Child abuse writ large

An eerie animated tale about a young girl who uncovers an abusive Satanic cult in her sleepy hometown, the subject matter of The Green Marker Scare was inspired by Jones’ own deepest fears as a parent.
“Having children,” he reflects, “your biggest fear really is that something will happen to them. So I began to think that there were aspects of paedophilia that really hadn’t been explored yet.”
The topic of child abuse is shocking in its own right, but Jones’ unique and unconventional approach adds another level of tension to the film. Recruiting children from Limerick, Cork and Tipperary, Jones let the young students animate the gore-free film – careful, of course, not to show the young illustrators more than they needed to see.
“Given that it’s a horror that children face, and one they’re often not able to express, or something that when they do express it, they’re not believed, I thought it would be interesting to tell the story in a childlike way. So the only thing we told the children was: ‘this guy is a baddie’ or ‘when this person talks, you feel uncomfortable’ – so it was all language that existed in children’s imagination. And though the children never saw the entire thing, their combined work on different parts of the film told the story more effectively than we ever could.”
Ironically, Jones’ love of horror cinema initially created a distance between him and his subject matter. He had assumed that Satanism was more urban legend than fact. He was shocked, however, when his research unearthed a huge volume of texts and testimonies about what is known as “ritual abuse.”
“I had always thought that people who engaged in abuse that’s connected to rituals and Satanic beliefs had just watched too many horror films,” he says, “that they were imitating what they’d seen in movies or read in books. But during the course of my research I realised that the horror movies were based on real events and real cases of this. It’s a sub-culture that’s existed for centuries, and though it’s gone more underground and is spoken of less in modern culture, it still exists. But I went through a very long period of denial, thinking it was too outlandish and bizarre an idea. It took a really long time of researching and reading a lot of texts and a lot of anecdotal material until gradually I realised the trick that we all miss. The idea is that they feed off power and incredulity, and count on the fact that when people talk about it, others dismiss it as being too unlikely.”
The most chilling aspect of Jones’ film is the way in which mundane details reveal the participants not as monsters per se, but as real, ordinary people. As members of the cult gather, preparing to engage in a ritual sacrifice, there’s an announcement: a badly parked car is causing difficulty in the car park and needs to be moved. It’s a terrifying moment that highlights the relatable, everyday banality of the abusers’ lives.
“One-on-one, abuse is absolutely horrific, obviously,” says Jones, “but there’s something about the organisational aspects of these kind of rings. The idea that people would be talking to one another in the cold light of day and saying, ‘Well we’re going to meet here at this time’, and there’s something about people collaborating in this fashion that hadn’t been explored. Because a lot of it is quite mundane, which is horrific in its own way.”
There’s an obvious but uncomfortable parallel between the abuse addressed in Jones’ film and clerical sex abuse. Jones was keen to challenge the widespread denial that allows abuse to continue.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about naiveté and innocence and where naiveté ends. I was thinking a lot about abuse in Ireland, because back in the ‘50s – and even later, as we’ve seen – if you said that a priest was abusing you, it wasn’t just that you wouldn’t be believed. It’s more that it didn’t seem believable. I think there will come a day where the ritual abuse addressed in my film will be spoken of more – it is mentioned in the news sometimes – but I think talk of it is still sufficiently rare that we can marginalise it and compartmentalise it in our minds. But I have heard that even the Rape Crisis Centre in Ireland have come to accept that this type of ritual abuse happens.”
Given Ireland’s slow reaction to the clerical abuse scandal, Jones is uncertain that Irish audiences are ready to see the nightmare of abuse on screen.
“One thing I’m always amazed by is that it takes us such a long time to learn. You’d think that any organisation that committed the kinds of acts that the Church committed would be disbanded; that people wouldn’t be able to get away from them quick enough. And yet with the Catholic Church, there’s no question of that.
“We’re still in a very, ‘No, it was just some bad apples’ mode, and we’re not questioning it on a deeper level. I’m always amazed at how these things can happen – but people can still rapidly slip into the mind-set they had before. But there is progress and I think people will be more open to accepting that abuse happens and hearing about these things.”
Like all of his work, The Green Marker Scare was a passion project for Jones, who has decided to make his work available online, free of charge.
“We’re just trying to get people to watch it. There’s no commercial plan. I’ve also re-mastered my other films, How To Cheat in the Leaving Cert and Fudge 44. The idea is that now all three of my films are available free online, so people can share them with each other. We live in a world where if you think of something you’re interested in, you can find it immediately, and I wanted to catch up with that. People can now find them really easily – so hopefully over the years they can build up an audience.”

The Green Marker Scare and Jones’ other films are now available to watch on YouTube, or via Jones’ website, grahamjones.ie.