It is always interesting to discover a new film that challenges preconceptions of the filmmakers behind it, and in this particular case, also challenges my preconceptions about films that are billed as Horror films.
The Village is just such a film.
If you don’t want to hear too much about the film before you have seen it for yourself, and made your own judgement, stop reading this now, as it will contain spoilers which will certainly affect your viewing of the film.
One of my particular interests could be broadly described as human anthropology, and in many respects this particular film is an interesting reflection of this subject matter.
To take a sideways introduction to the subject matter of this film, consider if you will human anthropology from a scientific or more specifically from an understanding of our own ancestors.
There was an interesting BBC documentary recently which looked at some of the closest known ancestorsm or close evolutionary relations to Homo Sapiens.
The most obvious of these is perhaps Neanderthal man, and during the 20 or so years that I have read everything I can about this subject, much has changed in terms of our understanding of this species of near human.
Most importantly, until fairly recently, it was received wisdom that there was no genetic link between modern humans and Neanderthals.
In more recent times, this has been transformed, perhaps with advances in an understanding of the genetic structure of the Neanderthal and as a species, and close comparison with the human gene map.
It seems that most of us contain between one and 4% Neanderthal genes within our own genes, demonstrating that to a greater or lesser extent there was indeed interbreeding between these two very different races of modern humans.
Interestingly, detailed analysis seems to suggest that only Neanderthal females produced offspring, so that perhaps as in the mating of other animals, sterility was a consequence of male Neanderthals attempting to procreate with human females.
I have already written in this blog on the question as to whether we are descended to some extent from Neanderthals, so I will not write further about this here.
Indeed, my point is more concerned with the likely date by which the great majority of Neanderthals might be considered to have become extinct.
Normally, this is suggested to have been about 10,000 years before the present.
Numerous theories have been suggested for the decline and extinction of what is generally described as a subspecies, and archaeology suggests that the last surviving populations lived somewhere to the extreme west of the European mainland, with the occupation of caves in Spain and Portugal as the last outposts of a dying breed.
Interestingly, more recently there has been archaeological evidence that of what has been described as a Hobbit like creature from the island of Flores in Indonesia, that survived it seems until about 12,000 years ago.
However, if one takes seriously the evidence gathered from talking directly to some of the tribes that have lived on this isolated island for thousands of years, it may well have been far more recently that the Hobbit like creature died out.
Similarly there appear to be some accounts of what are described as wild men in Europe as recently as in the 1930s in Russia.
It is also recalled that a wild man was brought before Napoleon, captured as a curiosity during that mans attempts at the conquest of Europe.
My point is simply that it is impossible to put a precise date on the ultimate end point for an extinct species. Human or otherwise.
In a strange sense, this is directly relevant to the plot of the film, The Village.
Since it centres around the survival of a group of humans, definitely modern humans, but living as if the progress of the 19th and 20th centuries had not in fact taken place.
In other words, continuing to live hidden within the wider civilization in this case of modern America, but choosing quite specifically to live without the so-called advances of modern society.
This is perhaps not such an extraordinarily unbelievable circumstance, as America is rich in land, and that it is quite conceivable that people could have chosen to live a less sophisticated lifestyle.
The film gives from the outset a sense of perhaps a Shaker community, so that there are numerous long lingering shots of handmade chairs on wooden balconies, and early on a group of girls play simply with their sweeping brushes. Simplicity gives the appearance that this is a 19th-century community.
But quite quickly it becomes apparent that this community lives in an uneasy relationship with creatures that live in the woods surrounding and separating this community from the wider world.
The elders of the community explain that they have made a truce with these creatures, so that they have agreed not to enter their woods.
We discover later that this has been a manufactured mythology, designed to prevent their young people from venturing out of what is in effect a gated community.
They have even created costumes that have ensured that the creatures have occasionally made an appearance, costumes designed to generate a sense of fear of those creatures, whom they even make presentations of meat to as some form of payment to protect their agreement not to interfere with each other.
Something happens, however, to make it necessary to seek medical help that the elders know will be available beyond the woods.
A blind girl that has expressed her desire and sought permission to enter into a relationship with one of the young men in the community volunteers to go through the woods and to seek the help that might save the life of her young man.
She is brave even though blind, and just before she sets out on her dangerous journey, one of the elders confesses to her privately that the creatures are the creation of the Elders themselves.
She believes this elder, and to a great extent this serves the purpose intended by the elder to give her the confidence to make her dangerous journey.
However, one of the young men in the community has discovered accidentally one of the creature costumes made by the elders, and he follows her into the woods, a place that he has wished to explore himself in any case.
It her encounter with the creature, she suspects that what she had been told about the fictitious nature of the creatures was simply a ruse to give her the confidence to make the journey.
So that after she nearly falls into a deep pit in the woods, she later tricks the creature into the same pit, and it is killed.
She makes it through the woods, and the shock is that she comes upon one of the park rangers that are employed to keep this preservation area protected.
We suddenly realize that in reality the elders have cut themselves off from 21st-century society, have preserved their way of life through their trickery over the threat of the creatures.
The Ranger provides her with the drugs she needs, which are kept in each of the many locations from where the Rangers patrol this conservation area.
In case of animal bites, the Ranger explains, but the blind girl had been given strict instructions not to reveal anything about their community.
She keeps her word, and manages to return to the isolated community from which she has found her way with the help simply of a stick.
The death of the young man dressed as one of the creatures gives the elders another opportunity to reinforce their protective way of preserving their simple way of life, and at the end, we find out something of the events that led to their extreme choice.
The elders have suffered terrible experiences so common to the modern world. Their choice to protect and closet their children in this apparently 19th-century community, in which they listen to their parents and ask permission before they embark upon a potential relationship with another young person.
It is an extraordinary story, and whilst it is understandable that it is categorized as a horror story, it is not so much a horror story as a story of how fear itself is to be feared.
The director and writer M. Night Shyamalan
is becoming well known for his particular take on these mythologies.
Perhaps it is natural that he should have been influenced by the Shaker communities of Pennsylvania, since he himself was brought up by his immigrant parents, both doctors, in the wealthy Penn Valley area in Pennsylvania.
It is a film definitely worth seeing, and I feel I should apologize for all of my spoilers.
But truth as they say is stranger than fiction, and who can say with certainty that such a circumstance has not been realized somewhere in America, where ever since the time of the Shakers people have been drawn by the opportunities of the New World for a new start.
The Shaker communities originated from emigrants that left those dark satanic mills of Manchester to find a new and more spiritual life in the New World.
The auction prices for original Shaker furniture reflects their sense of attempting perfection, probably exceeding the prices reached for original Chippendale furniture in the UK.
It is said that the guiding principle of a Shaker craftsmen would be to make each object so that it might be suitable for an angel to sit upon.
Much has been gained in the progress that society has made over many decades, centuries even, but much too has been lost.
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