Unquiet
Things

I mentioned previously that I had a particular hankering for a specific sort of ’70s horror, something brimming with dreamy, moody, autumnal vibes, and preferably something I’d never heard of before. The examples I gave were The Haunting of Julia (1977) and Images (1972). The former is a drizzly autumn in London, all grey skies and rain-slicked streets, while the latter unfolds in a misty, golden-hued countryside. In both, the location isn’t just a backdrop—it’s almost a character in itself, infusing every frame with a palpable sense of melancholy and unease. The sense of place is really important for this mood, creating an atmosphere that seeps into your bones.

While I received tons of suggestions, many were things that I’d already watched or just didn’t fit that very specific atmosphere. Lots of folks mentioned things like The Changeling, Don’t Look Now, Rosemary’s Baby, The Sentinel, The Legend of Hell House, The Other, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Eyes of Laura Mars, and Suspiria–which are all great, but I’d already seen them, and either they were not the level of obscure I was looking for, or they leaned too heavily into thriller or giallo territory.

I promised to share a list of the interesting ones, even if they didn’t *quite* fit.  Here are the ones that stood out.

Magic (1978) //  Allison’s Birthday (1981) // The Wind  1986// The Legacy (1978)  

There were also a few mentioned that I was familiar with because I’d read the books. But I loved the books, so finding the film adaptations is now a priority!

Ghost Story (1981) // The Owl Service (1969-1970) // The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

But my friend Kate (who, as you may recall, has written a few things for this very blog) came through in the end. She seemed to understand exactly what I was looking for—even if neither of us could articulate it perfectly. We agreed on a few key elements: the film must be deeply atmospheric, potentially at the expense of a conventional plot. We were looking for surreal, dreamy sequences that border on nightmarish, yet remain too elusive to instill outright fear. Above all, we wanted what Kate aptly described as an “unshakable sense of the uncanny.”

Among her recommendations, including Symptoms (1974) and Dark August (1976), Kate suggested also Black Moon (1975).

As I would soon discover, this last suggestion was precisely what I had been seeking all along.

Louis Malle’s Black Moon is a celluloid incantation, a fever dream caught on film. To describe it fully would be to break its spell, but glimpses may be shared:

A war rages, men versus women, gas masks, and tanks in pastoral fields. Lily flees, her car careening through countryside both beautiful and menacing. A mangy unicorn appears, vanishes. She finds a secluded manor, but safety is an illusion.

Inside, a bedridden old woman babbles through a radio, conversing with a giant rat. Naked children dart between shadows, chasing pigs across immaculate lawns. Beautiful twins, both also named Lily, move through the manor with eerie grace, tending to housework and animals with an unsettling, dreamlike intensity. Animals and plants whisper secrets, while time stretches and contracts. Alarm clocks shrill at odd intervals, their urgency at odds with the languid unreality of the scene.

Lily wanders, observes, participates. She chases the elusive unicorn, tends to the old woman, joins a surreal family dinner. Scenes bleed into one another. Is she awake or dreaming? Are we? The war intrudes and recedes like the tide. Nature feels alive, watching, waiting. Lily transforms, but into what?

Malle draws clear inspiration from Alice in Wonderland, but filters it through a 1970s arthouse fever dream. His film evokes for me Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders–both works being hazy, hallucinatory coming-of-age tales where reality and fantasy intertwine. Black Moon also reminded me a bit of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! – particularly in its sense of escalating absurdity and horror within a confined space. All three films lean into surrealist storytelling, leaving viewers unsettled and searching for meaning amidst apparent chaos.  Nothing makes sense, yet everything feels ominously significant.

Black Moon finds horror not in jump scares or gore, but in the profound unease of a world unmoored from reason. The film’s refusal to provide clear meaning or resolution can be deeply unsettling. Malle apparently said that “each time something appeared that looked like a plotline, I would cross it out,” and obviously, this leaves viewers adrift in a world where the rules of reality no longer apply, which is its own kind of terror.

To say more would be to risk breaking the enchantment. Some spells are best experienced, not explained.

Day Twenty of 31 Days Of Horror in years past: 2023 // 2022 // 2021

 

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