Horror As Folk: The Beasts of the Field – Folk Horror in “Baby” and “Murrain”

In 1975, legendary British TV writer Nigel Kneale was hired to pen a teleplay for the ATV series Against the Crowd, a series which “focuses on the plight of the individual who, either through circumstances or his own convictions finds that he is the odd man out,” as showrunner Nicholas Palmer told the Aberdeen Evening Express.

“Murrain” became not only the sole supernatural-themed episode of Against the Crowd, but also a sort of “backdoor pilot” to Kneale’s hit ATV series Beasts, which would arrive on British television screens the following year. A story of witchcraft (whether real or imagined) in rural England, “Murrain” shares several interesting parallels with “Baby,” the single folk horror episode of Beasts.

Of course, the term folk horror had not yet been popularized in 1975-76, and the 2010 Mark Gatiss docuseries A History of Horror, which would catapult the term into everyday use, was still decades away. Yet Nigel Kneale was already no stranger to folk horror, even if he might not have used the term.

Elements of folk belief and its conflicts with (and parallels to) modern science abound in many of Kneale’s most famous stories. We’ve already written about Quatermass and the Pit (1967) in this very column, and we could (and may yet) easily include everything from The Abominable Snow Man (1957) to The Stone Tape (1972), The Witches (1966) to Halloween 3 (1982), which Kneale wrote before having his name removed from the credits.

When Nigel Kneale is discussed in terms of his contributions to folk horror, however, two of the most oft-cited titles are “Murrain” and “Baby.” Originally broadcast in July of 1975, “Murrain” is the story of a veterinarian in a rural Derbyshire community who is trying to figure out why livestock there are sickening and dying. The locals, however, already have a pretty good idea – they blame the mystery ailment on a local woman who they claim is a witch.

Even the title itself is an archaic throwback to an older form of folk belief, one which can be found in Shakespeare and has its roots in pestilence and death. At one time just a term for death of any kind, murrain (sometimes spelled murren) came to specifically be associated with infectious diseases among livestock, before dropping out of common usage altogether. Its presence in the title of Kneale’s teleplay is a specific nod to that idea of murrain as an illness among livestock and its older associations with death more broadly.

All of this is addressed (at great length) in Andrew Screen’s exhaustive The Book of Beasts, which covers “Murrain” alongside the episodes of that series, and which we’ll be referencing more as we dig into the Beasts episode “Baby.”

Nigel Kneale was commissioned by Nicholas Palmer and ATV to write the six episodes of the 1976 series Beasts on the strength of his teleplay for “Murrain,” before that episode was ever broadcast. Because of the vagaries of British television in the 1970s, the episodes of Beasts were not always shown in the same order everywhere, and so establishing a proper broadcast order is difficult. The Book of Beasts places “Baby” as the last episode of the series, broadcast on November 5, 1876.

In a 1998 issue of Video Watchdog, Kneale himself recalled “Baby” as “a sort of witchcraft thing.” He goes on to describe the creature that the newlywed couple find inside the wall of their rural cottage: “You couldn’t tell what it was, because we’d made it up, but it was the bones of a familiar of a witch who haunted the district and blighted the surrounding fields.”

The parallels between “Baby” and “Murrain” are obvious, driven home by the fact that the husband of the couple – perhaps Kneale’s most wretched male character, played by Simon MacCorkindale – is a country vet, as was the protagonist in “Murrain.” But the themes are nonetheless quite different, as evinced by the fact that the main focus of “Baby” is on the six-months-pregnant wife of the couple, who has already had one miscarriage and fears that the ominous events surrounding her new abode may trigger another.

Those events begin when they uncover a large jar in the wall which contains the mummified remains of some kind of unidentifiable animal. Jane Wymark (great-granddaughter of W. W. Jacobs, writer of “The Monkey’s Paw”) plays Jo Gilkes, the heavily-pregnant wife of the couple and the main focus of the episode.

It is she who observes any and all of the supernatural phenomena which takes place, and the episode can be just as easily read as her nervous breakdown as it can a witch’s curse. Either way, though, the nature and tenor of the events is informed by the folk beliefs of the region, and catalyzed by the thing in the jar, which is a sort of synthesis of some real folk practices.

“Witch bottles” were often found in the walls of antique structures throughout England and continental Europe. These were made of either glass or stoneware, and contained things like human urine, pins and nails, animal bones, hair, effigies, and other items. They were “used to turn spells and curses back upon the person who was placing them,” according to Screen, who draws his information predominantly from a 2019 book by Brian Hoggard called Magical House Protection.

The other major folk practice influencing the jar and its contents in “Baby” is a tendency to place mummified animals – especially cats – inside the walls or foundations of buildings. A quote from the Fortean Times suggests that “more than one hundred dried or mummified cats have been found in old buildings in Britain, but the actual number of immured cats is probably much higher as many people either wouldn’t know who to report the discovery to or wouldn’t want to anyway.”

Like witch bottles, the cats and other critters are often viewed as a means to lay protection upon a place. In “Baby,” of course, the thing in the jar is something else entirely, drawing from a different branch of folklore. It is a witch’s familiar – or so the locals assume – and its purpose seems decidedly more sinister.

That both “Baby” and “Murrain” can be subjected to an entirely naturalistic reading where nothing supernatural actually occurs does nothing to detract from their power as examples of folk horror. This is due, at least in part, to the fact that few other practitioners of the form ever seemed to understand its potential quite like Kneale. Many examples of folk horror pit modern knowledge against folk belief. Kneale does so, as well, at times. But in many of his stories – as in “Baby” and “Murrain” – the parallels between folk belief and modern science are as telling and as ominous as any conflict between them ever could be.