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Film Review: WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED: A HISTORY OF FOLK HORROR: A Spooky, Gargantuan Marvel of Genre Analysis [Fantasia 2021]

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Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror Review

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021) Film Review from the 25th Annual Fantasia International Film Festival, a movie written and directed by Kier-La Janisse, featuring Kevin Kölsch, Dennis Widmyer, Piers Haggard, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Alice Lowe, Mattie Do, Jeremy Dyson, Robert Eggers, Katrin Gebbe, and Ian Ogilvy.

With a long title and a lengthy runtime, Kier-La Janisse’s Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is an absolute tome of genre analysis that more than lives up to its gargantuan suggestions.

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Using the British horror staples of Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and The Wicker Man as a jumping-off point (dutifully deemed “The Unholy Trinity”), Janisse lays out the foundations of folk horror with the focus on fears about the past, disconnect with the land, and reckonings with the horrors of colonialism. In all three of these films, Janisse and her numerous interview subjects (who range from modern-day horror directors to the original filmmakers themselves) discuss these films’ lasting legacies, particularly in how they pushed horror beyond the stuffy prestige of the Hammer label into a more critically visceral look at British society.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched explains how Christian supremacy and a disdain for pagan practices is the root cause of these films’ fears, but how that, too, is but an analytical starting point to understand these cinematic worlds rather than their actual promulgated viewpoints. It makes us modern-day viewers look inward and ask why we’re so afraid of the “old ways”, and why rural landscapes and isolated forests tend to fill us with such dread.

Like all genre and stylistic classification folk horror is flexible and fluid, and from the “Unholy Trinity” Janisse traces a connecting through-line to Hollywood filmmaking, 18th- and 19th-century American literature, and other cinematic movements the world over.

Fears surrounding colonialism imbue the folk horror cinema of the Americas – both in being the conquered and suffering retribution as the conqueror – but so too does religious radicalism, and Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched thoroughly elucidates how these angles allow us viewers to better comprehend historical violence. For example, many American films that could be classified as folk horror might feature the “sacred Indian burial ground” as a plot device, arguably to assuage white American viewers’ guilt over their ancestors’ genocide of the First Nations people; however, that same trope can be used to mystify the First Nations people and demote them solely to stand-ins for their cultures’ mythologies. Likewise, fear of women has long fed into America’s judicial history of misogyny, which in turn has influenced stories of witchcraft that reflect men’s base-level irrationalities.

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But Janisse does not stop there, as Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched bounces around from Europe to Southeast Asia to the Caribbean to Australia, taking the folk horror magnifying lens to every culture that crosses its path. In doing so, the documentary teases forth analyses of hyper-specific folklore as well as national histories and traumas, and how they all eventually tie back to our connections to the land. Such readings tinged with gentrification and climate crisis may explain the modern-day resurgence in folk horror à la Midsommar, the films of Ben Wheatley, and countless other works as a reflection of our growing sense of social, political, and environmental isolation (which explains why the last few minutes of this were one “And then something [adjective] happened” away from becoming Adam Curtis-adjacent).

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is an absolute treasure trove of information, and its miracle is how effortlessly engaging Janisse presents it. Despite running for more than three hours the film never drags, flowing seamlessly from one topic to the next on account of co-editors Winnie Cheung and Benjamin Shearn’s spectacular sense of pacing.

Granted, if you have no interest in horror at all then you may find this a bit of a drag on principle, but if that’s the case 1) what’s wrong with you? and 2) the film and its interviewees have such broad and expansive comprehensions of folk horror that they’re bound to pique your interest with at least one overlapping topic – be it history, anthropology, psychology, or whatever else. Towards the end of the film, one of interviewees even describes folk horror as less of a subgenre and more of a lens, an approach through which to understand a piece of artistic work: it’s not a passive experience, it’s an applied one. Not to mention some worthwhile animation from the iconic Guy Maddin, Jim Williams’ score, and an otherwise eerie soundtrack really help spur this film along.

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The one major setback is that, despite it being divided up into six unevenly-spaced “chapters”, the film is so singular and packed with information that it’s hard to stop for breathers – which, if you’re someone like me who literally scribbled pages worth of notes and took others’ advice to make a list of must-see films from the excerpts (mine is currently over 100), then it might take even longer than 193 minutes to get through with all the starting and stopping you’ll be doing to make sure nary a detail is missed. At times the film is more of a cinematic textbook than it is a documentary narrative, but that should give it a long and healthy life for film school students and video essay aficionados on YouTube or some other streaming service that will allow for the consumption of it at one’s own leisure.

It’s the Los Angeles Plays Itself for the horror crowd. A spooky marvel.

Rating: 8/10

Leave your thoughts on this Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror review and the film below in the comments section. Readers seeking to support this type of content can visit our Patreon Page and become one of FilmBook’s patrons. Readers seeking more Fantasia International Film Festival news can visit our Fantasia International Film Festival Page, our Film Festival Page, and our Film Festival Facebook Page. Readers seeking more film reviews can visit our Movie Review Page, our Movie Review Twitter Page, and our Movie Review Facebook Page. Want up-to-the-minute notifications? FilmBook staff members publish articles by EmailTwitterFacebookInstagramTumblrPinterestReddit, and Flipboard.

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Jacob Mouradian

A Midwest transplant in the Big Apple, Jacob can never stop talking about movies (it’s a curse, really). Although a video editor and sound mixer by trade, he’s always watching and writing about movies in his spare time. However, when not obsessing over Ken Russell films or delving into some niche corner of avant-garde cinema, he loves going on bike rides, drawing in his sketchbook, exploring all that New York City has to offer, and enjoying a nice cup of coffee.
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