The corn dollies have an old pagan traditional culture for harvest time all across Europe. The larger ones are used as scarecrows or sometimes known as straw men or straw dogs and sometimes they move about. Robert Wynne-Simmons earlier wrote for The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and rather sexy for this one but in 1982 he made it much more serious and not really folk horror, based on Irish mythology and set during the Great Famine of the middle 19th century. Oddly enough Peckinpah's, Straw Dogs was made the same year as The Blood on Satan's Claw and they both had mention of those corn dollies. The Outcasts has an eerie, magical, atmosphere and the photography in the woods and those muddy or snow paths and the winter trees are made rather scary. The music of the fiddlers also makes of it something of the eerie too but there was also dancing and the thin story had influences of The Book of Thel by William Blake and poetry with W B Yeats. Beautiful, worrying, but with much charm and even if there was some struggle with the otherworldly although there was always that mystical and alluring something that was buzzing around my head.
