Black Death

I was brought up so deep in the English countryside that the local dialect was Old Danish. To this day, the only way to reliably get there on public transport still involves a steam train and a horse drawn bus. It’s windswept, isolated and it’s fiercely suspicious of strangers. It’s also spooky. A mile or so down the road, there’s an isolated church that was allegedly abandoned after nearly all of the townsfolk died during the Black Death of the 1300’s. The shell-shocked survivors packed their bags, turned their backs on God and moved away across the river, where they came, again allegedly, to celebrate a very different kind of Mass. To this day, the Guy Faulkes celebrations there are about as vivid a recreation of a witch-burning as you’ll ever see, featuring a raggedy body dragged and beaten through the narrow lanes before being strapped to an enormous pyre. So these are real things to me, and I’ve thus always found the rural peasantry pretty damn scary. I’m just not convinced about this movie though….