Children of the Stones (1977) is a seven part miniseries aimed at children that aired on HTV in the UK and was repackaged as part of the The Third Eye on Nickelodeon in the US in the early ’80s. I saw like half of an episode when I was around 10 and it scared the crap out of me. The Brits apparently view it as an important landmark for children’s programming, which is funny, because all the Brits I know who watched it as a kid also report having been terrified by the show.

It is pretty great through. Father and teen son come to a town built inside a stone circle (modeled after Avebury, down to the crushed barber-surgeon, and filmed there). Dad’s an astrophysicist, son’s about to discover he’s a psychic. The town is presided over by Hendrick, a retired astronomer. Most of the villagers insist they are having a Happy Day, no matter what. There is a complex relationship between all these people, the stone circle (which sits above a massive stone dish), cosmic energies and a black hole in the constellation Ursa Major that plays out over and over in a time loop. The time loop has four main instances — the first in the megalithic era, the second in the medieval period, the third in 1976 and the fourth right as the action of the third resolves. Much is left murky and mysterious. A lot of people turn to stone. It’s damn good folk horror, mixing cosmic science with re-awakening ancient forces. I watched it recently, and it is still pretty scary!

Part of that is the music. This is the LP, issued by Trunk Records in 2022, and packs an astonishing 32 tracks onto just one side of an LP, including the HTV station fanfare the prefaced every episode. The music was composed by Sidney Sanger and performed by the Ambrosian Singers; it’s a feast of anxiety-inducing ululations. Check it out on Bandcamp if you’re feeling up to it. Genuinely startling music.

The LP has some other goodies. The serpent painting (which I mention in Monday’s post and figures as an important clue in the series) is included as a small posters — the release of the LP is actually entwined with a hunt for the original painting used in the production. The sleeve is also decorated with Les Mathews’ spooky illustrations that were included in the original 1977 novelization of the series (and, lamentably, left out of the recent re-issue, which is nevertheless worth reading [but skip the sequel]).