Invite Them In

What is folk horror? Who can say? Or rather, everyone has a different definition of the subgenre, which is why it can contain such multitudes. Whatever it is, you know it when you see it: The Wicker Man, The Witch, Midsommar.

Though its found-footage conceit mixes things up a little, The Blair Witch Project is very much a story of people stumbling into spaces where the old rules remain in place. Hereditary is built around ancient gods that might still be rattling around, waiting for their chance to get back inside. Heck, half of Ben Wheatley’s films are folk-adjacent. Just not the Meg sequel.

And these are just the English-language entries; every culture has its own creepy stories shared around campfires or in tea houses or in the sauna. There’s the hook of folk horror: No matter how secure we are in science and reason, no matter how much progress we make, at some point it’ll be 3am again and something will rustle in the shadows. The darkness is always waiting.

I wasn’t able to review All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror when it came out, but I have experienced its glory: Severin Films and Keir-La Janisse assembled 19 folk-horror features from around the globe – some familiar, others not, each one restored from the best available materials and accompanied by thoughtful supplemental sections – and threw in a special edition of Janisse’s three-hour documentary Woodlands Dark & Days Bewitched, a CD of its soundtrack and a little hardcover book of new writing from critics, academics and novelists.

Placing everything from Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen and Ryszard Bugajski’s Clearcut and Wheatley’s own A Field in England in the canon, it was a definitive statement on the genre … but not the last word. Three years later, Janisse and Severin have brought us a second volume offering two dozen titles from decades of folk-horror cinema, with hours and hours of supplements and a new book of folk-horror fiction.

The remit for Volume 2 is a little looser – “we wanted to go a bit further afield,” Janisse said when the set was announced earlier this summer – so not every title on the set’s 13 Blu-rays exactly qualifies as full-on horror.

“There’s definitely elements of rural paganism involved, but at its heart it’s a very somber and deliberately paced Filipino melodrama” admits Andrew Leavold in his commentary for the set’s final title, Mike De Leon’s 1976 The Rites of May – which is indeed as he describes it, but also infused with squirming darkness, tendrils of grief and recrimination snaking through the shattered the family at its centre.

Other titles spin their nightmares right in front of us, like this set’s Canadian selection. Gwaai Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown’s 2018 Edge of the Knife, the first and only feature produced in the Haida language, follows the deterioration of a young man (Tyler Wolf) into the bestial gaagiixiid, or Haida wildman, when he abandons himself to the wilderness after accidentally taking the life of his best friend’s son. For other stories of people becoming monsters, we can hop over to Leonardo Favio’s post-Franco allegory Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (Argentina, 1975) or Juraj Herz’ Beauty and the Beast (Czechoslovakia, 1978).

Accursed puppets abound in Christine Cegavske’s 2006 stop-motion feature Blood Tea and Red String, and Juraj Herz’ 1979 The Ninth Heart; spirits tempt mortals to join them in unholy acts in Rainer Sarnet’s 2017 November, or grab them outright in Marcin Wrona’s 2015 Demon.

And of course the spirits of murdered women return to avenge their deaths – and torment a few other people – in Yoshihiro Ishikawa’s 1968 Bakeneko: A Vengeful Spirit and Sisworo Gautama Putra’s 1981 Sundelbolong. (Suzzanna, the Indonesian genre superstar of Sundelbolong, is celebrated in the feature-length documentary Suzzanna: The Queen of Black Magic, directed by Severin president David Gregory.)

Communities struggle under the weight of traditions and legacies in Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer (Finland, 1952), Jean-Pierre Mocky’s Litan (France, 1982), Pedro Olea’s post-Franco allegory Akelarre (Spain, 1984), Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (Thailand, 1999) and Shahad Ameen’s muted Scales (Saudi Arabia, 2019); Kim Ki-young’s Io Island (Korea, 1977) comes at the same theme from a different angle, using a Wicker Man premise to follow an outsider into an insular, matriarchal society to investigate a mysterious death.

Previously released by Kino Lorber as The Legend of Hillbilly John, John Newland’s Who Fears the Devil (US, 1973), mashes up Billy Jack and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” for a truly unique story about a time-traveling Appalachian musician who battles Satan. (It could happen!) And Carter Lord’s The Enchanted (US, 1984) is a gentle Florida ghost story about a sailor who comes home to fix up an old house – and finds it occupied by a family of strangers.

And then there are the weirdo English films, which either toy with the limits of genre or jump right in with both feet: Christopher Lee’s professorial menace in John Llewellyn Moxie’s 1960 The City of the Dead (aka Horror Hotel), the zombie biker foolishness of Don Sharp’s 1973 Psychomania, the surrealist apocalypse of Jamil Dehlavi’s 1987 Born of Fire.

Not to be outdone: The Welsh! Wil Aaron’s 1981 short feature From the Old Earth (O’r Ddaear Hen) finds an ordinary family beset by nightmares, visions and violence after they discover an ancient idol in their garden. (According to Sean Welsh’s program note, its archaeological content led to screenings for schoolchildren all over Wales, despite being entirely inappropriate for children.) It’s accompanied here by Aaron’s equally charming and unsettling 1975 Blood on the Stars, about a children’s choir deciding to thwart a celebrity concert by any means necessary. I am positive Edgar Wright watched this multiple times as a kid.

And speaking of kids stumbling across things at too young an age, Sean Hogan’s To Fire You Come At Last (UK/US, 2023), commissioned by Severin for this collection, riffs on BBC chillers of the ’70s for a tale of 17^th century coffin bearers whose latest job turns very dark indeed.

Each film is presented in the best state possible. Akelarre, Bakeneko, Born of Fire, The Enchanted, Psychomania, The Rites of May,  and The White Reindeer are pristine, sourced from 4K scans of the original camera negatives, while Blood Tea and Red String, The City of the Dead, From the Old Earth and Io Island are mastered from 2K scans of their OCNs.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf and Who Fears the Devil are scanned from surviving 35mm prints – in the former’s case, the scan uses the only surviving print – and they’re entirely serviceable. Supplements are plentiful and exhaustive, with surviving filmmakers tapped for commentary tracks and interviews wherever possible, and a small army of experts coming in to fill any gaps. (The White Reindeer has no commentary track, but the film is accompanied by an episode of the Projection Booth podcast with Mike White discussing the film with author Kat Ellinger and musician El Goro. It counts!)

Janisse’s curation within the set is clever and subtle, finding films that rhyme with one another – the American Gothic flavors of The Enchanted and Who Fears the Devil, the Indigenous narratives of Edge of the Knife and The White Reindeer, the marine concerns of Io Island and Scales – and pairing them on the same platter. Each double-feature disc become its own movie night, the supplements serving as post-screening conversation. Only Born of Fire and From the Old Earth stand alone; perhaps they were just too weird to be put next to another picture. Presenting them together might have summoned something too horrible to imagine.

All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror, Volume II is available now from Severin Films. And Volume I is still in print, if you’re looking to beef up your Christmas list. Totally worth it.

Up next: Criterion’s Seven Samurai leads a pack of stone classics arriving in 4K, and Tim Burton returns to the spookhouse with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. It’s what the people want!