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Expert doco casts a spell

This three-hour deep dive into folk horror is well designed to educate and entertain, writes James Croot.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is now available to stream on Shudder.

As the subtitle, A History of Folk Horror, suggests, the otherwise evocatively titled Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a more than three-hour deep dive into the cult cinematic subgenre that has brought us such delights as

The Wicker Man, The Amityville Horror, Wolf Creek and Midsommar.

Divided into six fascinating chapters (a structure that caters to those who might prefer to tackle the meaty, thoughtprovoking discussions, dissections and nightmarish visions in more palatable bitesized chunks), this soup-to-nuts, Hammer-to-A24 look at more than

50 years of a potentially terrorinducing, at times taboobusting section of movingpicture storytelling is well designed to educate as well as entertain.

About 50 interviewees (experts, critics, academics, film-makers and stars) provide enlightenment on more than 200 flicks, usually with the aid of hauntingly illustrative clips, describing where they fit into the topic’s pantheon and how they reflect much older tales and practices from their countries of origin.

Yes, we’re not limited here to the traditional British pagans or their ilk, as much as you devote an entire featurelength doco to either 1968’s

Witchfinder General or 1971’s

The Blood on Satan’s Claw.

There are the expected movies from the United States

(Children of the Corn) and Australia (Picnic at Hanging Rock), as well as Poland (The Dybbuk), Japan (Kakashi),

Indonesia (cult hit Lady Terminator), Czechoslovakia

(The Ninth Heart) and Mexico

(The Living Head).

Topic discussions are just as eclectic, starting with the only religion Britain gave the world (witchcraft), before segueing into themes as diverse as Hollywood’s

favourite myth: the Indian burial ground, depictions of hoodoo and voodoo, Spanishlanguage filmmakers’ obsession with La Llorona (‘‘the weeping woman’’), and folk horror’s recent revival (which experts and commentators put down to the uncertain times we live in that echo what was happening during the genre’s first wave in the 1970s, when it even managed to infiltrate ‘‘family’’ shows such as Doctor Who and The Waltons).

Kier-La Janisse, the Canadian founder of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, has made a fabulous directorial debut that is guaranteed to leave you searching out streaming services, Alice’s and AroVideo’s catalogues for copies of what’s teased here.

Tv Week

en-nz

2022-01-18T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-18T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282406992718394

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