Starve Acre and its roots in 1970s folk horror: “Stranger things were being made on television at the time, frankly”

Based on the novel by award-winning horror writer Andrew Michael Hurley, Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre is the latest film in the new wave of British folk horror that has swept across the country’s genre cinema over the last decade. A tale of grief, ritual and summoning, the film harkens back to the atmospheres found in now classic examples of the genre from British film and TV of the 1970s, focusing on the landscapes and eeriness that first brought them to prominence.

In 1970s Yorkshire, young couple Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark) are struggling to understand the increasingly unusual behaviour of their son (Arthur Shaw). Eventually a heartbreaking event leaves them bereft, forcing them to face the strain of isolation in their rural cottage, which is broken only by the arrival of Juliette’s sister Harrie (Erin Richards). Richard’s work as an archaeologist becomes his obsession. As he excavates the nearby field, supernatural events begin to unfold: old rituals threaten to reach their conclusion, and the stump of an ancient, sacred tree is slowly unearthed.  

The current wave of dark, rural cinema arguably began in 2011 with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, and has since blossomed into a whole cultural movement, not simply in film (with examples such as William McGregor’s Gwen (2018) and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men (2022) to name but two), but as a wider arts movement seen in everything from art galleries to television series, theatre to zine culture.

We spoke to Kokotajlo about Starve Acre, the upcoming Roots, Rituals and Phantasmagoria season he programmed alongside it, and how he went in search of the fiend in the furrows.

What first drew you to Andrew Michael Hurley’s work and Starve Acre?

Kokotajlo: I’d read Hurley’s previous novels The Loney [2014] and Devil’s Day [2017] and had enjoyed their style. Then producer Tessa Ross mentioned Andrew had a new novel coming out, so I got hold of a copy and read it. I was struck by the level of detail as well as his approach towards storytelling. After I’d read the book, thoughts around springtime, rebirth and resurrection lingered. It spoke to me on a kind of religious, spiritual level.

Starve Acre is visually fluent in the films and television from its own period setting, the 1970s. How was the film shot?

I couldn’t shoot on film sadly as it would have been way too expensive. But we found some amazing 1970s lenses, very evocative of loads of old films I was watching at the time. They had that kind of halation and the slight distortion on the ends. When we were finished, we did print the edit on to film, which helped bed everything in. The colours really blended together then.

Landscape is clearly important to the film. How did you approach the locations of the film?

I used the book as a guide. It talks of the place being a field where nothing grows. There was a sense of isolation too, so that needed to be evoked in the setting. What I loved about the real location was that the field we used sunk down into a bog. You felt trapped being there, already underneath the landscape somehow.

The landscape certainly feels like a character in the film, almost in a pervasive way.

I always wanted there to be an awareness of the landscape in the film, even when the characters are in the house or elsewhere. It’s there through the windows or in the background. It’s really a nod to the fact that nature is in charge in the film in the end. It’s a kind of nature’s revenge story really. Nature is getting its own back in some way.

Looking at the Roots, Rituals and Phantasmagoria season, quite a lot of things being screened are from the period setting of Starve Acre itself. What was it about that period that made it so ripe for these kind of eerie stories, and even now as a period setting?

Well the book is roughly set in that time period. Having said that, we did play around with anachronisms. In the film we don’t say exactly when it is set, but you can roughly work it out from the type of cars and things. There are actually modern aspects quietly there in the film as well, so we’re potentially playing with the very concept of nostalgic filmmaking. The clothes, for example, are actually new and bought in shops today. We’ve left things in the film that people will actually recognise as being the current present day when viewed in the future. This slippage is there in the book too, which is why we did it.

There’s a lot of television in this season, and it clearly has a heavy influence on the film. What differences have you drawn out from television influences as opposed to other feature films?

Stranger things were being made on television at the time, frankly. They were hard to define even then, and their creators didn’t worry about that too much. That’s what’s exciting about it: who the hell was this stuff made for? Those films, like Murrain [Against the Crowd, John Cooper, 1975], have a cult following now and have been reassessed arguably because of that uniqueness.

The two inclusions that stand out, as connected to Starve Acre certainly, are A Warning to the Curious (1972) and the Beasts episode ‘Baby’ (1976). There’s a sense of unearthing that feels relevant to Starve Acre.

They’re the more obvious ones, undoubtedly. You can’t beat that kind of creepy storytelling. When you’re in the mood, there’s nothing better than A Warning to the Curious. If you watch it late at night on Christmas Eve, there’s something that can really get to you: a cosy fear that reminds of childhood. It’s about the English landscape but also has a sense of something potentially lurking in the walls or under the bed.

You mentioned Murrain earlier, and Starve Acre certainly shares the same atmosphere in that it balances an ambiguity between the supernatural and the psychological.

People still come away with uncertainty after watching Starve Acre. It’s never quite clear what’s real; it was more about making it feel like a folk tale. That’s what I loved about Murrain: it didn’t matter if the main character at the centre of its mystery was a witch or not in the end. It was the atmosphere and journey to that point of ambiguity that’s most effective. We tried to do the same thing, embedding that psychological potential.

Folk horror’s never been more popular, and there are very clear tropes within the genre. How did you approach a work which has some of these things naturally present and manage to give it its own voice?

I generally focused on character, and talked to Matt [Smith] and Morfydd [Clark] a lot about the psychology of their characters. I was sending them clips and documentaries from the Yorkshire Film Archive to help them get a sense of how people spoke and also the physicality of their characters. 

We needed to convey the problem of how their relationship moves forward after the tragic events of the film. Sometimes people need something to stop the grieving process. They find things like various beliefs and religions that have both positive and negative aspects. That’s what will hopefully make it stand out: the emotional detail of what the characters are going through.

Starve Acre, backed by the BFI Filmmaking Fund with National Lottery money, is in cinemas from 6 September.