Recent acquisitions from Arrow and Radiance cover a range of genres from Japanese B-movie crimes to traditional ghost stories, lingering traces of German fascism, a Poe adaptation filtered through pandemic anxieties, a pair of Italian genre movies, and Sam Raimi’s masterful neo-noir A Simple Plan (1998).
Four releases from the BFI offer excellent presentations of a pair of features from the 1970s which didn’t leave much of a mark at the time but are well worth rediscovering – Richard Loncraine’s Flame (1975) and Simon Perry’s Eclipse (1977) – and two recent experimental features – Bait (2019), Enys Men (2022) – by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, which provide a hand-crafted glimpse of disruptive social change in a timeless landscape.
Three recent releases from England explore the survival into the modern world of ancient mystical forces, illustrating different aspects of folk horror. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) a pagan entity brings tragedy to a family; in Robert Wynne-Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), villagers in 19th Century Ireland believe a farm girl is a witch: and in Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape (1972), scripted by Nigel Kneale, a research team believe they’ve found the mechanism behind hauntings.
