The Good Children and the Bad (1970)

D. Piers Haggard
Colour

It’s interesting to imagine how horror films would have been made in different eras. Obviously there are remakes that allow you to see a more modern take of a classic film, but then ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and even that travesty of Nicholas Cage’s ‘The Wicker Man’ retain substantial DNA of the original. No, what I’m talking about is taking a film, one that was strange and innovative and daring in its time and imagining how it would be done today. If there had been no ‘The Hills Have Eyes’, ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ or ‘The Wicker Man’ in the 1970s, how would some young, ambitious and original filmmaker tackle them now? How would he or she make them distinctive and yet still give them a flavour of the modern world?

That thought occurred while watching ‘The Good Children and the Bad’, one of the English pastoral shockers of the 1970s. The sunlight, the dreamy shots of corn, the blonde hair of heroine make this one of the more aesthetically pleasing of English horror films, but surely the subject matter is what we would now know as torture porn.

It’s ‘Celebration Day’ in a lovely English village, which seems to be somewhere in the West Country. Possibly the most beautiful place in the West Country, every shot glows with luminous light, like the world’s best Flake advert. If you’ve ever been an English country fete you’ll know the kind of thing to expect; there are coconut shies, a local dignitary in stocks, various bobbing games and a maypole. However this is more sinister than your average cakes and tombola village fete. Towards the end of the day some of the younger children in the local school, the ones who have been naughty, are led to the maypole. There they are tortured by the good older children. The idea being that after such treatment, they’ll never be naughty again.

Only this year local teacher, Ingrid Pitt, decides she isn’t going to stand for this and attacks the older children – and then anyone who gets in her way – with a truly huge machete.

What follows is good gory fun, which at the time was an emulation of the American work of Hershell Gordon Lewis, but now looks more Eli Roth. The kids go down one by one, and when the locals react badly to this disruption of their local traditions, they are brutalised too. The only person to stand with the teacher is her lover, David Prowse, who makes full use of his West Country brogue. They are the good couple who are railing against the old orders, radical and righteous youth rising up to challenge the stifling conservatism of tradition. The film is unabashedly on their side and we as an audience is supposed to root for them, though their morality of their stand is somewhat sullied by the mayhem of their killing spree. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway would never have looked so cool as Bonnie & Clyde if they’d kicked proceedings off by murdering twenty kids.

It’s a minor film, one which deserves to stand a little behind the likes of ‘The Witchfinder General’, ‘Blood on Satan’s Claw’ and the original ‘The Wicker Man’ (not the Nicholas Cage travesty). However, I cannot imagine how it would look if it was made today. The air of reactionary rebellion, the very white Englishness of the village fete and the body painting that’s indulged in during Pitt’s obligatory nude scene all mark this down as a film of the age of Aquarius. A film whose air of menace and atmosphere of rebellion seems almost impossible to transport to modern cinema. And that’s before we get to the violence. The violence is extreme and nasty. And it heavily features children. As such, if it was made today, Mumsnet would scream outrage and demand we all have our eyes washed with soap; The Guardian would write long hand-wringing, mealy-mouthed articles about how it deplored censorship, but the violence of this film means that with a heavy heart it should be banned and all copies tossed into a landfill; while Paul Dacre of The Daily Mail would no doubt be so filled with rage and fury he’d no doubt immolate himself outside Northcliffe House as a final cry of despair against a country which could produce such a filth.

The fact is that this country did produce such filth, but in a different time so that it is now seen as a forgotten gem, rather than a full-on, screaming, naked assault on everything that is good and decent in this sceptred isle.