Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021)

This long documentary (available via Shudder) bears the subtitle A History of Folk Horror but it's more focused on movies and TV than horror literature. It is densely packed with video clips and titles so I'm not about to complain. For one thing, Wikipedia defines "folk horror" as "a subgenre of horror film for cinema or television." For another thing, I came away with another big list of stuff to look at. So fair enough. Director and writer Kier-La Janisse boldly attacks in the first of six sections, naming "the unholy trinity" of folk horror in three movies from the '60s and '70s: Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971), and The Wicker Man (1973). If you know any of them, notably The Wicker Man, you already have a good idea what folk horror is all about: superstitions of rural people and their connections to the mysteries of the earth. Witches are quite a big deal, and folk horror is often embedded in specific places—isolated rural settings, caves and shallow graves, abandoned homes going to ruin, and of course the deep dark woods. The first half of this documentary stays close to the British Isles, arguably the source for all folk horror—certainly this doc is willing to entertain that argument. But eventually it steps across the Atlantic to examine US traditions and contributions and then into the world at large, where folk horror or something like it appears to be everywhere: Greece, Japan, Laos, Mexico, Serbia, and many other points of interest. It also takes a look at a folk horror revival that has been going on in the past 10 years or so, with pictures like Midsommar, The Ritual, and The VVitch. And while it is mostly focused on movies and TV, Woodlands Dark takes time to note such writers as Algernon Blackwood, Shirley Jackson, and M.R. James, which I appreciated. For me, what's most immediately useful and interesting here are the TV movies from the '70s on, which often seem to slip through the cracks and elude me. I'm also excited to look into a number of the foreign titles, as Woodlands Dark lays bare some of my most significant gaps, such as Witchfinder General, which I hope to rectify pronto (I've meant to look at it for a while). This documentary runs over three hours, but it's packed with information and definitely worth a look.