The Outcasts: the return of a buried landmark of Irish folk horror

The Outcasts, which tells the story of a ‘mad’ young woman in pre-famine Ireland who meets a feared shaman and has her powerful true nature revealed to her, is the great lost classic of Irish cinema. Combining gritty realism in its depiction of rural Irish poverty, sexual frankness and mythic grandeur, it had a tremendously powerful effect on Irish cinephiles of a certain age, myself included, but has been impossible to see in any decent form in the four decades since its release. 

A beautiful new restoration by the Irish Film Archive is finally putting this right, and a generation of folk-horror fans are about to get the opportunity to see this poetic, unforgettable work for the first time.

I spoke to its writer-director, Robert Wynne-Simmons, who also scripted the classic British folk-horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), about the production of the film and his feelings about seeing it rediscovered by a new generation.

There wasn’t really a film culture in Ireland at the time you made the film.

Robert Wynne-Simmons: They had just started up the Irish Film Board, and the Irish Arts Council  granted me a script award. Between the two, our film could be made. The problem, though, was that it had been announced that the Film Board was going to vanish. So there were only two people who had a chance to utilise it – one was Neil Jordan, who had already got a film set up with Channel 4; he didn’t really need the money, but it allowed him to shoot on 35mm rather than 16mm. I needed it rather more badly! And I had to fight to get it.

How was it that you found yourself making films in Ireland?

There was a job available in RTÉ. They needed film editors for their new channel (RTÉ2), and I wanted to try to make films independently, so I made a little film for them [Double Piquet, 1980], and it went on from there. Ireland gave me a chance. England did not like what I had set out to do. I wanted to make films that could pass from reality to fantasy. When I first brought the script for The Outcasts around [in the UK] people said, “This is a bit adult for children!”, assuming that because it was a fantastical film, it must be a children’s film. In Ireland, they didn’t think like that, which was a big advantage for me.

You had written The Blood on Satan’s Claw at this point – did you learn from that process?

I had made a lot of short films on 8mm starting at the age of 11, so I knew how films were made and cut together, but The Blood on Satan’s Claw was the first time I’d worked on a professional feature. It allowed me to make the kind of film I wanted, a horror film but also a folk-tale. That’s what became folk-horror, I suppose.

That term didn’t really exist then.

No. Piers [Haggard] likes to think that he invented it, during the course of an interview about The Blood on Satan’s Claw. It was probably one of the first times it was used, but it became a genre.

It fits The Outcasts very well, because you were very influenced by Irish folktales as recorded in the writings of James Berry, I believe?

Yes, someone else actually transcribed his stories, tales storytellers told around the fire during Berry’s youth, some of which were totally fantastical and some of which were totally real. In pre-famine Ireland, the fantastical and the real could actually join hands. That idea fascinated me.

In many ways it’s quite a realistic film.

It’s a form of magical realism. To me it’s important that film can be as realistic as you want, but then you can step into another world, almost without noticing you’ve done it, and things then happen that just aren’t possible. That’s where the magic comes in.

Who were your initial collaborators?

There was a group of people who were trying to promote film in Ireland, but there were no established film producers, because there had not been any Irish films.

You didn’t even have a casting director to work with.

I had friends who went to the theatre and they recommended actors, then you would go to the pub and actors would recommend other actors [laughs]. It was all done by word of mouth, pretty much.

It worked! You found an extraordinary cast.

I was lucky. Mary was quite a find. She wasn’t obvious for that part at all – she can be quite in-your-face and sharp. This sort of otherworldly character was something she had to create from scratch. I saw her in a production of Fando and Lis by Fernando Arrabal. Mick [Lally] was different, because he was well-known [as the star of a popular TV soap]. I had always liked his work, and he had a quality of being powerful but also vulnerable.

I knew and worked with Mick. He was not only a tremendous actor but also a man of enormous emotional intelligence and range. His portrayal of Scarf Michael is remarkable – not good, not bad, not a demon, very difficult to describe.

Michael is not just a spook, he’s a human being – very much so – who is in this other world, and has this great knowledge and manages to convey it, and is able to help Maura understand herself and what she can do.

One of the things I love about the film is how much of what’s important in it is unsaid.

The conventional thing is, people [in films] tell you precisely who they are, precisely what they’re doing. But I would look at the dialogue I had written and say, “Well, that’s what they think, but what they actually say would probably be quite casual but with all that behind it.” I was criticised quite strongly for the script, in fact, because it was so simple. But it isn’t simple at all [laughs]. And the actors managed to bring that out.

Let’s talk about the ending – I find it very beautiful, and puzzling, because it leaves a question in the audience’s mind about how Maura has ended up.

The ending was instinctive. She never quite loses the desire to go back, to be accepted, and she never really is accepted. She’s always an outcast. She has this magical world where she’s in control, but part of her is still childlike and wants to be loved. I think we all have that in us.

Michael warned her she could never go back, but part of her wants to be back in the human world.

And he has that as well; he doesn’t admit to it but he does! That’s why he likes to play his fiddle at weddings he’s not actually been invited to. It’s part of his life as well.

Why couldn’t Michael and Maura be together at the end of the film?

It’s as though they’re above a romantic relationship. It’s there, very definitely there between them, but they can’t, in that other world, be quite the same. I don’t know because I haven’t died yet, and I’m not sure where you get to [laughs]. People say, “When I die I’ll meet my wife again,” or what have you, but I don’t think that’s it. There’s a lot more to it than that.

You faced some very bad weather in the winter of 1982.

It was extraordinary – the snow put paid to everything. You couldn’t see the cottage in which we were filming. It was totally buried beneath 14 feet of snow. It gave us at least one nice scene, and it gave us some time to get Channel 4 involved. Film on Four, by the way, was an idea I had put forward to David Rose at a meeting a few years before. I proposed that television and cinema shouldn’t be fighting each other, and he was convinced at that meeting to create Film on Four, which saved the British film industry. I feel quite proud of having started that.

It was a very anomalous film to come out in the acquisitive, materialistic 1980s.

A lot of people didn’t know quite how to take it. The Americans were more open to it, and we had quite a lot of interest there, but things went badly wrong with the US distribution deal. The company collapsed. In England, they didn’t like it. They would have preferred a realistic film about the famine. I would still like to do something on that subject. My great-grandfather’s cousin owned a newspaper, the Sligo Champion, where he tried to get the message across about what was happening in Ireland. Maybe sometime I’ll get to tell his story.

Do you feel there’s a reason for the rediscovery of The Outcasts in 2024?

The new generation seems prepared to accept it being what it is. Before, people would have said, “That’s a horror film, I don’t want anything to do with that,” but the folk element, the old way of storytelling, what Grimm’s fairytales were all about, that is very valid and has something that can speak to us now, very directly in the gut, rather than in the head. Through folk-horror you can mix the mythic with the present day very effectively. Myth is not something to do with some past time, it’s actually there, in among us now. These stories are there, and they’re real, now. And that’s what’s exciting.

The Outcasts is out on BFI Blu-ray on 23 September.

Paul Duane is the director of All You Need Is Death, which is streaming on Shudder.