Wildness and Magic in ‘The Shout’
By Luke Beale
The seventies were a hugely important decade for horror with the release of so many groundbreaking films. The year 1978 alone saw the release of Halloween, Dawn of the Dead, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers — perhaps some of the most influential horror films of all time. As more and more films are released each year, and with streaming services less and less likely to show films older than a decade, one can be forgiven for not seeking out older films beyond the usual fare. As many horror fans know though, there is much joy to be found in seeking out hidden gems. Perhaps The Shout from 1978 qualifies as one such film.
There’s something incredibly British about a game of cricket being played at an insane asylum, which is how this film begins. The Shout is told in flashback as patient Charles Crossley (Alan Bates) tells Robert (Tim Curry) the story of how one of the batsmen lost his wife, while the two of them keep score of the match. Crossley’s story is how he came to infiltrate the lives of the batsman Anthony (John Hurt) and his wife Rachel (Susannah York), using the power of aboriginal magic. Considering the story is being told by a man committed to an insane asylum who believes, as the doctor explains to Robert, that his soul has been shattered into four pieces, it’s very possible we’re dealing with an unreliable narrator. He claims his story is completely true, though he admits to varying the narrative slightly to keep it alive. Be that as it may, Crossley is apparently well-travelled, well-read, and certainly charismatic. At times that charisma reminds me of Matt Berry (from What We Do in The Shadows fame) only much less funny and much more terrifying.
A figure approaches over the sand dunes. Anthony and Rachel wake up from their seaside nap, and the figure vanishes, apparently a mirage from a shared dream. Rachel realises a buckle from her shoe is missing, and as Anthony searches for it he finds instead a broken bone beneath the sand. In town, as Rachel speaks with the local cobbler, Anthony shares a secret glance with the cobbler’s wife, hinting perhaps at a forbidden romance. Back at home, we discover that Anthony is a musician, obsessed with attempting to create new sounds using marbles, cigarettes, and all manner of weird trinkets. The walls of his studio are adorned with Francis Bacon paintings. After playing organ for the local church, he meets the mysterious Crossley in the churchyard. Before they’ve been properly introduced Crossley starts talking unnervingly about how the soul might be able to leave the body and be placed into a tree or a stone. Thinking him pretty odd, Anthony mumbles his excuses and quickly cycles away, apparently to frolic around in a field with the cobbler’s wife. On his arrival home, Crossley is waiting for him and insists on inviting himself in for lunch.
Thus begins Crossley’s worming his way into Anthony and Rachel’s lives. He tells them of his 18 years spent in Australia learning aboriginal magic, and how he murdered his children (but not to worry about it). All the while the couple are achingly polite, refusing to challenge or confront him. Eventually, a fully nude Crossley boasts to Anthony that he can kill a man with a special “terror shout.” Rather than insisting that he leave their home, Anthony sarcastically asks the guest if there’s anything else he needs before he leaves. Curiosity gets the better of him though, and he asks Crossley to perform the terror shout for him. Early the following morning Crossley takes him up to the dunes, and with a bone shard in one hand and Rachel’s shoe buckle in the other, unleashes one of the most terrifying sounds ever heard. Luckily for Anthony, he stuffed wax in his ears beforehand, but the force of the shout still seems to ripple his skin and knocks him all the way down the dunes. Unknown to both men, the shout also seems to have killed the local shepherd and his sheep.
With Anthony completely shaken and bedridden, Crossley uses magic to seduce Rachel by placing a spell on her shoe buckle. She falls immediately under his power, licking at him like an animal, stripping naked at his command, and scuttling around the bedroom like Francis Bacon’s painting Paralytic Child Walking on All Fours. In a display of his power, Crossley sits at the couple’s dining table with Rachel kneeling at his side kissing his hand, while he explains to Anthony that he is going to have sex with her. Anthony is still paralysed by politeness. Fleeing to the dunes for escape and answers, Anthony stumbles across a pebble that seems to contain part of Crossley’s soul. He finally takes some initiative and smashes the stone between his shoes, apparently causing Crossley to fall down the stairs. Coincidentally the police arrive and arrest Crossley for the murder of his children, suggesting that perhaps his children were murdered on English soil, thus sprinkling his backstory with doubt.
The difference in portrayals of Crossley and Anthony couldn’t be starker: one embraces elemental magic and can kill a man (and a flock of sheep) with a shout, while the other is stifled by politeness and makes boring music by rolling wet marbles on a tray. This duality of wildness and control is also portrayed through the inclusion of the cricket match at a mental hospital, where the rules of cricket eventually give way to the wildness of a storm as one patient strips naked and rubs himself with mud. As the match is abandoned, Crossley becomes upset, and a madness seems to overtake him and spreads to everyone at the hospital. As the doctor tries to restrain Crossley, Robert escapes through the shed window in which they’ve been keeping score. Just in the nick of time too, as the hut is immediately struck by lightning killing Crossley, the doctor, and the muddy patient. The sound of the lightning is reminiscent of the terror shout, and we see the last act of the doctor was to cover his ears, his face twisted in fear.
Anthony’s love for Francis Bacon paintings also highlights the themes of madness and wildness, versus control and repression. Bacon once said about his work: “I hoped to make the best painting of a human scream.” Anthony is trapped by societal norms, his marriage (see: frolicking in a field with the cobbler’s wife), a sense of powerlessness, and his own body. The inclusion of Bacon’s painting Head IV in Anthony’s studio is reminiscent of a quote from Nietzsche, of whom Bacon was a fan: “…enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual.” As a child, Bacon himself was locked in cupboards by the housemaid, was asthmatic, and at night had to hide with his family in locked rooms for fear of a visit by the IRA. These themes of confinement and terror seem present throughout The Shout. Anthony’s character is presented as impotent, as a man who wants desperately to scream but cannot. Along comes the suave Crossley who represents everything he isn’t, who by forgoing all the niceties of societal rules becomes free and wild. Perhaps Anthony wants to be him, perhaps he wants to be with him. It’s not much of a stretch to view Anthony as sexually frustrated, at once drawn to and repulsed by Crossley’s persona.
You can see the film’s inclusion of aboriginal magic as the counter to British stuffiness as slightly problematic. The figure of the aboriginal man as ‘Other,’ someone strange and unknowable, certainly draws upon racist caricatures…the longing look of the ‘cultured’ man towards the freedom of the ‘uncultured’ which he himself colonised. That said, the main magician in The Shout is not an aboriginal man, but a white man who may have stolen this magic through murder. In this way perhaps the film contains criticisms of imperialism within. Perhaps too there is an anti-colonial argument in how it presents wildness as being ultimately uncontrollable — that if you try to suppress and control, life always finds a way of breaking free. Lightning will strike, the inmates will run free, the game of cricket will be abandoned.
Mark Jenkin (director of Bait and Enys Men) spoke of this as one of his favourite and most influential movies, and it’s easy to see the touch points of this in his films. The Shout reaches into something elemental about Britain, and perhaps beyond, about both our relationship to and the history of wildness and magic. The scene of the terror shout is set upon the dunes, which are being shifted and shaped by wild coastal winds. Anthony may have wax in his ears, but he is desperate to hear something true. A part of him wants to believe in magic and to experience its power firsthand, to have the rules and conventions of his life shaken to their core. To give up control and find his power. To scream until it all comes crashing down. 🩸
