‘I’ll have an answer, or I’ll have blood…’
The Wicker Man is obviously the key text when it comes to British folk horror. The countryside is a strange place for outsiders, and The Wicker Man exploited that beautifully and is rightly revered as a masterpiece. Less than two years before Lord Summerisle was terrorising cinema-goers, legendary director Sam Peckinpah dropped Straw Dogs, and in many ways, it’s even nastier and more affecting than anything in the folk horror genre…
American mathematician David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) and his English wife Amy (Susan George) hope to find some solace when returning to the rural village in which Amy grew up. Upon arrival, they find that the locals are increasingly hostile.
Everyone fears the feeling of being an outsider, and David Sumner is about as much of an outsider as it’s possible to be. He’s too academic. Too American. To the hard-drinking, uncompromising villagers, Sumner might as well be an alien. Or an animal. In the end, that’s how they treat him. Not only an utter masterclass in editing, but Straw Dogs also demonstrates Peckinpah’s ability to present violence in a way that is genuinely upsetting without being gratuitous. It helps that Hoffman is great as the fish-out-of-water, and Susan George does well with a controversial character that would never make it to film today. Indeed, Straw Dogs is very much a product of its time, but this grants it an electric transgressiveness that ensures that it remains a powerful slice of brutal folk horror even all these years later.
The real star, however, is the village itself. Darkly shot in shades of grey with chiaroscuro lighting, this place and the people in it are increasingly frightening, culminating in the terrifying third act that left critics incredulous at the time of release. The cast of characters that inhabit the village are grotesque distortions of stock characters. The buffoonish town drunk (Peter Vaughan), the repulsive ratcatcher (Jim Norton), the dangerous village idiot (David Warner) – all of these characters are familiar and yet unfamiliar. An uncanny effect that gives Straw Dogs a charged atmosphere throughout.
It’s odd that Straw Dogs never appears on any lists of greatest horror films because it is undoubtedly a horror film, no matter how celebrated its director, and as a result of that, it works as a wonderful companion piece to The Wicker Man or for any other film that plays on the fear of the other. I loved it.