In an early classic of folk horror, the 1970 BBC Play for Today episode, “Robin Redbreast” (written by John Bowen and directed by James MacTaggart), a middle-class professional woman, Norah Palmer (Anna Cropper), whose long-time boyfriend just ended their relationship, moves rather reluctantly to a remote cottage she acquired during the break-up. After discovering that she has mice, Norah sets off to look for a man named Rob (Andrew Bradford), who lives in the woods and can apparently take care of her mouse problem for her. As Norah walks through the woods, the camera isolates her and also marks her enjoyment of the scenery. She is jolted from this enjoyment by the sight of a man who is virtually naked; indeed, she will call him ‘naked’ when she recounts her experience to her housekeeper, Mrs. Vigo (Freda Bamford), later. Norah stares and, when he sees her – when he looks back – she turns and hastens away, unnerved, back to her house.
Figure 1: Norah’s encounter with the (almost) naked ‘Robin Redbreast’
A folk horror film released over fifty years later, Alex Garland’s Men (2022), includes a strikingly similar scene. The protagonist, Harper (Jessie Buckley), is enjoying a two-week break from her London life in an “ideal country house” after the death of her husband, James. (He fell to his death during an argument in which Harper declared she wanted a divorce, and then he punched her.) Shortly after arriving in the isolated village of Cotson, Harper takes an extended walk in the woods, and the camera focuses extensively on her pleasure in the natural environment. As she is leaving the woods and heading out across a field, however, Harper turns and sees a naked man standing by a ruined building. Disconcerted, she hurries away.
Harper’s encounter with the naked man in Men
In each of these moments, the men that Norah and Harper, respectively, encounter are embedded in – indeed, almost indistinguishable from – the nature that surrounds them. And that connection between man and nature will deepen. The man Norah sees is, she discovers, the “Robin Redbreast” of the title, and the man Harper sees will soon begin a slow transformation into a living “green man” – an embodied version of the sculpture Harper sees on the font in the village church and which appears in lots of churches across Britain and Europe, a sculpture in which foliage sprouts from nose and mouth.
The green man has long been considered a symbol of “wildness,” of fecundity and fertility – above all, of reproduction, which must be considered one of the defining preoccupations of folk horror. Not coincidentally, the inn on Summerisle at which Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodward) stays is called The Green Man. And this inn is not only where Howie becomes the object of an attempted seduction by the landlord’s daughter, Willow (Britt Ekland), but also where he will see, just outside, multiple couples having sex at night.
The Green Man Inn, The Wicker Man
Both Norah’s and Harper’s encounters with their particular “wild” and “green” men will lead to fecundity and fertility (unlike Sergeant Howie, whose persistence in his virginity will lead only to his sacrificial death). In “Robin Redbreast,” Rob will pursue Norah after their encounter in the woods – coming to her house and finally getting invited to dinner. While Norah banishes him after their distinctly unsuccessful evening, she lets him back in after being scared by a bird flying down her chimney – and then they finally have the sex that, it turns out, the villagers have been engineering all along. Norah dutifully becomes pregnant and Robin is killed – exactly what the villagers intended: a man is killed so his blood can fertilize the land; a woman becomes pregnant so her child can, in his turn, be sacrificed. “Robin Redbreast” is, like many 1970s folk horror productions, concerned with the reproduction of the (vanishing) country “folk” and of a way of living rooted in nature and natural cycles (the harvest, spring). It conscripts the modern, urban, professional woman – accustomed to “choosing” her life’s path – into a place in which nature and ritual dominate, erasing individual free will. Norah finds herself becoming and staying pregnant without ever really choosing either. “Robin Redbreast” thus represents a “reproduction” of life in which the individual, the personal, doesn’t matter – is subsumed by the impersonal drive of the ritual.
The “reproduction” represented – indeed directly enacted – in Men by the film’s “green man” is a very different kind of reproduction. Just as Rob pursues Norah, the naked “green man” (Rory Kinnear) will follow Harper out of the woods, will continue to pursue her, and, late in the film, will (literally) transform into an embodied green man and will give birth to all the village men that have harassed her; finally, he will give birth, also, to her dead husband, James. There are many ways to read this scene, but
The embodied and fecund green man in Men
one reading sees it as grounding Garland’s film, like “Robin Redbreast,” in the inexorability – the necessity – of reproduction. (Perhaps this is what the reiterated shots of floating dandelion seeds in Men connote.) But, in Men, the necessity compelling its scenes of reproduction is not the perpetuation of a disappearing, perhaps always-non-existent ideal of a village life ordered by nature and its rituals. Instead, it is the perpetuation of masculine entitlement, power, and violence – itself encoded in (daily) rituals and a force just as inexorable and often seeming as “natural” as the rhythms of the seasons are in “Robin Redbreast.”[i] This form of reproduction subsumes all men – rural and urban, white and Black. In the face of this force, all Harper can do near the end of the film is ask her dead-but-reborn husband, in utter exhaustion, “What is that you want from me?” What she might want – as the film has made clear – doesn’t matter, subsumed by the impersonal power of masculine entitlement.
Despite their different ideological preoccupations, both “Robin Redbreast” and Men similarly conclude with pregnant women, in ambiguous endings that may signal a renewal of choice. Norah backs away from the villagers, saying “No. I don’t think so,” in a refusal of what they want from her – and then she drives away. Harper’s friend Riley (Gayle Rankin), whom we’ve only seen thus far as disembodied, on Harper’s phone, arrives, and a full-length shot reveals that she is pregnant. Harper looks at her, holding a green leaf, and smiles. Both of these moments could be merely illusory freedoms contained within larger cycles of an inexorable and ritualistic repetition. Or, they could be moments of authentic escape.
A pregnant Riley at the end of Men
Notes
[i] Two examples of the embedding of masculine power in daily rituals include Jeffrey’s insistence that he carry Harper’s bags into the house (along with passive-aggressive comments about how much she’s packed) and his even more aggressive insistence that he buy her a drink at the pub: “Her money’s no good here,” he tells the bartender.
