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Posted on February 4, 2023

Rewilding – A Thoughtful, Beautiful Folk Horror Anthology

Dawn Keetley

Rewilding is a folk horror anthology written and directed by Ric Rawlins. It includes three short films, “Stone Mothers,” “The Family Tree,” and “The Writer’s Enquiry” that all harken back to the stories of M. R. James and to their adaptation in the 1970s’ BBC’s A Ghost Story for Christmas series. The influence of James is especially strong in the first two, with “Stone Mothers” evoking “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” and “A Warning to the Curious,” while “The Family Tree” recalls “The Ash Tree.” The third installment, “The Writer’s Enquiry,” which has a brilliant ending, most definitely manifests the influence of Robin Hardy’s 1973 The Wicker Man – and is also akin to the recent “Mr. King” episode of Inside No. 9 (2022).

Any film that was so aware of tracing the influences of the tradition from which it emerged would be of interest to me – but that is by no means the only reason I highly recommend Rewilding. It is essential viewing for anyone interested in folk horror – or in slow-burn, thoughtful horror more generally. Each of the three short films is extremely well-written and directed; the settings are gorgeous, beautifully shot, and, in true folk horror fashion, contribute demonstrably to the meaning of the film; and the actors are all great. Rawlins obviously assembled a dedicated group for this project, and their investment in what they’re doing is palpable.

Posted on January 25, 2023

Reclaiming Jewish Monsters in The Offering

Guest Post

J-horror is often used as shorthand for Japanese horror, but that “J” is a bit limiting. It’s also required for Jewish horror, a subgenre that’s coming into its own. In 2012 the Jewish possession movie titled, well, The Possession presented the world with a Hasidic exorcist. Directed by Ole Bornedal, the film had a substantial budget and wide theatrical release. Played by the famed Hasidic rapper Matisyahu, the sympathetic exorcist has to assist a goy family who bought their way into trouble at a yard sale. Em (Natasha Calis), a young girl from a broken family, asks her father to buy her an ornate box which, unbeknownst to them, contains a dybbuk. A dybbuk is essentially the ghost of a wicked person—a very powerful entity that, according to the movie, is capable of possession. It turns out that this is actually the demon Abyzou.

Six years later, the famous Jewish monster, the golem, made an appearance in the Israeli horror film, Doron and Yoav Paz’s The Golem. Set during a pogrom in seventeenth-century Lituania, it follows previous films that share both the monster and title. It does this in unique fashion, however, by making the golem a little boy in the shape of a grieving mother’s dead son. Hannah (Hani Furstenberg), the mother, creates the golem to protect the shtetl against hostile Christians. Golems do what golems do, and it saves the community but then turns violent on the Jews. Read more

Posted on January 5, 2023

Troll and Ecological Folk Horror in the ‘Sacrifice Zone’

Dawn Keetley

Roar Uthaug is a master of genre film. His first directorial feature was the excellent slasher, Cold Prey (2006), and he then helmed Norway’s first disaster film, The Wave, in 20015. His latest is a monster movie – also an action adventure film, a disaster film, and a Norwegian kaiju movie. Released by Netflix in 2022, Troll is about an ancient being awakened by an explosion detonated in the mountains of Norway. The film is fairly self-conscious about its genre origins: one character, early on, suggests that the creature emerging from the mountain is “King Kong” – and in a later montage of “Breaking News” reports, a Japanese journalist asks, “Could this be a Norwegian Godzilla?”

Troll resembles no film, perhaps, so much as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953), in which a long-buried dinosaur is awakened from the ice of the Arctic by an atomic blast test. (I’ve written about the politics of that film here.) Indeed, the protagonist of Troll, Professor Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann) is, like the protagonists of Beast, a paleontologist, interrupted in her search for dinosaur fossils by the troll’s awakening – and the Norwegian government’s consequent summoning of her as expert. It turns out, moreover, that the troll, just like the rhedosaurus in Beast, is heading toward its “home,” which just happens, in both cases, to be one of the most populated of urban areas: Manhattan in Beast and Oslo in Troll.[i] The film’s respective monsters do some rampaging, of course, on their way home.

As fascinating as Troll is as a monster movie, however, I want to suggest that it also overlaps to some degree with folk horror.

Posted on December 22, 2022

Medusa: A Failed Feminist Look at Evangelical Extremism

Guest Post

What’s scary about Anita Rocha da Silveira’s second feature is neither its monstrous metaphors for the Evangelical extremism on the rise in her native Brazil, nor its Argento-esque aesthetic of hallucinogenic hues and contrast colors. It’s how the ignorant ideology which the sprawling story overtly criticizes asserts itself in the subtext of this supposedly feminist fairytale. Like many fairytales, it revolves around a haughty heroine humbled by losing her beauty and being thrown off her privileged pedestal. Excluded by her previous peers and having of necessity to engage in lowly work, her character becomes reformed so that when she regains her physical charms they are matched by spiritual perfection.

Despite openly parodying duplicitous definitions of physical attractiveness, the director-writer relies on archaic concepts of beauty, disfigurement and ugliness. Young, conventionally beautiful protagonist Mari (Mariana Oliveira) and her girl gang of radical Evangelicals pursue an immaculate appearance as one of women’s prime duties to Jesus and to men while at the same time condemning the attractiveness of “sinful“ young women. At night, Mari and the others hunt for “Jezebels“ and “Messalinas“ – epithets evoking the age-old history of slut-shaming women – beating them into renouncing their “depraved“ lifestyle to embrace religious piety. The forced confessions and conversions are instantly posted online where they draw likes and supportive comments. Read more

Posted on November 28, 2022

Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men: Cornish Folk Horror

Dawn Keetley

In the Director’s Statement in the Press Packet for his new film, Enys Men (2022), Mark Jenkin writes that the film emerged from “images” he had “in my head.” These images arise from the land and the history of Cornwall – from the moors, sea, standing stones, mines and miners, bal maidens (female mine workers), and the men who made their living on the sea. The film didn’t just emerge from these images, however; the film is these images. To describe Enys Men is not to describe a story or a plot – because story and plot demand linear time and conventional causality. Enys Men creates a world structured very differently. And it is, quite simply, one of the most thought-provoking, beautiful, and engrossing films I’ve watched in a long time – and certainly one of the best films of 2022.