Chalices at the ready to ward off coronavirus!
The “Ghost Story for Christmas” is a British tradition – associated with the adaptation of Whistle and I’ll Come To You so beloved by haunted generation people. But really it goes back as far as – say – Dickens A Christmas Carol, or the opening of 1898’s Turn of the Screw, which begins with a company on Christmas Eve telling spooky stories. Or even further, to legends that the veil was thin around Christmas-time. Christmas Eve is ancestor’s night.
The Bells of Astercote was screened for children, and is a pleasing little chiller. It’s gentle – but gentle is good, gentle creeps up on you. Like the best folk horror, it never quite explains the nature of the Happening. There is an occurrence: that is enough.
Like everywhere else, we’re doing coronavirus at the moment – I suppose this is why @cultauthor chose it as this week’s watchalong. In this context, Astercote’s depictions of plague houses marked with crosses, closed shops and villages barracaded against outsiders is unsettling, a little too close to home. Like many rural areas, my home has been putting up signs discouraging visitors; it’s hard not to see in this the deeper tension, of pretty jobless places that have nothing to sell but their peace and timelessness, to weekend-residents who are invested in the location more as fantasy than as vibrant, living community. Because this is the narrative, isn’t it? Londoners escaping the lockdown by travelling to second homes spread disease all over the country: that’s just basic epidemiology. But there’s something deeper to it than that, a thinly veiled belief that the city spreading out its tendrils, and its self-satisfied residents seeping into little, untouched pockets of quiet are themselves a kind of infection, a sickness that’s come in from outside. It only takes the spectre of a real plague for the mask to come off.
One of the best things about Astercote is the contemporary politics of the village. Like many pretty, rural places, Charlton Underwood has been “invaded” by outsiders. There’s a tension between the people living on the estate – (RP accents, urban, more wealthy, middle or upper class) – and the people who have always lived there, them and their parents and their parents parents (rural accents, associated with farming and hunting, working class). This helps ground the story in reality, a fantastic choice: it gives the story a bit of extra meat. This is favourable, in contrast to something like Children of the Stones (which I didn’t love), which is disorienting and otherworldly throughout, without such a firm sense of the everyday for the uncanny to interrupt.
Accent is always a key tool for understanding British television and cinema – it’s so unavoidably a marker of class and heritage. As such, I’m interested by the role of Mair and Peter’s dad. The protagonists are children who have moved to the village from London. But their parents are Welsh. You could easily have set Bells of Astercote in a little Welsh village, where the outsiders all had English accents; in fact, Owl Service does just that. A Welsh accent in cinema usually conveys many of the things the Somerset accent does here: rural, working class, politically radical, local, natural, authentic. Perhaps this was simply due to the casting of the children’s father. Perhaps, however, this is why we see the father as a peacemaker – trying to set up community meetings where both “sides” of the village can met and mingle; and why the children are able to act as go-betweens, being accepted by respectable old-village family the Tranters, despite being part of the “new” estate.
Scovell defines a key element of folk horror as “a happening – be it violent or supernatural”, because there are plenty of films in the genre where dangerous locals & rural cults are the source of threat. I generally find these less interesting (and from a Fencraft perspective, we are typically drawn to the supernatural ones, as the presence of the strange in the land is that which we reverence). But Astercote gives you a bit of both, and it’s a fantastic choice. It’s a self-aware story of folklore and rural superstition: it’s not only about the harrowing fate of Astercote resurfacing from the ancient stones, but also about the survival of memory and belief, about how we interact with folklore.
The acting and cinematograpy is a little stiff, but Mair – the modern girl with witches eyes – is well cast, and one of my favourite “otherworldly little girls” of the genre. The music is wonderful.
Let’s talk about Gowcher. Where did poachers go? This figure seems omnipresent in haunted generation lore. He shows up in Doctor Who and Quatermass, and Owl Service and Children of the Stones. The 1970s landscape was rife with strange, slightly odd older men – childlike in some ways, ancient in others – grubby, scruffy, always around, of no fixed abode, perhaps hoarding discarded things, completely impenetrable local accent. Where did this man go in reality, and also in television? I don’t know enough about the era or trope, but I’d love to read someone else write about it. Was this a naive pre-stranger-danger narrative choice which is no longer palatable to modern parents? Did he actually exist? Is he a genre trope, a sort of archetypal stereotype of “simple village folk, part of a bygone age”? Comments welcomed.
Overall, I strongly recommend this one. It’s got an eerie mood – gentle, but compelling; stays with you. And I liked it quite a lot more than its better-known companions in the genre.
For Discussion
- Folklore is not neutral. Who writes it down, how it is interpreted, how it is revived or neglected: these are political questions. Particularly, as is so often the case, when folklore is studied by “experts” who are outside of the culture (be this white Victorians studying the natives of Borneo, or posh Victorians studying the natives of Charlton Underwood. As Roland Hutton explores in Triumph of the Moon, the distortions and patrician attitude is essentially the same). How should we interact with folklore? What are the ethics of producing/consuming/interpreting/enjoying folklore in our lives and practice?
- Charlton Underwood is an uncomfortable mix of “outsiders” and local villagers. What relationship do we have to the place we live?
- How far and how fast can you run? These children do a lot of running.
For the Craft
Worth watching, although not much to magpie from it aside from the symbolism of the chalice and hawk.
Astercote Herald 