All in Folk Horror
The film takes place over the wedding and reception of a Polish woman and a British-born Polish man. Before the wedding, Piotr discovers a skeleton buried in the yard behind their new home, the old house Żaneta inherited from her grandfather. Demon is about a terrible truth that these wedding guests and many Poles want to forget, one that persists in the bones under the very soil of Poland itself.
Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy horror classic, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), is a coming-of-age story about Ofelia, a girl living in the fascist Spanish regime of Francisco Franco as an imperiled pregnancy brings about her mother’s death. In the end, Ofelia grows--she transcends these horrors--not by giving up childish fantasies, as she’s told to do, but by learning from them to hold to her convictions, keep her own counsel, and make moral choices, even when it means sacrificing herself.
We wanted to bring you a list of good Pagan horror we didn’t get to talk about last month. But there was a problem. In our search for Pagan horror, we came across a lot of Satanic cults and witches, as well as some stories and creatures from old folktales, but relatively little in the way of what we would call Pagan horror. So instead, we’re going to tell you about some other great folk horror we came across.
Häxan has left behind a unique legacy, and lots of folks have written about it as an early film that blurred the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy. It is also an essay, which is key to its integrity and artfulness. The Wrong Version of the film, recut, renamed a name we shall not name, and punched up with an out-of-place jazz score, scraps all that in favor of what feels like a deeply insensitive, drugged-out History Channel documentary.
In the wake of overwhelming tragedy and faced with the uncertainty of life beyond their four-year relationship, the main characters of director Ari Astor’s instant classic Midsommar (2017) reluctantly depart for the sunny hills of Hälsingland—a foreign town that serves the couple as a kind of limbo, testing each to see who they will become in the aftermath of a clearly failing relationship. Dani emerges with newfound purpose and identity, but her boyfriend Christian, loses himself at every turn, burning every social bridge that formed his identity until flames consume the little bit that’s left.
Happy Everyone’s Irish Day! Here are a few Irish horror movies we’ve watched recently. All the movies on this list were made by Irish filmmakers, all are set in Ireland, and all play off of fears that, in our American estimations (with some Irish heritage, which pretty much makes us experts, right?…), seem particularly Irish.
Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is an odd film, at once ultra-violent and even-keeled, confused and focused, quiet and, thanks to expert sound design, deafening. While detail and precision give movies like The Wicker Man (1973) and Häxan (1923) their own special brand of disturbing, in Kill List, it’s the lack of detail, the haziness, the things you can’t figure out that make this film so bizarre and unsettling.
A lot’s been said about the contents of the various cuts of The Wicker Man and about the film’s religious commentary. We’re interested in protagonist Sgt. Neil Howie’s depiction as a false martyr—false because, Sgt. Howie is not, in fact, the martyr Lord Summerisle proclaims him to be.
