Folk Horror/Eyes of Fire Text

I had read a post on the sub Reddit for Shudder about Eyes of Fire (1983), since Folk Horror is making an absolute resurgence. I hadn't realized the rich history of Folk Horror or even that the films I know and love were a real strong example of the genre, such as "Blood on Satan's Claw", "The Wicker Man", and "City of the Dead". I noticed "Night of the Eagle" mentioned, too. So on Shudder, there is actually a Folk Horror channel. I mentioned in my response (that I removed and just put here) to "Eyes of Fire" that I like to actually run this channel in the background. There is a mammoth documentary that is nothing short of remarkable, in its detail and depth, called Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror, I am watching as I throw this together. I couldn't recommend this more. It's long, but so rewarding.

I looked at what I wrote below about just a sampling of all that Shudder has for horror fans who are curious about or inquisitive about Folk Horror, and there is such a wide variety right now. It is incredible how much Woodlands Dark and Days features for us to absorb. Such a history that runs such a gamut. The horror genre has been quite a canvas, it seems, to paint about the past and all the imagination could include in developing a catalogue, vast and immersive.

I find myself putting on the Folk Horror channel on Shudder and running it as background throughout the night. Eyes of Fire was on late one night, I think. What I seen of it was really nifty. I was watching Clearcut with Graham Green the other day. That one knocked me for a loop. Green is so fucking good in it, scary at times, but also seemingly clear-headed, or at least looks it. But he's so clearly fed the fuck up with white man's law and is willing to prove a point in some really yikes ways like skinning the leg of the man who runs the paper mill cutting down trees of nature, shoot cops with a shotgun, and crush heads with an odd-shaped distorted mallet with a curved handle seeming made out of the wood of his land that does leave food for thought in terms of what someone can pushed to when "the system" seems to work against you no matter how wrong it is. The actor who plays the lawyer who equally hates the paper mill operations manager having to decide "whose side he's on" is also quite good.

I also watched Il Demonio and was throttled by the incredible performance of Dalia Lavi (I know her from my favorite Bava film, "The Whip and the Body") as a mentally ill young woman who has the misfortune of living in the Italian country of people who consider her a witch (the men are horrible to her, including her own father) because she doesn't behave as they consider socially acceptable. Most who have seen it refer to Lavi's "spider walk", but the scene that was damned eerie to me is her conversation with a little boy, quite healthy and happy, at a river (just after a goat farmer forces her hands tied with rope and rapes her among his goats in a very disturbing moment in a film full of them)...it turns out that had died in her town not far from that river.

Now the Tilbury was even too weird for me, haha. But I plan to watch all of Eyes of Fire quite soon. I guess like others I'm all in on folk horror now. I do wonder if others would consider Blair Witch Project as a descendant of the films before it with incoming technology of what would come after and somewhat existed at the time in its primitive form that the found footage genre would later finesse and go further with.