As we continue to exhume the cinematic past, more and more films get reassigned to whatever genre or sub-genre seems to be in favour at the time. One of the current cases in point is “folk horror”, once a useful grouping of like-minded but entirely independently made films but today rendered almost unusable by the sheer number of films being retroactively tagged with the label. John Schlesinger’s The Starfish: A Fairy Tale, a short film made as part of his student studies at Oxford University, has been added to the canon though the thought that Schlesinger ever saw it as any particular genre, let alone one so devalued today is laughable but tat appears to be where we are now. It takes its place in the groves of “folk horror” by virtue of it containing a witch, but is anything or anyone – least of all “folk horror” itself – enriched by this blanket inclusion of anything even vaguely witchcraft related?

Schlesinger shot the film in the Cornish fishing village of Cadgwith, mostly employing amateur locals though there are a few familiar faces here and there. It tells the story of a local sea witch named Meg (Margaret Webber), supposedly drawn from ancient Cornish legend tough seemingly more the concoction of Schlesinger and his co-director/writer Alan Cooke who went on to enjoy his own career as a director, mostly in television but he also made The Mind of Mr Soames for Amicus in 1970 (they’d previously made the short Black Legend (1948)). Meg does little to boost the local tourist industry, emerging from her watery cave to abduct and possess holidaying children. When she claims her latest victims (Nigel Finzi, Christopher Finzi and Susan Schlesinger), it’s up to a young sailor, Jack Trevennick (Kenneth Griffith) to battle the witch and get them back.

The Witch: A Fairy Tale was lost to the mists of time for many years but was safely stored in the BFI’s archive and they made it available on their BFIPlayer streaming platform. Schlesinger would probably have been less than impressed that it had resurfaced, telling the invaluable The British Entertainment History Project “it was the second film I made at university, a lousy movie.” It’s certainly a technically crude film and it’s all too obviously the work of a director still trying to come to terms with what a film is and how to make one, so his summation seems accurate enough. It’s only 45 minutes long so there’s little time to get bored of the endless admittedly lovely “local colour” shots, but there’s a lot counting against it.

First of all, it manages to feel much older than it really is, more like a product of the 1940s or even 1930s than of 1950. This is down to the amateurish nature of it and the crudity of its execution – the stiffness of the supporting cast and the starchy voiceover certainly don’t help very much. More troubling is the film’s depiction of Meg. She should have been terrifying, a ghastly figure crawling from the gloom of legend to stalk the present, a hideous monster perhaps only glimpsed briefly around the periphery of the action. As shot by Schlesinger and Cooke, she’s more a parody of the stereotypical movie witch, hooked of nose, warty of face and much prone to wild cackling. The result is a lot less frightening than she should have been.

In his British Entertainment History Project interview Schlesinger remembered “once going outside London, not far, I’m not sure where it was, to see the film in a double bill and at the end of it the people sitting next to me said well I suppose somebody had a good time making that. That was called The Starfish.” It’s unlikely he let the experience get him down. Her had a nice line in acting gigs at the time and just under a decade later he made the acclaimed documentary short Terminus (1961) and then it was onward and upward through a career that included A Kind of Loving (1962), Billy Liar (1963), Darling (1965), Midnight Cowboy (1969) and many more.

Seen today, The Starfish: A Fairy Story gives little indication of what Schlesinger would go on to make but as one of his earliest efforts it’s of historical importance all the same. Approach it for what it is, a student film with all the expectations that come with that, and it’s fascinating in its own way (there’s some atmospheric business with Meg despite her stereotypical presentation), a roughly drafted calling card from a director who would go on to leave quite the impression on the history of British and American cinema.