The Land of Blue Lakes (2021) is an independently-produced film directed and written by Arturs Latkovskis. It is the first Latvian found footage horror movie, although that doesn’t quite do the film justice. It is also a Latvian entry (again, perhaps the first) in the folk horror genre – and, according to director Latkovsis, it is at least ‘half documentary as it is using the real history of the locations where it was set’.[i] ‘The Land of the Blue Lakes’ is a term for the Latgale region of Latvia, one of the historic Latvian lands, lying in the easternmost part of the country. The film is, among many other things, a beautiful visual record of the lakes and islands of the region, as five friends set off on a canoe trip – heading, in particular, to see the ‘stone of the sacrificed’, a key site in the mythology of the region.
Camping on night 1
Much of The Land of Blue Lakes is exactly what the premise suggests: five friends – Arturs Latkovskis, Veronika Rumjanceva, Alina Sedova, Vladislavs Filipovs, and Edgars Jurgelans – canoeing all day and then setting up camp at night (the film covers two days and two nights). They act pretty much like young people would act – drinking beer, joking, swimming. But along the way, strange objects begin to appear in the landscape – a pyramid structure, rock cairns, arrangements of wood. And during the first night, when all five are sleeping, someone films them – and then a painted hand buries a rock with a symbol etched on it.[ii]
The creepy aftermath of the first night
Nothing seems to have changed in the morning, however, except for a creepy doll nailed to a tree, and the friends go on their way much as they did on the first day, moving through more lakes and more Latvian landscape, including the island where the stone of the sacrificed is located, as well as a watermill with two inexplicably wrecked boats (one with a symbol carved on it). The observant viewer will also see a briefly-glimpsed and masked figure amidst the tangled greenery that surrounds the lakes and islands.
Canoeing deeper into the woods
The horror – when it comes – comes in the last ten minutes or so, and it coalesces many of the clues planted earlier in the film. It’s a really intriguing ending that will have you not only rewinding the last few minutes and re-watching (many times) but also re-thinking everything that happened earlier in the film. You’ll also be scrutinizing what’s in the frame – both earlier and at the end. As in most found footage horror film, the source of the horror is in the frame only fleetingly, only obscurely, or not at all. Latkovskis knows that really good horror uses what is beyond the frame of the camera as much as, or more than, what is in the frame.
Something in the entangled greenery
Latkovskis has said that he was profoundly affected by The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999) when he saw it as a child – and The Land of Blue Lakes most certainly demonstrates the influence of that film and the many other found footage horror films Latkovskis says he watches. There are some important differences between The Blair Witch Project and The Land of Blue Lakes, however. Although a character in the latter jokes, ten minutes into their journey, that they’re lost, the characters don’t actually ever get lost – something that was a fundamental part of Blair Witch Project. Instead, the characters in The Land of Blue Lakes navigate a much more realistic landscape: they get drinking water from a farm and navigate through a watermill. There’s no sense that they are in the supernatural landscape that characterized Blair Witch, in which characters return over and over to the same place no matter what they do.
A second difference between the two films – and it’s related to the first – is that lead character Arturs takes seriously the history and mythology of the region. Just as the landscape in Land of the Blue Lakes is ‘real’, so too is its history. And so is Arturs’ commitment to it. There is none of the coolly ironic and mocking disbelief evinced by principal filmmaker Heather Donahue in Blair Witch Project, as she openly separates herself from those Burkittsville locals who believe in the witch.
Arturs serves as the center of The Land of Blue Lakes and the authority on local history and lore: he says he did ‘a lot of research’ in order to understand ‘which gods existed in these places in the past’. Arturs explains the function of the ‘stone of the sacrificed’, where virgins were sacrificed so that their spirits could protect the tribes that lived on the islands. He also explains that in Latvian lore, there are no such things as bad spirits, just ‘bad thoughts’ that become alive in the world. It’s critical to the film – and to the weight of its horror – that Arturs believes these things, that he identifies with them. When he describes them as ‘pagan’ beliefs, he doesn’t distance himself from them. Instead, he says, ‘Our ancestors were pagans and then Christianity came here’ and – in a line that could be the tagline for the film – ‘When we were pagans, then all the Land of Blue Lakes had a place where sacrifices were made’. Again, unlike Heather in Blair Witch Project, Arturs doesn’t position himself as the modern, secular disbeliever; he suggests that he sees himself as part of this pagan tradition. He’s bound to it, not separate.
The stone of the sacrificed
It’s in large part because of Arturs’ expressed connection to his pagan past and ancestry that The Land of Blue Lakes becomes a really interesting entry in the folk horror genre. Folk horror’s narrative is typically driven by the conflict between the modern/secular/urban and the primitive/pagan/rural. The ending, in particular, of The Land of Blue Lakes collapses this distinction, serving up a much more interesting plot.
The beautiful landscape of The Land of Blue Lakes
I could not recommend Arturs Latkovskis’ The Land of Blue Lakes more highly. It’s a visual spectacle – an introduction (for many viewers) to the beauty of eastern Latvia. It’s also a fascinating introduction to the history and lore of Latvia – all serving that ‘documentary’ function that Latkovskis mentions as key to what he was doing with the film. And, in the end, it’s a surprising – and refreshing – twist on both found footage horror and folk horror. All in all, it’s one of the most interesting films I’ve watched in 2021!
The Land of Blue Lakes is available to stream on Tubi.
Notes
[i] Personal correspondence with Latkovskis, December 25, 2021.
[ii] I didn’t understand the significance of this scene when I was watching the film at first, but Latkovskis told me that ‘the symbol on the stone is – Zalktis (snake) and in Latvian mythology he is the one who brings bad spirits back to earth’. This is important to the conclusion of the film!
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