Blu-ray: The Outcasts

This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.

The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Sparks fly up from the fire’s ruddy glow as tales are told of Scarf Michael, a Boogeyman with a cloak woven from the dead’s stolen shadows. Stray from the hearth at night and dislocating blue mist awaits, while in rare sunlight the horse-borne men who hold sway could be in a Western.

Celebration of a marriage brokered by sly matchmaker Myles (Cyril Cusack) brings sexual cavorting by Maura’s cruel sisters and pagan straw man musicians, while eerie reflections of Scarf Michael (Mick Lally) in rivers and mirrors precede his appearance to Maura in a woodland clearing. In a film of beautiful practical and in camera effects, light shimmers with his approach and he pulls down a piece of the moon, though he’s more or less a man, left to drown and bursting to the surface with “the power they believed I had”. Cusack compared Wynne-Simmons’ ingenuity to Orson Welles, and his similar sense of cinema as sleight of hand makes the film itself a form of folk art.

When Michael’s magic sexually humiliates the sisters and seemingly curses the village, they lead a mob to drown Maura, like The Blood on Satan’s Claw’s vicious girls, till Michael spirits her away. “I feel wide open, like a window,” she says before black mountains sweep towards her bearing power, in imagery echoing down to Mark Jenkin’s Cornish folk horror Enys Men (2022). She is outcast into a mythic, dreamer’s realm, scratching at windows, begging for entry, invisible now.

Wynne-Simmons’ only feature was also reputedly the first Irish-financed film since The Dawn 50 years before, which Cusack also acted in (fledgling Channel 4 chipped in with presales cash when a snowstorm buried the set). The director recalls in a new interview that he found Ireland more fertile for his mystical sensibility than London’s prosaic film industry. Stephen Cooney’s strong score of fiddles, autoharp and electronic eeriness points to the director’s own move into composing soon after. His 1964 Brighton-set short The Fugitive, included as an extra here, already has a sense of violent exiles in the town’s Mods and Rockers-roamed backstreets, and with no dialogue track, a hand-written intertitle adds to its own crafted, flickering weirdness. Folklore historian Dr Diane A Rogers’ excellent commentary previews her revealing interview with Wynne-Simmons for a forthcoming folk horror book, setting this recovered treasure in further context. The fine Gaelic folk horror of All You Need is Death (2023) and the forthcoming Fréwaka show its once broken lineage lives on.

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