Daniel Kokotajlo on 'hangout horror' Starve Acre

I’m chatting with Daniel Kokotajlo about interspecies breastfeeding (something I never thought I'd write). “It’s a big part of mythology and folktales,” he laughs. “Folk horror, to me, is about people who want to return to something of old. They want to return to the past because they think it's nostalgic or comforting in some way. But then they find something darker and more mysterious. It’s quite common in British storytelling.”

We’re discussing folk horror because Kokotajlo's second feature Starve Acre, the follow-up to his powerful 2017 debut Apostasy, is a macabre and contemporary twist on the genre. Based on the book of the same name by Andrew Michael Hurley and set in 1970s Yorkshire, the film follows archaeologist Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark) as they grapple with the loss of their son on the isolated farmland where Richard was raised. Add in some creepy neighbours who give a whiff of Rosemary’s Baby, a hospital scene straight out of The Exorcist III, a dog attack, and an urban myth and you’ve got yourself a folk horror film alright.  

Starve Acre has been compared to British cinema classics like The Wicker Man and particularly Don’t Look Now, something Kokotajlo was braced for. “It seems like such an obvious influence, I couldn't really escape it,” he says of the latter film. “It's the 70s. It's about grief. It's about this couple. So there's all sorts of things that you can't help but connect to. I was maybe playing up to that as well – I've got little nods to things in there,” like a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of young Donald Sutherland, the star of Don’t Look Now, on a TV in one scene.  

But there were more significant inspirations, explains Kokotajlo. For example, the British ghost stories of E.R. James and the magical realism of Jan Švankmajer. He also suggests Starve Acre could be classed as a new genre, calling it a cosy “hangout horror film”, which won’t necessarily be everyone’s cup of tea. “It won’t be their jam, the die-hard horror fans,” he says. “It's for people who feel like they deserve some other kind of horror than what we have now. That's how I feel. It's the horror that I feel like I deserve in some way.” 

What Starve Acre lacks in high-energy jump scares, it makes up for in foreboding dread. Its period setting is the 70s of frizzy haircuts, brown and orange geometric interiors, and the winter of discontent. It's also a decade when interest in the occult was increasing across the UK, spawning a whole range of so-called “satanic panic” films. A particular scene in Starve Acre links together occult practices with the period's burgeoning interest in spirituality – with yoga and meditation having made their way to the UK.

I wonder if Kokotajlo’s religious background – growing up as a Jehovah’s Witness, something Apostasy dealt with – makes the stuff of horror films seem less far-fetched? Accepting “magical events as mundane” is where the horror genre and religion overlap, Kokotajlo suggests. “Armageddon was supposed to arrive any day,” he recalls of his childhood. “They would always tell me that I was never going to grow old or die. So I was always hoping, before I hit 21, that Armageddon was going to arrive and everybody in the world was going to die, except us, and we were going to spend years just dealing with the dead bodies. And it was just commonplace, you know? It was talked about as if someone was asking, 'How's your day been?'

“That’s partly what drew me to Starve Acre,” Kokotajlo adds. “There is this magical thing that happens, and for Richard especially, it's just commonplace for him. He struggles with it internally. But then on the surface, he does internalise it and makes it commonplace. That's religion for me.” 

Richard deals with his grief by throwing himself into his archaeological work, until he digs up the bones of an old hare, a talisman that pops up to offer comfort to Juliette when – spoiler – it comes to life. But in classic horror film style, something comforting may not always be what it seems. Didn’t Kokotajlo get the memo about working with kids or animals?

“I instantly thought of the Švankmajer version of Alice in Wonderland, which was stop-motion, but we couldn't do stop-motion,” he explains. “It was just impossible, with the schedule and the mud and the budget. So the next best thing was puppeteering. I'm a big fan of Jim Henson, I love The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth. So I was getting excited by this uncanniness of it.”

Whether this hare is real or all in the characters' heads is for the audience to decide. It's not the only part of Starve Acre that's ambiguous. “In a way, the whole thing is an analogy, right?” Kokotajlo explains. “How the hell do you move forward after such an event like losing your child? It’s not necessarily real to me anymore at the end. It's like folklore itself. Because if people are coming out of the film questioning the blocking, or wondering, what happens next? Then I feel like the film hasn't worked…” And with that, just like a classic jump scare, our Zoom shuts off. We’ve run out of time.

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Starve Acre is released 6 Sep by BFI