The Outcasts: the return of a buried landmark of Irish folk horror
The Outcasts: the return of a buried landmark of Irish folk horror
Paul Duane, the director of modern Irish folk horror All You Need Is Death, speaks to Robert Wynne-Simmons, whose haunting 1982 film The Outcasts has re-emerged after decades of obscurity.
The Outcasts, which tells the story of a ‘mad’ young woman in pre-famine Ireland who meets a feared shaman and has her powerful true nature revealed to her, is the great lost classic of Irish cinema. Combining gritty realism in its depiction of rural Irish poverty, sexual frankness and mythic grandeur, it had a tremendously powerful effect on Irish cinephiles of a certain age, myself included, but has been impossible to see in any decent form in the four decades since its release.
A beautiful new restoration by the Irish Film Archive is finally putting this right, and a generation of folk-horror fans are about to get the opportunity to see this poetic, unforgettable work for the first time.
I spoke to its writer-director, Robert Wynne-Simmons, who also scripted the classic British folk-horror The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), about the production of the film and his feelings about seeing it rediscovered by a new generation.