Everything you were interested in about folk horror, but had no one to ask, you can find out in this comprehensive, broadband documentary, in which we can really find out practically everything about this subgenre in more than three hours. Of course, “Woodlands Dark” will not be content to everyone’s taste and could also be described as a dedicated documentary, but all those who love horror will definitely not be wrong. The subject of folk horror from Great Britain to America and the rest of the world is covered, and everything starts with three perhaps key films of that genre from the late sixties and early seventies, the “unholy trinity of folk horror” – Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan’s Claw and Wicker Man. Numerous experts from all over the world (among them perhaps the greatest connoisseur of horror from this area, Dejan Ognjanović, whose blog Cultofghoul I recommend to all horror fans) analyze what folk horror means and why people need to learn about this topic.
Culturally, phenomenologically, and historically, this documentary is interesting and important. Director Kierla Jannise has divided the film into several chapters that complement each other nicely and in which many are analyzed more and less
known movies. Everything starts with the search for the roots of folk horror, primarily in film, but also in literature, and what is common, but also different in this genre, which practically exists in all corners of the world. The focus of folk horror is the conflict between past and present, suppressed and overcome paganism, beliefs, myths that were thought to have disappeared, but apparently remained there somewhere in the subconscious.
Fear of modernity and anxiety, which may have been caused by the change in society from the sixties, seventies onwards, led to a kind of escapism and escape from reality being sought in horror, a genre in which authors have the most freedom anyway. Almost two hundred of the most famous titles, mainly from America and Great Britain and the rest of the world, are touched here, and all those who love horror will surely find some classics that they have missed so far. The film also deals with the rise of paganism and various cults during the sixties, which spilled over into the film, how the second wave of feminism influenced the growing popularity of movies about witches, and how the colonial history in America and the bloody history influenced the emergence of folk sub-branches there. horror. This film also navigates through something that could be called repressed nostalgia for the old and the past, for something ancient and dark that was thought to have been forgotten, and partly through the film remained in the collective consciousness.