In short: And Soon the Darkness (1970)

Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice), two young British nurses, are on a cycling trip through France. Not the big tourist spots, mind you, but the more desolate, or at least mostly tourist-free, parts of the countryside. It seems to be more Jane’s kind of trip, really, and the two eventually get into a big row about their itinerary, which feels like work rather than fun to Cathy, clearly to Jane’s complete surprise. The argument becomes so big, Jane cycles off in anger, leaving Cathy so sunbathe alone in some idyllic patch of woods.

That’s the last Jane sees of her, for, as we the audience know, Cathy is attacked and probably raped and murdered by someone. Once she has cooled off and Cathy simply doesn’t reappear, Jane starts to worry about her friend something fierce. Her various attempts to get someone to help her never quite reach their goal, what with her French being horrible, and she starts to fall into a state somewhere between paranoia and simple panicked worry. Which is no wonder, seeing as everyone in this part of France seems to be a proper creep, and those people actually offering their help may do this only to get rid of her too. Or worse.

Scripted by The Avengers’ Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, and produced by the same people as the show (of course again including Clemens), this intense thriller directed by Robert Fuest has very little to do with that much (and rightly so) beloved British TV show, but rather feels as if it were only one step away from descending into a proper, proto-Texas Chainsaw Massacre style piece of early backwoods horror.

While the plot never quite leaves relatively traditional thriller structures behind until the end (though it is also really good at using these structures), the cast of characters populating this part of the French countryside are just the right kind of weird to suggest a whole history of all the unpleasant stuff of movies to come. There’s certainly quite a lot of mental illness and poverty involved, suggesting a nasty underbelly below the closed rural communities here. Everyone seems to have some sort of terrible secret; everyone seems to be obsessed with something or someone.

To Jane, in her panicked state, these surroundings and the increasingly eccentric people around her can’t feel anything but threatening, particularly since her attempts at getting help only ever seem to point into directions that will endanger herself, or put her fate into the hands of suspicious strangers, instead of her finding Cathy.

The film is wonderfully paced and constructed, and manages to achieve its obvious goal of feeling somehow grubby and unpleasant as well as thrilling usually by showing something bordering on the threatening or the truly weird and only suggesting more to it. Until the climax, that is, when Jane finds herself in surroundings where things truly become concretely nasty.

Unlike many of the “tourist in danger by evil foreigners” films of later years, And Soon never feels xenophobic somehow. It seems more a film playing into other prejudices by looking askance at the countryside, France coming into the equation so Jane can be easier isolated from proper help, and because there’s little better than the contrast between a sunny countryside and the unpleasant things happening there.