Is this one of the great less­er-known loca­tion-based horrors?

The coun­try­side was a bizarre place by the time British hor­ror cin­e­ma entered the 1970s. Its soil had cer­tain­ly soured. In the decade’s hor­ror films, rur­al realms increas­ing­ly became the back­drop for some of its most unnerv­ing nar­ra­tives, whether the cursed, mud­dy fields of The Blood on Satan’s Claw, the crop-sac­ri­fices of The Wick­er Man or the Home Coun­ties can­ni­bal­ism of Fright­mare.

Though all effec­tive, British cin­e­ma was most­ly obsessed with its own land­scapes, so it’s unsur­pris­ing to find Robert Fuest’s cult 1970 film, And Soon the Dark­ness, to be of a refresh­ing­ly dif­fer­ent flavour; still find­ing men­ace in the rur­al idylls but instead explor­ing the hazy, sum­mery vis­tas of France rather than fields in England.

Fuest’s film has an unusu­al nar­ra­tive fram­ing, per­form­ing a cun­ning sleight-of-hand from the off thanks to its scriptwrit­ers Ter­ry Nation and Bri­an Clemens. We open on what feels very much like a com­ing-of-age roman­tic teen dra­ma, with two nurs­ing stu­dents, Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), on a cycling hol­i­day across the French coun­try­side. Stop­ping in a pop­u­lat­ed area, they enjoy the hos­pi­tal­i­ty and the pres­ence of poten­tial men though Jane is keen to stick rigid­ly to the cycling rather than enjoy a hol­i­day dal­liance. Cathy, on the oth­er hand, wants to stray from the itin­er­ary and, on an emp­ty stretch of road, insists on stop­ping in a for­est for a rest, hop­ing that a man (József Sán­dor Elès) from the pre­vi­ous town with a moped may fol­low out of curiosity.

Leav­ing Cathy to sun­bath after a heat­ed argu­ment, Jane cycles on to the next town but soon becomes wor­ried when Cathy doesn’t appear. Cycling back, Cathy is nowhere to be found and no-one in the pre­vi­ous town has seen her either. The locals of the road are hid­ing some­thing, speak­ing in French about the pre­vi­ous rape and mur­der of anoth­er girl on the same stretch some years before. Jane’s curios­i­ty leads her in search of her miss­ing friend, unsure as to who she can trust of the few locals she comes across. Is one of them a murderer?

The film works due to its detailed sense of space and map­ping. The route tak­en by the two pro­tag­o­nists is sketched bril­liant­ly, filmed delib­er­ate­ly as an almost impos­si­bly straight stretch of road which the view­er then maps by asso­ci­a­tion; its ends being book­end­ed ini­tial­ly by the safe pres­ence of oth­er peo­ple and the Gen­darme (John Net­tle­ton) while its mid­dle con­tains the increas­ing­ly omi­nous for­est where Cathy dis­ap­peared. This for­est slow­ly accu­mu­lates hor­ror as we get clos­er to it on each trip, for the road is tak­en as end­less, even if clear lat­er on to be not all that far from pock­ets of civil­i­sa­tion. But the psy­chol­o­gy is per­fect­ly ren­dered, where a pic­turesque rur­al place is grad­u­al­ly tainted.

With this land­scape fill­ing the screen, it’s sur­pris­ing to find Fuest com­ple­ment­ing it with extreme close-ups. Jane’s face reg­u­lar­ly fills the screen, plac­ing the view­er tense­ly with­in her per­cep­tion, shar­ing her lack of vision for what­ev­er is poten­tial­ly near­by. There could be any­thing lurk­ing out of shot and we are forced to share her naïve gaze. For a hor­ror film of this peri­od, it relies on insin­u­a­tion rather than direct assault upon the viewer.

It’s debat­able whether any­thing hor­rif­ic actu­al­ly hap­pens at all for the major­i­ty of the film, only gain­ing trac­tion and reveal­ing most of its vil­lainy towards its con­clu­sion. Until then, all of the actions of the men in par­tic­u­lar are cloud­ed with uncer­tain­ty and sus­pi­cion but noth­ing more; no one is off the hook in regards to what has hap­pened pre­cise­ly because we don’t know what has hap­pened in the first place. Ambi­gu­i­ty is weaponised to its fullest.

The switch in tone that the direc­tor achieves is sim­i­lar to that in Robin Hardy’s The Wick­er Man, though it’s cer­tain­ly more grad­ual. It feels as if we wit­ness a grow­ing real­i­sa­tion of hor­ror in real-time. What Nation and Clements achieve in their script is two-fold; a fear of the unknown, matched by the grow­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion between place and peo­ple. With­out reveal­ing here exact­ly what hap­pens to Cathy, the rev­e­la­tion is explic­it­ly con­nect­ed to place and power.

Iso­la­tion has con­trived with psy­chosis to cre­ate a tick­ing time-bomb lying in wait on the coun­try road. There was some­thing about hor­ror in this peri­od that res­onat­ed with such ally­ing of place and peo­ple, con­coct­ing some great plot or hid­ing some secret in almost plain sight. The spaces of these peo­ple are decrepit, the lone­ly home and gar­den of one par­tic­u­lar char­ac­ter in the French coun­try­side fore­shad­ow­ing the des­ti­tute, rub­bish-strewn spaces of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Mas­sacre.

The decade assumed that the world out­side of the cos­mopoli­tan was a realm stalked by mur­der­ers and mad­man, and the mere act of being there, espe­cial­ly for lone women, was naivety incar­nate. It’s here where the tropes of the fol­low­ing decade’s more clichéd hor­ror cin­e­ma were arguably born.

If this sense of malev­o­lent coun­try­side was exag­ger­at­ed, it cer­tain­ly pro­duced great, inno­v­a­tive hor­ror cin­e­ma. It accounts for the genre’s pro­gres­sion from spooky cas­tles and coun­try manors to some­thing more tan­gi­ble; some­thing dis­turbing­ly banal and tak­en for grant­ed, places we all on some lev­el recog­nise but re-mythol­o­gised into vis­cer­al, hor­rif­ic lands. Fuest’s film, with its unfa­mil­iar land­scape, cer­tain­ly feels dif­fer­ent to its peers and has a mature under­stand­ing of how a tense topog­ra­phy could aid even a dra­ma as sim­ple as fol­low­ing a lost friend alone on the road.

And Soon the Dark­ness achieves its malev­o­lence by dwelling on the recog­nis­able, taint­ing spaces that seem nor­mal, as all real crime does. Who knew that a sun­ny hol­i­day in the coun­try­side could house such black dread?

A brand new 4K mas­ter of And Soon the Dark­ness is released in the US on 15 Octo­ber cour­tesy of Kino Lorber.