And Then There Were None...
COI films and more in the 70s
I am a child of the 70s, and I’m grateful that I am. My interest in horror and the macabre started early, and that era had a lot to do with it. Somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, I encountered a series of disturbing pop-cultural artefacts that stayed with me and still inform my writing and filmmaking today.
One of my favourite causes of mild trauma was the COI film. These were government-made public information films, often aimed at children, warning them away from danger. The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water is one a lot of people remember. Designed to stop children playing near unsafe bodies of water, it has cropped up several times as an influence on both my writing and my filmmaking, including my short film The Devil’s Harvest. I also wrote a short story about a boy who drowns in flooded chalk pits on the edge of Worth, my cursed fictional new town, where I’ve set a growing number of interlinked macabre stories over the years. I’ll upload some of them here soon, in case anyone wants some off-putting bedtime reading.
The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water is narrated by the excellent Donald Pleasence, and personifies death by water as a hungry ghost. In the 70s, on TV, I also had the pleasure of watching Pleasence’s head being eaten by a white cell after he was miniaturised and injected into the President’s bloodstream in Fantastic Voyage. Another film that still inspires me.
A film that regularly appeared on TV and had me obsessed with telekinesis for years was The Medusa Touch, with its delightfully disturbing ending. Richard Burton plays a gifted but traumatised psychic determined to make the world pay. As he says: “I am the man with the power to create catastrophe!”
I’m not sure how well it holds up today (I need to revisit) but there’s a irrational dreamlike quality to these films in my memory. I can add to it TV series, films and books such as Sapphire & Steel, Children of the Stones, The Omen, Glitterball, the Ruth Manning Saunders folk tale compilations, The Hammer House of Horror TV Series (particularly The House that Bled to Death) and more…Perhaps because my brain wasn’t fully formed and the lines between fiction and reality were much more blurry (to be honest, not much has changed) is the reason drama from the time unsettles, but i don’t think so. A number of writers (Mark Fisher, for one) have written about the hauntological aspects of the UK in the 1970s when the failed project of “Britain” left us with nowhere to go but inward and backwards. When I write or make films I’m always trying to get back to that feeling - and it’s one that resonates now (it’s no coincidence that Backrooms and Obsession are storming the box office).
The film that really got me was Apaches (1977). I was at home ill with the mumps aged seven and my mum had left me alone in front of the TV. As it was a school day they were showing school programmes and one of them was the notorious Apaches. This half hour film follows six children who decide to play ‘Apaches’ on a farm and every one of them comes to a grisly death as a result. The purpose of the film (like all the COI films) was to warn children of dangers. What it managed to do instead is make the world a sinister and malevolent place where death - like Pleasence’s Lonely Water apparition - takes an active interest in finishing off kids in horrible ways. If you were to make an adult horror today and just spent the time killing off kids for no real plot reason you’d never get a certificate. But in the 70s it was the government making those films.
Out of the deaths shown in the film, the two that stand out to me are the young girl who drinks poison (we hear her death screams from her bedroom at night) and the boy who - unbelievably - drowns in slurry. This imagery imprinted itself indelibly on my young brain and it wasn’t long after I started writing weird stories. Adults worry about children being damaged by disturbing literature or films but I think that’s a disservice to children. Children think about death all the time - they are small, vulnerable, and don’t understand how the world works. And the world is dangerous. Or maybe I was just one of those kids. Or maybe Apaches did warp my brain….
Here’s the film. Someone needs to do a 4K restoration.
If you want to help me bring my macabre visions to life, I’m currently finishing my first feature, Genesis, which is directly inspired by the mood of these films. We only have 2 days left to shoot and any donations will help us. The COI films are uniquely British. I strongly believe that there is a deep and valuable irrational and macabre current that runs through British culture and it needs to be kept alive. Help us do our little bit and visit the crowdfunder here.
If you wan to read a bit deeper into my interest in the uncanny, you can take a look at an article I wrote as a deep dive examining Egger’s The Witch through a Freudian lens (for practical purposes):
