The Fiend and its Followers

This chapter will examine the relationship between the past and the present within the film through a close assessment of the behaviour of the fiend, in particular the relationship between the fiend and the landscape. The chapter will consider the historical and cultural attitudes towards cultural memory and the remembrance or forgetting of unwelcome aspects of the past. The chapter will also place the film into its contemporary screen context through a survey of other British screen texts concerned with malign revenants that upset the present when unearthed or discovered. The chapter will continue by considering the nature of the fiend and the consequences of its influence through a detailed examination of the character of Angel Blake and the abject. The chapter will also make a close study of the influence of Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe on the film.