Tom (Gary Halliday) is holidaying with his best friend Mike (Michael Flowers) and his sister Penny (Emma Ingham) and Mike and Penny's mother Mrs Neil (Jenny Tarren) who has taken them to an isolated village in Derbyshire where a cottage is available. The estate agent goes to greet them and hand over the keys, but he is met there by an unexpected guest, Julian Reid (Michael Carter) who is in the area to trace his roots. What Reid asks the estate agent is very pertinent: will he tell the Neils and Tom about the history of this place? For the village has a very dark past, centred around the Black Death of centuries before...
Out of the Darkness was one of the last Children's Film Foundation movies as soon the government stopped making provision for them and the effort was allowed to dwindle into near-nothingness, with only the very occasional return to the nation's cinema screens. More likely this example would have been seen in schools or on television which were fast becoming the foundation's accustomed home, though even then its days were numbered as a regular part of British kids' media experiences, and soon its productions were relegated to nostalgic memories rather than a useful part of the nation's film industry.
Whereas there was a more civic duty tone to much of those works for the majority of them, by the time the eighties came around there was a move towards education, as if the bosses were saying, these aren't simply pieces of fluff you know, they have worth outside entertainment. So it was that here a lengthy sequence showing a schoolteacher giving a talk in a small museum about the plague, its place in history and how it travelled, borne by rats. Otherwise, the plot concentrated on the effects of social paranoia brought about by the disaster, which is at the heart of the terrible secret the children uncover through their adventures.
This is triggered by the appearance of a ghost which at first only Tom can see - or hear, as the initial visit to the cottage has him pressing his ear up against a wall and listening to sounds of a commotion which took place far in the past. Next thing you know, they have moved in and it all goes a bit Salem's Lot as when in bed at night Tom looks over at the window and catches sight of a ghost of a boy floating just outside, a bell around his neck chiming. Naturally, he has trouble convincing Mike or Penny (especially Mike) about this, until Penny has a vision of her own and soon they are trying to uncover just what the community there are so guilty about, which is much as you'd expect as it turns out.
Director John Krish was a veteran of not only cinema features but public information films as well, and his most famous entry in that vein was The Finishing Line, which detailed a sports day held on a railway line to warn children about the dangers of playing there. Nothing so horrific here, rest assured, although watch this at a tender age and it might have stayed with you for its simple chills, most of which are concerned with the hazy link between past and present, the middle ground being occupied by a mysterious mist through which Tom and Penny experience the events which have brought back the ghost boy in an attempt to achieve justice, or at least satisfaction. Pausing to note the C.F.F. were moving with the times, however slightly, by making Mrs Neil an apparent single mother, most of this unfolded with a sensible approach, even the scary bits, though you had to wonder about the sense of leaving the kids with Reid when he practically gets them into trouble at the end - plus he was Bib Fortuna, and we know whose company he kept. Music by Ed Welch.
[This is available on DVD under the title Scary Stories as part of the BFI's series of Children's Film Foundation releases, along with The Man from Nowhere and Haunters of the Deep on the same disc.]
