The Shout (1978): cryptic, constantly rewarding folk horror classic

Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout is the kind of film Criterion made their reputation on. It’s not just that it’s extremely good – although it is – but your appreciation of its good qualities can only be heightened by having it selected as part of this collection. Without this curatorial effort, The Shout is too easily dismissed as a minor work in several great careers. The fact that it’s Skolimowski’s only horror film makes it tempting to leave it out of any consideration of his auteur identity, despite it featuring familiar Skolimowski themes of alienation, thwarted love and societal repression. Its status as the first film produced by Jeremy Thomas’s Recorded Picture Company (although not the first film produced by Thomas himself) also makes it tempting to write this off as a first humble step towards his major international work with directors like Oshima, Cronenberg and Bertolucci.

None of this is really fair. In fact, The Shout now looks like a major contribution to a body of work that’s only become more relevant and commentated-upon in recent years: British folk horror. It begins on a bucolic summer’s day in a small English village where a cricket match is taking place. The players include a young Jim Broadbent as a fielder who has an unfortunate interaction with a cowpat, and the recently-departed Tim Curry in a delectable supporting role. The one to keep your eye on, though, is Alan Bates as the scorekeeper. He starts telling a story, a story which the pre-credits flash-forward has already let us know will end with several deaths. It is a story of ancient magic finding its way into the modern world, of a clash of opposing worldviews that becomes lethal, and quite a lot of other canonical folk-horror themes.

The Shout is based on a story by Robert Graves, which means it’s an overlooked masterpiece in a third man’s canon. Graves is now probably best-known for his Roman novels, if only because they were adapted into a legendary TV series (I, Claudius). He also wrote a shattering memoir of his experiences in World War I, Goodbye to All That, and The White Goddess, a strange but intriguing attempt to uncover a kind of forgotten moon-worship cult that Graves believed underpinned all European pagan traditions. You might think that the latter book would be more relevant to Graves’s folk-horror work, but in fact it’s Goodbye to All That which offers the best key to The Shout. Some of the most devastating moments in that memoir come not when Graves is in the trenches, but when he returns to his native England and is astonished to find people blithely carrying on as if mustard gas, machine guns and tanks simply didn’t exist. The land is the same, but its innocence is lost, transformed into something horrible by what Graves now knows. This is, of course, another classic folk horror theme.

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Many of Graves’s short stories involve a burst of madness interrupting a calm environment, a theme which is often explicitly linked to the trauma he suffered during World War I. The Shout is structurally similar, but its meaning is more ambiguous. When John Hurt’s happily-married musician Anthony is accosted by Bates’s brooding outsider Crossley, who follows him home after asking cryptic questions about whether trees have souls, we’re ready for a good old-fashioned horror story about the cuckoo in the nest. We get that, but we also get a lot of other, stranger material. Crossley claims to have lived in the Australian Outback among the Aborigines for years, and to have mastered Aboriginal magic. In particular, he can produce a scream which kills anyone who hears to it – the Shout of the title.

The temptation is to read this as a post-colonial theme, the traditions displaced by the Empire coming back home to haunt the old colonisers. This is not a reading the film rejects, but it doesn’t push it either. Crossley seems to be driven less by a desire for justice against white supremacist power structures and more by a desire to have sex with Anthony’s wife, and perhaps Anthony too. (This is never explicit, but during the scene where Crossley leans over Anthony, who is terrified and pretending to sleep, and whispers in his ear I was unavoidably reminded of Hurt’s late-life recounting of the sexual abuse he suffered at school; I imagine Hurt was reminded of it too) Aboriginal traditions are closely-guarded, and maybe there is a Nation somewhere that practices the grisly rituals Crossley claims to have engaged in. Equally, maybe there isn’t, and he’s just a psychopath appropriating a suitably distant culture to add weight to his threats. There are certainly hints of this, most chillingly when he tells a grisly story about a self-mutilating Aboriginal shaman, then later reveals scars that exactly match his story on his own stomach. Was this an autobiographical tale? Did the shaman even exist? As Crossley says to Curry’s character at the very start of the film, “It’s always the same story, but I change the sequence of events… I like to keep it alive.”

And yet, just as you’re prepared to dismiss him as a fantasist, Crossley issues his Shout. This does not happen at the climax of the film, as you might expect – Skolimowski has something even stranger saved up for that – but it is an astonishing moment, and one which allows us to see the engine behind the film’s power. This is, simply, one of the all-time great sound design movies. In adapting Graves’s 1927 story, Skolimowski makes Anthony a representative of an English tradition that didn’t exist when it was written: early electronic music. Hurt plays a one-man BBC Radiophonic Workshop here, making avant-garde compositions by running the sound of marbles, cigarettes and wasps in jars through delay and chorus devices. Crossley disdains his work, perhaps because its machine-made nature offends his own faith in supernatural sound. Yet Skolimowski and sound editor Alan Bell construct a middle ground between the two men.

With a minimal electronic score from Genesis members Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford, The Shout adds unease to its quieter scenes with natural sounds – a bird call, church bells – that are repeated just slightly more than would be the case in actual nature. It gives the sense that Anthony’s experimental sound collages have gotten out into the wild, an impression Skolimowski reinforces when Susannah York briefly adopts the pose of one of the Francis Bacon reproductions he’s pinned up in his studio for inspiration (and Skolimowski’s film, too, briefly adopts Bacon’s black-and-white palette). Elsewhere, the director is firmly on the devil’s side. At one point, a narratively-important death is revealed by the camera briefly passing over a corpse, not because Skolimowski is embarrassed by the story’s horror content, but because he wants to take you inside Crossley’s Olympian disdain for the little, non-magical folk. And when that Shout comes, its audio ingredients include a rocket launch, the roar of Niagara Falls… and Skolimowski’s own voice.

A great film that should be considered alongside Performance and The Wicker Man in the canon of cryptic, constantly rewarding 1970s British cult cinema, The Shout also comes with a good selection of extras. There are interviews both archival and new with Skolimowski, and a new one with Jeremy Thomas, plus a very good booklet essay by Leo Goldsmith and a 1977 on-set featurette. There are also subtitles for the Deaf and hard-of-hearing; you may not need them at the start of the film, but you definitely will by the end.

GRAHAM’S ARCHIVE ~ THE SHOUT