Get the popcorn ready and fire up the telly, because I’m proposing a Widdershins film fest! Some films, like the Outrun, I watched while editing the Widdershins, while the effect of others I only see now that the book is written.

Valhalla Rising (2009)

Otherworldly & transportive Viking Age adventure. The stark cosmology of Old Norse lore is rendered with surreal daring. Watching it, I felt I had been immersed in another way of thinking about fate and the gods.

The Company of Wolves (1984)

An adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story of the same name in her masterwork, The Bloody Chamber. She wrote the script; its stories-within-stories, funhouse mirror still fascinates. I think I have absorbed this mode of telling into my DNA at this point. The special affects—before CGI—are as terrible and uncanny as the first time I watched them as a teen.

Born in Flames, (1983)

I saw this film about intersectional feminist revolution as a young woman healing from SA. Let me tell you it was CATHARTIC. In the world of this film revolution as not only necessary but possible. It also frightened me, as any powerful thing might.

Bladerunner (1982)

I have watched this film over and over, and always find something new in it. While writing Widdershins, I returned to images of Pris and Rachel and other replicants. Their liminality and insistence on their own sentience and integrity inspired me. In many ways Kára, the pelt-less selkie doomed to be not-quite-human, was inspired by them.

Stalker (1979)

Andrei Tarkovsky’s genre-bending film set in a post-apocalyptic Russia is poetic dreamscape. The Stalker is an illegal guide in the ‘zone,’ a post-nuclear or perhaps a site of alien tech, where laws of physics are altered. The Stalker guides a writer and professor through the wilderness—a place where human civilization has been reclaimed by nature and by something else.

Labyrinth (1986)

Jim Henson & Brian Froud’s manifestation of fairyland and fairy logic is absolutely foundational for all fairy fic that came after, including mine.

American Werewolf in London (1981)

One of my favourite horror films, when I rewatched it recently I was struck by the kindness threaded throughout the film’s beauty-and-the-beast sub plot. As I wrote and revised Widdershins, it was this thread of kindness I polished, burnishing it until it shone as the red thread of hope through the book.

She Will (2021)

I have written before about this outstanding horror film exploring the psychogeography of the Scottish landscape, marked in places by the historical trauma of the witch hunts. It is a film about healing—the land, mind and body, but stripped of the corrupting force of ‘wellness.’ This is a path well forged through Ashes & Stones. I only saw this film after Ashes & Stones came out, but wished I’d seen it while I was writing the book. Perhaps I would have felt less alone in my task.

The Outrun (2024)

A beautiful rendition of Amy Liptrott’s outstanding memoir. This is an accurate portrait of the severity and mystery of Orkney, and what it feels like to live here. I fear the idea of Orkney as a ‘healing place’ might become a cliche now, and yet there’s something here that calls to me and others like me. The sense of belonging and place evoked in both the film and the book, as well as the pull of the land itself is absolutely the inspiration for Widdershins. As Steph, the chronically ill revolutionary in Widdershins, says, ‘…some people just have the islands written all over them—they mark us. We wear that island-longing like a second skin.’

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994)

This Irish selkie story shares aspects of Orcadian lore, and the original novel was set in Scotland. I saw the film as a young woman. My father actually told me about it. In a rare moment of perception he said, ‘this film is for you.’ I watched it 11 years before migrating to the UK, and 30 years before writing my own story of Seal Islands.