WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED: A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR (March 2021)

WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED:

A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR

(March 2021)

“Folk horror very much channels people’s relationship to the land, to this sort of shared consciousness, these traditional beliefs that are somehow in the soil, in the landscape.

--Kat Ellinger
   Editor, Diabolique Magazine
 
Writer/director Kier-La Janisse brings us the incisive and absorbing 3-hour plus documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which is, as its subtitle indicates, an expansive study of folk horror, from its literary roots onto its notable presence on both the film and television mediums.
 
“Like any decent piece of work, [The Wicker Man] survives. It has, coiled at the heart of it, a mystery. Peter Pan has it. It’s overtly a very silly play. But it isn’t, because it’s about something other than what its surface purports to be.”
--Anthony Schaffer
   Writer, The Wicker Man
 
If you’re the sort of horrorhead who loves to delve beneath the surface, who is (to use a morbidly appropriate analogy) drawn to rummage amidst the bloody innards of the slaughtered sacrificial lamb to see what makes it what it is, to study its innate lamb-ness as it were, then Woodlands… is, as they say, a “must-see”.
 
“Generally speaking, we wanna believe that the thoughts and fears and beliefs of a past generation, we’ve sort of transcended them, we’ve grown out of them, we’re above them. Horror films always pose this problem that in fact, it’s not as simple as that.”
--John Cussans
   Author, Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex
 
There’s a host of experts and writers and filmmakers interviewed during its runtime, and a whole bunch of films are touched on, including a number of personal favorites and titles that have been mentioned ‘round these parts.
As such, I could just go on and on with the quotes, but I imagine I should just leave you with this…

“So I think it’s super-interesting how these myths are, like, all around the world, they just have different names, and we make it local.”
--Abraham Castillo Flores
   Head Programmer, Morbido Film Festival
 
The fifth (and penultimate) chapter of the documentary, “All the Haunts Be Ours: Folk Horror Around the World,” is a key section that further expounds on the definition of folk horror and expands its borders to make room for a more diverse catalogue of titles beyond the usual suspects like The Wicker Man.
 
It’s somewhere towards the end of that section though, that I was starting to despair of seeing any kind of Philippine representation, when lo and behold, the film I consider, hands down, the best horror film our shores have managed to produce (and by this, I also mean it’s one of the best horror films ever made, regardless of country of origin) appears here under its international title, The Rites of May.
Go, Mike de Leon!
 
So, yes, check this out if you’ve a mind to, as it also makes the sobering case for the timeliness of folk horror in this very fraught moment in our race’s history…
 
“And ‘We don’t go back’ is the fundamental tension of folk horror.”
--Howard David Ingham
   Author, We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror
 
(Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror Blu-ray cover art courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com; Itim OS courtesy of imdb.com.)