Doomwatch (1972) is infrequently cited in the burgeoning scholarly and popular conversations on folk horror, and yet I would argue that it is in fact a key text.[i] Its hybrid generic form manifests both what is and what is not folk horror; it exemplifies folk horror, in other words, both positively and negatively. Indeed, the Doomwatch’s shift toward the end is a brilliant illustration of how the trajectory of the folk horror plot can be negated.
The 1972 Doomwatch (called Island of the Ghouls in the US, emphasizing its ‘horror’) was directed by Peter Sasdy, who also directed 1972’s The Stone Tape (written by Nigel Kneale), a staple of the folk horror canon. The screenplay was written by Clive Exton, and the film was produced by Tigon British Film Productions, the company behind such folk horror classics as Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). Doomwatch is based on the BBC series of the same name, which ran between 1970 and 1972. Both film and TV series feature a government agency called the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, dedicated to tracking down unethical and dangerous scientific research.
Check out the highly entertaining trailer for Doomwatch:
The 1972 film features some regulars from the TV series—notably John Paul as Dr. Spencer Quist and Jean Trend as Dr. Fay Chantry, characters who, for the most part, stay in the London lab. The principals in the film, those who venture to the unsettling island of Balfe off the coast of Cornwall, are new to the Doomwatch world—Dr. Del Shaw (Ian Bannen) and Victoria Brown (Judy Gleeson).
Balfe’s hostile locals
The plot sees Dr. Shaw heading off to Balfe to find out whether an oil spill has disrupted the ecosystem on the island. The fish he sends back to the lab, however, evince an unnatural growth. With the lab in London instructing him to collect more samples, Shaw is also contending with the strange and unaccountably hostile locals on Balfe, who, with the exception of the schoolteacher, Victoria Brown, want nothing to do with him and, indeed, do everything they can to get him off the island. As Shaw continues investigating, aided by Victoria, it becomes apparent that a mysterious disease afflicts the islanders; their hostility masks a deep shame about this illness. While they attribute it to inbreeding and a consequent divine punishment, the disease has in fact been caused by a toxic brew of radioactive waste and growth hormones dumped off the coast of the island by, respectively, the Royal Navy and a corporation trying to enhance the growth of cattle for the agriculture industry. The islanders have been ingesting the growth hormones in their fish and have developed a hyperactive case of acromegaly, a disease in which the human thyroid produces too much growth hormone.
The mysterious deaths on Balfe
For much of its first half, Doomwatch is folk horror. Indeed, it uncannily anticipates that iconic folk horror film, The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), which began production in October 1972, seven months after Doomwatch‘s release. The resemblances are so striking that I’m convinced Doomwatch was in fact a direct influence on Robin Hardy.
Like Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), Dr. Del Shaw is an embodiment of urban modernity heading across water to a remote island where he finds strange practices (Adam Scovell’s ‘skewed beliefs’) amongst the remote villagers. Like Howie, Shaw gets the sense that the locals are hiding things from him as they peer from behind curtains and resist his efforts to engage them in what he feels is sensible and ‘rational’ conversation. Both men have disturbing experiences in pubs. Like Howie, Shaw meets a blonde (semi) ‘local’ woman whose motives and allegiances aren’t entirely clear at first. And there is a girl at the heart of the plots the men seek to unravel—the allegedly missing Rowan Morrison in The Wicker Man and the dead girl in the woods that Shaw finds (and then loses) in Doomwatch. Both Howie and Shaw go into the local schoolroom –asking questions of the teacher—as part of their ‘investigations’. There’s even a specific parallel in the one meal each man eats in the film. Howie has a very unsatisfactory meal in the local pub, and he asks why the food is so bad (and tinned) when Summerisle is supposed to be famous for its produce. Similarly, Shaw asks Victoria, ‘Is the food always so awful on this island?’ In each film, the ‘badness’ of the food actually contains clues about what’s really going on.
Dr. Del Shaw and the enigmatic local schoolteacher
More generally, both Howie in The Wicker Man and Shaw in Doomwatch attempt to impose the laws and authority of mainstream ‘rational’ society on the locals. Realizing something is wrong with the islanders, Shaw repeatedly insists that they should seek medical help, just as Howie repeatedly threatens the inhabitants of Summerisle with the law. Both Shaw and Howie also violently object to what they see as the archaic, superstitious, even blasphemous religious practices of the islanders. Howie is himself a Christian—appalled by the pagan practices of the islanders, but understanding, on some level, the need for spiritual belief. Shaw is the epitome of secular, scientific rationality and has no patience with the beliefs of the islanders, promoted by their vicar, that they are suffering God’s punishment. He simply dismisses it, insisting that what ails them is physical and can be cured only by medical science.
The town meeting with the locals
It is Shaw’s scientific rationality, shared by the film itself, that finally turns the narrative of Doomwatch away from folk horror. Shaw is, finally, never seriously threatened by the villagers of Balfe. They are strange, hostile, and even monstrous (indeed, the film problematically exploits the sensationalism of what is a real disease—acromegaly—for the purpose of shaping a visual ‘monster’), but Shaw is always confident that science can slay all monsters—and it does. So Doomwatch critically turns from folk horror to something else—not least, a film that offers a prescient critique of industries intervening in growth hormones (a practice that continued in the real corporate world, despite its dire consequences in Doomwatch).
The ‘monsters’ inhabiting Balfe – actually victims of industrial pollution
The Wicker Man is folk horror because the force of the islanders’ ‘strange’ beliefs overcome Howie, overcome modernity, the law, and mainstream Christianity. Howie—and all the ‘civilized’ values and rules he represents—are burnt on the altar of the wicker man. The ‘horror’ of the film stems largely from its final, violent, sacrifice of ‘normal’ society.
In Doomwatch, it is the ‘strange’ islanders who are sacrificed on the altar of modern science and medicine. In a town meeting that weirdly anticipates a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Shaw manages to convince the islanders that what really threatens them is a disease that he and the forces of modernity can conquer. It comes, however, at the cost of destroying their community. As one of the islanders says, ‘There won’t be any village left’ and ‘You want to kill the island’. Indeed, it is the ‘village’ and the ‘island’ that is sacrificed in this film. It is the ‘strange’ that is sacrificed, not ‘normality’. Doomwatch begins as folk horror but ends as its negation.
Doomwatch does offer a powerful critique of the ways in which governments and corporations are poisoning both the ecosystem and rural populations, but this critique is offered mostly as the film turns away from its folk horror origins. Doomwatch thus raises provocative questions about the extent to which folk horror can coexist with social critique—or whether there are inevitably significant incompatibilities between the two.
You can find Doomwatch on YouTube:
Doomwatch is also available on Blu-ray and DVD #ad:
Notes
[i][i] Adam Scovell mentions Doomwatch briefly (p. 88-89), writing in Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (Auteur, 2017) that the film ‘is the culmination in the trend of modern outsiders entering rural realms for experimental reasons that was arguably started by Nigel Kneale in Quatermass II’, p. 88. In The Modern British Horror Film (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2017), Steve Gerrard also mentions Doomwatch as showing, like the folk horror classics, ‘how the once-peaceful country village had become a place where the death and destruction of the individual, the community, and the wider populace remained a constant threat’ (p. 68).
