Defining the term Folk Horror is as difficult as pinning down what Film Noir is. In place of the mean street we have a mean forest of disturbing forces (both real and mythic). Both are treacherous and shadowy worlds. Although Folk Horror Cinema appears to exhibit common themes or traits it remains remarkably fluid.
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Not quite a genre, tone, mood, visual style or sole idea: more a mongrel hybrid. Let’s just say there’s always an impervious and dangerous impurity that runs through our many cinematic versions of the natural world that we both do and do not want to get back to.
At the climax of Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen (included in this set) teenager Stephen, beset by issues of identity, has a vision of the last Pagan king of England and is presented with a choice of obedience to the modern state or (in David Rudkin’s words) to find his own way through “the sacred state of ungovernableness.” Perhaps Folk Horror is an ungovernable force incorporating much movement and re-action that complies with but also deviates from traditional horror cinema.
There are many attempts at a definition of Folk Horror voiced by filmmakers, critics and folk historians on the terrific, almost three hour long, documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (directed by Kier-La Janisse) accompanying the feature films on All the Haunts Be Ours. Her film took three years to make and is a great labour of love, research and sharp insight. My advice would be to commence with the documentary as an overview of Folk Horror before launching into the films.
We are well aware of the three imposing titles of British Folk Horror, The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General. In the documentary they’re used as a platform from which explore the antecedents and inheritors of these films whether they were aware of the British trio or not. Folk Horror has its literary and cinematic roots in Asian, African, Middle Eastern, European, Australian and American culture. A folklore that’s pagan, Christian and Buddhist or else contains invented religiosities and beliefs that similarly tries to resist the pressure of a secular modernity.
“What if the old ways where right?” is one of the questions raised in this set of films. Yet any return to an older ritualised sensibility can be dangerous. A huge urbanization of the planet is presently happening. The woodland needs to be preserved. Yet that zone contains pre-industrial, even pre-agricultural practices that, though dormant, can be re-awakened to our detriment. Science hasn’t dealt with all of that stuff. As Jacques Derrida says we might have to tackle an “unresolved past that comes back” containing, at least in cinema, something more clingingly apocalyptic than soothingly pastoral: a feeling that the rural mind-set will take revenge on our technologically driven minds.
War, terrorism, famine, disease and unemployment can drive us to back to the forest for easy solutions. But remember what the witch in Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods said.
“Careful the wish you make, wishes are children. Careful the path they take, wishes come true, not free. Careful the spell you cast, not just on children. Sometimes the spell may last past what you can see, and turn against you. Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell. Children will listen...”
We can always create too much misplaced nostalgia and selectively rewrite things to exaggerate and misinterpret our folk horrors and delights (a scholarly warning raised by one the folk historians interviewed in Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched.) And will Sondheim and other lyricists make it into the Folk Horror gallery one day? Sweeny Todd can leave the streets of London to make enchanted human pies in the forest glade!
And of the chosen films themselves? Well Severin Films have carefully chosen Folk Horror from the UK, Western and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Canada and the USA. In this article I shall scan their menacing geographies.
EASTERN EUROPE
Leptirica | Viy | Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach | Wilczyca | Witchhammer.
Leptirica (1973) is a Serbian TV film loosely based on Milovan Glisic’s 1880 vampire story, After 90 Years. A group of villagers are shocked to hear of the death of their local miller. They are desperate for bread but realise that they might just set up a fourth victim of the local vampire. What’s astonishing isn’t just the fierce variation on blood-sucking that director Djondje Kadijevic releases at the end, with Leptirica being the she-butterfly exploding on her victims, but an authentic grasp of 19th century country life. The bloody mill scenes hint at the drowning in flour climax of Dreyer’s (1928) Vampyr. Yet Leptirica has an originality of conception and attack. It’s a Beauty and the Beast story comfortably cohabiting with the legend of the undead.
Yet at 76 mins the film is far too short. Such general excellence of execution called out for an expanded storyline well before the young man’s final ordeal. But I savoured all we have of these highly entertaining Slavic thrills. And the film has a wonderfully performed peasant dance scene that enchanted me but failed miserably to console the student.
I almost expected a chained bear to appear dancing, Petrushka-like, at a country fair, with the women of Leptirica. However it’s only in the Polish film Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittembach (1970) that a white bear really appears or does it? In this fine intersection of Folk Horror with the Gothic we’re presented with a warning.
“There are more things in a Lithuanian forest than dreamt of in your philosophy.” So says the young nobleman Count Szemiot to the scholarly pastor Wittembach who encounters unexplained happenings indoors and outside of the count’s country residence. No one is allowed to forget that the count’s pregnant mother was once attacked by a bear and went mad, thus the count, ridden with guilt, might be the incarnation of a savage bear and about to attack his beautiful would-be bride.
I loved the ambiguous tone of Lokis whose visual grandeur and subtle intelligence grips from beginning to end. Very little is shown. Much is hinted and suggested. No bear-man ravaging through the corridors of the estate. And those white bear corpses, lying in the snow, by the railway track, are surely only meant to be symbolic? My favourite moment in Lokis is when the now bride of the count is presented with a tiny toy bear. She stands up in horror, from the wedding-feast table, after the toy is dropped to the ground and broken. That’s the kind of metaphorical placing of objects in folk tales that I appreciate. Lokis is an unpredictable and haunting film elegantly directed by Januse Majewski.
Wilczyca (Poland, 1983) was a big hit in Poland on its first release. A bit over the top for me but an important Folk Horror addition for its protagonist is a female werewolf. Crazily directed and acted at a roaring pace. Set during the springtime of the Peoples upheavals of 1848 its blending of politics, a pact with the devil and a much shook-up patriotism becomes an exciting if sometimes absurd affair.
Witches return in this box set’s first masterpiece Witchhammer (Czechoslovakia 1970). For many years my two most admired period witchcraft films have been Reeve’s Witchfinder General (1968) and Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943). In 2015 I was impressed by Robert Egger’s The Witch. Now the brilliant Witchhammer makes up a powerful quartet of seriously observed ‘witchery’.
Witchhammer can be experienced as a dual text. A disguised allegory of the political show trials in 1950’s communist Czechoslovakia. Yet equally a harrowing, and despite the torture scenes, a non-sensationalistic account of the persecution of innocent women accused of being witches plus the unjust killing of their few liberal town representatives / defenders in 1670’s Northern Moravia.
An intense quasi-documentary realism cuts into Witchhammer. In a series of stark episodes, intercut with a male commentator, excoriating the women, the film’s systematic trial procedure, as cruel as anything in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, is inexorably enacted.
Witchhammer displays great sensitivity and empathy with its victims. The direction is unyieldingly tight and the casting faultless. Severe yet deeply humane. Vivid and correctly uncompromising with a visual beauty and superb music score, this is folk horror territory at its best. The authentically grim reality of Witchhammer’s irrationality, paranoia and madness left me speechless.
SCANDANAVIA
Lake of the Dead | Tilbury.
I fled the landscape of 17th century Moravia to go to the lakes and forests of Norway in 1958. In Lake of the Dead a crime writer, his wife, a psychologist, magazine editor, lawyer and fiancée arrive at a cabin, in the Osterdal forests. The owner is missing. The place is drenched in the legend of a man killing his sister and lover and then drowning himself in the lake.
There’s a consistently fine employment of a Folk Horror water trope in Lake of the Dead realised by its beautiful photography of the lake at midnight during mid-summer: still, powerful and constant shining to the accompaniment of atmospheric music.
But clocking in at only 76 mins the film’s conclusion feels rushed and its proposed explanations for the mystery killings is stultified by an psychoanalytic wordiness. The psychologist’s Freudian dream thesis may have some behaviourist validity yet this clogs up the drama. Too often the literal over-dominates the mysterious. A pity as this film has acquired a small cult following. However when the moon shines on that mysterious lake things turn other-worldly.
Tilbury (1987) is an Icelandic made-for-TV film exploring the folk legend of the tilberi – a beast who could be summoned by women in times of famine. What director Vidar Vikingsen and writer Porarinn Eldjarn do is to cleverly transpose the legend to the Iceland of 1940 now under British occupation. A young volunteer at the army camp discovers that his childhood sweetheart is romantically attached to a British soldier: much older than her and with the countenance of an ugly imp complete with devilish tail. He sucks of a nipple on the girl’s thigh (yes, thigh!) and vomits out green butter. The churned butter is used in chocolate bars that are handed out to civilians.
This may all sound ridiculous but the visceral menace of Tilbury had me backtracking for it’s an amazing modern take on fairy tale / folklore. Produced with a deadly seriousness, to create its own fable of a wartime world, Tilbury is an extraordinary re-working of myth that tackles complex ideas about sexual attraction, religion, militarism and the perpetuation of an ancient dark power that’s for more invasive than the occupying forces.
I love the black joke about the standard British chocolate bar being replaced by the arrival of the American military: with our British army imp now handing out Hershey bars. Whilst my standout scene has to be the army social event, with the imp and his girlfriend jiving and singing on the dance floor, looking like a weird collision of the styles of David Lynch and Dennis Potter.
A brilliant one-off original. What else was Icelandic TV daring to produce in the 1980s and more significantly, what where they on?
WESTERN EUROPE
Il Demonio | Dark Waters
If only Dark Waters (1993) could have lived up to its eclectic opening then we might have had a great horror film. A storm battered remote convent, (shades of an attacking Bava); violence in murky cavernous passages (Argento’s just round the corner); nuns grouped round crosses on a cliff edge (a conflated nod to Bergman and Eisenstein) and one sister carrying a stone mask pushed over the cliff to her death (a-la not quite Powell). Those stylish ten minutes of eclectic styles with the spiralling menace of its music really gripped.
Unfortunately once we introduce the story of a young woman, from England, visiting to see why, after her father’s death, she should still donate money to the convent, on the island where she was born, I lost sympathy. Not with the intermittent strong visuals but the characters who appeared polite cardboard until they finally removed their masks.
Too many muffled answers to strange parentage, motivations, the real intensions of those murderous nuns and a mournful duty to preserve ancient powers (what exactly was the great beast?) left me puzzled. Still Dark Waters is an enjoyable enough mess of a film even if I prefer my Folk Horror frissons to be elucidated as much as indulged.
UNITED KINGDOM
Anchoress | A Field in England | Penda’s Fen | Robin Redbreast
Anchoress (1993) is an unusual oddity about a peasant girl walled up in a local chapel with the statue of the Virgin Mary. I was pleased to witness its resurrection from the large lost film pile. Although not in the major league of Penda’s Fen or Robin Redbreast it’s well worth seeing.
I had strong doubts about A Field in England (2012). Ben Wheatley’s film was generally very well received and I liked the notion of a group of deserters, during the Civil war in 17th Century England, fleeing from a battle, to encounter a field with a mysterious energy where they eat the field’s mushroom patch and begin to hallucinate. Yet the script lets the film down badly and quickly becomes a self-indulgent affair. Their resultant tripping in the field barely develops its dramatic potential. Psychedelic disturbance in a remote past is a neat idea for Folk Horror. Alas, for me, A Field in England fails to construct a strong narrative framework coherent enough to guide the actors (improvised?) situation.
A notch down from that is the remarkable Robin Redbreast (1970) written by John Bowen. It may or may not have influenced The Wicker Man (1972) but either way looks like a domestic version of the principal ideas of Wicker, especially ritual sacrifice. As Nora (Anna Cooper) the TV producer, has been impregnated by a local villager the sinister villagers await the birth of her baby. Paranoia nestles in with pagan energies in this strange BBC Play for Today. Containing both creepy village characters and satirised London sophisticates Bowen’s writing is edgy and well researched. It’s a pity that only the black and white master print exists of this once colour production as I feel colour tones would have given Robin Redbreast an extra edge of menace. Still like Penda’s Fen this is expansive and intelligent television drama exploring the clash between the need for personal development (Both Stephen and Nora seek an unnamed fulfilment) against social pressures and their entrapment by individuals driven by a supernatural moral code.
AUSTRALIA
Kadaicha | Celia | Alison’s Birthday | The Dreaming
I can understand why Severin wanted to have Kadaicha (1988) for it concerns the residents of housing that was built on top of a sacred Aboriginal graveyard. And of course a horrible curse has been placed on those who disturb it. Thematically this fits in well with the aims of All the Haunts be Ours. However it’s all pretty silly as it borrows extensively from slasher movies and Poltergeist. An entertaining late night guilty pleasure.
Celia (1989) tried very hard but overall didn’t work for me. The film has moments of natural humour, good social observation of children and appealing warmth that comes adrift from its muted horror elements. Celia’s an ambitious production packing way too much in. Hatred of Communists in the1950’s; an impressionable young girl hallucinating her dead Commie grandmother; monsters from a folk tale called The Hobyahs; sexual tensions between next door neighbours and the Governments unreasonable policy to eradicate the menace of rabbits.
I found it a hard film to dislike but even harder to enthuse about. My feeling is that the casting of Rebecca Smart as Celia was the fault line here. Another child actor could have carried the film better and glossed over her eventually revealed, but too obviously director-willed, ‘evil’ side more plausibly. I never really believed the 12 year old Celia we have in Celia was capable of violence. Frustration, rage and anger, yes. But not the killing of a local cop? Here performances and script failed to convince me. However it was right for Severin to have included an intriguing Folk Horror story from a child’s viewpoint.
In Alison’s Birthday (1981) three teenage girls are using a ouija board. They receive a warning, from Alison’s real dead father that Alison (Joanne Samuel) should not go home on her 19th birthday (three years hence) to visit her adopted parents for she will be in great danger. But she does only to be ensnared in a Satanic cult. The opening is arresting and the film reaches a chilling climax. Yet Alison’s struggle, helped by her boyfriend, in the middle of the film, to defeat the Satanists, is unimaginatively directed. It lacks pace, suspense and attention to detail. Still it does deal with the idea of soul transference and Bunny Brooke and John Bluthall, playing Alison’s sinister guardians, exude a memorable cosy horror.
The final Australian offering is The Dreaming (1988) directed by Mario Andreacchio. In later interviews Andreacchio has talked of producer interference that sent the story of in another direction. I wouldn’t say this fatally flaws this film but there’s a contradictory pull as to who are the most determined force: the threatening whalers who two centuries ago attacked a defenceless Aboriginal tribe or a younger generation of aboriginal youth holding onto their ancestral objects.
The doctor (Penny Cook) who attended the death of a young Aboriginal girl begins to experience bad dreams and waking visions of a horribly violent time in Aboriginal history. The ancestral revenge finally brings her to a lighthouse where the whalers are replaced by the doctor’s archaeologist father (Arthur Dignam) who advances towards her with a suggestion of incest. This doesn’t make sense and muddies what has been a good horror film – technically the visions and nightmares were technically impressive and scary. And before the plot changes effectively conveyed a folk culture, damaged by exploitation, in frenetic pursuit of an inquisitive doctor.
We have two thirds of relevant dreamtime excitement until a final third of rushed and wrong conclusions. Yet my succumbing to much of The Dreaming’s powerful dreamtime proved exhilarating.
UNITED STATES
Eyes of Fire
In 1750 a settlers’ journey to a promised land turns out to be an ordeal in hell on the American Frontier. A preacher accused of having an affair with two women avoids a hanging from the community and escapes with two families, on a barge, down the river. On board is the preacher Will Smythe’s adopted young woman Leah who has considerable powers to combat the supernatural. She’s a protective force but cannot avoid the deaths of the preacher and the older parents. En route they are subjected to malign spirits dwelling in a place called The Valley of the Devil. In these woods much blood has soaked the earth causing the victims to sprout up as ghosts. These apparitions are joined by dead Indians and the hostile spirits in the trees.
I’ve recently re-watched Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010) and Eyes of Fire’s spirits can compare aesthetically, even if they’re dissimilar in form, to those of Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The soul of trees and other natural phenomena is realised by vivid special effects. Director Avery Crounse was an esteemed photographer before turning to film direction and it shows. The fiery attack of his spirits makes them appear excitingly natural, convincing and as solid as wood bark. No Disneyfication allowed in 1983 and no hyperbolic CGI in sight. This is an adult personification of visceral terrors depicting the devil.
“I’m afraid that God has left us” says the preacher finally shaken to the core – both a manipulative, though caring and finally foolish man. Smythe’s religious platitudes annoyed the group for he recognised, too late, the palpable reality of the evil round him. It’s the young women, children, the pursuing husband, of the wife who ran of with the preacher, who possess the practical knowledge to survive. Yet the strange witchlike Leah remains their guardian – at least in the director’s other version of the film.
All the Haunts Be Ours have managed to give us Cry Blue Sky, the director’s own personal cut (32 and a half minutes longer) of the film with a different, and for me, more satisfying, ending. You can argue that Eyes of Fire might excite better and be differently atmospheric but the extra footage in Cry Blue Sky really fleshes out the characters, creates suspense, instead of a highly nervous jagged action, making for a more reflective experience. I slightly err on the side of the longer film but I wouldn’t be without either version.
When asked by his daughter what’s happening in the woods the trapper father speaks of “Cold eyes and a hot fire” looking in on events. A lovely dense metaphor for the stories we compose about the powers of darkness as we tell our stories round the fire? Or a refusal to look sympathetically on the gods that control things in the natural world?
And remember the supernaturally endowed Leah. “What good were eyes. No one knew what they had seen. The evil is not out there it’s in here.”
As Smythe picks up the scattered pages, torn out by the ghosts, from the preacher’s books you know that he and his rationality was wrong and that all the knowledge of most enlightened was of no help in The Valley of the Devil.
CANADA
Clearcut
It’s a brutal and disturbing realism and not fantasy that tempers the mood of Clearcut (1991) to create one of the most powerful of horror films to employ complex arguments, over physical action (though it has frequent dark eruptions of violence) to engage our heads as much as our senses. Clearcut is a rigorous, severe, ugly and semi-diabolical debate cum confrontation about individual and collective rights, motivations, causes and responsibility concerning the land ownership of the indigenous Indian, lucidly couched in personal / political and mystical / mythic terms.
Without ever having recourse to being a tirade, or worse propaganda for a white liberal, white conservative and even Indian cause, Clearcut let’s none of its four principal characters (an ineffectual but well meaning liberal lawyer, a rapacious and arrogant mill owner, disturbed Indian elder and his trickster figure Indian activist) off the hook. Good and bad intentions are raised on every side in this morally ambivalent folk horror drama.
Indian activists are battling it out against the police. They’re attempting to prevent clearcutting on Indian land which will result in an extension of the highway next to the town and logging company.
Ron Lea (Peter Maguire) is a lawyer who can make an appeal but releases that this will probably fail. An elder, Wilf (Floyd Red Crow Westermann) introduces the attorney to Arthur (Graham Greene) an activist. When Ron is asked by Arthur what he intends to do then he says in a frustrated semi-serious tone that he’d like to blow up the mill and kill the logging manager, Bud Rickets (Michael Hogan). Arthur says no, and ignoring Ron’s dark jokey wish, says he will kidnap the manager and take them all into the woods where he will then instruct them in “listening to Mother Earth.”
When Ron protests to Wilf about Arthur’s plan his calm response is. “You dreamed anger - your anger is real. Someone has to pay.” Their careful listening to Mother Earth is what the violent Arthur forces them to do but at the cost of everyone verbally attacking one another: competing moral outrage – both grimly authentic and glibly rhetorical. For Clearcut’s admirable script, by Rob Forsyth, creates no obvious friends and enemies of the land. And combined with its Polish director, Ryszard Bugajski produces an intensely concerned film operating on many levels but principally as an ecological revenge tale.
Of course the film revolves round a powerful and justified cry of outrage, from the indigenous Indian community, over the desecration of their land by white Americans. Yet Arthur’s means to make his captives listen turns sadistically cruel. The scene where Arthur takes his knife and strips the flesh off Bud’s leg is horrible and unforgiving. But again and again in Clearcut physical violence is contrasted or compared with the brutally cutting dialogue of its antagonists trapped in the woods (At times I felt Clearcut was a further spin on the threat to survival in the wilderness depicted in John Boorman’s Deliverance.)
The manager is callous and uncaring. The lawyer weak but humanely protective of Bud. Whilst Arthur is an enigma: simultaneously crazy yet wise and elegant in his despair at the plight of the land. And Will just waits for the trickster Arthur to depart and he’ll take the kidnap victims back to the law.
Clearcut is an intense shock of a horror film whose pain is the laceration of the tongue over a hellish three day journey exploring the consequences of an uncontainable anger made painfully, physically and mentally, real. (Be careful of what you dream or wish for children as they’ll take you to the woods and put you on trial!).
Clearcut alongside of Witchhammer, Penda’s Fen, Robin Redbreast, Eyes of Fire, Lokis and Tilbury are the essential films of All the Haunts Be Ours. For them alone (and its indispensable documentary) this set is worth buying. Yet it has so much else that’s so good, interesting and challenging even when it doesn’t fully realise its ambitious aims. I must also mention that the set has many extras, including short films, interviews, a fine illustrated book, with essays and stories, and a new 2 CD recording of Arthur Machen’s The White People.
All the Haunts Be Ours is one of the most important media releases of 2021 /22 that greatly expands our knowledge of a mid to late 20th century’s international cinemas exploration of Folk Horror Culture. Everyone who cares about highly personal, expressive and imaginative filmmaking (whether they’re Folk Horror enthusiasts or not) should acquire a copy.
- Alan Price.
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