Rural Ireland, the early nineteenth century. Maura O’Donnell (Mary Ryan) is the youngest of the three daughters of Hugh O’Donnell (Don Foley). Hugh is a widower, so eldest daughter Breda (Brenda Scallon), herself widowed due to consumption, has become the housekeeper. Middle daughter Janey (Bairbre Ni Chaoimh) is pregnant, due to Eamon Farrell (Martin Ó Flathearta), and about to marry him. Maura is thought of as “odd” and frequently picked upon by the local youngsters. Then Maura meets Scarf Michael (Mick Lally), a semi-legendary fiddle-playing outsider, and she becomes entranced by him...

The BFI’s Flipside strand has comprised showings at the BFI Southbank and an ongoing series of disc releases. It has always been intended to showcase films like The Outcasts, British works which slipped under the radar at the time or which have passed into obscurity and the hinterland of the little-shown over the years, but which are worth reevaluating in the best available conditions that Blu-ray can supply. For British in this example, read British Isles, as this was an Irish film, made in that country with partly local funding (and some from Channel 4) and writer/director Robert Wynne-Simmons being by his own account the only non-Irish member of the cast and crew. It stands as a rare example of Irish filmmaking, though not as rare as some have thought, of which more in a moment. After two showings on Channel 4, a UK cinema release and a pre-Video Recordings Act video, the film – shot on a very low budget in 16mm with a smallish cast, fourteen credited – certainly has not been widely seen. The present Blu-ray, based on a 2023 restoration, enables those who like me had not seen the film before to watch and appreciate it.

There’s another reason for the film’s currency, over forty years after it was made. It’s now riding the wave of folk horror and all the present interest in it. There’s a direct link to that subgenre in that Wynne-Simmons, then in his early twenties, was the screenwriter for Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). That film, directed by Piers Haggard, is now regarded as one of the “unholy trinity” of folk-horror films. It was the middle one of three British horror films which came out in the space of a few years, following Witchfinder General (1968) and followed by The Wicker Man (1973). While the films are certainly different to each other – two with historical settings and one contemporary, one with supernatural elements and two without, and so on – all are rooted in the British countryside and local folkloric traditions. While Christianity is certainly present and prevalent, the rural pre-Famine nineteenth-century Ireland of The Outcasts is riddled with local legends and superstitions and the supernatural and uncanny happenings (and there are some, done very well in camera as I’d imagine the special effects budget was close to nonexistent) are part of this world and these characters’ reality. You could say this makes The Outcasts a work of magic realism if that term wasn’t primarily used for work from other continents. So, folk, but yes horror too, though it’s a horror built up from oddness and that uncanniness. The film sets a mood early on and sustains it until the end. Part of that is due to a carefully controlled use of sound and Stephen Cooney’s music score. Much of that is diegetic and is certainly heavily Irish, with fiddles featuring prominently, but there are elements from other cultures as you can hear a didgeridoo. The film is anchored by a very strong performance by Mary Ryan in her screen debut, ably conveying Maura’s mixture of otherworldliness and innocence. It’s not hard to read the film as a story of a young woman’s awakening into her power, including her sexuality, the price of which is to make her one of the outcasts of the title. Cyril Cusack, the biggest name in the cast at the time, provides considerable gravitas in his smaller role as Myles Keenan, or “The Matchmaker” as he is referred to as in the opening credits.

It has been claimed, not least by Wynne-Simmons in his two appearances in this disc’s extras, that The Outcasts was the first Irish feature film for nearly fifty years. However, that isn’t actually true. I presume he isn’t counting films which were shot in Ireland though financed from elsewhere, even if directed by Irish residents, for example John Boorman with Zardoz and Excalibur. However, there was Poitín (1978, also known as Poteen), directed in 1978 by Dubliner Bob Quinn, also shot in 16mm, and the first dramatic feature to be made in the Irish language, with Cyril Cusack in the lead role. That film wasn’t shown much outside Ireland (though it did have a TV showing in 1980 on ITV in the Southern region), but it certainly exists as a small part of Irish film history, as indeed does Wynne-Simmons’s film.

The Outcasts was partly funded by Channel 4, who came on board while the film was in production after seeing the rushes. The film was shown at festivals, and won amongst other awards Best Film and the Critics’ Prize at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival. It was shown on the channel in its Film on Four slot on 14 June 1984 (I saw most of the first two years’ run of Film on Four on broadcast but it seems not this one) and again on 21 January 1988. Unusually, after its first UK television broadcast it had a limited cinema release, on 4 October 1985. It also had had a pre-Video Recordings Act VHS and Betamax release in 1983 and a copy of the sleeve is included in the booklet of this Blu-ray. However, it slipped into hard-to-find obscurity until the restoration which is the source of this Blu-ray release. I’m not going to claim The Outcasts as a masterpiece – it’s overlong by a good twenty minutes or so – but it remains a film of quite some merit and in its way significance.

The Outcasts is number 49 in the BFI’s Flipside line, released on a Blu-ray encoded for Region B only. The film had a 15 certificate in UK cinemas in 1985 and it retains that rating on disc. At the time of writing, The Fugitive and The Wanderings of Ulick Joyce do not appear on the BBFC database.

The film was shot in 16mm and blown up to 35mm for cinema release. The Blu-ray transfer is derived from a 4K scan and 2K restoration of the 35mm colour reversal intermediate by the Irish Film Institute and R3store Studios. The aspect ratio is 1.66:1, which is the native ratio of Super 16mm film, and no doubt that’s intended, though many cinemas in the UK and probably Ireland as well in 1985 would have projected the film in 1.75:1. Seamus Corcoran’s cinematography has an intentionally “raw” look, with not much in the way of strong colours (rainy and snowy conditions with iron-grey skies no doubt contributed to that) and to these eyes looks like much of it was shot in natural light or a close simulacrum of it. The 16mm origins result in plenty of grain.

The sound is the original mono, rendered as LPCM 2.0. Nothing much to say here except that it is clear and the music and sound effects are well integrated. Subtitles for the hard-of-hearing are available for the feature only, and they also render a few lines of Irish and church Latin in those languages.

Commentary by Dr Diane Rodgers
Dr Rodgers (misspelled “Rogers” on the Blu-ray menu, or at least it is on the checkdisc supplied for review) is a scholar and historian of folklore and a specialist in folk horror, with a monograph, Wyrd TV: Folklore, Folk Horror and Television, forthcoming from the BFI. As you might expect, and as someone without a direct link to the production, much of her commentary discusses The Outcasts as a work of folk horror, without generally being too scene-specific, though she does fill in details of the cast and crew when appropriate. Her interest in the film came about when she interviewed Piers Haggard about Blood on Satan’s Claw for her PhD thesis and Haggard directed her to Robert Wynne-Simmons. Her first viewing of the film was on a DVD that Wynne-Simmons burned from her from a VHS copy. An interesting and clearly enthusiastic commentary.

Writing Folk Tales (9:26)
Robert Wynne-Simmons talks to camera about his career and the making of The Outcasts. Given the shortish length of this, the latter has more prominence. As mentioned above, Wynne-Simmons does make a few factual errors here. As well as claiming that The Outcasts was the first Irish feature in nearly fifty years, he also says that Cyril Cusack was proud of having been both in this film and the previous one, which Wynne-Simmons identifies as The Dawn (1936, directed by and starring Tom Cooper, also known as Dawn of Ireland). However, every reference source I’ve checked says that Cusack was not in this film. He was however in Guests of the Nation (1935, the only cinema feature directed by Denis Johnston, father of the distinguished novelist Jennifer) so maybe that’s where the confusion arose.

The Fugitive (30:32)
Shot in October 1963 (when Robert Wynne-Simmons was sixteen), and completed in 1964, this had its origins in Lancing College drama group (or the Lancing College Dramatic Existentialist and Aesthetic Philosophers’ Movement, hence the production company L.C.D.E.A.P.M). This put on plays which its members wrote and performed themselves, and soon their interests moved on to film. The Fugitive (in which the writer/director is credited as R.A.W. Simmons) was one such, half an hour long and shot in 8mm colour. There is no spoken dialogue and the soundtrack is devoted to music and occasional sound effects that don’t need to be precisely synchronised, such as laughter. There is a caption towards the end to convey a particular plot point. It’s a story of a young man who kills a rival in a knife fight but begins to be convinced that he is actually still alive. It was filmed in Brighton during the fights between mods and rockers and the directing ability is apparent even with such clearly limited resources. It ends rather artily with “Fin” rather than “The End”.

The Outcasts in Pictures (15:19)
Interviewed by the BFI’s Vic Pratt, Robert Wynne-Simmons talks over photographs taken by him and others during the shoot, many of the cast with some of the crew, all in colour. They include shots of Wynne-Simmons with a beard, as he took a cue from Stanley Kubrick in not shaving while a film was in progress and seeing how long it reached before the film was wrapped. We also see shots of the snowfall which shut down production for a while due to burying much of the location under fourteen feet.

The Wanderings of Ulick Joyce (4:53)
A short animated film made in 1975 for the BFI Production Board, The Wanderings of Ulick Joyce appears to have been the work of two people: directed by Gillian Lacey with music provided by Tom McCarthy, who also reads the narration. Ulick is banished from his would-be kingdom and forced to wander in exile through Ireland. Based on Irish folklore, it was inspired by Lacey’s reading of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. Lacey had worked on Yellow Submarine, which in 1968 had become just the second UK animated feature (the third, Watership Down, is soon to have a UHD and Blu-ray release from the UK) and she later worked with Halas and Batchelor (who had made the first, Animal Farm) and taught at the National Film and Television School.

Booklet
The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release, runs to twenty-four pages. Following a warning of possible spoilers, it begins with a director’s statement by Robert Anthony Wynne-Simmons (as he bills himself). He states that he was a storyteller from the outset, at first via music and poetry, then prose fiction. An example of the latter was a novel, A Winter Emerald, in which, he says, the readers “would feel the magic in the ordinary, like ‘seeing the Kingdom of Heaven in a puddle’.” From there into filmmaking, with The Fugitive (included on this disc) and an earlier short, The Scrolls, and his screenplay for The Devil’s Skin, as Blood on Satan’s Claw was originally called. His ideas of linking the real and the supernatural weren’t fully realised or maybe understood in that film, he felt, and The Outcasts gave him the opportunity to develop them further. The film was the one accepted of four submissions to the Irish Arts Council, and he praises the cast and crew of the result.

In “The Outcasts: Film as Folk Tale”, Vic Pratt, which begins with a quote from Wynne-Simmons that of the two words “folk horror” he considers the film to be more of the former than the latter. Pratt compares the more low-key clearly personal work The Outcasts with its brasher, sexier, bloodier and avowedly more commercial sibling Blood on Satan’s Claw. While there’s no doubt that supernatural goings-on are taking place in the latter film, the former is more ambiguous. It’s less important to be certain that someone has put a curse on another than it is that people believe that someone can do that. Also, the women in The Outcasts, not just Maura, are stronger characters, put upon and managing to survive. There’s no equivalent of Linda Hayden’s full-frontal temptress Angel Blake, for example. The Outcast is a quieter film, as grounded in its rural landscape as any other, one that traps its characters.

Dr Diane A Rodgers returns with “The Outcasts: A Forgotten Wyrd Classic of British Folk Horror”. Inevitably this overlaps with her commentary on this disc, as he begins by telling how she came across the film, with Piers Haggard putting her in touch with Robert Wynne-Simmons. She ranks the film alongside other British entries in the genre, such as Penda’s Fen and Red Shift, both shot on film for television and originally broadcast as Plays for Today (and both previously released on disc by the BFI). She wonders why the film had fallen so much out of circulation and why so few people knew about it, something explained by the fact that this essay dates from 2018 and is reprinted from Cinema Retro magazine.

Following a cast and crew credits listing, and a two-page reproduction of the sleeve of the VHS release, there are notes on and credits for the extras. These include a piece by Wynne-Simmons on The Fugitive and one by Jez Stewart on The Wanderings of Ulick Joyce.

While it has its flaws, The Outcasts is a singular and at the time rather lonely entry in the folk-horror subgenre, from an Irish perspective. Newly restored, it is well served by the BFI’s Blu-ray.