Tarry-Dan Tarry-Dan Scarey Old Spooky Man (1978)

I found this British TV movie via this excellent post.

A Cornish coastal town. Teen Jonah Grattan (Colin Mayes), working-class scruffy and the kind of dead-end rebellious that’ll guarantee he’ll end up in the same kind of nowhere his social class would nearly guarantee him however he acts, becomes obsessed with the town’s very own creepy tramp Tarry-Dan (Paul Curran).

There’s something truly strange going on with the man: children have been singing a mocking playground ditty about him for generations, as if he’d been a feature of the town’s life from the beginning, and Jonah has dreams about the man and a battle – presented as animated version of a stained-glass window – that somehow concerns himself as well as the strange old man. The teen becomes convinced that the old man is evil, and he is somehow destined to slay him; the truth is rather less nice.

Directed by John Reardon in a very typical late 70s BBC style of moody 16mm outside location shots and drab shot on video interior sets, this was written by Scottish TV playwright (that was an actual thing once upon a time) Peter McDougall, who otherwise appears to mostly have been involved in more socially realist endeavours.

As often happens when this kind of writer turns towards the supernatural, there’s an especially strong sense of the predominantly metaphorical around the non-realist bits – being cursed here turns out to be very much the same thing as being from a no-future working class background just with rather a lot more drama – but McDougall makes up for this sin by his ability to easily, and seemingly off-handedly, portray the drab world of Jonah and his small group of not-really friends, which in turn makes the elements of folk horror (or more properly myth horror, I suppose) more grounded.

It’s a lot like a Cornish version of a Bruce Springsteen song with added folklore, the old tale of a poor, not necessarily nice, young man finding himself trapped in a life he had no hand in choosing.

Which probably wasn’t – even expressed as folk horror – exactly new to anyone in 1978, and certainly isn’t today, but then, cycles repeating themselves is built into this narrative for a reason. In any case, Tarry-Dan tells this tale with tightness, insight and a sense of the local, and is much too good at it to be damned to an existence as a blurry VHS rip on YouTube.

But why not have a look yourself: