This British/French thriller is a classic hybrid of rural horror, tourist cautionary tale, and the woman-in-peril subgenre that would emerge throughout the 1970s. Two British nurses are bicycling through France on summer holiday when they become separated, and one vanishes. Trapped in a small village with little language skill, the remaining traveler attempts to find her friend while dodging the advances of an overly solicitous man on a scooter. To worsen her fears, she learns that the village was the scene of another woman’s rape and murder some years before. Of course, the villain is the last person you would suspect.
As screenwriter Brian Clemens explained of the film’s inspiration: “It’s very easy to frighten people in the dark because darkness itself is frightening, but we thought it would be nice to frighten people in daylight.” And Soon the Darkness’s use of a remote setting and lean plot, with its hapless main characters and knowing locals, imbues it with an awkward realism recognizable to any travelers who have found themselves lost and alone in a strange land.
Don’t Deliver Us From Evil (1971)
In a decade full of notorious and controversial films, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil makes a good case for the banning it received in its native France. Based on a real-life incident of folie à deux in New Zealand with more than a nod to the infamous Papin sisters case, the film follows two Catholic schoolgirls on summer vacation in a rambling château who experiment with Satanism before turning to murder. The horror commences innocently enough as the precocious girls Anne and Lore, alone and left to their own devices, begin to engage in childhood pranks, sexual games, and readings of Decadent poetry. But as their fascinations with death take on darker undertones, so do the pranks become more elaborate and twisted. When they finally commit the ultimate crime against a stranger, the girls pledge themselves to Satan and decide to honor their pact with a final, shocking performance before the school. Twisted and difficult to watch at times, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil might be the ultimate “what I did over my summer vacation…” horror film.
The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971)
