Woodlands – Olaf Möller

Until a decade or so ago, the phrase ‘folk horror’ didn’t exist, but the films that make up this tendency did. Some of them are considered canonical classics of cinema and television, like Erik Blomberg’s The White Reindeer (1952), Andrew McCullough’s The Fugitive episode The Witch (1963), Shindō Kaneto's Onibaba (1964), or Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General (1968).

The lesson is that history only reveals what we ask of it – it gives nothing spontaneously, and provides no resistance to our findings and no inherent meaning of its own. For all its wordiness, history is ultimately silent and patient, and strangely generous. It offers us the possibility to reflect, on ourselves as well – nothing more, nothing less. Which begs the question: why are we now asking about the terrors and threats you can find (or that find you) in the countryside? Why does paganism seem so interesting these days? What went before us in terms of civilisations, and what remains of them – in whatever shape or form? What is it that we are suppressing? For if we know one thing about horror, it’s that it deals with the return of the suppressed.

Kier-La Janisse is a true specialist in reading these narratives of buried, forcefully hidden fears and fury. She’s written books about all kinds of deviant cinemas, has composed film programmes, and worked on the release of DVDs and Blu-rays of various masterpieces. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror started out as a short bonus work for one such release, and turned into her debut feature, a monumental essay on the suppression of the oppressed – those we have extinguished through the millennia.

Written by Olaf Möller