The Encyclopædia Britannica’s Short Story Showcase was a series of short films adapting famous short stories, for distribution around schools across American in the late 1960s and early 70s.The most successful of these, in terms of rentals and purchases, proved to be Larry Yust’s atmospheric and creepy adaptation of the Shirley Jackson story The Lottery, accompanied by a ten minute discussion about the story by Professor James Durbin of the University of Southern California, an element sadly, missing from most currently available prints.

It begins with the residents of a small town (Jackson said that she modelled the setting on her home town of North Bennington in Vermont) gathering in the square for some sort of meeting. Initially, all seems normal enough, the people (among them a young Ed Begley Jr) coming together for the annual drawing of a lottery, exchanging pleasantries and mundane chit chat on a seemingly idyllic June morning. Each of the town’s extended families – there are said to be 300 residents in the story though there are notably fewer here and most are played by the people of Fellows in California where it was filmed – has their names on a piece of paper that’s placed in a barrel for the draw, while children pile up stones around the edges of the square. Old Man Warner (William Fawcett) reminds the crowd that “lottery in June, corn be heavy soon” when he hears that some nearby villages have abandoned The Lottery, a ritual that dates back many years, possibly centuries. Coal merchant Mr Summers (William ‘Billy’ Benedict) and postmaster Mr Graves (Jim Boles) draw the name of the Hutchinson family, and Tessie (Olive Dunbar) complains that her husband Bill (Joe Haworth) was rushed into making the draw. In the final draw, one member of the family is chosen, Tessie, and is stoned to death by the townspeople as a sacrifice to ensure the success of their harvest that year.

The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in June 1948 and provoked much anger among the readership, some of whom sent hate mail to the editor while others canceled their subscriptions in protest. Both the magazine and Jackson (better known around these parts perhaps as the author of the source novel for the film The Haunting (1963)) herself were caught off guard by the reception, Jackson later recalling that “curiously, there are three main themes which dominate the letters of that first summer – three themes which might be identified as bewilderment, speculation and plain old-fashioned abuse.” She was later vindicated when the story became one of the best-loved and most revered of American short stories.

Yust was just starting his career with The Lottery – it was his third film and he’d go on to make the quirky horror Homebodies (1974) – and makes an excellent job of bringing the superficially simple story to the screen while retaining many of its more interesting nuances. Photographer Isidore Mankofsky, also at the start of his career and on his way Werewolves on Wheels (1971), Scream Blacula Scream (1973), Homebodies, Carrie (1976) and many others, brings a grainy, hand-held, almost documentary feel to the film. It begins innocently enough, giving the impression of being a simple study of small-town life before descending into something altogether more nightmarish. As with the story, we don’t find out the reason for the gathering until near the end when the terrible secret is revealed in almost matter of fact fashion.

Yust maintains the mystery effortlessly, keeping those unfamiliar with the story guessing. No-one explains how this nasty little ritual began, how it’s meant to work, nor why it’s lasted so long (“there’s always been a lottery” is the closest we get to an explanation) and the story is all the more unsettling for it. It’s a cautionary tale of mob violence, blind adherence to belief and the survival of ancient traditions whose origins are long lost in the mists of time. In this world of superstition and an unwillingness to change, Tessie is, ironically, the sole voice of reason and if one were to take a cosmological approach to the story, one might argue that she had to die simply to keep the tradition alive. Today the film has been co-opted into the seemingly endless corpus of the “folk horror” film thanks to its depiction of old ways surviving into a modern setting. It would make a good companion piece to The Wicker Man (1973) which of course covered similar ground.

The story itself is a grim piece to be offering up to school age children, but the film version is an unlikely classroom aid. It’s a terrific, briskly paced and above all else atmospheric vignette that has escaped the confines of the classroom (where it was an unlikely learning aid for young children) to find a cult audience. The story had been adapted for television as part of the Cameo Theatre (1950-1955) anthology series in 1950 and would turn up on NBC radio the following year. Later it would be adapted into a feature length television film in 1996 and the South Park episode Britney’s New Look (2008) uses elements from the story.