Woodland Dark and Days Bewitched is a 3 hour and change Shudder documentary about folk horror. By which they mean mainly stories of modern people / city folk who venture into the countryside and meet up with ancient lore and/or pagan religion. Think The Wicker Man and Midsommar and you get the idea.

I was expecting something like those 3-4 hour history of horror docs like Shudder also produced. Basically just a recital of a bunch of specific movies with side commentary on specific topics. It shares some DNA with them but ultimately has a different, more historical and contextual approach.

I was getting burned out by the first hour of this documentary which focuses on British folk horror. Mostly (in my mind) pretty obscure films that started to all sound alike covering a really broad, not very nuanced pattern. Their position and argument got repetitive. But I credit them for doing a deep dive or finding the people who lived and remembered all these 1960s and 1970s British horror films.

But hour 2 (he says in an American-centric way) focuses on American folk horror and was, at least to me, far more interesting. Not because I recognized more of the films, but because they explored more avenues of folk horror than the first hour. Puritans in the new world, prairie folk lore, Appalachian, Lovecraft, voodoo and hoodoo, and the black experience in general. It went into more (and more interesting) detail, I feel.

The third hour goes global and is also pretty interesting, though that’s partly because they don’t linger too long on any one region. So we get a discussion on Australian folk horror, Japanese, Argentina, Russian, Finland, and so forth. Probably could have actually used a little more detail on some of those, especially Japanese folk lore, but I appreciated the wider cast net.

So overall I got quite a bit out of this doc though it took take some patience in that first hour. A good exploration on a topic that, ahem, could just as easily be rounded down to “city folk are scared of the rural areas” or “horror is cheap to make, especially when bounding around some backwater” and been done with it.

Score: 85