A solid folk horror comes to us from the Netherlands, and screenwriter and director Nico van den Brink wisely used local legends and made a slow-burning film thematically somewhat in the footsteps of the iconic “Wicker Man” or Aster’s “Hereditary”. The story develops here patiently, even almost too slowly for all the waiting to be worth it in the good ending of a horror film set in a Dutch province. Archaeologists gathered from all over Europe on the edge of a site in the north of the Netherlands have found a grave containing the mummified body of a woman who is clearly hundreds of years old.
Very close to the archaeological site lives Betriek (Sallie Harmsen), whom we meet in the prologue as a girl in the early nineties, and then we travel 30 years into the future. Betriek herself now has a daughter of a similar age, and when she meets the head of the archaeologist, Dan Jonas (Alexandre Willeume), she points out that her family seems to be cursed. And not only because her husband died young, but many not very pleasant things happened in her family over several generations. Betriek lives with his daughter in the last house in the town with his father and mother, and as the story develops, we realize that a dark local legend from hundreds of years ago is looming over the whole town, which will clearly turn out to be much more than just a folk tale to scare a little girl. children.
Van den Brink decided to build the story slowly and build an ominous atmosphere that seems to hang over this family and the whole place. Only at the very end will “Moloch” turn into a classic horror, and although it is a variation on the theme of similar legends that has been seen several times, it was not bad at all in the end. As horror connoisseurs probably know, the name Moloch is mentioned as far back as the Old Testament, and it is a deity to whom human sacrifices are made. In a figurative sense, the term Moloch can also be used for something that requires an expensive or large sacrifice, and in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” Moloch was one of Satan’s fallen angels.