Horror as Folk: Old and New Collide in Robin Redbreast (1970)

Like “Murrain,” Robin Redbreast was originally broadcast as part of a larger series of standalone, generally non-horror works. In this case, that was the BBC’s long-running Play for Today series, which featured original teleplays, stage plays, and adaptations of novels from 1970 until 1984. Many of these have since come to be regarded as classics and some have even spawned their own subsequent television series. Robin Redbreast certainly falls into the former category.

One of many teleplays written by British novelist and playwright John Bowen – who also contributed to the ITV Play of the Week, A Ghost Story for Christmas, and the BBC anthology series Dead of Night, to name a few – Robin Redbreast is not even Bowen’s only dalliance with folk horror, though it may well be his most overt.

And make no mistake, Robin Redbreast is emphatically folk horror, though, once again, that term was not yet in wide use when this episode was made. Like many of the other titles we have treated in this column, Robin Redbreast was included in Severin’s original All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set, but unlike many of the other films therein, its folk horror bonafides are not in question. Indeed, Robin Redbreast could just as easily be read as an ur-text of the form as could, say The Wicker Man, released some three years later.

The story follows Norah (Anna Cropper), a decidedly modern woman who has come to the end of an eight-year relationship. It has put a strain on her, and on her social circle, and she decides to get away by staying at the cottage that she acquired as part of the split. In so doing, she very gradually becomes embroiled in the lives and machinations of the exceedingly odd rural folk who live thereabouts.

It’s a steady drip of paranoia that trades in social awkwardness and “offness” rather than overt scares, building to a series of revelations that have much in common with Rosemary’s Baby, albeit operating within pagan rather than Christian cosmologies.

While it is an exceedingly slow burn, there is an almost immediate sense that something is wrong which gradually builds and builds until it becomes suffocating, all centered upon Norah’s developing relationship with Rob (Andrew Bradford), a sort of socially isolated local exterminator who seems every bit the outsider that she is.

All of this is delivered in drips and drabs throughout the picture’s relatively brief 76-minute runtime, often by Bernard Hepton as local “learned man” and lay reader Mr. Fisher. Fisher is, indeed, one of the first people that Norah meets in the area, and his appearance and manner are among the first hints we get that something quite strange is going on. “He’s a learned fellow,” Norah’s equally odd and sinister housekeeper says of him. “You can’t tell what he means.”

Not content merely with dealing with an outsider encountering the pagan customs of the rural folk, Robin Redbreast presents specific juxtapositions between modernity and older modes of thought. This comes in many forms, whether it’s Rob – who is red flagging his way through an obsession with the SS – comparing them to Arthur and his Knights of the Round or Norah stating that the country actually has less privacy than London.

The biggest juxtaposition, however, comes once Norah becomes pregnant. That her pregnancy has been carefully arranged is a condition she arrives at probably more slowly than we do, but her approach to it, as a “modern woman,” is one that sits at the center of the story. In fact, Bowen himself has claimed that Robin Redbreast was originally rejected and almost wasn’t made due to Norah’s contraceptive diaphragm being a central plot device.

“Men of a certain age and class at that time could not accept that a woman should be in charge of her own body,” Bowen is quoted as saying. “The idea that a woman should put a barrier between her eggs and their sperm – no way! It was a direct threat to their own masculinity.”

It is sad to say that these “men of a certain age and class” are still all too familiar to us in the year of 2024, and they would be no happier with Norah’s repudiation of Rob when he attempts to persuade her to keep the baby. “It may be your child,” she tells him, “but it’s certainly not your business.”

Unfortunate that a teleplay made more than half a century ago should still feel so relevant in its depictions of attitudes around abortion, women’s sexuality, and so on, but here we are, and Robin Redbreast certainly does. Nor is that the only place. Norah’s modernity would challenge plenty of viewers today, imagine how it must have gone over fifty years ago.

Perhaps most interesting, however, is that Norah’s modernity is not depicted as necessarily a departure from the “old ways,” but in some ways an echo of them. Fisher compares her to the “goddess of fertility in the old legends,” who was herself “not a married lady but nevertheless, if you’ll excuse the freedom, not a virgin, either.”

One of the most fascinating things about Robin Redbreast is in the way that it sets up the conflict not so much as between the modern world and the “old ways,” but in how the two strangely echo one another. This can be seen in the film’s ambiguous ending, where Norah’s fate is not the one that she had feared for herself, and yet not quite the escape she had hoped for, either.