We Don't Go Back #29: Ring, Ring 2, Ring 0 (1998-2000)

As different as our cultures are, I think Japan and Britain are more similar than we sometimes realise.

We're both island nations that used to have empires. We have populations centred around reasonably large cities and one massive sprawl that carries with it its own centre of gravity. And both countries have a rural landscape that is very much lived-in. People have lived there and have worked that land for thousands of years. There isn't a place that hasn't been seen by human eyes. There isn't a patch of land that hasn't been walked by human feet. And while each country has its own historical mainstream religion, in the the rural places folklore, paganisms and heresies persist.

The landscape is rich in psychic leavings exactly because it has never really been uninhabited. The distance of the countryside is temporal, a distance of belief, of feeling. This is the soil in which folk horror grows, wild as berries.

A land with layers of history is a land full of obsolete technologies.

I remember the old Bush radios, the transistors and ancient bits of circuitry that mouldered in my Dad's garage. The weird archaeology of it, the way that the ZX Spectrum we had when I was a kid is even more archaic now than these things were when I was young. All these things have ghosts.

In 70s Britain, that combination of technology and haunting gave us The Stone Tape. In 90s Japan, the same impulses produced Ring.

We Don't Go Back #28: Psychomania (1973)

Psychomania is not, by most usual metrics, a good film. Nonetheless, Psychomania is terrific.

We Don't Go Back #27: Moondial (1988)

I was 12 when Moondial aired. It was shown on Wednesday evenings, five minutes past five, in February, just before it got dark.

It was appointment TV for me, before I even knew what that meant. I saw the first episode because it was what happened to be on, and made sure I didn't miss another.

The second time I watched Moondial was in these last school holidays, and I had decided that I was going to put the first episode on with my kids watching. Because no critic of kids' TV is as exacting as a kid. If they didn't like it, I thought, I'd watch it later myself, or maybe I wouldn't bother, because I've already done three children's serials and why do a fourth if it's not much cop?

We Don't Go Back #26: Epiphany

Whistle and I'll Come to You (1968);
The Stalls of Barchester (1971);
A Warning to the Curious (1972);
Lost Hearts (1973);
The Treasure of Abbot Thomas (1974);
The Ash Tree (1975);
A View From a Hill (2005)¹

How do you write about something so comprehensively signified, so seen as a touchstone for British television drama as a whole and the subgenre of folk horror in particular? What can you add?

I suppose I'll tend to the personal in this, as I often do. It's the Feast of Epiphany, Twelfth Night has passed. It is time to take down the trappings of Christmas.

We Don't Go Back – Guest Post: The Company of Wolves (1984)

A guest post, this time on Angela Carter's The Company of Wolves. It's by Monique Lacoste, who I've known for maybe 13 years, although the last time we saw each other in person was when she very kindly let me stay at her home, then in Los Angeles, in 2005.

Monique is one of the smartest, funniest, and most courageous people I know. She describes herself a media scholar and student botherer who loves movies and cultural criticism. Monique says that she has been known to turn into a werewolf when provoked.

Monique has taken her brief much more seriously than I usually do (this is the first film article I've posted that has a proper bibliography!) and there's some real meat here.

The complexities of structure in The Company of Wolves allow for the navigation of a landscape of dreams, and the film's isolated geography, with a sense of combined proximity and distance so like the British countryside, lies in the territory of an adolescent imagination. In many ways it's a companion to Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, and several scenes are direct callbacks to that strange, awkward little film.

Enough of me. Today we're here for Monique.

We Don't Go Back #25: Red Shift (1978)

Of the last four subjects in the We Don't Go Back project, one was great but honestly pretty tough to write about, one was disappointing, one was unpleasant in all the bad ways, and one was just godawful.

I have a guest post in hand (and a really magnificent one at that), but that'll come on Monday, because I kind of felt funny about kicking off 2017 with someone else's writing. What I really needed to get us up and running again for a new year was a film that's just good, and which gives me something to write about. Thank the heavens for Red Shift.

Deciduous

It is uncontroversial among many people in the West that this last year finished has been in some way bad; in fact, all that happened was that the horrors of the world finally began to visit themselves on us in a mediated, creeping way, and in our arrogance we realised for once that we were going to have experienced a year that was, if not quite as terrible as most recent years experienced by people elsewhere, more on a par. It is sad that a great number of beloved public figures have died; it is appalling that our certainties that fascism would never return, let alone be accepted as part of mainstream discourse, have been proven so very complacent. 2016's electoral catastrophes in Britain and the USA are still far from genocides and crusades, but for the first time since 2001, we suspect that these things might come to our doorstep.

2016 was the year that it came to us that we had the same problems as everyone else, on a level beyond the purely intellectual. Inasmuch as a year is a period of time to which we ascribe a significance and a limit, 2016 was for most people in the world, a year like any other. All that happened to us was that we finally got to share some of it.

For me, the disappointments, failures and heartbreaks of 2015 continued into the early months of 2016. But by April, it began to turn around. I started to succeed again. Modestly, perhaps, perhaps on penalties, but a win in the penalty shoot-out is no less valid a victory. I won, this year gone. I won.

My wish for you, friend, and if you're reading this far, I'll count you a friend whether I know you or not, is that you will achieve your own victory in 2017.

Win.