Welsh Gothic in Film: DARKLANDS (1996)

This is a mini-essay/thought-dump I had in my August newsletter after watching DARKLANDS (1996). It links back to my posts on Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013), so I thought I would post it again here.

CW: rape scene discussed

Pre-Devolution Horror

I’ve been doing the #100HorrorMoviesin92Days challenge and keeping my thread updated on Mastodon, TwiX and Bluesky.

My latest watch was DARKLANDS (1996), dir. Julian Richards, which has CWs for antiziganist tropes, anti-indigenous discourse, on-screen animal sacrifice/slaughter, and an extended scene of male rape (by a woman) during a fertility ritual. I first became aware of this film via the site Wales in the Movies, and this post, and totally agree with the assessment of it.

It’s The Wicker Man meets Rosemary’s Baby set in Port Talbot, with a black metal / industrial metal aesthetic that reminded me very strongly of the cannibal cult in Doomsday (2008), and I watched it mainly because the anti-Welsh Nationalism discourse was really interesting. (Port Talbot’s steel works and industrial skyline were the inspiration for Blade Runner (1982), by the way, and they also form a core part of the DARKLANDS aesthetic and setting.)

This film is pre-Devolution as the referendum loomed, and I’ve written on post-devolution (1997-2013) Welsh Gothic here, summarising and commenting on a chapter of Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic (University of Wales Press, 2013) that covers this period. Emma Schofield’s thesis, Independent Wales? The Impact of Devolution on Welsh Fiction in English (2014) is also worth a read for the post-Devolution period, but media like this in the mid-90s gives an idea of the counter-arguments and currents running through Welsh society.

I have also written on the context of Welsh Gothic fiction from the 1940s-1997 here, and done a chapter review on the Zombification of Wales in Jane Aaron’s Welsh Gothic here.

The whole premise of DARKLANDS is basically that Welsh Nationalism is a form of extremism, where Welsh is a vehicle backwards into a dangerous and savage past. The main character expresses views that the indigenous peoples of other cultures forced into Christianity by colonisers were cannibals and ‘savages’ anyway, so in need of civilising by the [white] Europeans. This comes up in a discussion about a religious (neo-Pagan) cult in Port Talbot returning to “Celtic” pagan ideas of Druidism and animal/human sacrifice, so a parallel is being drawn here with Welsh paganism that manages to be wildly and weirdly offensive in a few directions at once, which is about right for a 90s film.

There are other discussions too – the journalist character, when interviewing a Welsh Nationalist up for re-election, accuses him of alienating Anglophonic constituents who are just as local and just as Welsh as he is, and yet are being sidelined and pushed out of their own community where they were born by the imposition of things they never asked for and don’t want.

The journalist himself has a strongly Londonised accent, cannot speak or read Welsh, and is – or considers himself to be – a prime example of those he is concerned about.

The thing about this film is that it’s not as clear-cut as “those against Welsh Nationalism and its aims are the Outside Enemy”, because in real life, that is not and was not the case. The film does encapsulate a lot of shared feeling within Wales and the monoglot, Anglophonic population that posited that Welsh Devolution was a dangerous project. They were concerned – and angry – as previous bad experiences with ineffectual politicians and distrust in the party leadership coloured their expectations. Some sincerely believed that Devolution would set Wales back and yoke them to an extremist, self-serving, faction-ridden and therefore ineffectual, leadership. The whole project was deemed to be a vain white elephant that would end up impoverishing Wales as a nation even further, with very little to show for it. “Welsh Sovereignty” or Welsh Independence was not on the table at any time and not what Devolution was ever going to deliver. This wasn’t a case of “get a Welsh Senedd and you’ll be able to make your own decisions” – it was seen by quite a few people at the time as “get a Welsh Senedd, so Westminster can ignore Wales’s position even more than they already do, and the Senedd will achieve nothing and line their own pockets, mishandle the meagre budget given to them, and make everything worse.”

I’m not saying any of this was my personal view, or that I agree. I’m just saying that’s the perception I remember from those I knew who voted ‘No’ in 1997, and they were not alone in these attitudes.

Anyway, the year after this film was released, the Welsh Devolution Referendum (1997) squeaked in a ‘Yes’ vote by 50.3% only (second referendum on this, the first had been a ‘No’ vote for the reasons outlined above), and the fears of the ‘No’ crowd are pretty much allegorised and amplified in this film.

Read through this lens, the rape of the [white, English-accented] male journalist (drugged, strapped down on an altar/table and forced to impregnate a woman during a fertility ritual and clearly in pain during the whole thing) is fairly obvious as an allegory. This is the working class demographic coerced and forced into a world they don’t want to live in, and bring children into it who will grow up in this barbaric, exploitative, backwards-looking world and lose their own autonomy in the process. These working men themselves don’t fit into or belong in a bilingual or Welsh-speaking world, and are therefore going to be bulldozed and colonised by it, to their personal detriment.

Worse, they are being actively betrayed by prominent figures in the community (the corruption fears of the time, and concern about the political factions manifesting with cult-like adherence to certain personalities and ideologies within them).

This was not an unfounded or irrational persecution complex. This social anxiety was born of decades of slow neglect, and in some cases utter contempt, shown to multiple sectors and regions of Wales by those in charge. This is about the betrayals communities suffered time and again after disasters like Aberfan (1966), even by Labour governments that they voted for, and the mine closures and decimation of Wales’s industry during the Conservative Thatcher years. By the 1990s, the explicit feeling for a lot of people I knew was: whoever you vote in, they will betray you, so better the Devil you know. Where Devolution was concerned, this became: if you create a new ‘Welsh’ government, they will promise you the world and then turn into the lapdogs of Westminster, and you’ll only be betrayed again. But in the process, your own people will create a Wales in which you, who are just as Welsh as they are, no longer belong.

These fears are definitely explored in DARKLANDS, with a heavy dose of all things mid-90s. Read in this way, this film is also about the futility of trying to save Wales from itself/from the factions within it determined to drag it down, although in 1996 the writing was far from being on the wall, and in 1997 the referendum results looked set to be a ‘No’ until the count got well into the night. (At least, I remember it that way – whenever we went to bed it was ‘No’ and when we got up it was ‘Yes’).

It’s also just a film with some dated and problematic stuff in it from the mid-90s that riffs on a lot of classic folk horror but is also industrial in setting and aesthetic.

Anyway: Er gwaetha pawb a phopeth, ry’n ni yma o hyd.

Until next time!