Calibre – New Folk Horror?

Calibre is a brilliant Scottish thriller released in 2018 and directed and written by Matt Palmer, who has previously made two short horror films, The Gas Man (2014) and Island (2007). The film features two late-twenty-something men, Vaughn (Jack Lowden) and Marcus (Martin McCann) who head from Edinburgh up into the Highlands to hunt, an activity Vaughn is less than enthusiastic about. They arrive at the Highland village of Culcarran (filmed on location in Leadhills and Beatock in South Lanarkshire) and head straight out for a raucous night at the local pub, replete with enticing local girls. Vaughn, who has a pregnant fiancée, resists temptation and only talks with Iona (Kate Bracken), but Marcus does rather more with the clearly dangerous Kara (Kitty Lovett). Despite hangovers, both men head off the next morning to hunt deer, as planned, but they’re involved in a terrible accident and almost immediately lose control of the spiraling, out-of-control consequences.

Check out the trailer for Calibre here:

It may sound exaggerated, but in this case it happens to be true: everything about Calibre is perfect—the acting, writing, directing, cinematography, and pacing. The film’s plot is relatively simple and depends all the more on its stellar cast, and the stunning, alternately lush and bleak, Highlands landscape (not only Leadhills and Beatock but also Wanlockhead in Dumfries and Galloway, as well as Beecraigs Country Park in West Lothian). Nothing is wasted in the tight and tense plot, and the ending is both inevitable and unbearably painful.

In many ways, Calibre is akin to films like Shallow Grave (1994), A Simple Plan (1998) and, in the horror genre, I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997), in which characters find themselves caught up in a whole stream of unforeseen consequences after they stumble inadvertently into something criminal.  The plots of these films are, well, unplotted—that’s kind of the point—as events spool out without the characters being able to foresee or control them. If we read Calibre as this kind of film, the drama centers on Vaughn and Marcus and their relationship—their desire to protect each other and their possible ultimate betrayal of each other.

Part of the brilliance of Calibre, though, is that it exists at the same time as another kind of film. Indeed, it exists as two kinds of film at the same time, playing on the tension between them.

In fact I argue that Calibre is also an instance of a subgenre of horror film that is having an unambiguous resurgence right now, the folk horror film.[i]

Calibre’s intersections with the folk horror plot generally–and 1973’s The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy) more specifically—are numerous.

The contrast between the Edinburgh lads and the locals of Culcarran, where they stay, and Dumrain, where they visit briefly, is stark. The contrast is heightened by the fact that Marcus works in “finance and investment”—a long way from the traditional occupations of those who live in Highland villages. There are long shots of the car traveling through the Highlands that aren’t unlike the opening long shots of the ill-fated flight of Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) to the island of Summerisle, just off the Scottish Highlands.

Early in Calibre, there is the obligatory pub scene, in which Marcus and Vaughn wander into a room full of hostile-seeming locals, a repeated trope in folk horror. Two local girls seem very anxious to get to know the visitors—and Iona just happens to be the innkeeper’s daughter, just like Willow (Britt Ekland) in The Wicker Man. Iona seems, moreover, to be trying quite hard to seduce Vaughn just as Willow did Howie in The Wicker Man.

Just as in Wicker Man’s Summerisle, moreover, where the life-sustaining crops have catastrophically failed, times are very hard in the Highlands villages of Culcarran and Drumrain, something that two powerful local men, Logan (Tony Curran) and his cousin Alastair (Cal MacAninch), refer to frequently. As Logan says of Drumrain (and the same is true of Culcarran), “It’s turning into a ghost village. Just dying slowly over time. These kind of villages, they, well, they exist on a knife’s edge.” The awareness of all the local men that their villages are “dying” prompts the viewer to wonder what, exactly, they’d do to save their community and their traditions.

That, of course, is the central question of The Wicker Man, and the climax of the film shows exactly how far the inhabitants of Summerisle will go to save their island—exactly as far as sacrificing a virgin at the annual May Day celebration. It just so happens that Vaughn and Marcus arrive in Culcarran on the weekend of the annual Alban Eiler festival—called in the film a solstice celebration that marks the end of the hunting season (though actually, Alban Eiler celebrates the spring equinox not the solstice). Reading Calibre as folk horror, the viewer starts to wonder if Culcarran’s celebration of Alban Eiler doesn’t involve more than “a bonfire and a piss-up” and if Vaughn and Marcus’s arrival in the village on this weekend isn’t exactly accidental.

In fact, reading Calibre as folk horror potentially turns everything that seems to be accident or coincidental in the film into, possibly, part of some larger plot. Are the locals engineering things? Are Vaughn and Marcus caught up in some larger design, specifically some sacrifice that will help keep these Highland villages alive?

One thing that strikingly supports this reading is that the locals already seem uncannily to know about Marcus and Vaughn. The first thing Logan says to Vaughn in the pub is “I hear you’re stalking.” And, when the two go to the northern village of Drumrain later, the shop owner says, “Culcarran’s south. What are you doing up here?”—making it clear that everyone in the region knows exactly who Vaughn and Marcus are and why they’re here. This prior knowledge may be due to the fact that, as Marcus told Logan in the pub, their hunting trip is “all cleared with Lord Griffin,” a man we never meet but who hangs over the narrative as a possible analogue to Lord Summerisle, having a possible hand in what transpires.

There are other ways in which Calibre connects to the folk horror tradition, but I’ll end with the fact that, however you read the film, Calibre ends with a blood sacrifice (and with the threat of another one looming in the future). As Logan’s brother Brian (Ian Pirie) says, “This can only be paid for in blood.” Two men from Edinburgh, where transactions are financial, legal, abstract, meet a “primitive” rural community where things are paid for with bodies, in blood, a staple of the folk horror tradition.

What I am still puzzling out about this film is exactly how much it is like The Wicker Man. Robin Hardy famously said that the plot of his film demonstrated that “the hunter becomes the hunted.” Howie went to Summerisle looking for a missing girl and discovered that he was the prey all along. To what extent are Vaughn and Marcus trapped not in a set of completely accidental and unforeseen circumstances but, in fact, in a carefully designed plan. They went to Highlands to hunt, but are they the hunted? They are featured frequently in a mis-en-scène that includes stags heads as trophies on the wall. The pub is called the Stag’s Head. The hunting business is demonstrably dying in the region ever since, as Logan tells Vaughn and Marcus, a country club opened up 50 miles away. Is another kind of “game” now necessary now to keep village life alive? In short, was the sacrifice at the end of Calibre planned all along? That’s something that I’m definitely going to keep thinking about.

Calibre is streaming on Netflix.

Notes

[i] I’ve only found one article that suggests Calibre may be folk horror –a brief review in the Manchester Journal.

Related: Other articles on folk horror: Hereditary as folk horror; Eden Lake as folk horror; the resurgence of folk horror; folk horror and grief in The Other Side of the Door and Wake Wood.