The Lure is a 2015 Polish horror-musical directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska. It's a modernized retelling of The Little Mermaid -- the original Hans Christian Andersen version, not the Disneyfied one.
I saved this one for last on our list because I was most excited for it, and it did not disappoint.
The movie is about two sisters, Golden and Silver, who encounter a rock band playing on a beach. They try to lure the band out to get eaten for a bit, but end up instead coming ashore to join them. They get recruited to be a new act at the night club, with the band's backing.
But the sisters are not on the same page. Golden still hungers for human flesh and hunts when she has the opportunity. Silver wants to assimilate because she's fallen in love with the bassist. Things proceed to get ugly.
This movie is weird. In a good way. I do suspect that some stuff gets lost in translation with the songs; I bet it's more enjoyable in Polish. But I still really loved it. It's grimy and textured and charged with sexual energy and everybody is exploiting everybody else in different ways. And it's a story about siblings, which I'm always a sucker for.
This week's double feature has a bit of a monstrous motherhood theme.
You Are Not My Mother (2021) is an Irish psychological horror written and directed by Kate Dolan. It's a changeling story, although there are some teasing hints of a pucca lingering about as well.
It's about a teenager trying to navigate the shittiness of being bullied at school while her mom has a mental breakdown and her grandma is convinced that aforementioned mother is in fact a changeling who needs to be dealt with in The Old Way. Teenage Char isn't so sure about that one, but she DOES know that her mom went missing for several days during a depressive episode and has come back with a wholly new and deeply disturbing personality. She also discovers that there are some disturbing family secrets that put a whole lot of things into context.
This is one of those movies that can spark a vibrant discussion of ableism in horror. And I think that's appropriate, tbh, because it's impossible to tell a Changeling story without butting into that. A lot of modern adaptations take a firm stance that changelings aren't real, thus all of the things done to supposed changelings (like burning them to make them reveal themselves) are cruel and barbaric. And from a historical perspective, I think that is correct. But in a setting where changelings are real, could it be that those monstrous actions are justified? Well, maybe, maybe not. This film asks that question and doesn't, I think, take a firm stance one way or the other. Instead, this movie agrees that, yeah, being the child of someone with severe mental illness does sometimes really suck, and sometimes nobody can really do anything about it, but sometimes people who are compassionate step up to help the best they can anyway.
It's messy. I would have liked it less if it weren't.
Also, I think this was Dolan's feature debut, and it's a damn fine first movie.
Other films with similar vibes:
Pyewacket
The Babadook
Relic
They Look Like People
Goodnight Mommy
In My Mother's Skin (2023) is a folk horror co-productionof the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan, written and directed by Kenneth Dagatan. It's set during WWII during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, about a wealthy family who has been accused of stealing Japanese gold. When the dad goes to plead help from the Americans, he leaves behind a sick wife and a couple young kids, and the wife's condition rapidly deteriorates.
The responsibility for caring for the household falls to young daughter Tala, who -- while looking for food for her family -- encounters a colorful-but-malevolent insect-like faerie queen in the woods. She enters a bargain with the faerie to save her mother's life, and everything rapidly goes to shit when her mother starts to transform into...uh...something else.
I don't know enough about Filipino mythology to know whether this is referencing any folktales or fairy figures in particular, or if the glittering insect queen is just a stand-in for all of the ways a kid can be fucked over by the horrors of war.
This movie is also quite good, but it is unrelentingly bleak and kind of overstays its welcome by repeatedly hammering home the awfulness of Tala's circumstance. Like, damn, dude, I get it. War is hell and it's the innocents who suffer. At least in other movies where supernatural stuff happens during war, the fairies offer their own sort of reprieve from the horrors outside. But our insect queen is not so merciful. It's just an hour and a half of being poured from one frying pan into a series of increasingly hot fires.
But then again....right now...we could probably stand to remember the horrors of war and the suffering of innocents. Maybe it's worth remembering that there are no silver linings when children are being bayoneted by occupying fascists.
A pair of Irish fae horror films this week, both with a surprising bit of a "stranger danger" theme.
Unwelcome (2023), directed by Jon Wright, is about a young London couple who experience a violent home invasion shortly after learning they're expecting a baby. The pregnancy is fine, but they take the first opportunity they can to get out of the city -- moving out to the Irish country home of a recently deceased elder relative.
The only thing is this house comes with an extra bonus, or curse, depending how you look at it. There's a little gate at the rear of the property where you must make a blood offering (a bit of raw meat or whatnot) to the redcaps.
Going into this, I expected it to be similar to There's Something in the Barn in terms of "family fails to follow the simple rules and gets punished for it." Instead, we get something more interesting -- because the primary conflict in here is actually with some rowdy locals, and the redcaps themselves prove to be effective, if crude, allies. Just...be careful what you promise to the fae, because they'll come to collect.
Overall I really liked this one. The husband character goes through some bouts of being insufferable and moody because he's feeling emasculated by the plot in several places and his thoroughly capable bride has to do everything around here. But I actually felt sorry for him more than anything, and they overall have a pretty sweet relationship. I think I brought more subtext to the characters and the storyline in my own interpretations than the text actually supports but hey.
Also the redcaps are stupidly cute. I want one!
Meanwhile, The Hallow (2015), written and directed by Corin Hardy, was...uh. hm.
It's about a British conservationist who finds a sample of a mysterious black fungal mold slime...thing...in a forest that is in the process of being sold and privatized for lumber. Weird things start happening pretty much as soon as they move in and his wife unwisely takes the iron bars off the windows. Local cops warn them about meddling in the woods and stirring up the little folk.
Eventually, the scientist is attacked by some mystery creatures, and the rest of the film is basically a....cordyceps zombie + faerie hybrid survival....thing?
I was really not clear about several things in the plot of this movie, and reading the Wikipedia summary for this review isn't helping. I have so many questions. Beginning with, why does this scientist take his baby with him tromping around in the woods collecting fungal spores? Why are the locals more mad about him doing conservation work than about the logging company clear-cutting the forest? Is destroying the forest Good, Actually because now nobody can be killed by zombie faeries? What was the whole deal with that, anyway? There's a thing with a book that tries to give some exposition but I just...didn't get it. I also really struggled to connect with the characters and literally could not see a big chunk of the film because it's so darkly lit so.....maybe I just missed the cool stuff. idk. Other people seem to have enjoyed this film but it was not for me.
This week's double-header features a Scandinavian folklore creature, huldra (or hulder, for a collective of them, I think?) -- generally described as a seductive forest spirit or guardian, a beautiful woman with an animal tail and/or a spine like a hollow tree stump. I've read that they can be friend or foe to people who venture into the woods, and a common thread seems to be that they can seduce and manipulate men into doing all kinds of things.
I'm not personally familiar with the myths, so I'm not sure which things I've read on the internet are historically accurate. Maybe one of you lovely followers can fill me in?
Anyway, the films this week were Thale (2012) and Huldra: Lady of the Forest (2016). They are, to my knowledge, the only two movies about hulder. They also could not be more different from each other, beginning with the fact that one of them is quite good and the other is a steaming pile of hot garbage that had me screaming at the television.
First, the good one. Thale is a Norwegian film written and directed by Aleksander L. Nordaas. It's about two guys, Elvis and Leo, who work as crime scene clean-up guys. While cleaning up the very messy remains of an old man ("wild animals" got at him, tearing him to pieces and scattering him around the property) they find his hidden basement, where he had seemingly imprisoned a young woman.
The girl, naked and mute and somewhat inhuman, turns out to actually be very inhuman in the sense that she's not a person at all but a hulder who had been taken into captivity and experimented on. The old man in the cottage had worked at the laboratory, smuggled her out, and raised her here as a father figure, but continued to experiment on her. We figure out some backstory courtesy of some convenient fae-creature telepathy, and the story builds from there because the girl (the eponymous Thale) has family still in the forest, and also the military is looking for her.
I won't spoil anything further. It's a very simple story, one that leaves a lot of questions unanswered. But I don't mind that ambiguity. In form, it reminds me quite a bit of an episode of Trevor Henderson's podcast, The Mayfair Watcher's Society: Two normal blokes stumble into an uncanny situation, see some crazy shit, and get on with their lives without explanation or context. If you like that type of storytelling (and I do), this is worth the watch.
The entire movie was filmed on a budget of $10,000, with Nordaas acting as writer, director, editor, set designer, and so forth. Most of the film was shot in his dad's basement.
And honestly? Mad props. I have nothing but respect for a micro-budget film that understands its limitations and leans into them. The creature effects are excellent. Like, the CGI is a little rough, but the design itself is A+ and it delivered a proper scare at one point.
The greatest strength of the film imo is the on-screen chemistry between the two leads. We don't really know what the relationship between Elvis and Leo is, whether they're friends or brothers or what, but they manage to communicate a great deal without saying a word, and it's easy to believe they've known each other a very long time. They're drift compatible, in other words, and they have very different personalities (Leo is utterly unflappable, Elvis can't get through a job without puking several times) that make it fun to watch them grapple with being in over their heads. Props to Erlend Nervold and Jon Sigve Skard. And props too to Silje Reinåmo, who has to spend most of the movie naked and do most of her acting with her eyes. Good stuff all around.
Which leads us....sigh....
Huldra: Lady of the Forest is a Swedish film directed by Ove Valeskog, with writing credit to Valeskog, Eddie Boschek, and Björn Boström. I believe it is Valeskog's first feature film, and I don't know what the budget on it was for sure but IMDB estimates it at $75,000. It certainly looks and feels much cheaper than Thale, probably because of the terrible script.
Okay. Ugh. Basically: A lady boxer is invited out on a camping trip with a bunch of guys she went to school with, and they all go party in the woods and engage in various...activities?...at some kind of former hippie commune turned hunting resort attraction camp....thing? The hippie who runs the place has a "daughter" who they spy bathing naked in a lake and who (spoiler?) is a huldra.
I guess (???) the main point is that the hippie guy lures people out to his commune to sacrifice them (???) to the huldra, who also apparently has the ability to make people go crazy and turn on each other, which is seemingly how the hippie guy got here in the first place. The story keeps cutting between the present-day group and the original hippie group, and we see both of them becoming paranoid and turning on each other until only one dude is left standing to take care of the huldra?
It's convoluted. And, frustratingly, there are the bones of a really good story in it. I actually really like the idea of a forest creature who uses her faerie wiles to psychologically fuck with a group of tourists and make them turn on each other. It's like Evil Dead with a faerie and I'm here for it!
Unfortunately, the movie is two hours long and agonizingly boring to get through. It's paced like a slow-burn psychological thriller, except none of the characters are actually fleshed out or given any depth at all. You're forced to watch scene after agonizing scene of rambling, pointless naturalistic dialogue as a bunch of annoying frat guys get drunk, argue, act misogynistic, and make small talk, without any clear idea of why anyone is doing anything. Also most of the film's dialogue is in English (owing I guess to their multinational friend group) but it seems like English is not the primary language of any of the actors so all of the line delivery is also kind of weird? Like inflections are in odd places, stiff tone, just....everything is weird, man. And most of the violence is off-screen and there are no cool creature effects so we don't even get the pleasure of seeing these people eviscerated for our trouble :(
I could have put up with all of this, maybe. I could have dealt with the frankly nonsensical storytelling (which was SO CLOSE to being good but then shit the bed), the bad acting, the wobbly erratic camera that bounces around for no reason, the poor editing....all of it. I could have shrugged it off as a "meh." Until the end of the movie.
At the outset, we see our heroine playing with her baby niece, and her sister telling her that having babies is great, actually, and that she needs to get laid, and maybe if she acted more feminine people would stop assuming she was a lesbian. and we think, ok, fine, sister is kind of annoying but whatever.
So then the heroine goes into the woods with all these dudes and tries to rekindle with a childhood crush. They have sex, then he pushes her away because he's married, and then gets all up in his feelings about it and it's stupid but ANYWAY....he dies, and then later she nearly drowns, but she has a vision of his stupid dead face telling her she HAS TO LIVE because there is a BABY INSIDE HER and this gives her the strength!!! to survive!!!! and then there's a flash forward a couple years later and we see her baby running around on the beach with his cousin and her boxing coach tells her, "You finally have achieved real balance! but why did you quit boxing?" and she's like "I don't need it anymore because MY LIFE IS COMPLETE with the power of LOVE! I love being a mommy soooooo much" I'm not even exaggerating this is almost exactly how the scene plays out and oh my god it is so stupid and cheesy and terrible.
You are allowed to be a shitty movie, and you are allowed to be surprise twist birther propaganda, but you don't get to be both.
Ew, ew, ew.
Anyway. Ugh. I don't know where or how this film ended up on my list -- it doesn't have much footprint online, there's only one review on the IMDB page and no Wikipedia, there's no Rotten Tomatoes score, only two reviews on Amazon. So maybe it's mean to hate this much on a tiny obscure random movie. But dear god. If you have two spare hours and a Tubi account, spend that precious time on something else because this movie is a big stinker.
Our fae horror film series continues! This pairing was loosely coupled as "period pieces," which was one of the only things they had in common.
Errementari: The Blacksmith & The Devil is a 2017 film written and directed by Paul Urkijo Alijo. It's produced in the Basque language and based on a Basque folktale, which already makes it super interesting.
Basque, for the uninitiated, is a distinct cultural and ethnic group of people living at the border of France and Spain in the remote area of the Pyrenees (the mountains, not the dog), whose historic seclusion and cultural isolation meant their language developed completely independently. Apparently Basque has really nothing linguistically in common with any other language. Neat!
Anyhoo, the plot here is pretty simple: It's the year 1835 and a blacksmith who sold his soul to the devil to return home from war, only to come home to find his wife cheating on him and his life in shambles. Now he lives alone and everyone tells rumors about him being a real scary dude, supported by the quantity of barbed wire and bear traps around his home. But things are not what they seem, and it's all blown wide open when a mistreated orphan girl from the town crosses his path.
I don't want to spoil anything about the plot because I think this movie is delightful and I want you all to go watch it. Aside from how cool it is as a cultural and linguistic artifact of a culture we don't get to see much of here in America, it's a well-made film with excellent practical effects and a solid story.
Also mad props to the little girl in this, played by Spanish actress Uma Bracaglia. She kills it in the role, bringing pathos, vulnerability, and feistiness to it. I was solidly in her camp the whole time.
Movies with similar vibes:
Pan's Labyrinth
Apostle
Tale of Tales
Draug (2018) is a Swedish film written and directed by Klas Persson. It's set in the 11th Century, at the end of the Viking age, and is centered on a rescue party who venture into a rural pocket of pagan worship in search of a missing missionary. There they encounter a witch and some restless undead spirit creature ice zombie fellows called draugr. They're known for guarding burial mounds and killing those who try to grave-rob them.
I didn't enjoy this one as much. It was a bit of a slog and honestly pretty forgettable. There are some wonderful spooky visuals and the vibes are good, but I kind of lost the thread with the plot and checked out mentally somewhere along the way. We're having rough luck with Swedish filmmaking over here.
Up this week in our #Fae Horrors watch is a duo of films loosely connected by the theme, "fucking Christians I stg."
Both are folk horrors about awakening things that had been slumbering. But tonally and stylistically, they could, ah, not be much different.
Rawhead Rex (1986) was directed by George Pavlou, from a screenplay written by Clive Barker (and adapted from a Barker story of the same title). It's about an American historian/author who is interested in the way Christian churches occupy sacred sites belonging to older religious traditions. Conveniently, while he's visiting one little town in Ireland, a farmer has just awoken some kind of ancient deity/monster who goes on a killing rampage and can, ultimately, only be stopped with....a fertility statue?
Man, the plot on this thing is simultaneously threadbare and convoluted. It feels like it's missing some key exposition, because the main character makes a few leaps of logic that feel unsupported by the text. I'm normally on camp "Explain nothing! Just let the monster exist!" but in this case I really wanted to know what this Rawhead Rex dude's whole deal was.
Why does touching the altar in the church cause some people to become brainwashed acolytes of Rawhead, when the altar itself contains the fertility statue (?!) that destroys him? What is the significance of Rawhead decapitating his victims? Why does he avoid killing a pregnant woman but doesn't mind killing a child?
The creature design in this movie is also unfortunately, unintentionally hilarious. The monster looks like...well. he looks like this.
The 80s hair. The goofy gorilla face. The sparkly red googly eyes. the inexplicable bare chest and washboard abs. The punk rock jacket. Amazing. Absurd. Supremely dumb.
Far and away the most entertaining part of this film is the intense homoeroticism between the monster and a corrupt priest, Declan O'Brian, who plays the entire role with a kind of panting over-the-top horniness. He gets "baptized" by way of golden shower in a graveyard, and it just gets more overtly sexual from there. By the time he ultimately meets his demise (the monster picks him up around the waist and pins him against a wall with his hips while, uh, biting his
I haven't read the story it's based on, but I suspect it's better. There are some interesting things to say here about masculinity vs femininity, colonialism vs indigeneity, christianity vs paganism. Unfortunately, all of that is flattened into a mockery of itself in this film's execution. The sexual politics are especially eyeroll-inducing to modern audiences -- in attempting to make a feminist statement about womanhood, it kind of feels like it's making an argument for compulsory heteronormativity instead.
I did however have an excellent time watching it. I laughed so hard I cried, more than once. So hey.
Other films with similar vibes:
Pumpkinhead
The Wickerman
Nightbreed
Meanwhile, Troll (2022), directed by Roar Uthaug, is essentially a Norwegian kaiju movie. A mountain troll is awakened when a construction team excavates the mountain with dynamite. Nobody realizes that's what's happening at first, so the government assembles a team of experts, including a paleontologist who has been estranged from her dad for a while due to his dad's crazy conspiracy ramblings about mythological creatures. But hey, surprise! All the myths are true! Or at least, partly true.
Anyway, the government tries to kill the troll in a bunch of different ways, we find out that the government actually did know all along that trolls were real and are now extinct, and were driven to extinction by Christianity, and at some point we lure it to its death by loading an infant troll skull into the back of a truck and driving it away from the city.
I was solidly on #TeamTroll for this entire film and kept yelling at the TV to leave the poor thing alone. It's a good movie to watch if you want to get angry at Christian imperialism, but also we have the news for that. It's competently made, the effects are great, the creature design is beautiful, but I also struggled to stay engaged with the movie and its emotional beats kept kind of missing for me. But YMMV. I may have enjoyed this more if I weren't suffering tonal whiplash from watching Rawhead Rex first.
The loose theme this week was "stuff in the woods, and kids not being taken seriously." We're in North America for a change this time around, with a pair of films I quite liked!
Pyewacket (2017) is a Canadian horror-thriller written and directed by Adam MacDonald. It's about a gothy-witchy teenager, Leah, who's having a tough time with her mom after her dad's death. Her mom is an erratic mess whose grief has made her selfish and resentful, and she's making Leah's life hell as a result. When she decides (without consulting her kid) to uproot their lives and move into a remote cabin in the woods for a fresh start, Leah retaliates by performing a ritual to make her mom go away.
It works, in the worst way imaginable.
This was really good. It's a slow burn and there are some places I think could have been explained better, but the characters feel real and relatable. Fair warning when you watch this that if you have problems with your own mom or emotional abuse that this could be a rough watch.
In terms of fae creatures, this one is more of a demon summoning, although it's kind of vague what exactly is being summoned and what the rules are. As with Errimentari the week prior, I'm including "demons" in the fae bucket as long as they can be bargained with, because I think demonic pacts and fae bargains are essentially the same thing from an anthropological and folklore perspective. See my latest Patreon post for details.
Films with similar vibes:
The Craft
Goodnight Mommy
Next up is The Wretched, 2019, written and directed by The Pierce Brothers. I'd seen this one floating around but avoided it out of fear it would be yet another "wendigo" story, but I am happy to report that for once we have white filmmakers using the imagery of Creepy Deer Thing In The Forest in a non-appropriative and actually imaginative manner! Do wonders never cease!
Story here has a cool framing device - it's primarily through the POV of a teenager spending the summer with his dad, but most of the action is next door where a family has unwittingly invited Something inside. The creature is a body-stealing, memory-modifying hag that likes to eat children, and our intrepid teenage hero might be the only one who sees what's happening.
This movie is great, through and through. The writing is tight and clean and the story fits together neatly, and I really enjoyed the characters, particularly the pathologically responsible lead. I ALSO respect a child endangerment film that isn't scared to straight up murder kids once in a while. Highly recommended.
Films with similar vibes:
Sinister
Bagman (but don't watch this, watch The Wretched instead)
This week brought us a very uneven pair of films, both centered on a mother-child relationship but with extremely different approaches.
The Haunting of Helena is a 2012 Italian film also known as Fairytale. It was written and directed by Christian Bisceglia. He's only got a couple other films listed on his Wikipedia page and I'm unfamiliar with them, so I don't know about his work in general, but this one feels...pretty rough.
Broadly speaking, this movie is about a tooth fairy who is actually a vengeful ghost of a woman scorned except there's a twist ending that goes in a different direction. A lady and her kid move into a new apartment during a divorce/separation period and weird spooky stuff starts happening immediately, the kid is fixated on a tooth fairy person, then they have an encounter with the fairy and....the kid ends up institutionalized for 18 months for some reason that is not wholly explained???
Honestly trying to further summarize this summary is a waste of time. There are holes in the plot big enough to drive a truck through. There are some cool effects, but the acting is somehow simultaneously melodramatic and wooden. Do yourself a favor and skip this one.
Other movies with similar vibes:
Darkness Falls
The Tooth Fairy
Mama
The Hole in the Ground is a 2019 Irish horror film directed by Lee Cronin and co-written by Cronin and Stephen Shields. It's another changeling story, which I am almost burnt out on at this point, but it's redeemed here by some stellar performances, especially from child actor James Quinn Markey who acts the shit out of his role.
The basic pitch: a kid and his mom move to a new place after some ambiguous marital troubles. They find out about an old lady here who reportedly went kinda nuts after becoming convinced her son was not her son (and he subsequently died in an accident). There's a great big hole in the forest and one day after going too close to it the son comes back acting....weird. In subtle ways that only a mother would notice. Is she off her rocker? Is she going to hugely regret taking action? Or is she gonna do what she has to in order to get her kid back?
Anyway, like I said, we're several changeling movies deep into this series already so all of the beats here were familiar. But the execution is quite good and if you're only going to watch one changeling movie, this wouldn't be a bad choice.
