Martin Rosen’s famous 1978 adaptation of Richard Adams’ 1972 Watership Down turns 40 this year, and no doubt there will be numerous tributes to the brilliant film that traumatized a generation of children. Indeed, there is a conference planned in November 2018 at the University of Warwick, The Legacy of Watership Down, organized by Dr. Catherine Lester (@CineFeline; @watershipdown40).
I’m very interested, specifically, in Watership Down’s legacy within the horror tradition, and this post just points out one small connection between Rosen’s film and a later important British horror film, Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008).
Watership Down begins with Fiver’s horrific vision of fields covered with seeping blood. What is behind Fiver’s deep unease, we find out, is the planned building of a housing estate on the land where the rabbits live. Their warren—their home—is reduced to “six acres of excellent building land,” as the sign says, “to be developed with high class modern residences.”
Planned housing development in Watership Down
Eden Lake similarly begins with its protagonists confronted by a planned housing development—“A secure gated community of fifty superior New England homes”—which is due to be built around a lake where Steve (Michael Fassbender) spent his childhood. The planned community is right next to a working-class village, the one in which Steve grew up, and the film is driven by the class-based rage and resentment that the “superior New England homes” galvanize.
Planned housing development in Eden Lake
Although Watership Down and Eden Lake are primarily concerned with the horrors that a species inflicts on itself (rabbits and humans, respectively), the land continues to feature in each film as a profound source of both danger and (sometimes) safety. That both films open with the planned destruction of the natural landscape, to be replaced with manicured homes for the wealthy, makes it clear that the land—nature—is an integral part of the rabbit / human drama that follows. Indeed, land has a latent agency in both films. It refuses to remain only the passive backdrop that humans, with their plans to develop it, want it to be, and in both films it acts as a shadowy third term in the escalating intra-species conflict.
Rosen’s beautiful Watership Down is available on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection; it’s also streaming:
Eden Lake is also streaming on Amazon:
