Folk Horror Festival Part 6 – Dooms From Down Under

It’s time for another episode for my ongoing trawl through All the Haunts Be Ours, Severin’s massive compilation of internationally-sourced folk horror obscurities. The first time around, I touched on Alison’s Birthday, an Australian piece which is a big load of early 1980s cheesy nonsense – entertaining, for sure, but perhaps not in the manner intended. However, the Australians aren’t out of the game yet! There’s no less than three other Australian offerings here, all of them from 1988-1989; will any of them turn out better than Alison’s Birthday did?

Kadaicha

A high school girl dreams of a mysterious Aboriginal figure, who presses a crystal painted with esoteric patterns into her hands – as she realises to her horror that the flesh has been stripped from his face, leaving a gruesome skeletal visage. The next day, she and her friends learn in class about the lore of the Kadaicha stone – a traditional Aboriginal curse, entailing a shaman passing a crystal to the intended victim. Gosh! Could this mysterious stone from out of a dream, in fact, be the mysterious stone of folklore? And could it unleash a fairly generic series of Poltergeist-esque phenomena with occasional Aboriginal aesthetic touches and more appearances from the shaman? If you have seen literally any horror movie, you know the answer to all those questions is “of fucking course”.

This is, shall we say, one of the shakier offerings in the set. Despite being a fairly recent piece – it’s from 1988 – Severin weren’t able to get a nice source than a rather murky-looking 4:3 aspect ratio version intended for TV broadcast, and it looks like that was on VHS. It basically mashes up a Nightmare On Elm Street-esque inciting incident (figure who has been the target of communal violence appears in high schooler’s dream, hijinks ensue) before settling into being a Poltergeist-alike, right down to having the exact same backstory (modern homes get built on indigenous population’s burial ground, hijinks ensue).

Whilst this does at least engage with the Elm Street idea of the crimes of the past being avenged on a new generation, it still entails presenting Aboriginal figures and culture as a source of horror. This can be pulled off with nuance – Clearcut in this very set did it masterfully – but this is just cheesy and simplistic enough to make that unlikely.

The overall effect is a lot like Alison’s Birthday – same general area and time period, same Neighbours-tier acting – with added racial tension and colonial themes. That’s no surprise, because it was written by Ian Coughlan, the writer-director of Alison’s Birthday; in that, he at least avoided doubling down on colonialist racism, and in fact arguably offered a critique of colonialism by having the evil be a cult originating in Europe and coming to Australia to do their evil in peace and quiet Down Under. Here, alas, he grabs the high-voltage power line running through Australian history and goes and gets himself electrocuted.

The film’s poor state of preservation also means that what you get here has very shaky picture quality and a near-constant audio hiss which makes it difficult to follow some of the dialogue. This is the first feature film in the set that I simply couldn’t get into; Alison’s Birthday is at least funny, but this is too shoddily presented for me to derive any amusement value from.

Folk Horror Festival, Part 1: She-Wolves, Spooky Nuns, and Satanic Australians

Late last year Severin Films put out All the Haunts Be Ours, an utterly stuffed to the gills boxed set of folk horror treats, comprising some 19 movies, plus an epic three-hour documentary on the genre, plus a deep bench of short films and other bonuses. Most of the films in it are lesser-known attempts, with some having been almost wholly unavailable until their rerelease here, and I’ve finally gotten around to cracking into it, and I’ll see about reviewing the movies in this article series.

Wilczyca

It is the middle of the 19th Century. As turmoil grips Poland, Kacper (Krzysztof Jasiński) – a small-time boyar and a veteran of the national liberation struggle – returns home to find his wife Maryna (Iwona Bielska) on her deathbed, having sought a botched abortion. Kacper knows full well that the child couldn’t have been his; between comments by his family physician, Dr. Goldberg (Henryk Machalica), and by his brother, Mateusz (Jerzy Prażmowski), it becomes apparent that Maryna was running wild in Kacper’s absence, drinking to excess, cavorting with wild company, and getting involved in honest to goodness black magic, and generally being such a hellraiser that Mateusz insists on sticking a good stout stake through her heart when they bury her.

Disgusted by the whole torn of events, Kacper turns his back on the family estate, leaving Mateusz to manage it whilst he goes to work as the steward of Count Ludwig (Stanisław Brejdygant), an old comrade from the insurrection. Alas, the political winds have started to blow the other way – and the Count must go into exile in Hungary for a while. He leaves his house in Kacper’s care – along with his wife, the Countess Julia (also played by Bielska).

Julia, for her part, is more interested in being “taken care of” by her maid, Heloise (Hanna Stankówna) – and then quickly takes up with Otto (Olgierd Łukaszewicz), a studly Hussar captain she knew before the political troubles and who is in command of the forces who sweep in to occupy the region and use the mansion as their headquarters after the Count departs. Against this backdrop, a series of eerie events begins to convince Kacper that Maryna has returned from the dead somehow – and that she has somehow possessed or otherwise corrupted Julia. As the incidents mount, the stage is set for a terrible confrontation…