Na Cloigne, Essay Example

Many films that are set in Ireland show the Irish countryside as a beautiful, green place that Seán Crosson describes as a “pastoral idyll.” As Crosson notes, some Irish filmmakers have turned this expectation upside down by setting horror movies in the same countryside. In the television miniseries Na Cloigne (The Heads), director Robert Quinn uses the Irish forests and countryside as the setting for a terrifying story about murder and the supernatural. Tourists who visited this world expecting to see the Ireland often depicted in films would be quite disappointed. From the beginning of the film, the director builds suspense by showing the woods as a place where mysterious figures roam around. In the second part of the film we see a friend of the missing girls confront the main character of Sean as he begins to realize something terrible has happened while the police are investigating a gruesome murder nearby. Things get even stranger as Sean begins to hear voices coming from the trees around him as he talks to the police.  These scenes are a sharp contrast from the “pastoral idyll” that tourists might expect to find on a visit to Ireland.