The hook: "Random film of the day" threw up a 1970 poster — And Soon the Darkness. Director Robert Fuest, screenplay by Brian Clemens and Terry Nation, producer Albert Fennell. Budget £260,000. All the action — in full sunlight. Not a single night scene. I was hooked: how can you even make horror when you've crossed out the main ingredient — darkness? And why did a film that critics in 1970 tore to shreds end up half a century later on BFI and BBC lists as the benchmark for "daylight horror"?
Investigation:
To appreciate the audacity of the concept, recall what "classic" British horror of the early 70s consisted of: gloomy Hammer soundstages, foggy graveyards, nocturnal burials, vampires in capes. Fuest and his team took the genre and subtracted darkness from it. They kept: isolation, vulnerability, language barrier, foreign country, missing friend, suspicious locals, a policeman who turns out to be a maniac. They removed: shadows, basements, thunderstorms, midnight.
Clemens formulated the principle in a 1979 interview (Starburst, later reprinted on John Fleming's blog):
"Having decided to do a thriller, we made it harder for ourselves by insisting that all the action took place in bright sunlight... It's very easy to frighten people in the dark because darkness itself is frightening. And we thought: it would be great to frighten people in daylight".
This wasn't stylization — it was an engineering challenge: remove the cheapest and most reliable trigger of fear (invisibility) and make the suspense mechanism work in full visibility. The plot: two English nurses, Jane and Cathy, are cycling through the French countryside; after a quarrel they separate, and Cathy disappears. Then — 90 minutes of searching in scorching sun, where even the finale happens in an abandoned trailer park, under the midday sky.
The entire key crew of the film grew out of the series The Avengers — a British classic of the 60s where visual style was dictated by budget. Clemens spoke about it directly:
"A lot of the evolution of style was pure economics. We just didn't have sets. Director Peter Hammond was always shooting through wine glasses because if he moved the camera slightly aside — there were no windows, no walls".
Fuest started there as production designer, later directed seven episodes. Clemens was the series' writer and producer. Nation — future creator of the Daleks and "Survivors" — wrote episodes. Fennell was producer. "And Soon the Darkness" became their first joint feature film after "The Avengers," and they applied the same principle: minimal sets, maximum location work, style instead of special effects.
Shooting took place August–October 1969 entirely in France — mainly in the village of Prénouvellon, 48 km from Orléans. Fields, roads, cafés, cemetery — all real. Cinematographer Ian Wilson worked on 35mm film with natural light. The only "special effects" — heat, dust, and lens flares.
Premiere — July 5, 1970. The critics were merciless:
EMI executive Bernard Delfont put it more colorfully in his memoirs: "real dodos, belly-flopping out of Elstree". Critic Alexander Walker noted the circumstance that killed the box office: the studio had no West End cinema of its own for premieres, films went out one after another to provincial venues — and coincided with the World Cup, heat wave and general election. The Guardian later summed it up: the first three films of EMI's new management "sank without trace."
Now here's the plot twist: in 1980, Cinefantastique magazine compiled a list of the best fantasy and horror films of the decade — and put this "failed" film in seventh place. Editor Frederick Clarke called it "a damsel-in-distress picture that for suspense surpasses anything of its kind".
1. Isolation as frame architecture. The heroines don't speak French, locals' lines remain untranslated — the viewer is in the same information vacuum as Jane. Every conversation with the café owner, gendarme, schoolteacher — it's noise from which you must extract meaning. Misunderstanding works as an anxiety amplifier.
2. Daylight as deprivation of shelter. In classic horror, darkness is where evil can hide. Here it doesn't hide. The final twist hits with exactly this: a man in police uniform, in broad daylight, in open space commits a crime — and the entire surrounding world, the whole "shop window" of rural France, does not prevent it. Daylight removes ambiguity: no "maybe I imagined it" — just "this is happening right now."
3. Sound instead of music. The score was written by Laurie Johnson (composer of "The Avengers"), but it's used sparingly. The main sound layer — wind in grass, clicking bicycle wheels, distant radio broadcast, fragments of French speech. A decade and a half before "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" the film proved that silence frightens louder than an orchestra: the viewer strains to hear and hears the threat before it appears in the frame.
4. Self-limitation as tension generator. The "no night scenes" rule forced the authors to seek other levers. Instead of jump scares — long takes of empty roads where nothing happens, but editing makes you wait. Instead of a monster in a mask — ordinary faces whose role only becomes clear in the finale. Clemens said he wrote the script in two days — but this is a script by someone who built suspense for 200 episodes of "The Avengers" on economy of means, and here applied the same discipline to the genre.
Open today's BBC Culture piece on "the blinding terror of daylight" (2019, for the release of Ari Aster's "Midsommar"): there's the Shudder section called Sun Scorched, and the BFI list "10 great daylight horror films" — "The Birds," "Witchfinder General," "The Wicker Man," "Who Can Kill a Child?," "Day of the Dead," "The Reflecting Skin," "Funny Games," "Ringu." The genealogy of the subgenre that in 1970 no one considered a subgenre essentially begins with this film: Robin Hardy in 1973 made daylight horror ritualistic, Aster in 2019 took it to polar day without a single night. But Fuest and Clemens were first in British cinema to run the experiment: remove night — and see if the structure holds. It held.
A separate line of legacy — the fate of rights. In 2008 the film came out on DVD in restored form, in 2010 came an American remake (Marcos Efron, Amber Heard, Karl Urban; action moved to Argentina) — 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, instantly forgotten. But the original all this time quietly accumulated status: Blu-ray from Kino Lorber in 2019, and in August 2024 — a 4K UHD release (double bill with Fuest's "Sudden Terror" from the same year). The box office "dodo" from Elstree became a collector's item for which collectors pay money half a century later.
Conclusions:
"And Soon the Darkness" is a textbook in genre minimalism. Four television professionals took £260,000 (roughly £4–5 million in today's money), the French countryside, two young actresses and one hard constraint: no night. The result was a film that critics of the era evaluated by the standards of gothic horror — and, naturally, gave it an F: wrong criteria. But the film worked by the standards of isolation thriller, a genre that would only take shape by the 2000s — with "Eden Lake," "Turistas" and the whole family of "tourist" horrors where the main threat is not evil in darkness, but foreign terrain where you're alone and no one is obligated to help you.
My favorite layer of this story — the director's fate. Fuest, having worked on "sunny" minimalism, immediately went to the opposite extreme: "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" (1971) with Vincent Price — baroque, theatrical, oversaturated with color and décor horror that became a cult classic. Meaning he could do both. But it was the "boring" film about two cyclists in the sun that turned out to be his most radical contribution to the language of cinema — though the radicalism there is expressed through subtraction, not addition. In engineering it happens: the strongest solution is not where everything's invented from scratch, but where you ruthlessly removed the main crutch and looked at what survives. Here the genre itself survived.