‘The Moor’ Writer and Director On Why The North of England Will Never Forget The Moors Murders
Between 1963 and 1965, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abducted and murdered five children before burying their bodies on Saddleworth Moor in the North of England. It remains one of the UK’s most infamous and sordid crimes.It’s this story and others like it—or rather, the loss that lingers in their wake—that are leveraged in The Moor.
Written by Yorkshire-born Paul Thomas and directed by Chris Cronin, the film blends history, both modern and ancient, with supernatural elements in a slow-burn horror for which landscape is given more significance than the killer’s pathology. Claire was just a child when her best friend was abducted and murdered. Decades later, she is approached by the boy’s father, Bill, who is searching the moors for his son’s final resting place. The Moor renders its titular setting not just as a treacherous physical location but as mental terrain—a headspace cloaked in the mists of grief, in which it’s all too easy to lose your way.
We spoke to Thomas and Cronin about crafting a truly Northern tale, the film’s Jaws moment, the moors as an eldritch location, and why the North can’t close the book on its trauma.
Dread Central: The Moor feels like a film not just inspired by local and regional news of the 1960s and beyond, but also a film inspired by your connections to landscapes and places like these. Could you talk about growing up in proximity to the moors?
Paul Thomas: I’m a child of the 1980s. Chris is a child of the 1990s. But across that whole span, the moors murders were there. We were trying to capture that feeling. It’s strange when you’re a kid—no one explains what serial killers or pedophiles are, for obvious reasons. So there was this idea that there are dead kids up on the moors, and you don’t understand why and no one wants to tell you. You got this sense of dread from the moors.
Chris Cronin: I remember when our school was being fumigated or they were doing repairs or something and they sent us to another school further up the hill. From the playground, you could literally see the moors. And I remember one or two kids, who were more privy than others, saying, ‘Oh, things happen on the moors…’. I don’t remember what we were told but we were scared of the moors.
So when Paul started talking about it as a treatment, I could feel that horror. Paul did his research and applied some elements to add weight to the story. We took this idea of how we felt as kids and manifested this boogeyman, which in the film is more of an eldritch location than a person in some ways. Through the combination of those things, we tapped into something. We’ve labeled it a Northern trauma. The moors murders are something the North will never forget. It stays with towns. It stays with families. That’s what we tapped into. Let’s not focus on the [murders]. Let’s focus on the after-effects. That’s the real horror.
DC: You do a really good job of that. And I want to touch on the landscape as an eldritch location a little later. What the film does well is create this ubiquitous boogeyman that exists for all children and equally for their parents.
CC: Every town has their own. Paul brought in the Lindow Man in Cheshire and standing stones from around the country. Americans say, ‘For us, it’s just like the Texas killing fields’.
PT: I’m a big Lovecraft fan, so there’s a real fear of the unknown in the film. Part of the reason these stories stick with us is because we can’t understand why anyone would do it. And that opens this door to unfathomable dark powers. In the film, that can move the focus off the killers and onto the location.
DC: There isn’t really another story like the moors murders in the UK. Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are the embodiment of that kind of evil and media aftermath.
CC: We know it’s an inspiration for the film but we had long conversations about how not to shine more light onto those characters. If you want to watch that, watch a true crime documentary. We utilized [the moors murders] as a way to create something truly Northern and grounded in reality, so that when we do the supernatural, you’re willing to follow the characters there. No matter what Bill does in the film, part of you understands why he does it.
DC: One fascinating detail is that you have the police taking the killer—or vice versa —out on the moor. Police escorted Brady and Hindley, separately, to Saddleworth moor in the mid-1980s so that they could assist in the search for the victims’ bodies. But the whole escapade was dismissed by the press, which is echoed in your film.
PT: Taking the killer up on the moors is the most direct thing [we took from the moors murders case]. I remember seeing that on the news. It was always this blurry little person [on TV] who was the epicenter of all evil. They didn’t let the press very close, so it was this blurry little dot who you were supposed to be scared of.
Storywise, you need an enemy. Bill and Claire are trying to do this against the odds. Everyone else has moved on and no one’s helping them. In real life, you could say it was the opposite – the police kept taking [Brady and Hindley] out of prison and did everything they could to find the bodies. They weren’t trying to bury it. They were trying to solve it. But in the film, you want this feeling that everyone has moved on. The characters are left alone with their grief and loss.
PT: It’s easy to make the police the big bad. That’s a common trope: well, clearly the police are absolutely useless. That would’ve made me roll my eyes. But having the media as the enemy makes it a little more personal when they’re sensationalizing something like that.
DC: Part of what I like about the film and what’s frightening about Brady and Hindley going up there is that apparently Brady said he lost his bearings and couldn’t take the police to where he’d buried the bodies because the landscape had changed. It underscores the dangers of the moors as an environment and how time and weather can literally shift the landscape, as well as introduces the idea that the moor has its own secrets. It decides whether you get to find out what’s there.
PT: Going back a long way, there’s always been people talking about seeing weird things up on the moors. Black dogs and things, ancient peat bodies. One of the theories is that the peat bodies were sacrificed. They didn’t seem to have fallen in the bog. They seem to have been taken up there and killed. We don’t know for sure but there are ritualistic elements. When we think of faeries today, it’s a bit Disney-fied. But historically, people were scared of supernatural creatures. So there’s this supernatural element to the moors, the idea that there’s something dark and sinister up there that people were sacrificed to.
CC: The weather changes so chaotically. The moors feel like their own environment. Its own space. In the film, the mist comes and goes when we want it to, for story reasons. But we talked about the weather being the moors’ personality. When Bill and Claire go up for the final time, the weather is horrible. It’s like, ‘You know what I am now’.
Everyone thinks that line [about the rapid shifts in air pressure meaning the weather can change extremely quickly] is a plant to save us [from continuity issues] but it’s not. The weather actually does that. When we were shooting the scene where Claire goes up to the moors for the first time, we arrived, looked around, and knew the weather was going to change in about 15 minutes. Could be rain. Could be fog. But it’s going to change. I just had to take a minute. ‘Right, can we shoot scene 56 instead?’ If the mist is going to come in, let’s use it. I was thinking of that shot in The Exorcist, with the car. So in 15 minutes, we shot a completely different scene that had a completely different feel to it. We had no lights or anything. We just waited with a camera and it all changed.
DC: Tell me about the techniques you used to sell the scale and dangers of the moors. I like the scene in which Bernard Hill’s character pulls out all the Ordnance Survey maps, lays them out side by side, and says, “You think that’s the moor? This is the moor”.
CC: That was probably one of my favorite scenes in the script. I couldn’t wait to shoot that, even before finding out Bernard Hill was doing it. I hear reviewers from the US say, ‘These moors are as big as Texas!’. They’re not. The scale is not what you’d think – you can be anywhere in four hours in the UK. But up on the moors, it’ll take you three times as long to get around. It’s treacherous. It’s a slog. The scene was another way of showing the hopelessness of looking for something in that environment. It puts a question mark over Bill. It was basically the film’s Jaws moment.
PT: ‘We’re gonna need a bigger boat.’ It was a set-up. How do you shift from the real world to something supernatural without losing the suspension of disbelief? Well, if the moors are that big, what’s Bill even doing up there? Is he just walking around randomly looking at the ground? If you haven’t thought about it already, hopefully, you think, ‘Well, how’s he doing it?’ Then you add in this creepy pendulum over the map and you go from ‘maybe he’s crazy’ to ‘maybe he’s doing something sinister’.
CC: It’s easy to get lost and turned around. One of the tricks we pulled was just removing the roads in post-production so the moors look endless.
DC: I like the idea of someone saying, ‘Oh, the moors must be the size of Texas’. Obviously that’s not true but it occurs to me now that the arranging of the Ordnance Survey maps and the selling of the moors’ size works on a metaphysical level. Maybe once you’re there it’s like another dimension. It’s bigger than satellite imagery might suggest. There’s a spiritual element at play here.
CC: The distance is deceiving. If it was flat, straightforward terrain you’d get there pretty quickly. But on the moors it’s more like, ‘I hope we get there within a few hours…’ It’s about trying to create that feeling for people who wouldn’t know what it’s like to traverse the moors. We were aware that people who haven’t been on moors would watch it as well, so we could take some liberties and play into the legend of it.
We took a cosmic approach to some of the supernatural elements. But because of the nature of the UK, the environment, and the history, it’s basically a folk horror. There’s some crossover. The vastness [of the moorland landscape] plays into the cosmic.
PT: It’s not a location Lovecraft would’ve used. But a British Lovecraft might’ve used the moors. That’s what it felt like to me. Maybe there’s one of these unfathomable things sleeping under the moors, that kind of thing.
DC: Descriptions of the environment in Dagon, for example, sound not unlike moorland. Lovecraft refers to the sea as “a heaving vastness of unbroken blue”.
CC: That’s not dissimilar to your description, Paul. ‘Scorched earth’ is how you described it.
PT: If you go up during summer, it can be quite green and pretty. We were trying to capture the brown. It’s quite unique.
CC: There’s some colour-grading trickery there too. As you go through the film, the color of the moors changes.
PT: We were using the stone as a threshold. Once the characters go past the stone, things change. Obviously the stone is Lovecraftian, too.
DC: You can find neolithic standing stones all over the Yorkshire and Lancashire moors, the Peak District, the Lake District, all over Cornwall. Talk to me about working the stone into the story.
PT: When you have a villain that you’re not going to meet, it has to have some sort of representation, which is why Peter Jackson used this burning eye in The Lord of the Rings, which isn’t really in the books. So at some point, we had to have something to represent the villain, rather than it be faceless. It’s ambiguous whether someone [carved] a representation of something into the rock or whether the weather formed it.
DC: The finished product has just enough of a face to make you question what you’re looking at as a viewer.
CC: I like something staring. Me and Andrew Layfield, the sound designer, talked about giving the stone something, to make it feel like there was something breathing under the wind. The film is subtle. You play with subtleties in sound, visuals, and VFX.
DC: Is there anything neither of you has been asked about The Moor in your time doing interviews?
CC: We went to great lengths to take what we know about the moors and its history, what inspires us and what we bring to the table from our upbringings around the moors, and use it all to make an original story that feels very Yorkshire. It’s definitely inspired by the tragedies that have happened on the moors but we also went to great lengths to ensure it’s not about them. So I haven’t been directly asked about the moors murders before.
PT: In my case, audiences sometimes want answers to make themselves a bit more comfortable. The whole point is to be uncomfortable. It’s a tricky balance. If it goes too far, it just feels like the people who made the film didn’t know what they were doing. And if you explain too much, you lose the creepiness and uncertainty. What could be going on in someone’s head for them to want to murder a child? That’s scary because we don’t understand it.
In order to not leave the audience feeling like you just made up a bunch of random things and don’t know what they mean, you have to come up with a working theory in your head. But how much of that do you put down? Put too much down and people forget about your film when it’s over because it answers every question. Don’t Look Now messed me up. I did not understand it. I didn’t understand the ending. If the film-maker had given me a really rational explanation the next day, I’d have stopped being creeped out.
CC: My main interest was in the moors as an eldritch location. I thought it was a really good idea for a Yorkshire film. Paul mentioned Don’t Look Now, he told me that. Mine was The Wicker Man. I saw that too young. Back then, the good guys won and the bad guys lost. This cop was trying to solve the mystery of this missing girl. And they get him, they punish him, they sing kumbaya and then the film ends. I was like, ‘What the fuck was that?!’ It took me days to rationalize it.
When I read Paul’s treatment, that’s how I felt. That’s when I started thinking about Northern trauma. It’s a book we just cannot close.
Categorized:Interviews
