Comprehensive documentaries are a tricky business. Condensing the overview of a chosen topic into cinematic form without the resulting piece folding into the realm of glorified lecture is far from guaranteed. No filmmaker wants their work to land with all the glory of an out-of-print history textbook that smells of glue and decades of after-school snack smudges. Through a combination of experimental animations, well-chosen clips, and a steady string of engaging talking heads, Kier-La Janisse’s new documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) avoids the major pitfalls that often doom similar projects. Consequently, Janisse orchestrates an informative and bewitching adventure that takes viewers through the roots, developments, and current iterations of folk horror the world over.
In essence, folk horror is a sub-genre that situates the locus of horror as coming from the lore associated with a given culture, most often tied inextricably to the physical land underneath it. Think the British island of The Wicker Man (1973) or gloomy, colonial New England in The Witch (2015), both films Janisse includes in her survey. These films, for better and worse, tap into cultural touch points relating to fears of the unknown and to places that are considered savage. Referring again to examples – the Pagan ritualism of The Wicker Man, and the feminine occult of The Witch. If horror is broadly a way to access a cross-section of what a culture fears at any given time in cinematic history, folk horror ranks high on the list of genres that offer a direct route to the basest human nightmares. That idea emerges as Janisse’s thesis, informing her globetrotting review of the genre’s development from its Anglo-centric origins to its elucidation of how filmmakers continue to turn to it as an outlet for a critique of cultural anxiety.
The culminating scene of The Wicker Man
To achieve this, Janisse calls on a massive roster of critics, academics, screenwriters, directors, actors, and horror fans to situate major topics of folk horror with the cinematic history. The documentary is divided into chapters to achieve this. One fixates on “The Unholy Trinity” of British films that remain touchstones of the genre, while another is devoted entirely to the American breed of film. Structurally, this allows repeated appearances by figures with knowledge to impart across sub-sections, while spotlighting those tied to a particular era. Edited with aplomb to juxtapose energetic movie and TV clips with narration and traditional talking head cutaways, Janisse ensures that the film’s rhythm never stagnates.
It is worth noting however that while later sections on global folk horror employ local experts and filmmakers, there is a noticeable lack of non-white commentators in the first two-thirds or so of the documentary. Jesse Wente and Maisha Wester stand out as experts tapped to discuss the treatment of Indigenous and Black characters and histories in folk horror, but they are surrounded by a stream of white faces. This is not to say the film ignores the racial components of folk horror, in fact much of the runtime is dedicated to astutely parsing those issues. It is simply an observation that for whatever reason the voices doing the parsing represent the dominant ideologies most often cited in film criticism and scholarship. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror thus misses the opportunity to issue a scholastic corrective in the process of presenting an exhaustive review of folk horror.
Interspersed with the various clips and interviews, Janisse enlists artists Guy Maddin, Zena Grey, and Brendt Riouz to supply exquisitely unnerving animations. Working with a combination of paper collages and hand-drawn animations, the team refract visual markers from folk horror, such as runes and ravens, through an abstract vision of greens, blues, grays, and blacks. Visually they suggest the commingling of tropes and styles that encapsulates a genre which constantly refers back to its ancestral films and texts, whether they be H. P. Lovecraft or Lawrence Gordon Clark. Janisse deftly inserts these sequences throughout the film, introducing the work through the haunting opening credits, and then frequently deploying further animations to bookend the sections, or even signal a transition within a given topic. The choice further cements the reality that documentaries work best when they are grounds for cinematic innovation and experimentation, divorced from the outdated assumption that the format can only supply dreary historical re-creations and droning academic sermons.
The film’s three-plus-hour runtime does suggest that Janisse may have benefitted from trimming a few darlings or reimagining the piece as a multi-part series, but even so, there is no denying the magnificent craft and care she exhibits in executing this project. I found myself nodding vigorously, taking notes on future readings and viewings, and even pausing in a moment of realization when her piece suddenly provided a potential fix to a pacing issue in one of my screenplays. The point being that Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is a must-see for anyone who counts themselves among the community of cinephiles who salivate over horror and all its grisly variations. Janisse brings a lover’s touch to her work, ensuring that we who watch it can feel the passion she feels for folk horror.
Woodlands Dark will be available on Shudder on January 10, 2022.
Devin McGrath-Conwell is a graduate of Middlebury College currently working on a Screenwriting MFA at Emerson College. His work has also appeared on portlandfilmreview.com where he is a staff writer, cbsnews.com, and in The Middlebury Campus. He has been lucky enough to have his screenwriting produced in the short film Locally Sourced, which he also directed, and the web series Lambert Hall. He has previously written on Midnight Mass, on Mike Flanagan’s devotion to negative space, on parallel editing in The Hunger, and masculinity in Scream for Horror Homeroom. If you enjoy his work, follow him on Twitter @devintwonames where he regularly tweets into the abyss about film, television, and, of course, horror.
