Death in the Countryside: The British Pastoral Horrors of The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General
There is a heavy fog upon the moor as the sun rises -- in the distance, the dark and ominous treeline of the forest looms menacingly, much like a boundary between two worlds: the known and the unknown. Ancient hamlets serve as islands in the vast ocean of agrarian emptiness. And though these communes may serve as bastions of civilization in an otherwise desolate countryside, the insular ways of the townsfolk and the derision with which they leer at outsiders inform us that though these villagers may be Englishmen, there is something, all together, wicked about them. The “pastoral horror film,” perhaps, bears fewer traits, in common with films such as Psycho (1960) or Halloween (1978) than they do with the picturesque American Westerns of John Ford. “Landscape is absolutely crucial to American genres like the western and the road movie, and even informs fantastical styles such as science-fiction and horror...[b]ut English landscape is too often taken for granted...concerned with fr