WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED is the first feature-length documentary on the history of folk horror, exploring the phenomenon from its beginnings in a trilogy of films – Michael Reeves’ The Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggard’s Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) – through its proliferation on British television in the 1970s and its culturally specific manifestations in American and international horror, to the genre’s revival over the last decade.

While exploring the key cinematic signposts of folk horror – touching on hundreds of films, television plays and episodes as well as early inspirational literature – the film also examines the rise of paganism in the late 1960s, the prominence of the witch-figure in connection with second wave feminism, the ecological movement of the 1970s, the genre’s emphasis on landscape and psychogeography, and American manifestations of folk horror from Mariners’ tales and early colonial history to Southern Gothic viagra cheap fast shipping and backwoods horror. Finally, the film navigates through the muddy politics of folk nostalgia. The term ‘folk horror’ is a loaded one, and WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED explores the many ways that we alternately celebrate, conceal and manipulate our own histories in an attempt to find buy levitra lowest prices spiritual resonance in our surroundings.

The directorial debut of House of Psychotic Women author Kier-La Janisse, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is produced by Janisse with David Gregory and Carl Daft of Severin Films  and due for release in 2020.

Featuring original collage animation by acclaimed filmmaker Guy Maddin, readings by folk horror icons Ian Ogilvy and Linda Hayden and interviews with over 40 filmmakers, writers and historians, including Piers Haggard (director, Blood on Satan’s Claw), Lawrence Gordon Clark (director, A Ghost Story for Christmas series), Jeremy Dyson (co-founder, The League of Gentlemen), Alice Lowe (director, Prevenge), Robert Eggers (director, The Witch), Ian Ogilvy (actor, Witchfinder General), Sean Hogan (director, The Devil’s Business), Adam Scovell (author, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange), Andy Paciorek (founder, Folk Horror Revival), Howard David Ingham (author, We Don’t Go Back: A Watcher’s Guide to Folk Horror), Jonathan Rigby (author, English Gothic: A Century of Horror Cinema), Kat Ellinger (Editor, Diabolique Magazine), Samm Deighan (Editor, Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin), Darren Charles (Unearthing Forgotten Horrors Podcast), Pete Tombs (author, Mondo Macabro), Jasper Sharp (author/filmmaker, The Creeping Garden), Sam Dunn (BFI Flipside), Pentagram Home Video, Vic Pratt and Will Fowler (authors, The Bodies Beneath), John Cussans (author, Undead Uprising: Haiti, Horror and the Zombie Complex), John Cameron (composer, Psychomania), Bobbie Watson (Comus), Sam Waymon (composer, Ganja & Hess), Mark Wilkinson (composer, Blood on Satan’s Claw), Jim Williams (composer, A Field in England), Mitch Horowitz (author, Occult America), Mark Pilkington (founder, Strange Attractor Press), Geraldine Beskin (owner, Atlantis Occult Bookshop), Gail-Nina Anderson (lecturer, The Lit & Phil, Newcastle), Alexandra Heller-Nicholas (author, Rape Revenge Films: A Critical Study), Maisha Wester (Associate Professor, African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University Bloomington), Briony Kidd (founder, Stranger With My Face Film Festival), Chad Crawford Kinkle (director, Jug Face), Katrin Gebbe (director, Pelican Blood), Mariano Baino viagra super active (director, Dark Waters), Emma Tammi (director, The Wind), Teresa Sutherland (writer, The Wind), Abraham Castillo Flores (director of programming, Morbido Film Festival), Mattie Do (director, The Long Walk), Amanda Reyes (Made for TV Mayhem), Jesse Wente (director, Indigenous Screen Office), Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer (directors, Pet Sematary 2019) and more.

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About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).