom is also a guest of the Neil family, accepted by them as one of their own yet still at the same time an outsider, he shares something in common with the nameless ‘boy from Eyam’ -- who similarly became the guest of a kindly neighbouring family, but paid a terrible price as a result. By far the eeriest of the three stories in this collection, Out of the Past portrays the collision of the past and the present through some extremely creepy dreamlike sequences that director John Krish imbues with a very effectively rendered hallucinogenic quality. Tom’s first experience of the supernatural comes as a strong feeling of foreboding upon his first entering the old cottage rather than an actual ghostly sighting -- but it is conveyed to the viewer through a haunting sound design and a placement of the camera that somehow captures Tom’s palpable sense of dread. The first appearance of the spectral boy himself, seen by Tom gazing through the second storey bedroom window of the guest house that he and the family are staying in during their holiday, is oddly matter-of-fact in its presentation and yet leaves one with a clear sense of the scene’s uncanniness, especially when we are reminded how the boy would have to have been floating several feet off of the ground in order to be able to appear in such a position. The ghostly boy’s visitations are subsequently announced by the tinkling of the bell that legend records having been attached to his neck, leading to a jokey scene where Tom and Mike stay up late to try and see the ghost together, but mistake the ginger pet cat that belongs to the owners of the guest house for the spirit, when they hear the tinkling of a bell from the pet’s collar as it nocturnally prowls the garden.

The film makes good thematic use of the standard motives often used to embellish many traditional ghost antecedents -- both literary and anecdotal – providing them with a reason for their manifestations upon this earthly plane: namely, a need to be remembered by somebody living, and for the site of their death to be discovered so that their remains can be properly laid to rest, thus allowing them to move on.  The problem of memory and the means by which we discover and commemorate historical events, and what the experiences of our ancestors is capable of saying to us about ourselves in the present, are themes which are particularly prominent in many ghost stories, and nowhere are they more evident than in this one. Tom also has vivid and disturbing visions of the experiences that were endured by the Eyam boy during his ordeal, and he feels the full onslaught of the fear and anger the boy inspired in the villagers of three hundred years past. But the film’s most haunting sequence comes during a supernatural experience that, in fact, happens to Penny when the three youngsters spend the day at the cottage by themselves: after falling asleep in a windowsill, the young girl has an out of body experience that seems to take her back three hundred years to witness through semi-blinding light and fog, from the top of the cottage staircase, the small coffin of a child being removed from a room that she and her peers were minutes earlier happily playing in, borne by a cloaked figure wearing one of the age’s characteristic wide-brimmed puritan black hats.

The unbroken line of ancestry connecting the past to the present becomes noticeable in the very faces of the villagers Tom witnesses persecuting the unfortunate boy during his own visions of the 1660s, experienced when the family visit what seems to be a perfectly picturesque hillside to soak up some history,that also turns out to have been the site of one such instance of mob injustice. The faces of the mob are the same as those possessed by the apparently benign figures Tom encounters in present day Stonewell: the local garage mechanic (Roy Holder) looks the same as the blacksmith who made and placed the collar and bell around the lad’s neck and then led the fearful villagers on its terrible hunt; and that mob is itself also made up of a lot of the same faces we see elsewhere in the present day community, such as the mute cleaning lady from the guest house (Hilary Sesta) and the lady at the counter of the local corner shop – a visual metaphor to emphasis the museum curator Mr Reid’s point that the 17^th century atrocity might seem remote to contemporary eyes, but that it was carried out by ‘ordinary good people’ who were turned into savages by fear.

Reid’s interest in the village's past and its vestigial ghost turns out to be the result of his determination to find out if one of his own esteemed ancestors also took part in the villagers’ actions that day all those years ago, or whether he attempted to stop the tragedy, but failed. Ghosts offer us the promise of being able directly to perceive a past which is otherwise liable to become obscured by myth and legend; they bring with the contradiction of their non-corporeal bodies a sense of the past’s resistance to full exposure, while holding out the possibility of our untangling the mysteries of its circumstances and bringing resolution to the problems of the present through remedying and laying to rest the pain and legacy that lingers on as a bequest of an obscured history. Here, that idea is combined with a traditional CFF adventure-type approach to the final act, in which Tom finds himself literally transported through time and trapped in the 17^th century after becoming lost in the very woods that the Plague boy was himself banished to just before his death. He takes the place of the victim, experiencing directly the events which led to his demise and risking re-enacting the same fate while he is being pursued by the same torch-bearing villagers -- unless his two friends and Mr Reid are able to reach him in time.

The synergy that’s formed between that 17^th century hunt and the attempts of the village mob’s present day ancestors to organise themselves into an equivalent search party -- but this time with the objective of saving Tom rather than condemning him -- helps put a positive spin on some dark material. Tom’s literal re-enactment of the past enables him to discover the site of the ghost boy’s remains, and in doing so he also helps to partially lift the shadow of shame which has blanketed the village of Stonewell for centuries; for it transpires that the boy’s death was in part accidental rather than a deliberate act of collective murder. Out of the Past succeeds in taking on a sensitive area of history and turning it into an engaging ghostly adventure that, while ticking all the adventuring boxes demanded of any CFF or CFTF story, delivers some effective, atmospheric imagery which takes place in a compelling pastoral landscape emblematic of the region’s folkloric history.

This collection features all three films on a single DVD disc with re-mastered High Definition transfers. There are no other extras on the disc but a booklet is included with an introduction by film historian Andrew Roberts; an overview of the CFF’s work by film lecturer Robert Shail; screenwriter John Tully’s recollections of working on The Man from Nowhere; a contextualising piece on Haunters from the Deep by associate professor in Film and Television Studies Rachel Moseley; and a short essay by actor Michael Carter on his memories of making Out of the Darkness. In addition the booklet contains full cast lists for each film and production stills. 

As well as the DVD edition, this volume will also be made available from the BFI as an app, which can be downloaded from the Android store and is priced £4.99.