Thoughts on The Owl Service 1969

I'm sketching out a new tradition, and creating a quasi "holy book" for it made up of books, films, music and so on, things which capture the mood and essence. So I'm watching/reading some potential additions, and up now is the 1969 adaptation of The Owl Service

It seems like a likely prospect: rural horror based on a children's book from the early 70s combines several factors which come up again and again on the list. Plus, Owl Service was complained about by parents on the basis it was too frightening for children.

And errrr holy smokes, the mood of the piece is midway between "porn" and "video nasty" - just like what I imagine the Exorcist or Last House on the Left to feel like.

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"But what was it about the Seventies that produced such weird, eerie and horrifying stuff for kids? Brotherstone’s theory is that it was a hangover from the permissive Sixties. “At the end of that decade the shutters sort of came up and film-makers and artists started doing a lot of stuff that they felt was free of censorship,” he says. “I think they felt so free that they just went for it in a big way, there was possibly an element of naivety in what people thought was appropriate for kids. These days there are so many guidelines about what children should and shouldn’t be exposed to, and that sort of thing wasn’t in evidence much back in the Seventies, which is why we had a lot of stuff that looks really scary and disturbing today.”

Brownstone on his book Scarred for Life, a lovingly assembled 700-page tome on unsettling children's media of the 1970s.