Few events take place in the countryside as brutal as fox hunting. It is one that highlights the class divisions still present in this country, far more powerfully than most other country pursuits. Aside from obvious power on display by those who still, quite illegally, partake in it, even before its ban in 2004 it had become a symbol of the ultimate violence of the land-owning classes.

Thankfully, the arts have always seen fox hunting for what it is – outside of the clearly inane arguments for it as either pest control or the upkeep of tradition – and no medium has highlighted its violence more brilliantly than cinema.

Films of the wyrd landscape tradition especially have tapped into the nasty hypocrisies and exertions of power displayed in the act of fox hunting, and have been providing damning critiques of it for a number of years now. Fox hunting is inescapably a symbol of elite power through bullying and violence.

Thoughts of this idea first began to reverberate when first watching Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s underrated classic, Gone To Earth (1950). The film follows the doomed romance between a Gypsy (Jennifer Jones) and a fox-hunting squire (David Farrar), all taking place in a lavish rural landscape.

Fox hunting takes centre stage in the drama. Even the title refers to the call given when the fox has disappeared on the hunt. But Powell & Pressburger knew there was symbolic potential in the act, especially as a tool to comment on rural class divides and misogyny.

The Gypsy, who has a pet fox which is later killed (as is she) by a pack of hounds, plays the role of another fox; with the overtly masculine squire resorting to similar violence and coercion in order to obtain her, even after she is married to a local vicar. As is often the case in such films, the landowners treat everything on their land as theirs to do with as they please, even if those things are actually living creatures.

This same theme was heightened several years later in Terence Fisher’s adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) for Hammer Studios. There is, of course, a natural horror to the act of fox hunting that lends itself well to the genre but Fisher does something more than just use it as a backdrop.

The film’s opening is centred on a group of young men fresh from the hunt and dangerously high on the kill. Fisher shows the natural escalation of the characters where they see the local servant girl (Judi Moyens) as just another creature to be taken. She is literally chased across the moor; no doubt in the same way they chased the fox earlier, though a more sexual charge comes to light.

There is a clear link in both of these films between the act of taking an animal for granted -killing it needlessly for some bestial pleasure – and the taking of a woman’s body, both for sexual and violent pleasure, though the line between the two is deliberately blurred.

Horror would find another interesting use for the act in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, The Tomb of Ligeia (1964). After the initial opening scene, the first post-credit sequence is a detailed portrayal of a foxhunt which frames the first quarter of the film. This is partly to show the difference in character of the lead as he uses the hunt as a ruse to meet a woman. But the whole sequence then has later consequences, framing the individuals as deserving the horror to come (especially as it is animal-based, albeit in the form of a demonic cat).

There are few better scenarios to act as shorthand for grotesque upper-class English characters than to have the one waving a corpse of a fox about such as Derek Francis’ Lord Trevanion does. There are undoubtedly other examples. Disney even used the nastiness of such violence to build a message of caring in their underrated 1981 animation, The Fox and the Hound. But the final example I want to draw attention to is not a film but a music video and because it addresses a further issue easily equated with the clear unfairness of the foxhunting set-up.

For Dizzee Rascal’s 2007 single Sirens, foxhunting is used as an effective framing of inner city racial inequality and the inherent violence of it. What is so effective about the video, apart from its stunning 35mm aesthetic, is that it manages to displace the act of fox hunting into an overtly urban environment and still make it seem plausible; the gentry effectively exerting their violence and will everywhere.

The most powerful shot is one of a mounted hunter in a small urban flat, attempting to chase the rapper, though the final sequences of men and women dousing their faces with blood (hinted at potentially being that of a working-class black man) is one of the most powerful and stark images in twenty-first-century music videos.

What is clear from this, and all of the previous uses, is that foxhunting, while commenting on a number of inequalities, is ultimately a symbol of power, bullying, unfairness, and the belief that finance gives a free pass to just about any action. With the still prevalent hunting with dogs on private land, even after the ban, it has never had a more depressingly potent effect on screen.