SXSW 2021 Film Review: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
Ambition, Academia, and Ineffable Horror Collide in the Masterful Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
My coverage of SXSW continues. Ambitious, exhaustive, and utterly entrancing, Kier-La Janisse’s three-hour-plus treatise on folk horror is an education in a bottle. A deep, dark rabbit hole that examines the power of storytelling and tales inherited, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is more than a mere documentary, it’s an essential text.
Folk horror is the most ephemeral of genre terms; a blanket classification of recent vintage, its provenance is hard to pin down and its definition murky enough to appear impenetrable. Kier-La Janisse - film programmer and horror scholar extraordinaire - attempts to demystify her subject and educate the initiated and uninitiated alike with Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. Teaming up with Severin Films, a production company known for its meticulous restorations of cult horror, Janisse guides the audience on a three-hour-plus journey into the recesses of dark lore and the fringes of civilization. Woodlands covers a wide swath of storytelling, spanning from the 1960s until present day, exploring twisted and warped folklore from at least four different continents.
One lesson that Janisse imparts is that folk horror isn’t a genre, per se - it’s a “mode,” as one interviewee suggests. Unlike other genres, or even subsets of terror, folk horror is heavily shaped by its regional histories, local conventions, and dark pasts - an expression of trepidation, unease, and general fear about the unknowable in isolated communities. Woodlands spends much of its long but undaunting runtime illustrating its syllabus through a variety of talking heads, acting as guides as the documentary tours the Appalachians, the deep American South, pastoral England, and the rural territories of Asia and Scandinavia. A rabbit hole that will enrapture you with intricacies of local myth, it’s absolutely fascinating to dig deep and find explanations on why ghosts haunt one corner of the world, while witches, cults, and beasts haunt another. Folk horror can stretch from “the strange things found in fields” all the way to “the devil having a cup of tea with you,” and Woodlands is here to bewilder, enchant, and educate.
“Woodlands covers a wide swath of storytelling, spanning from the 1960s until present day, exploring twisted and warped folklore from at least four different continents.”
Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched may be long, but it’s a labor of love that’s exquisitely crafted and utterly hypnotic. Janisse finds the perfect balance and rhythm to convey the depths of her knowledge: interspersed between its talking head experts and history lessons, the film catalogs a trove of relevant film footage. Ranging from modern favorites such as Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Jairo Bustamante’s La Llorona all the way to deep cuts from the bedrock of the “mode” like England’s Witchfinder General and Blood on Satan’s Claw, there’s no shortage of horrific threads to be pulled. Woodlands is an absolute treat for horror novitiates, but it has an equal amount to offer to genre veterans as well - as a diverse tasting menu of unique, localized folklore, the film leaves almost no stone unturned. It certainly has the breadth and expertise to do so.
As a true History of Folk Horror, Woodlands is a rich and dizzying tome of information, but never inaccessible. Kier-La Janisse organizes a love letter with such precision and craft that its runtime evaporates. It’s likely that this is the only three-hour-plus documentary that elicits the response: “More, please.” A film that has me sifting through a fascinating wealth of new information, furiously jotting down a new watch list, and marveling at its craft, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a horror cinephile’s dream come true.
