Severin Films: All the Haunts Be Ours - A Compendium of Folk Horror

[Robert Chipeska]

TRIGGER WARNING: CONTENT

SpoilerShow

Still not sure what the extra 15 bones "shipping" charge was for, as my set came in a regular shipping box with motherfucking packing peanuts instead of "hay" (what is this, a circus-themed collection?) but at least it arrived... finally. Now to offload the Ben Wheatley atrocity and try to make some of that scratch back.

[Robin Davies]

Got my set today (no hay either ), binge-watched "Eyes of Fire" (the theatrical version - saving Crying Blue Sky for later). Needless to say, this presentation of "Eyes of Fire" blew my old Thai DVD out of the water. I loved this film after watching it on the crappy DVD, but this viewing increased my appreciation ten-fold.

SpoilerShow

I preferred the longer version (Crying Blue Sky) partly because it didn't have the embarrassing "Michael Jackson's Thriller" ending that marred Eyes of Fire.

[domino harvey]

Also discussed were failed efforts to include some Brazilian films, hampered both by their archive being closed due to the pandemic, along with the recent fire destroying a number of elements stored there.

That makes sense, given the rather large section of the documentary devoted to Brazilian films. I was wondering where those were in this set!

I must confess it seems to me to be a bad omen that the only films I hadn't seen before mentioned in the massive documentary film that looked interesting were not included in this set: Bedevil and the Polish horror film Demon (and perhaps the most recent iteration of La Llorona). As for the documentary, well... I think there are a lot of problems here, the main ones being that there's no consistency in defining what "Folk Horror" is (though literal at the commentator whose entire contribution is his ability to use LexisNexis to search for the term "folk horror" in newspapers), which really gets sticky when applying the term to other countries' output, and that several of the larger claims made by commentators are rather specious and dubious. I thought the film had one (1) compelling idea, when in the midst of endless talking heads of white people lecturing the viewer about the evils of colonization, one of the interviewees describes the idea of returning to the countryside as a further example of colonization (of the rural by the urban)-- that's an interesting idea. Thank God no one expounded on it! I did enjoy the one cultural commentator who seemed completely disengaged from any sympathetic discussion of horror films with "Indian burial grounds" and whose terse non-reverence of the genre was a welcome respite to the fawning of everyone else (and I liked his addition that on second thought, he likes the idea of white people being scared of "Indian burial grounds," because "Guess what, it's all Indian burial grounds")

I may have missed some since I may not have been able to tell what constitutes a spoiler for films I haven't seen, but these appear to be the only films which have significant narrative spoilers revealed in the documentary, for those waiting to watch it:

the Dark Secret of Harvest Home
the Fool Killer
Ganja and Hess
Whistle and I'll Come to You
the Wicker Man

[brundlefly]

Also discussed were failed efforts to include some Brazilian films, hampered both by their archive being closed due to the pandemic, along with the recent fire destroying a number of elements stored there.

That makes sense, given the rather large section of the documentary devoted to Brazilian films. I was wondering where those were in this set!

I must confess it seems to me to be a bad omen that the only films I hadn't seen before mentioned in the massive documentary film that looked interesting were not included in this set: Bedevil and the Polish horror film Demon (and perhaps the most recent iteration of La Llorona). As for the documentary, well... I think there are a lot of problems here, the main ones being that there's no consistency in defining what "Folk Horror" is (though literal at the commentator whose entire contribution is his ability to use LexisNexis to search for the term "folk horror" in newspapers), which really gets sticky when applying the term to other countries' output, and that several of the larger claims made by commentators are rather specious and dubious. I thought the film had one (1) compelling idea, when in the midst of endless talking heads of white people lecturing the viewer about the evils of colonization, one of the interviewees describes the idea of returning to the countryside as a further example of colonization (of the rural by the urban)-- that's an interesting idea. Thank God no one expounded on it! I did enjoy the one cultural commentator who seemed completely disengaged from any sympathetic discussion of horror films with "Indian burial grounds" and whose terse non-reverence of the genre was a welcome respite to the fawning of everyone else (and I liked his addition that on second thought, he likes the idea of white people being scared of "Indian burial grounds," because "Guess what, it's all Indian burial grounds")

I may have missed some since I may not have been able to tell what constitutes a spoiler for films I haven't seen, but these appear to be the only films which have significant narrative spoilers revealed in the documentary, for those waiting to watch it:

the Dark Secret of Harvest Home
the Fool Killer
Ganja and Hess
Whistle and I'll Come to You
the Wicker Man

Thanks for that list as it's the exact thing I'm wary of before watching these sorts of docs. (Not that Severin's shipped my box yet. Maybe they're holding it until they get another shipment of hay. Supply Chain Problems are folk horror.)

Not surprised there's a wandering definition to the subgenre throughout; caught a Zoom panel discussion with Janisse and several others from some festival and it was very "and that's folk horror and that's folk horror and that's folk horror" -- not necessarily in a bad way, definitely aimed at broadening cultural inclusion, but there weren't many guard rails set around the thing. Severin tweeted this essay a while ago and, though there's already a disc devoted to Canadian indigenous horror, it made me wonder if they'd missed an opportunity to broaden distribution of the recent SGaawaay K'uuna/Edge of the Knife. That film's a little amateurish -- something that doesn't hurt, I don't think, with this stuff -- but homegrown, earnest, and I thought worthwhile. Had to order mine from a First Peoples' gift shop and got a BD-R with a minor glitch; interested parties probably should probably just settle for iTunes.

Saw Wrona's Demon just a couple months ago and, while I'm glad I did, did not find a ton sticking with me. It's obvious without being tidy, which is not the worst mix; it's a good hang and may weirdly make a decent double feature with Shiva Baby. If it's the Bustamante La Llorona, you're considering, I liked a lot about that. But it's done with such a level of polish and calculation that, even if ankle-deep in the legend, I hadn't considered it as folk horror. Maybe wrongly. More about 20th-century history than pre-Christian stuff bubbling up.

[Robin Davies]

I'm glad they didn't waste time on struggling to "define" a genre which is even harder to define than film noir.
The documentary succeeded in pointing me towards several items I would like to check out.

[Robin Davies]

A warning that the interview with Djorge Kadijevic contains major spoilers for the two short films that follow it on the Bonus menu, especially for Devicanska Svirka which is definitely my favourite of his three films on the disc.

[Yakushima]

Continuing my journey through the set, in rather random order.

LOKIS: A MANUSCRIPT OF PROFESSOR WITTEMBACH is exceptionally good, one of best inclusions in the set. It had a certain Borowczykian vibe to it. It is based on a Prosper Mérimée's story by the same name, which I actually had in my library, but somehow have never read. I will definitely read it now. One of the top discoveries from the set!

I started watching WILCZYCA with high expectation, but in the end it seemed rather thin. It is still a decent horror picture, just temper your expectations.

THE DREAMING - a decidedly mediocre effort, which I wish they have not included.

PENDA’S FEN - a major work, very memorable.

[ikms]

Watched the first part of the documentary and enjoyed seeing so many clips from films I know (and don't). I was a bit surprised by the ropey nature of some clips; Onibaba has had a good HD release for ages, and those Ghost Stories For Christmas sequences were likely youtube rips. Given the screen time spent on M.R. James, surely someone at Severin could have coughed up for the BFI DVD set?!? Eyes of Fire had moments that were absolutely sublime, but I have to agree with the commentary that had they secured an actor as compelling as Klaus Kinski, the film could have been absolutely legendary. The Aguirre/Herzog connection becomes even more intriguing: in the interview Avery Crounse remarks Les Blank personally approached him to join in the filming of Burden of Dreams (not sure if that was based on his still photography work - Eyes of Fire was still a year out)! Now David Lynch doesn't like to cite his film influences but this one almost certainly fit the bill. I have found cases where he lifts elements from some out-right, in this case it seems eerie how much of Eyes of Fire seemed to presage the horror of his post-Dune output. In any case Eyes of Fire has dark transcendent sequences that were years ahead of the game.

[Robin Davies]

LOKIS: A MANUSCRIPT OF PROFESSOR WITTEMBACH is exceptionally good, one of best inclusions in the set. It had a certain Borowczykian vibe to it. It is based on a Prosper Mérimée's story by the same name, which I actually had in my library, but somehow have never read. I will definitely read it now. One of the top discoveries from the set!

I watched this yesterday and, given that I'm not a fan of Borowczyk either, I found it pretty boring and the least interesting item in the set so far.

PENDA’S FEN - a major work, very memorable.

Full agreement on PENDA'S FEN. I wish more of Rudkin's work was available on disc, such as ACROSS THE WATER and WHITE LADY. ARTEMIS '81 was released but, sadly, with contractual cuts.
Regarding picture quality, I'm surprised some of the Australian movies (especially KADAICHA) look so much poorer than the other films in the set (thought they are all well watchable).

[GaryC]

Regarding picture quality, I'm surprised some of the Australian movies (especially KADAICHA) look so much poorer than the other films in the set (thought they are all well watchable).

Kadaicha is sourced from a video master, which appears to be all that exists, for a 1986 film shot on 35mm (though it went straight to VHS). If the version in the box is mastered from the same source as Umbrella's DVD edition, there'll be a huge great tape offlock about an hour and a quarter in.

[Mel]

My set finally arrived. I was unpleasantly surprised the subtitles in this set are in big yellow letters. I would've much preferred a smaller font in white. I find the yellow subs to be quite distracting. It's not something I see much on bluray releases. So strange Severin made this decision. The set looks fantastic though. Hopefully I get used to the yellow subs.

[swo17]

Yeah, that's how Severin do subs

[Mel]

Yeah, that's how Severin do subs

The first movie I watched was VIY. Severin also released that title as a stand alone bluray. On that disk the subs are white. I was very aware of the subs during the movie. I checked it with some B&W movies in the set. To my eyes, it's very distracting. These big yellow letters over a B&W movie. It's because I don't really see that anymore. I have some DVDs with yellow subs but I never see it on a bluray. Most boutique labels like Criterion, Arrow and Masters of Cinema use white subs. Hopefully I get used to it.

[swo17]

To be more precise with my original comment, the last discs I watched from three separate Severin releases (which come to think of it were all in B&W) used yellow subtitles

[MichaelB]

When ripping discs for playback on my Oculus Quest 2, I routinely replace the disc’s own graphical subtitles (whose size is fixed against the image, and invariably too big for comfortable viewing) with SRT subs whose size and colour I can control.

And I suspect I’ll be doing the same thing here.

[domino harvey]

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it used but given how widespread it was in the DVD era (a carryover from VHS subtitling, where the yellow was a crucial change from the unreadable non-border white subs that blended into the image in many 80s video releases) I don’t think it’ll phase me much

[Feego]

Yeah, that's how Severin do subs

The first movie I watched was VIY. Severin also released that title as a stand alone bluray. On that disk the subs are white. I was very aware of the subs during the movie. I checked it with some B&W movies in the set. To my eyes, it's very distracting. These big yellow letters over a B&W movie. It's because I don't really see that anymore. I have some DVDs with yellow subs but I never see it on a bluray. Most boutique labels like Criterion, Arrow and Masters of Cinema use white subs. Hopefully I get used to it.

I don't care much for yellow subs either. One thing you could do to get around it for the remaining B&W films is simply remove the color on your TV/monitor, thus making the subs white. It's a nuisance, sure, but that's probably what I'll do when I get around to this set.

[swo17]

You can only use it on external files, but the subtitle control on the Oppo UDP-203 is the best imaginable--lots of different options to select the color, outline color, size, position, and even adjust the sync. If you can find external subtitles for any of these Severin discs (or rip them from the disc yourself), you can save them on a flash drive, rename them as 'sub.srt' within a folder called 'sub' and then access them from the subtitle menu while you watch the disc. (I understand that most if not all earlier Oppo models have at least some of this capability as well)

[MichaelB]

This won’t apply to these films, but apparently a peculiarity of the Oppo is that you can replace subtitles, but you can’t add them to a disc that doesn’t already have some.

[swo17]

Correct

[zedz]

As for the documentary, well... I think there are a lot of problems here, the main ones being that there's no consistency in defining what "Folk Horror" is (though literal at the commentator whose entire contribution is his ability to use LexisNexis to search for the term "folk horror" in newspapers), which really gets sticky when applying the term to other countries' output, and that several of the larger claims made by commentators are rather specious and dubious. I thought the film had one (1) compelling idea, when in the midst of endless talking heads of white people lecturing the viewer about the evils of colonization, one of the interviewees describes the idea of returning to the countryside as a further example of colonization (of the rural by the urban)-- that's an interesting idea. Thank God no one expounded on it! I did enjoy the one cultural commentator who seemed completely disengaged from any sympathetic discussion of horror films with "Indian burial grounds" and whose terse non-reverence of the genre was a welcome respite to the fawning of everyone else (and I liked his addition that on second thought, he likes the idea of white people being scared of "Indian burial grounds," because "Guess what, it's all Indian burial grounds")

I agree with your criticism. I think the idea of Folk Horror is reasonably consistent in the documentary when it's dealing with British films. 'Folk horror' being, as I understand it, basically horror that is based on indigenous folk traditions. It also helps that the UK had a fairly consistent batch of film and television in the late 60s / early 70s that was exactly that, and attained a level of ongoing popularity that generated a tradition of work in the same vein up to the present day. It's a proper subgenre.

But this immediately gets muddled as soon as the conversation migrates to North America, and the indigenous folklore is othered, co-opted and inauthentic (all those "Indian burial grounds" which are little more than a handwaved McGuffin to alibi generic weird shit). And worse, they also stretch the definition of the sub-genre to include anything that looks vaguely like British Folk Horror (i.e. there's a witch or a pagan cult in it). Then they stretch it even further (let's include Christian weirdos too! And anything where somebody drives out into the country! Or digs something up!) until it's all loosey goosey and incoherent. And once they've crammed a couple of buffalo into that generic leotard, it doesn't just snap back into shape once they move on to other countries, so the Australian section is just as incoherently defined. Which is a pity, because there are other national horror cinemas that could have benefitted from a more focused examination based on core principles. Japan, for instance, is a nation where a lot of its horror cinema (maybe the majority of it) before the 1990s is derived from traditional folklore, so it would have been interesting to explore how the more internationalist horror films of recent decades relate to that tradition. For instance, the way in which much modern Japanese horror (e.g. The Ring) constructs its own modern folklore that emulates traditional forms.

That aside, I'm enjoying the set so far, with even the lousy films being lousy in an unusual way.

[mteller]

My set finally arrived. I was unpleasantly surprised the subtitles in this set are in big yellow letters. I would've much preferred a smaller font in white. I find the yellow subs to be quite distracting. It's not something I see much on bluray releases. So strange Severin made this decision. The set looks fantastic though. Hopefully I get used to the yellow subs.

What's even worse is how much the subs are riddled with errors. Even on (especially on) the English-language films they're hilariously mistranscribed. As I recall in one place "spot of ale" is subbed as "spot the male". There's no way a human looked at these and approved them.

[ianthemovie]

I’m in the midst of working my way through Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which I’m mostly enjoying—though I share some of the qualms that have been expressed by others here and elsewhere. But I’ve found that some of the films I hoped would be discussed in depth are only given a few seconds of screen time. I’ve found many of the online lists of films discussed (on Letterboxd, IMDb, etc.) to be largely unhelpful in actually giving a sense of which ones this documentary are actually about. In some cases the lists are inaccurate or comprehensive to the point of being meaningless.

To that end, I’ve been compiling a kind of “table of contents” for the film, which includes only titles of those films which are given at least 2 minutes or so of screen time, and/or are actually discussed by the commentators. I hope that this may be helpful to others
(since this is what I wish I had been able to consult before I decided to watch the movie).

Introduction to “folk horror” cinema (5 mins)

I: THE UNHOLY TRINITY (14 mins) – Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man

II: WHO IS THIS WHO IS COMING: SIGNPOSTS OF BRITISH FOLK HORROR (40 mins) – Adaptations of the stories of M.R. James (“Whistle and I’ll Come To You,” The Stalls of Barchester) – Blood on Satan’s Claw continued – The English countryside (I Start Counting, Requiem for a Village, Psychomania) – The work of Nigel Kneale (The Stone Tape, the Quatermass films) – Stonehenge and stone circles (Stigma, Rawhead Rex) – The work of David Rudkin (Penda’s Fen, The Living Grave) – Robin Redbreast – 1970s children’s television programs (Bagpuss, The Owl Service) – The 1980s: The Company of Wolves and Lair of the White Worm – A Field in England – Murrain

III: WE DON’T GO BACK: PAGANISM AND WITCHCRAFT (13 mins) – 1960s and 1970s occultism – The Wicker Man continued – Robert Eggers’ The Witch and Puritan America – Night of the Eagle (Burn, Witch, Burn) – Women and the occult

IV: CALL ME FROM THE VALLEY: AMERICAN FOLK HORROR (46 mins) – Colonial America and the Puritans continued (with footage from Eyes of Fire) – Native Americans and “Indian burial ground” horror narratives – New England (The Devil and Daniel Webster/All That Money Can Buy) – H. P. Lovecraft – Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” – The Dark Secret of Harvest Home – Cults and rural religious sects (Midsommar, The Children of the Corn) – The rural Midwest, Appalachia, and Southwest (The Wind [2018], The Fool Killer, Deliverance, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) – Southern Gothic, voodoo, and Black horror (The Skeleton Key, The Believers, Candyman, Ganja and Hess)

V: ALL THE HAUNTS BE OURS: FOLK HORROR AROUND THE WORLD (55 mins) Australian horror and colonialism (Lake Mungo, Bedevil, Kadaicha, The Dreaming) – Jewish dybbuks and Demon – Films about “La Llorona” – Japan: Shikoku and Noroi – Australia continued: Alison’s Birthday, Celia, the “Wild Colonial Boys” myth, and Wake In Fright – Afro-Brazilian religions (As Filhas do Fogo) – Nazi occultism – Archeological horror (The Aztec Mummy, El Signo de la Muerte) – Italy: The Demon (1963), Don’t Torture a Duckling, Dark Waters – Russian and Eastern European occultism and paganism: Viy, Witchhammer, Savage Hunt of King Stakh – Japanese folk culture (Kakashi) – Folk legends and folk tales (Tilbury, The Juniper Tree) – Legends of the undead (Night of the Devils, Lepterica) – Female shape-shifters, Japanese ghost cats, The White Reindeer, and Nang Nak

VI: In progress

[therewillbeblus]

Dark Waters is an absolutely bonkers and messily nebulous approach to engage with the occult, and it's a perfect choice for aligning us with a character who would similarly be in a hypervigilant state of confusion, and constant shock at being presented with stimuli that make zero sense within her comprehension of corporeal possibilities. While not quite a nonstop trek into insanity, the film plays kind-of like if the last ten minutes of The House of the Devil were stretched across an entire narrative feature, with the same kind of whiplash from withheld information and unprompted activity present throughout. I admired that restraint, as frustrating as it is and was to be a viewer not cued into all the wacky -yet sincere in its urgently debilitating threats- horrors' derivation and progression. We are not welcomed into this world, or we are but with the same high stakes of irremediable instability as Louise Salter. Wild stuff.

Also, apparently Baino didn't make another movie, until... now?!