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Posted on November 9, 2015

Don’t Go Into the Woods: The Hallow

Dawn Keetley

Corin Hardy’s 2015 Irish folk horror film,The Hallow follows a couple, Adam and Claire Hitchens (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic), along with their baby, Finn, who go to stay in a house deep in the Irish forest, which has just been sold for development. They discover there is a frightening truth to local folklore about “the hallow”—fairies and other supernatural creatures who want humans to stay out of their woods.

I really wanted to like The Hallow, but while there are certainly some interesting aspects to the film, overall I have to say that it was a pretty big disappointment.

The Hallow is firmly in the folk horror tradition, the crucial components of which I mapped out in an earlier post. It is dominated by the landscape (beautifully shot, despite the film’s other limitations), located in an isolated community, and the narrative is driven by archaic occult beliefs. The film also, though, draws liberally from other kinds of horror. At times, it fairly self-consciously evokes creature features—Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982)—as well as what could be called the “possessed patriarch” films—The Amityville Horror (1979) and The Shining (1982). The creatures were also reminiscent of those in Neil Marshall’s brilliant The Descent (2005)—and the two films share something of a narrative trajectory. While horror films always draw on other horror films, though, The Hallow may do so a bit too wildly and without shaping its borrowings into something distinctively its own.

Posted on November 6, 2015

The Resurgence of Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

If you haven’t yet heard of folk horror, this post will serve as your introduction to a subgenre that seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance. It’ll also get you ready for the release onto VOD on Friday (November 6) of what promises to be a compelling example of that renaissance—The Hallow, a British-Irish co-production filmed in Ireland, and directed by Corin Hardy. The official trailer includes the tag-line, “Nature has a dark side,” getting at what I think is perhaps the most distinctive characteristic of folk horror: Nature is no longer content to be background. Nature has power, agency, in folk horror. It lives, moves, acts, overpowers, destroys.

By most accounts, the term “folk horror” was coined by Mark Gatiss in a 2010 BBC documentary on the history of horror. Gatiss identified three films as the core of this tradition—Witchfinder General (1968), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). Recent discussion of this newly-defined horror subgenre (almost all on websites and blogs) has begun to uncover both its roots and its persistence, looking back to late nineteenth-century writers of “weird” fiction, like M. R. James and Algernon Blackwood, and recognizing the contemporary renaissance of folk horror in Wake Wood (David Keating, 2010) and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013). I should add to the list, too, the upcoming The Witch (Robert Eggers, 2015) and The Forest (Jason Zada, 2016).

Posted on October 29, 2015

Game Horror, Circle (2015), and Lifeboat Ethics

Dawn Keetley

Circle (2015), directed by Aaron Hann and Mario Miscione, is the latest entry in the horror sub-genre I’m calling “game horror,” one perhaps best exemplified when Jigsaw, villain of the Saw franchise, uttered those now infamous words, “Want to play a game?” In this sub-genre, a group of seemingly random people are brought together by some unknown person or entity and forced to play a not-very-fun “game.” Sometimes the rules are made very clear; sometimes the players have to figure them out as they go along. Sometimes the game really is arbitrary and the players random; sometimes, though, the players are there for a reason—one they must figure out if they want to survive.

“Game horror” originated in 1939 with Agatha Christie’s mystery novel, And Then There Were None (made into a very good film, directed by René Clair, in 1945), in which ten people are invited to an island and are, one by one, accused by their absent host of the crime of murder. The host uses a gramophone record to lay out his guests’ crimes—a direct antecedent of Jigsaw’s recorded messages to the “players” in his games. Needless to say, in And Then There Were None, as in Saw, punishment ensues.

Like much horror, game horror also has roots in The Twilight Zone, specifically the 1961 episode, “Five Characters in Search of an Exit” (season 3), in which five characters wake up in a large metal cylinder and have to try to find a way out before they starve to death. This plot anticipates the many subsequent films (Cube, Saw, and Circle) in which characters wake up in a strange place, disoriented, and with no memory of how they got there.

Posted on October 26, 2015

“Not Dead!” Glenn’s Fate in The Walking Dead

Dawn Keetley

If you didn’t watch last night’s Walking Dead episode, “Thank You,” you won’t want to read any further. Watch it and then come back.

Posted on October 23, 2015

9 Questions Paranormal Activity: Ghost Dimension Must Answer

Dawn Keetley

The sixth and possibly final installment of the Paranormal Activity series (2007 – 2015), Ghost Dimension, is due out today (Friday October 23)—in limited release—and the word is it will answer all fans’ questions about the franchise.

So, what questions do we have? As it turns out, I, at least, have plenty.

-1. Most pressingly, what do the witches (and Toby) want?

Hints about what the witches and their demonic leader, Toby, want have been slowly doled out across all five films, but they are still not at all clear. They seem mostly to be after boys. In PA2, Kristi’s step-daughter Ali reads something online about how people have been known to make a demonic pact by which they get power or wealth in exchange for offering up the first-born male in their family. The suggestion is that Kristi and Katie’s grandmother (Lois), who is part of a coven of witches, made such a pact and so Toby now wants Kristi’s son, Hunter.

The coven clearly pre-dates Lois, though, since, in PA3, Dennis shows Kristi and Katie’s mother, Julie, a photograph of a witch coven from the 1930s and reads from a book about a ceremony by which the witches would take the sons of pregnant girls, brainwashing them (it’s not clear if they brainwash the boys or the girls) so they remember nothing.