The Lord of Misrule is the latest horror film from William Brent Bell, who has previously directed 2016’s The Boy and Orphan: First Kill (2022), among others. The Lord of Misrule is firmly in the folk horror tradition and, as a huge folk horror fan, I had been excitedly anticipating its release. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. That isn’t to say there aren’t things to like, but while it delivers on pretty much every folk horror convention, it adds little; it plays out a rote folk horror narrative across its admittedly beautiful surface, but it’s flat, lifeless, bereft of underlying meaning. It doesn’t add anything new, as the best recent folk horror films – Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), Without Name (Lorcan Finnegan, 2016), Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019), In the Earth (Ben Wheatley, 2021), The Feast (Lee Haven Jones, 2021), Enys Men (Mark Jenkins, 2022), and Men (Alex Garland, 2022) – have done.
The Lord of Misrule centers on Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton), who, along with her husband Henry (Matt Stokoe) and daughter Grace (Evie Templeton), has recently moved to the village of Berrow where Rebecca will serve as the new vicar. (I can’t help but think of Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins here!) We see the family almost immediately plunged into a village festival celebrating the Lord of Misrule and a figure called Gallowgog. Both are associated with the harvest: the Lord of Misrule protects the village against Gallowgog, the “Lord of Blight.” The festival serves to drive Gallowgog out of the village each year in order to ensure that the harvest will be a good one.
Grace has been abducted
On the night of the festival, Grace Holland disappears, walking off into the woods with a hooded figure. As Rebecca and Henry desperately search for her, they learn that Grace is to be the latest youthful sacrifice to Gallowgog. The rest of the film unspools the lore of Gallowgog and stages the showdown between Rebecca and town elder Jocelyn Abney (Ralph Ineson), whose son was sacrificed to Gallowgog twelve years ago and who is now the village’s anointed leader. Abney tells Rebecca that Gallowgog demands the ‘gift’ of her daughter (and her husband too. it turns out). Rebecca refuses the necessity of this sacrifice and dares to enter the ‘Black Barn’ – the site of sacrifice – where she confronts Gallowgog and changes the trajectory of the lore, the nature of the sacrifice. The film ends in the village church with an ambiguous shot. Who or what does Rebecca, once devoted to God, now worship? Has she banished the pagan god and replaced him with the Christian god – or does the village tradition persist? If so, in what new form?
Despite its promising plot and capable cast, The Lord of Misrule fails to inspire. One of the major ways in which the film fails to live up to its promise is that it gets repeatedly bogged down in exposition at the expense of dramatic action. The story of the Lord of Misrule and Gallowgog gets told and re-told throughout the film – through exposition and through paintings (in at least two scenes). The paintings aren’t allowed to speak for themselves, moreover, but get explained to Rebecca by other characters. So, characters tell the story of Gallowgog, paintings illustrate it, a song that runs over the ending credits reprises it. All these reiterated expoundings bog the film down and come close to insulting the intelligence of the viewer. The Lord of Misrule’s use of paintings, to take one example, serves as one of its many borrowings from other folk horror films, by which it largely suffers in comparison. With its use of paintings, The Lord of Misrule invokes the far superior Midsommar – but to its own detriment. In Midsommar, the murals remained as uncanny background within the mise-en-scène – there for the viewer to interpret (often in a second or third viewing) in light of the action that also happens in front of them. In The Lord of Misrule, on the other hand, viewers are beaten over the head by characters belabouring the meaning of the paintings.
One of the paintings that gets explained in The Lord of Misrule
As I suggested earlier, The Lord of Misrule is a veritable compendium of folk horror tropes; none are left behind. There are the outsiders to a tight-knit, isolated rural village community. There is the expressly pagan religion, which at first seems to be only an instance of quaint residual village practices but is soon revealed to go all the way down. There are pagan artifacts, a suitably pagan-themed village pub (The Laughing Goat), and the requisite scene when everyone in the pub falls silent when the outsiders (vicar and family) enter. There is an expansively-developed lore that stretches back to 1621 and is elaborated in an ancient, sacred tome. There are pagan chants (“All is as was”), folk songs, and a god associated with the fields and the harvest (“He stands in the fields and waits”). There are scythes, fire, and sacrifice. So many folk horror conventions and yet, somehow, they don’t add up to anything either frightening or thought-provoking.
The one interesting aspect of the film, in my view, is that it squarely recognizes the clash (but also possibly the alignment) between Christian and residual pre-Christian practices – a clash that often animates folk horror but is not always an explicit part of the plot. In this regard, The Lord of Misrule invokes The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973). For instance, Rebecca Holland (the new vicar) engages in a conversation with village leader Jocelyn Abney in which Abney says that Gallowgog is “the truth.” Rebecca responds that it’s nothing but “an old story,” to which Abney retorts, well what is your religion “but an old story.” This moment hearkens back to Sergeant Neil Howie’s debate with Lord Summerisle about immaculate conception: on Summerisle, women jump naked over fires – and Summerisle asks Howie whether that is substantively different from the virgin birth that centers his (established) religion.
The clash of Christianity and paganism in Berrow
The Lord of Misrule is especially interesting because it begins its clash between established Christianity and local pagan rites in the early seventeenth century, as the religious conflicts that would set the English Civil Wars in motion were stirring – complex conflicts involving reformed Protestantism, the Church of England, Catholicism, and swelling accusations of heresy and witchcraft.[i] All across England, local communities had their own often idiosyncratic sets of religious practices that always risked putting them at odds with reigning religious dictates. The history of Berrow, then, in which enforcers of the established church ride into Berrow and burn the village leader, Tobias Bron, in an effort to stamp out heretical practices – is mapped onto historical reality (albeit in exaggerated form). As Berrow’s history tells it: “When the Church learned of their heresy, they came to Berrow and executed them.” Later, Abney will add, “Purification, they called it.” The execution of the “heretic” by the established church did not end the heresy but merely sent it under ground: “Spirit Gallowgog took us to his bosom – hard little seeds deep beneath the earth.” The pagan religion survived literally “beneath the earth” – that “survival” of ancient rites that is so often integral to folk horror, but which also formed a real part of the seventeenth-century religious landscape.
In the end, though, The Lord of Misrule doesn’t do enough with its potentially interesting historical situatedness. Like everything else in the film, it’s all surface, no depth. I couldn’t help, perhaps unfairly, comparing The Lord of Misrule to the most recent folk horror release I watched – Mark Jenkins’ Enys Men – and it falls dramatically short. Whereas Enys Men is all depth, The Lord of Misrule is all surface. My disappointment was compounded because I thought Bell’s The Boy was an innovative film, weaving gothic horror with (unexpectedly) slasher traditions. There is no such innovation here – just paint-by-numbers folk horror.
That said, if you’re a folk horror fan (as I am), you’ll want to see this – and I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
Here’s the trailer:
[i] Michael Reeves’ classic folk horror film, Witchfinder General (1968), set in 1645 (after war broke out) depicts something of the same turbulent and perilous religious moment.
