The Outcasts

A major rediscovery for fans of fantasy and folk horror, the debut feature from Robert Wynne-Simmons (screenwriter of Blood on Satan’s Claw) plays like an ancient ballad somehow captured on film, filled with the sorcery of earth and woods, musicians hooded in pagan straw masks and skirts, prejudice, myth and religion—and the peat and the mud and the bone-chilling cold. Maura (Mary Ryan), the intense daughter of an impoverished rural 19th-century Irish family, is accused of witchcraft after she’s seen consorting in the woods with conjurer/fiddle player Scarf. Her neighbors and even her own family become consumed by fear and superstition as she starts to experience surreal, poetic flashes of her latent powers.

New 2k restoration by the IFI Irish Film Archive for IFI’s Digital Restoration Project funded by Screen Ireland/Fís Éireann with further support from Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE) and EU Creative Europe MEDIA programme.