If you want to get me in the door, tell me you made a folk-horror movie. Honestly, I’ll turn up for any horror movie, but folk-horror is the quickest path to my heart, whether we’re talking about small-scale stories of ritual gone wrong or grand-scale Old World meets New World cultural clashes. It’s just My Jam.
So I was thrilled to find that this year’s Fantastic Fest lineup featured a couple of films (at least) that felt right up my alley, and thanks to the fest’s online screening room, I was able to pair them as a double feature from the comfort of my couch. The films are the English film The Severed Sun and the Dutch film Witte Wieven, and thankfully for me, both turned out to be wonderful exercises in folk-horror atmosphere.
But it wasn’t just subgenre that linked these features, it turns out. They’re set in different parts of Europe, in different periods of time, but both are potent studies of women pushed to the brink when the systems of power that govern their lives prove either ineffective, dangerous, or both. In The Severed Sun, we meet Magpie (Emma Appleton), a woman caught in an abusive marriage within the isolated spiritual commune run by her father (Toby Stephens). Desperate for some sense of control over her own destiny and her own suffering, she murders her husband and makes it look like an accident. But the locals aren’t buying Magpie’s story, and her future gets even more complicated when a mysterious beast from the woods starts invading the community and picking off locals.
It’s not hard to parse the thematic content at the heart of this, nor is it meant to be, but what The Severed Sun lacks in mystery it makes up for in atmosphere. Director Dean Puckett shoots his film in a vivid juxtaposition of handheld close-ups and wide, pastoral static shots, blending the chaos of Magpie’s life with the seemingly idyllic world in which she lives. It’s a style that reminded me of classics like The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General, and indeed it feels like something that UK studio Tigon might have dropped somewhere in about 1971, in a very good way.
Then there’s Witte Wieven, another story of a woman wronged who takes matters into her own hands. In this case, that woman is Frieda (Anneke Sluiters), a wife in a Medieval farming community who’s desperate to be a mother, as much because she’d like a child as because the deeply Christian community around her expects it. Driven to frustration by her own fertility issues, and by the presence of the local abusive butcher who’s allowed to walk free, Frieda’s life changes when she runs into the dark woods around the village one day, chased by said butcher, and discovers something lurking there that might change her life.
Again, thematically, you can see where this is going, but Witte Wieven is not hobbled by predictability, nor is it entirely predictable. You can see the vague scaffolding that Frieda’s climbing in this film, but director Didier Konings successfully immerses her into a world so lush and shadow-filled that you can’t truly see exactly where things are going until they exploded in sometimes orgasmic gouts of blood and emotional revelation. The violence in this film is particularly well-staged, there’s great creature work, and the mist-soaked visuals will remind you of recent folk-horror hits like Hagazussa and You Won’t Be Alone.
Bottom line, I loved both of these movies, as much for their differences as for their thematic, visual, and atmospheric similarities. If you’re a folk-horror devotee like me, I urge you to seek them both out, and maybe even pair them together if you can. This is a subgenre that remains not just alive and well, but full of strange magic not yet revealed.
