There are a lot of companies out there that seem to dedicated to uncovering weird obscure horror movies from the 20th Century, which is something I find cool but mostly don’t partake in unless they happen to get a title I’m already fond of. I’m not really in the business of just blind buying movies because some respected boutique label is putting it out. However there was this one boxed set put out by Severin Films that kept interesting me like a siren song, a set of about twenty relative obscure movies called “All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror.” As the title would suggest it’s a set of movies from all over the world that all fit into the broader “folk horror” genre that’s been increasingly discussed in a post “The Witch” and post “Midsommar” horror landscape and even though most of the films in the set (with two exceptions) were entirely unfamiliar to me I still thought I might want to give it a shot if not for the fact that it’s a fairly pricey purchase. But then Severin had a big sale that presented a substantial discount and next thing you know I had the set on my shelf. So, a big backbone of my October horror watching this year is going to be dedicated to going through this boxed set and taking in all twenty movies, likely just following the order the set places them in. Not sure how this is going to go, but I’m curious and we’ll see how it goes.
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021)
The first disc of Severin’s “All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror” is dedicated not to one of the movies but instead to this rather lengthy three hour documentary that was produced by Severin itself. I’m usually a bit mixed on if these sort of things that could be interpreted as bonus features should be logged as movies unto themselves but the set treats it as its own movie with its own bonus features and this is also very notably not just focused on the movies in the boxed set, in fact the movies in the boxed set are kind of deep cuts compared to much of what’s discussed in the documentary. Folk Horror is of course a “genre” that’s a little hard to nail down and there’s a question of whether it should be viewed as a true genre at all. Basically it’s meant to be horror that’s rooted in folk traditions and monsters that exist within folklore. Of course vampires are also monsters that exist within folklore but I’m not sure most people would view Blade as folk horror so you do need to have a bit more of a focus on the folkloric elements in order to really make sense under the label. The three hour documentary is split roughly into three acts: its first hour is dedicated to the British folk horror tradition (E.G. The Wicker Man), the second hour is dedicated to American folk horror (including movies derived from Native American legends and African derived concepts like voodoo), and then the third hour is about folk horror from around the world and sort of jumps from one country’s folk horror tradition to the next including Australia, Japan, Latin America, and various European countries. Robert Eggers is one of the interviewees for the film but aside from him the movie doesn’t have a lot of celebrity talking heads and instead focuses on film scholars and horror experts to make its points and most of them seem to know their stuff. The film also seems to have paid their fair use lawyers very well because it’s not nervous about using film clips extensively and most of them look quite good here and they also made sure to use a lot of cool animations and the like to make sure the film coheres well. At the end of the day it’s a fairly straightforward and functional video essay, but an informative one. There’s very little crossover appeal here to people who aren’t interested in the subject but I’m something of an aficionado of these film genre survey docs and I’d say this sits well next to something like Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation! These kind of docs, the ones made for the real sickos, are a great humbling experience for the likes of me because they’re a great reminder that no matter how deep into cinema you are there’s actually a whole lot more out there waiting to be found.
***1/2 out of Five
Eyes of Fire (1983)
The first scripted feature in Severin’s “All the Haunts Be Ours” boxed set is this 1983 independently produced American film which I believe is the only fully American film in the box and I suspect it was placed upfront as a way of easing people into the programing a bit before diving into the more exotic fare. That said this is not exactly a “normal” 80s horror flick and is pretty deeply folk horror to its core to the point where it seems like a pretty direct influence on several of the films in the more recent folk horror revival. The film is about a preacher who, along with his family and some followers leave a New England settlement in pre-revolutionary America and goes out into the frontier and build a settlement only to encounter some unexplained evil that threatens them and turns them against each other… sound familiar? Yeah, there are definitely some similarities between this and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, but there are also some pretty key differences. For one, while there is witchcraft involved in what’s terrorizing these people it gets employed in ways that are a bit less psychological and a bit more aggressive that it was in that movie and seems to involve several ghost-like entities. So you’ve got a lot of interesting things going on here but this is certainly not a perfect movie, in fact it’s kind of frustrating because the stuff it does right it does very right but it has some kind of gaping filmmaking issues. For one, the film is kind of awkwardly edited with a bunch of these strange fade outs and ins between scenes early on that makes the movie like it’s a TV production going to commercial breaks, but more importantly the film has a lot of visual effects and photographic techniques that loudly scream “1983” in a film that should be trying to seem timeless. The evil witch, who for my money should have probably just been off screen for the most part, is rendered in this rubbery suit that kind of resembles the old had in that “jump scare” from Mulholland Dr. and it also frequently signals the uncanny by putting these kind of cheesy photographic filters over things and also overestimates how scary it is to put fake animated yellow eyes on people. The film also has a cast that is, well they’re not terrible, but there’s a reason they’re making an indie movie instead of an A-picture. The film was also reportedly cut down after some test screenings in ways that are said to make some of the plotting less clear and having watched the theatrical version that seems likely. There is an alternate longer cut which bears the original title “Crying Blue Eye” which is also available in this boxed set (something I was not aware of when I hit “play”) and I may give that a watch some day in the future. Despite the flaws I still mostly think the good outweighs the bad here: it has a fascinating setting and setup and when it’s not using cheesy visual effects it does come up with some genuinely cool horror visuals and hell even those bad effects are bad in a kind of charming analog way. It’s a film that was ahead of its time, and it’s kind of a shame that the director committed career suicide with his next film, a sellout comedy called The Invisible Kid liked by no one, which left him pretty much out of work pretty much to this day.
***1/2 out of Five
Leptirica (1973)
After easing people into the “All the Haunts be Ours” set with an American movie the set then starts to venture into the deep end with an exploration of Balkan vampire mythos via this hour long made for TV film from the former Yugoslavia. Though westerners tend to associate vampires with Romania because of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Serbia has just as much of a tradition of folkloric vampires as they do and the first discussions of the monsters in western Europe actually came from accounts from travelers in Serbia. This film is based on a short story from the Serbian author Milovan Glišić (who’s often compared to Nikolai Gogol) called “After Ninety Years,” which was actually written twenty years before Stoker’s novel and tells a village folk tale of a vampire named Sava Savanović that starts killing people in a mill until the villagers find his grave and drive a stake through it, though aren’t quite able to permanently kill his evil spirit after it escapes in the form of a butterfly. This folkloric version of the vampire does not necessarily follow all the rules and aesthetics we’re used to from Vampires: it has fangs but they’re a full mouth of pointy teeth rather than just two long canines (probably the film’s most enduring image) and monsters seem a bit more spectral, more akin to zombies or demons than zombies despite ostensibly having human forms and they also aren’t very talkative and I’m not exactly sure I understand the mechanics of what happened in the ending. I wouldn’t read too much into the fact that this is a relatively short TV movie because the production values here are less bad than “1970s Yugoslav television” might lead you to believe. Director Đorđe Kadijević had been a legit theatrical film director earlier in his career and got confined to television more out of political concerns than for a lack of talent and it generally doesn’t take that much cash to make something like this. The film’s brevity is also probably an asset moreso than a drawback given that the film doesn’t feel too much obligation to pad out what is meant to be a campfire story of sorts. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to an entry level vampire movie fan, it’s kind of one you need to have an interest in the folklore background to get too much out of, but as an example of a folk tale being brought to the screen effectively it works quite well.
***1/2 out of Five
Witchhammer (1970)
Within the folk horror canon there are not only movies about the fear that the old folklore is real but also movies The Wicker Man about the feat that the people who believe in the old folklore could turn out to be driven to kill and one of the other most famous examples of this is the 1968 British film Witchfinder General, about the way hunting for witches led to deaths of a lot of innocent people in the past and of course America had its own version of this with the Salem witch hunts which have turned up in any number of movies. Well as it turns out that central Europe had its own version of this and that is vividly dramatized in Otakar Vávra’s Witchhammer, a movie made at the tail end of the Prague Spring and while it wasn’t officially part of the Czechoslovakian New Wave (Vávra was an older filmmaker than those guys) it benefited from some of the same freedoms they had. The film’s title is a reference to a medieval book called the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a sort of “how to” guide to carrying out inquisitions about witchcraft and filled with the kind of demonology details that would inspire works like Häxan. The film is specifically about a series of such events that have gone down in history as the Northern Moravia witch trials, in which a sanctimonious potentate named Jindřich František Boblig of Edelstadt presided over the trial sparked by an old beggar woman stealing a communion wafer and under Malleus Maleficarum sanctioned torture she ended up naming other people supposedly in league with the devil, then when tortured those people end up naming other people, and so on with all of these people then being burned at the stake.
It’s a fairly familiar “witch hunt” dynamic of the kind you’d recognize in works like “The Crucible,” which was of course actually an allegory for the McCarthy communist hunts of that play’s time and there’s a similar if opposite political subtext to be found here as well. Several years before this Czechoslovakia was the sight of some pretty infamous communist show trials such as the 1952 Slánský trial, which is depicted in Costa-Gavras’ film The Confession, which was released the same year as this. That allegory was lost on no one and when the Prague Spring ended shortly after the film’s release it was withdrawn from cinemas and banned. That’s unfortunate because this is a really well made film. Though made in 1970 Vávra still opted to film the movie in black and white but in widescreen and it has a somewhat timeless look because of it despite having some graphic violence and nudity throughout and some surprising choices like the idea of occasionally cutting to this mad monk’s fanatical speeches about the evils of witchcraft from time to time (the, uh, contrasts in the opening scene is particularly effective at this). Where the film does start to lose me a bit is in its third act, which it kind of repeats itself by just showing the same kangaroo court process we saw in the first half again but with a different victim and the film never quite finds a way to end in a satisfying way given that the real events it depicts did not really have a satisfying conclusion either. In fact a big part of the original story is that justice did not finally prevail, in fact the film goes out of its way at the end to say that the grand inquisitor responsible for all this suffered basically no consequences for his bloodthirstiness. Still, the journey getting there is really strong here and it’s probably one of the best renderings of a “witch hunt” in cinema.
**** out of Five
Viy (1967)
There are only two movies in the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set which I’d already seen beforehand and this is one of them. I watched this about seven years ago because it was featured in the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die book but that was a rather compromised viewing in which the only version of the movie I could find was a crappy dubbed copy, so I was more than happy to revisit the movie in this superior presentation and sure enough I enjoyed the film a lot more this time around but I think that probably had less to do with superior audio and video and is more just a function of knowing what I was getting into this time around. This film is a product of the Soviet Union and was directed by a pair of filmmakers named Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov who don’t appear to have made a whole lot else of note afterwards which is a shame because this is neat movie. The film is an adaptation of a short story by Nikolai Gogol who himself presented it as a recounting of an old folk tale though it was probably more inspired by folk superstitions than a direct telling of an actual tale. The film follows a monk who encounters a witch and after a frightening flight she takes him on he beats her half to death and upon that she transforms into a younger woman, aparantly the daughter of an important village leader, and with her dying breath this “daughter” names the monk by name and insists he be the one who engages in a ritual in which he stays with the body for three nights in a row doing prayers over it and on each of these nights progressively creepy things happen to him. The film’s is a horror movie of sorts but it’s really more “trippy” than it is scary with the witch flying scene and the three nights being rendered with special effects that aren’t “realistic” exactly but which are visually interesting to say the least and the directors employ some interesting editing tricks to render some unnatural movements on the part of the witch. I will say that the “primitive” special effects hit a bit of a wall once the titular demon (which I believe is just pronounced like “vee”) shows up in the flesh and is a dude in a pretty unconvincing and kind of dumb looking rubber suit but the rest of that scene is so cool that you forgive it. Ultimately the movie is like a very cool haunted house attraction mixed with something of a ethnographic recreation of Slavic peasant life and it’s probably the most famous soviet horror film for a reason.
**** out of Five
Lake of the Dead (1958)
The “All the Haunts be Ours” boxed set heads into the Nordic region for its next pair of films starting with this Norwegian film about a group of bourgeois intellectuals who find themselves taking a trip to a cabin in a remote wooded area near a lake that they come to learn has a dark history. Legend has it that a man named Tore Gruvik who had an incestuous fixation on his sister killed her and her lover and then drowned himself in the lake, and they say his ghost haunts the lake and occasionally draws people into the lake to their deaths. That setup sounds familiar and it’s not too hard to imagine a version of this that turns into a slasher movie or more straightforward ghost story but this goes for something a bit more cerebral, possibly too cerebral. The film does have atmosphere for days; its black and white photography and widescreen compositions look quite nice throughout and whenever it gets to that lake in question it does a great job of making it seem like a creepier body of water than it objectively should be given that nothing is really happening there most of the time. The catch to all this is that the film is based on a novel by a guy named André Bjerke, who is more of a mystery/thriller writer than a horror writer and the film plays out more like a mystery than a straight supernatural horror film at times which feels a bit awkward. I’d also say that the film’s ending is more than a little anticlimactic. That having been said this is interesting when looked at as folk horror because it’s not really harkening back to some ancient evil so much as it’s dealing with the ghost of someone who died not that long ago and if not for the rural outdoor setting it might fit more in the Henry James/Shirley Jackson tradition of haunting stories than what’s normally associated with folk horror, though there is some cryptic stuff involving a raven that stands out. Ultimately I’m not sure that this rather brief movie would stand out that spectacularly under some other circumstances but it’s a cool little find just the same.
*** out of Five
Tilbury (1987)
The “All the Haunts Be Ours” box really found a deep cut with Tilbury, a one hour Icelandic TV movie that uses an ancient legend as a metaphor for Iceland’s experience when British troops were stationed there during World War II. The Tilbury of the title is a mythological gremlin type thing from Iceland that gets summoned by women during times of starvation and sucks milk out of them through a sort of third nipple that they grow on their leg and then sort of regurgitate that milk into a cow that then produces butter for people. It’s kind of a gross legend. The film is set long after the era this fable was made for and is set in 1940 during a rather tense period of Icelandic history in which they were technically in a state of British occupation as a result of the Nazi invasion of Denmark (whose kingdom they were previously part of, not unlike the current situation with Greenland) and while this occupation does not appear to have been particularly violent there were certainly resentments and in the case of this movie it’s a rather petty resentment experienced by a young man who comes to learn that a girl he grew up with and clearly has a crush on has been having an affair with a British officer, which makes him rather jealous. This young man then imagines (or perhaps correctly intuits) that this officer is actually secretly one of these Tilbury things. The metaphor here being that much as the mythological Tilbury may have been a necessary thing to summon in order to stave off starvation, this British occupation may have been necessary in order to keep the Nazis away but that they are nonetheless not necessarily people with the people’s best intentions in mind. That’s an interesting metaphor to ponder but as a horror movie this has shortcomings, the biggest one being that Icelandic folklore maybe did not provide director Viðar Víkingsson with the scariest of monsters to make a movie about. These Tilburys might provide some transgressive Freudian imagery but they look kind of odd (I get a whiff of antisemitic imagery out of their large nosed goblin like appearance, not sure if that was intentional given the world war II backdrop) and are more gross than frightening. I’d also say that the drawbacks of 80s Icelandic TV production values are what they are. Still, this is a thoughtful and unique little horror movie rooted in a not very widely explored historical era and as a “horror movie for people who’ve seen every horror movie” it’s a cool find.
*** out of Five
The Dreaming (1988)
Starting on disc six the “All the Haunts Be Ours” boxed set we start getting a series of folk horror related movies from Australia, a place that like the United States is a breakaway settler colony whose folklore is both tied into the beliefs of the aboriginal populations as well as the legends formed by early settlers and their interactions with the former. One such film is this 1988 film called The Dreaming which was actually put out direct-to-video upon first release, supposedly because it was too sympathetic to the aboriginal people, though I’m not sure that this is exactly the most progressive thing in the world from a modern perspective. The film reckons with an early time in Australian history in which the continent had been discovered by Europeans but not really settled yet but did still occasionally get visited by whaling vessels who would then brutalize the native population while there. This trauma gets explored through a story where a white woman working as a doctor starts experiencing strange visions after a young adult indigenous woman she’s treating passes away. These visions also seem to be connected to the woman’s father, an archeologist of sorts, who opened an aboriginal tombs and as the film was originally envisioned there was supposed to be an implication that the father had once abused the daughter and this would be paralleled with the visions she’s having about aboriginal women being abused. The producers reportedly ordered that the filmmakers tone down this aspect and this does result in some aspects of film making a bit less sense than they otherwise would. Also, for whatever interest the movie has in the history of aboriginal mistreatment, it remains a movie about a white woman with actual living aboriginal people being reduced to side characters. Despite all this, this is a pretty stylish movie in a lot of ways and its political overtones and focus on trauma following someone feels remarkably ahead of its time and dare I say rather… elevated?
***1/2 out of Five
Kadaicha (1988)
This is another late 80s Australian film that went direct to video in its home country but reportedly did play in some movie theaters in the United States, which surprises me because this feels a lot less like a product for theaters. In the booklet and press materials for the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set Severin Films somewhat defensively announces that this was “Mastered from [the] only surviving broadcast quality video master” which is to say that this is in 1.33:1 and kind of looks like shit. So, the VHS-like image quality isn’t helping but what’s the content like? Well the title refers to something called the Kadaicha Stone, which is a sort of magical item in the movie linked to what is essentially an aboriginal curse that seems to be going after a set of teenagers because they live in homes that were built on top of an aboriginal burial ground. These teenagers then die in various mysterious ways as the curse starts making stuff happen and the targeted teens not yet affected by this need to get to the bottom of what’s happening to save themselves. Sound familiar? Yeah, this is basically A Nightmare on Elm Street but without a charismatic villain like Freddy Krueger or an explicit connection to dreams in the bizarre deaths (which aren’t executed particularly interestingly). The theme of generational guilt that seems to be implicit in all of this along with the aboriginal imagery would seem to be the one interesting thing that still makes this noteworthy all these years later but at the end of the day “built on an Indian graveyard” was already something of a cliché by 1988 and I don’t think doing it in Australia really changes things that much. If executed with a bit more style and with frankly better scares this would be less of an issue and I will concede that the sub-par presentation may have been a bit of a handicap here but for me this one was mostly a “miss.”
** out of Five
Celia (1989)
Calling the 1989 Australian film Celia a work of folk horror is a bit of a stretch, and for that matter calling it a horror movie of any kind is a touch misleading. For long stretches of its runtime it feels more like a coming of age film, albeit one like Heavenly Creatures or Poison for the Fairies which is interested in how youthful innocence can lead to darkness and violence. The film is set in the Melbourne suburbs in the mid-50s, which seem to pretty closely mirror what you’d expect from 50s suburbia in other settings. The title character is a girl of about eight or nine who hears a somewhat obscure (but real) fairy tale called “The Hobyahs” in which these mythological creatures besiege a house and this story really starts to get to her head. This is where the “folk horror” element of the movie comes in but there’s not too much of a suggestion here that this story is real in any supernatural way and mostly just seems to be in her head. Meanwhile, Celia is kind of “going through it” in her coming of age; her father has recently learned that the parents of her best friend are socialists and has decided to ban her from playing with them as a result. To make up for this he tries to buy her a pet rabbit, but this came at the height of rabbits being an invasive species in Australia and not long after the government temporarily passes a law restricting pet rabbits and all of this stress builds towards some dangerous behavior from Celia. The movie has quite a mix of genre and tones and that’s probably why it had trouble finding an audience (the non-descriptive title probably didn’t help) but the movie has gotten something of a cult audience since then and I can see why. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to people looking for a hardcore horror experience but the period setting is interesting and I think that director Ann Turner really “gets” the psychology of this girl and she put together a neat little film about her.
***1/2 out of Five
Alison’s Birthday (1981)
Alison’s Birthday is a movie that’s slightly older than the other Australian films in the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set and is more adjacent to the wider “ozsploitation” movement that carried over from the 1970s. It’s also a movie that feels a bit less tied to Australia and its unique history than the other three and feels more like a horror movie that could have been made in any given western country and kind of fits into the wider world of movies about demonic possession that popped up in the wake of The Exorcist but its much more direct influence is almost certainly Rosemary’s Baby. The Alison of the title is an eighteen year old woman who’s soon to be turning nineteen and is surprised when her family shows up to throw her a big birthday party she did not ask for and they suddenly seem really pushy about this and they’ve also brought a strange extremely elderly woman along who they claim is her great grandmother she’s never met. It quickly feels like she’s being gaslit by some sort of kooky cult. Unlike the protagonist in Rosemary’s Baby, however, she’s not alone in this and her boyfriend who becomes concerned about her increasingly becomes a protagonist in the second half forced to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on here in order to save her. This aspect, along with the absence of pregnancy material, make this less of a statement about gender than Rosemary’s Baby and perhaps more of a statement about generational conflict if there is a statement being made here at all. The actual nature of this cult, whose exact religious origin seems at times like a sort of paganism and at times more like straightforward devil worship, is a bit hazy but it is notable that their ultimate scheme seems fairly similar to the plots of a couple of recent horror movies like Hereditary and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (which was, probably not coincidentally, directed by an Australian). The film was shot on 16mm and isn’t really the prettiest of movies and doesn’t have a ton of “scare” beyond the general paranoid vibe, but that vibe does have some value to it and while the movie is derivative it mostly works.
***1/2 out of Five
Wilczyca (1983)
On disc eight of the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set we return to Central/Eastern Europe with a pair of movies from Poland, starting with this movie whose title translates to “She-Wolf” and was a pretty big hit in its native country when it came out in the early eighties. The film is set in the mid-19th Century during an era of Austrian occupation in Poland and a variety of upheavals are happening around Europe. In that environment a man returns home to find that the wife he routinely mistreated is on her deathbed having engaged in all sorts of sinful things while he was gone and she curses him with her dying breath. Given her witchcraft adjacent actions the man’s brother suggests he stake her to her coffin, something he refuses to do so the brother does it for him but worries she could still rise from the grave. Sure enough that seems to happen as he shortly finds himself being stalked by a female wolf as well as other creepy apparitions. When watching the Yugoslav film Leptirica a few discs back in this boxed set I discussed how the rules of vampirism in these old folk tales did not always line up perfectly with the rules that Hollywood lays out and that the line between ghosts, vampires, and werewolfs is often more nebulous and this shows the werewolf side of that same coin. The film also reminded me a bit of Viy in terms of its general look and feel as it has this clean Academy ratio appearance with some pretty nice period detail. I will say that the film maybe had a few more characters than it needed to with a pair of countesses who may or may not be channeling the wife kind of muddying the narrative but when the film does have this guy being stalked or dealing with alchemists to find a solution to his problems it’s a pretty interesting watch.
***1/2 out of Five
Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach (1970)
The second Polish film in the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set is this strange little movie based on a 19th Century novella of the same name by Prosper Mérimée. Though Polish the film is actually set in Lithuania and follows a professor who’s traveled there to study the local folklore and while there encounters a young nobleman who’s mother has gone completely mad after having been dragged away by a bear shortly before he was born and there are wild rumors that this bear may have been the guy’s true father. Yeah, you read that right, movie about a dude who may be the product of bear rape. It… comes off a bit more tasteful in the movie than you might think. The potential bear offspring doesn’t exactly look like a half-ursine, he simply looks like a human and his maybe bear side seems like more of a werewolf type situation if it is true at all. There’s also a witch hanging around and some other local shenanigans going on. It makes sense for this movie to be present in a folk horror boxed set as it’s about a literal folklorist but the emphasis is a bit more on the “folk” than on the “horror” with this one. It’s take on 19th Century Lithuania serves as a nice little travelogue with a focus on the diversity of the area including the Romani population but the film involves a lot of buildup and not a ton of payoff once the were-bear shenanigans finally happen. I kind of dug it but there are definitely more compelling movies in this boxed set and this one is maybe a bit more for the completeists.
*** out of Five
Clearcut (1991)
Disc Nine of the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set returns to North America, though it also secretly continues the streak of Polish cinema as the film in question, Clearcut, is a Canadian film made by a Polish filmmaker named Ryszard Bugajski who was essentially exiled from his native country for political reasons. That is perhaps surprising because the film in question is pretty deeply rooted in the wilderness of Ontario and deals extensively with the very North American theme of Indigenous rights. The film concerns a white human rights lawyer who flies into Indian county in order to assist activists who are protesting a logging operation on contested land and when he arrives he meets a particularly angry activist calling himself Arthur (played by Graham Greene, coming right off his work in Dances With Wolves) who believes in much more forceful activism than this lawyer does… to the point where he kidnaps one of the logging executives and drags him out into the wilderness along with the lawyer who’s also more or less being held at gunpoint. This becomes something of a war of wills with Arthur in many ways trying to make a point to the lawyer as much as anything and the point seems to be trying to contrast the lawyer’s non-violence principals with Arthur’s more extreme measures.
This violence vs. non-violence conflict is the heart of the movie and how one reads that is perhaps something of a Rorschach test: is it suggesting that the lawyer is a timid squish who needs to get his hands dirty, or is it suggesting that the lawyer was a bit naïve to what native activism is all about and was a fool to not have his guard up around this guy. Bugajski’s background could support either of these interpretations, on one hand he lived under an authoritarian regime and saw the limits of non-violent dissent over there, but when he came to the west he was also reportedly annoyed by the naiveté of western leftists who engaged in apologia for the Soviet Union. Of course the other question about this is why it would be considered folk horror as it in many ways plays out more like a hostage thriller or even a wilderness survival film rather than a true horror movie. This mostly comes from the fact that the film could be read as something a bit more supernatural with the possibility floated that “Arthur” is actually some sort of vengeful spirit rather than a regular person and his final scene does seem to support this. That’s pretty heavily de-emphasized in the movie though and isn’t really the main way the film “plays.” It’s a fun idea to play around with and the movie more generally is a very interesting take on modern indigenous issues, one that stringently avoids a lot of the “noble savage” nonsense you often say in movies about the topic in the 90s and generally doesn’t take the easy way out. I do kind of with Ron Lea as a bit better here however and feel like the movie could have been a bit more perfect if that character had been honed a bit.
**** out of Five
Il Demonio (1963)
The tenth disc of the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set digs into Italy’s contributions to the folk horror tradition, particularly via this notable film about the persecution of a so-called witch in a provincial Italian village. This fits more firmly in the Witchfinder General/Witchhammer side of folk horror in that it seems fairly clear in the movie that there isn’t really any witchcraft going on (or is there?) and the “real” monsters are the superstitious villagers who are oppressing the supposed witch. The catch with this one is that the falsely accused witch is a woman who’s clearly suffering from some sort of mental break and as such plays into the accusations of demonic possession at times and may believe them herself. The film stars Daliah Lavi (who was in Bava’s The Whip and the Body the same year) as the woman in question and she proves to be a very effective screen presence and also manages to pull off a “spider walk” similar to the one seen in that famous deleted scene from The Exorcist (this walk is apparently referenced a lot in the literature of demonic possession through history). The movie’s director was a guy named Brunello Rondi, who was actually a fairly prominent figure in mid-century Italian cinema and even has co-writing credits on a number of Federico Fellini movies including some of the really big ones. His work as a director though is a lot more eclectic and inconsistent and he’s not really much of a horror guy and truth be told this one is more horror themed than horror and that’s maybe for the best given that it’s in many ways more of a metaphor for the mistreatment of women and the mistreatment of the mentally disturbed than it is a movie about witchcraft. So not really a movie to watch if you’re looking for straight horror and also probably not the best option if looking for something about superstitious oppression either but it handles its themes well and has some style and is mostly successful.
*** out of Five
Dark Waters (1993)
Mariano Baino’s Dark Water (not to be confused with Todd Haynes legal thriller, or the J-horror film Dark Water, or its remake) is a pretty intensely international production which had an Italian director, a mostly British cast (it’s in English), and was mostly shot in Ukraine and Russia. The film’s Italian side is probably the one that’s most emblematic of the final film, however, as this is very much in the lineage of Dario Argento… to the point where if you’d told me it was a lost work by that director I’d have probably believed you. Notably this is not giallo Argento I’m talking about, it’s Susperia/Phenomena supernatural Argento, with the film focusing on a British girl who visits a distant convent that her father had long donated to and when she gets there she starts to notice all kinds of weirdness. If you’ve seen any images from this movie it’s probably the sight of a talisman-like thing depicting a demon face, which as you might suspect represents and actual demon that this convent has some relation to, so insomuch as this is folk horror it’s basically viewing Christian demonology as a folk tradition but I wouldn’t read too much into that. When I suggest that this feels like a long lost Argento movie I mean that in both positive and negative ways; like Argento’s movies this is a pretty good looking piece of work that does an effective job of conjuring a sort of dream-like feel, but it also has a rather under-written script and some rather suspect acting. I’ll also say that the Argento comparison stops at the killing scenes which are a lot less gory than what Argento is known for and this may be a bit more remembered today if they’d just gone all in on splatter material. Still, if you dig these nutty Italian horror movies this is a nice example of one from fairly late in the cycle that movies like this emerged out of them and I’m a little disappointed that the director’s career stalled out after this because they guy did have some skill.
*** out of Five
A Field in England (2013)
The last two discs of the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set focus in the United Kingdom, the country whose “folk horror” movies were among the first to be identified as such and we actually start with an anomaly within the set: a movie that came out when I was both alive and old enough to be paying attention to new movies: Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England. So along with the soviet horror movie Viy this is the only movie in the set that was a rewatch for me and it’s pretty clear that this was included in the set in order to represent the new folk horror revival that’s occurred in the 2010s although Wheatley himself has said that the film wasn’t really thought of as being in that lineage and he made it more out of a general interest in history and tipsiness. The film is set in the seventeenth century during the English Civil war but follows a small crew of deserters who find themselves interacting with an alchemist who says he can lead them to buried treasure before everyone turns on each other. As the film is set entirely outdoors and with a limited cast Wheatley is able to make a period piece on a relatively low budget and generates a lot of interest with stark black and white cinematography and some cool trippy camera tricks sparked by some magic mushrooms that appear to be in the field. The film works best as a visual/sensory experience, as a drama… well there’s fun to be had in watching these people bicker in the field and there’s also interest in the historical setting and the ideas about alchemy and whatnot it brings to the table but I found most of the people in it to be pretty thoroughly unrelatable and after things start getting “crazy” at the end it starts to lose me leading to an ending I’ve always found muddled and anti-climactic. So I still can’t say I really love this movie but it’s a little too cool to dismiss, which is true about a lot of Wheatley’s stuff if I’m being honest. He’s one of the most “always almost there” directors working today.
***1/2 out of Five
Anchoress (1993)
This is a pretty weird one. This movie was made in 1993 but it’s in black and white and looks a lot older than that, which is a kind of retro style I don’t tend to associate with movies from the 90s. The film is set in the 14th century and concerns a female anchorite, which is a figure that Merriam Webster defines as “a person who lives in seclusion usually for religious reasons,” though they tend to live closer to society than “hermits.” In the case of this movie we follow a young woman who willingly gets bricked into a room in the basement of a church where she intends to live her entire life with just a couple of holes in it for food to be handed to her and for her to occasionally talk with people who are interested in her saintly pursuits, though there’s some suggestion that her motivations are not entirely pure and that she’s perhaps doing this as a means of distancing herself from her mother, who still mixes paganism with her Christianity. That theme of paganism’s lingering place in medieval British society mixed with the generally unsettling idea of anchorism is likely why the film is being included in this folk horror boxed set but the emphasis here is definitely more on the “folk” than on the “horror” and I wouldn’t be too inclined to recommend it to anyone looking for something that’s conventionally “scary.” The film is pretty successful at giving itself a fairly timeless look and if I didn’t know better I would not have pegged it as a work from the early 90s and the general feel of it is pretty unique but it’s definitely a movie where you need to be pretty dedicated to digging into the themes because it isn’t exactly the most twisty and eventful of narratives. There’s a very specific kind of viewer for whom this is really their thing but it wasn’t really what I was looking for when I popped the disc in and while I thought it was doing some interesting things it only moderately engaged me in its world.
*** out of Five
Penda’s Fen (1974)
The documentary that started the All the Haunts be Ours boxed set, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, makes the argument that several key texts of British folk horror were actually made for television rather than theaters and that is the medium explored on the boxed set’s twelfth and final disc which features a pair of “teleplays” from the early 1970s. The more famous and acclaimed of the two is 1974’s Penda’s Fen, which has a pretty strong reputation that goes well beyond “folk horror” and seems to be regarded as one of the finest works of British television of the era writ large. Truth be told calling this a horror movie is pretty misleading and it’s a lot more accurate to approach it as a coming of age story. The film follows a teenage boy, the son of a vicar who begins the film as a pretty uncompromising Anglican conservative but over the course of the film comes to see some more nuance in the world in no small part because of some “visions” he begins to have visions of angels, the pagan king Penda of Mercia, and the turn of the century British composer Edward Elgar. These visions and their occasional interest with contrasting Britain’s pagan past with the character’s Christian ideals and how this undermines his patriotic visions is likely the reason the film is associated with folk horror, and I guess some of this imagery could be called “scary” by the standards of British television in the 70s but scaring the audience is not really the point. Instead the goal here is giving this kid a real character arc as he changes (and possibly comes to terms with his latent homosexuality) and the film throws some curveball in its treatment of this including making his father a lot more complicated than you’d expect. Now, the film is billed as a “teleplay” and aired as part of an anthology show called “Play for Today” but that doesn’t mean it feels like a stage play (on the contrary, there are definitely things here that you could not do on stage) and while the production values aren’t high and it’s not necessarily the prettiest thing in the world I would not say its medium is that much of a hindrance. That all having been said, while I respected the thematic layering here I would not necessarily say it speaks to me personally all that loudly and I do think it maybe could have been taken up one more level if it had been done as a full fledged theatrical feature.
***1/2 out of Five
Robin’s Redbreast (1970)
The other BBC production featured in the All the Haunts Be Ours boxed set is an even earlier installment of the “Play for Today” series called Robin’s Redbreast, which is less celebrated than Penda’s Fen but which probably does situate itself more comfortably within the folk horror genre. The film concerns a fairly affluent London woman who takes a trip to her newly acquired vacation home and when she gets there she encounters a strange and somewhat reclusive man named Rob who might have a been of a secret he’s concealing and she eventually starts to wonder if she’s being trapped in this home. Built into this are a lot of the foundational aspects of folk horror: the urban fear of the rural, paranoia about ancient legends being true, and eventually some occult aspects that presage The Wicker Man by three years. In that sense this feels like an appropriate final film for this boxed set and beyond the horror aspects there are some other bold storytelling ideas here including some pretty frank discussions of abortion that make this feel like some pretty bold television. That having been said, this does feel a lot more like “television” than Penda’s Fen did. Notably the film apparently initially broadcast in color but the only elements that still remain are a 16mm black and white print and the downgrade in picture quality is noticeable, and even without the original masters being lost this definitely has some pretty budget sets and unambitious camera work and the actual horror elements are brief and unsophisticated. So you can either look at this as being a rather impressive work of early 70s television or as a not so impressive “real” movie, but regardless I did find it an interesting watch and within the context of a deep dive into folk horror I do think it has its place.
*** out of Five
In Conclusion
I really had very little idea what I was getting into with this project and I must say I’m mostly pretty satisfied with how this month of folk horror watching turned out. Out of some twenty movies I can really only say I particularly disliked on movie (Kadaicha) and almost everything else was at the very least an interesting watch and along the way there were some real gems to be found. I particularly like Witchhammer but also found Clearcut and my Viy revisit to be very rewarding but the set is chock full of interesting watches that I probably wouldn’t have seen without this push. In some ways it’s that curation that really stands out with this set both in its ability to cover a lot of different aspects of folk horror but also its ability to find a good selection of “deep cuts” and also include some (slightly) bigger movies alongside them. If I have a complaint about the set it’s that, despite the central documentary being aggressively global in its outlook, the films selected here ultimately feel fairly Eurocentric with just about all of these movies being from Europe or from European settler colonies with pretty much the only non-western folklore being riffed upon being indigenous folklore that’s been pretty clearly interpreted through western eyes. This does appear to be somewhat rectified by Severin’s second volume of this collection, a set I have not purchased at this time and as rewarding as this watch was I’m still not 100% sure if I’m going to splurge on that second set, firstly because it’s another expensive box that isn’t to be bough casually but also because I’ve just run one marathon and am not quite in a headspace to start planning another one but I wouldn’t be shocked if some fomo makes the choice form me the next time Severin runs a sale.
