Once Upon a Time

I did a podcast a while back discussing Kier-la Janisse's massive folk horror documentary, Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, in which one of the panelists (not me) suggested that the parameters of what constitutes "folk horror" might be too broad to be useful. His suggestion was that all horror is folk horror or none of it is. I've been thinking about this idea lately because there's another big folk horror box set on the horizon and because I remembered something after the podcast that's been preying on my mind. There's a section in Stephen King's Danse Macabre in which the author plays a game with the reader. He asserts that all good horror movies are folk tales of a sort or another and suggests describing the plots of well-known horror movies beginning with the classic opener: "Once upon a time." He offers twenty examples. Here's one: "Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night. Only one of them was alive come All Saint's day." And another: "Once upon a time there were two children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other." One more: "Once upon a time, there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when they came home with her she didn't feel so sad. Except one night, she picked up a man wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman." You get the picture. Thinking about these kinds of framings, I'm inclined to think that all horror is folk horror. It's all folklore and fairy tales. Some movies lean into that idea harder than others. Hard enough that "folk horror" seems like a subgenre when maybe it's not. But then, maybe it is.*

In any event, that big folk horror box looming on the horizon includes two films by Juraj Herz, a director probably best known for The Cremator. The one that caught my eye was the 1978 version of Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor, or "The Monster and the Virgin," as the copy I have translates it). This is a film I've had for a long, long time on a gray market VHS sent to me by a pen pal. It's been sitting unwatched in a drawer for decades. Its appearance on the list of films on the next edition of All the Haunts Be Ours prompted me to see if I still had it and if it was still playable. I did and it was. I was a fool to wait so long. It's good. It's very good.

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Flowers in the Wreckage

My local arthouse runs a series of recent international cinema every fall. They call it "The Passport Series" and the conceit is that they hand out a punch card with your ticket and if you attend at least six of the eight films in the series, they throw your card in a hopper and give you a chance to win passes for the St. Louis Film Festival later in the year. They also theme the series around wine, but I don't imbibe, so that's never something I notice. I do like the idea of a passport, though, as a kind of tally of cinematic destinations (in lieu of actual travel, which I usually can't afford). I often approach this series with the attitude of a collector: Do I have this country yet? I've seen films from an impressive number of countries. In any event, this year's series kicks off with a Georgian film, and I can check that country off the list now.

In Bloom (2013, directed by Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Groß), finds neo-realism alive and well in Georgia. Set in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet empire, this details the coming of age of two teenage girls, Eka and Natia, who are best friends. They live in the wreckage of Tblisi, where they stand in line for bread, are terrorized by autocratic teachers, and where they fend off the aggressions of boys. It would be easy for the filmmakers to use their story as some kind of grand historical gesture, but this is too smart for that. This finds itself following the path of other neo-realists who find in the lives of their characters broad possibilities for melodrama. In Bloom is also a withering critique of patriarchy.

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Rat Race

My friend, Renee, is absolutely mad for obscure horror movies. Every Halloween, she dredges up oddities from around the world to show at her big movie party with the aim of showing things none of the attendees has ever seen before. Given that she's friends with some hard core horror fans, this is no small task. She's been trying to stump me for years, sometimes successfully, but I don't have the same kind of monomania she has. The upside of this is that I get to walk behind her as she blazes a trail through the undergrowth. This year's mathom is Izbavitelj (1976, directed by Krsto Papic) from Yugoslavia. It's one of those strange cometary remnants of the Prague Spring, rippling half a decade later as the Croatian Spring, when Eastern European cinema had joined the raging New Waves of the 1960s and began criticizing the old order of things.

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