A Slice of Fried Gold – The Resurgence of British Horror Cinema
Written by Luke Flood
In 2011 I saw Ben Wheatley’s social realist drama-cum-folk horror, Kill List, at the fantastic Quad cinema in Derby. I left the screening wide eyed and genuinely shaken. Kill List, like so much great international horror, is a film that is representative of the culture and society it was produced in, in form as well as in theme. Its first half borrows from the likes of Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, depicting an immensely believable family working through modern familial strife. The dialogue and performances are naturalistic and engrossing, the framing tight and dry. An underlying edge of foreboding and even dread is realized in the film’s second half, in methods I would hate to spoil here. Wheatley and co-screenwriter Amy Jump channel a myriad of British horror films of the past. The engrained paranoia and distrust that exists between urban and rural society that is so central to The Wickerman (1973) and hinted at more subtley in An American Werewolf in London (1981) is key to the film’s climax, as is the more overt fear of religion and the occult that Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) shocked the world with 50 years ago.
Looking back a decade on, Kill List seems to represent a starting pistol for British filmmakers. In the years since we have seen a re-emergence of horror cinema in this country that harkens back to these giddy heydays of the 70’s and 80’s and has lit a spark of ghoulish creativity, specifically in our young and up and coming film makers. Horror has become an effective calling card, the creativity and lavishness of the genre allowing young directors to get noticed in a world where the entire middle class has the capacity and tools to make films sitting in their jean pocket.
In 2016, Babak Anvari released his debut feature, Under the Shadow. The film is a co-production between Qatar, Jordan and the UK and is set entirely in Tehran, but watching it in the UK in 2021 it is striking how politically relevant the film feels. Using the very real horror of political violence and war to tell a story of grief and loss, the film should be required viewing for any Daily Mail reader who feels there is no place for asylum seekers in contemporary Britain. It uses fictional horror to present us with an extremely non-fictional reality, and is one of the most empathetic horror films I’ve seen in recent years.
Similarly, His House (2020) uses the trappings of the haunted house genre (see Robert Wise’s 1963 work The Haunting for Britain’s most visceral take on the concept) to tell a timely and socially relevant story about the immigrant experience in England. Another feature debut, the film melds the direct and obvious horror of experiencing a supernatural presence in one’s home with the no less affecting fear of being thrown into a society you don’t yet understand and doesn’t want to understand you. It’s a bleak experience, but one that doesn’t forget that it has its roots in genre cinema, providing some classic jump scares while attempting to communicate an honest and painfully real experience to its audience.
2020 brought a pandemic that affected every person, every culture, every society, every entertainment medium. The impact on cinema was immense, and I for one felt that the last thing I wanted to do was watch a film or read a book or play a video game that was specifically about this pandemic. I wanted to use those things to escape and avoid it. However, Rob Savage’s Host (2020) managed to correct me. While very deliberately and intelligently not about a pandemic, the film uses the language of the pandemic – a Zoom call – to tell a genuinely creepy story that plays with the audience’s imagination. While I stated above that great horror is representative of its culture, Host manages to go a step further, using an aspect of hyper contemporary society that I didn’t think I was ready to see in entertainment media. It’s a fantastic example of a film being of its time without trying to lecture or philosophise about that time.
As 2021 draws to a close, it seems to me that the future of horror both in Britain and internationally is fantastically female. In Australia Jennifer Kent’s 2014 hit The Babadook (another debut) brought worldwide attention, with a titular character so striking that it was met with the greatest acclaim there is: becoming a meme. Outside of the internet jokes and Halloween costumes, the film gives us a story that is truly bold, unafraid to address themes of grief, isolation, and the often unspoken challenges of motherhood. In France, Julia Ducornau’s Raw (2016) (yep, another debut) delivered a euphoric, utterly feminine take on the cannibal genre, and is personally one of my favourite films ever made.
Meanwhile here in Britain, Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019) (…her debut!) is one of the most distinctly British horror films I can recall seeing. It manages to present the bleak melancholy and outright uncanny nature of the British seaside town in a way I’ve never seen before. As so much great cinema does, it portrays an idea and a feeling that it would be impossible to put into words. Picturesque and airy, yet grey and old fashioned, it shows the British coastal town like a ship in a bottle, an untouchable and fragile relic. Like The Devils, The Wickerman, The Exoricst and so many others, it also finds its story and its parables in the realm of the religious. It takes the literal concepts of religion and reveals the inherit fear that exists within them: angels, demons, voices from an unreachable realm, Saint Maud draws a clever link between the spooky tales we tell to amuse ourselves and the allegorical tales we use to control ourselves. It also continues a long tradition of the best horror cinema in that it features a startling lead performance, Morfydd Clark switching from tragic to terrifying seemingly on a whim.
Even more recently, Prano Bailey-Bond’s (debut!!) Censor (2021) gave us a self-reflective horror film set in the era of the video nasty scare. The 1980s Britishness almost seeps through the lens: smoke-stained wallpaper, enormously framed spectacles, awkward silences in beige offices, the sound of videotape rewinding, casual sexism. I felt transported to my childhood, the sense of a specific time and place was so stark. It’s amazing to think that a debut filmmaker could create something so thoroughly, believably specific, and it is heartening to know that the future of British horror cinema is being lead by such creative and diverse minds.
