‘I was angry at the programmer for getting me in there to see the movie without warning me.’

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Interview – Kier-La Janisse on Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk-Horror

I first met Kier-La Janisse in the early 2000s when I interviewed her for the Vancouver Courier (RIP). At the time, she was working at the Cambie outlet of Black Dog Video and beginning to program a horror-film series, Cinemuerte, in Vancouver. More than the movies themselves, I enjoyed Janisse’s descriptions of them; I still have those old programs.

Since then, Janisse has made a name for herself programming all over the world, from Austin to Australia. She’s back living in B.C., at least temporarily. Now though she has something of her own to promote: a three-hour documentary, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. The 2021 Vancouver International Film Festival is streaming the film and screening it at the Rio Theatre Oct. 8.

I recently interviewed the film historian/filmmaker for the Vancouver Sun. Here are the out-takes from that interview, including her love of A Field in England, the scariest movie she’s ever seen that she probably wouldn’t watch a second time, and the NIcolas Cage remake of the classic horror film The Wicker Man. Well, just a mention of the latter, to be honest.

The never-ending documentary

Q: Did you do a lot of travelling for the interviews?

A: They were all done by local camera crews. I would write the questions, and sometimes Skype in live as they were doing it, but the camera people and interviewee were there together while I was back in L.A.

Q: So you were putting it together long-distance, and putting it together as the footage came in?

A: We were putting it together long-distance, and especially when COVID started, then we definitely weren’t going to be able to go anywhere doing interviews in person. We were putting it together as footage came in but in chunks.

I did my first six interviews and I thought was complete, I thought I was done. We started editing it and I realized I needed more. Once the second batch of interviews came in I thought, Okay, this is it. Then we would start editing.

Every time we started editing it was because we thought we were done, that we had all the material we were going to need. But as we were editing, and sometimes when we were interviewing people, it would become apparent that there were certain things we hadn’t touched on yet. These were important and we were going to need somebody to talk about them.

The timeline shifted many times. We thought it was going to be done in November 2018, then we thought it was going to be done in November 2019. It kept going longer.

City mouse, country pagan

Q: What are some of the commonalities in folk horror from different countries?

A: There was a preconceived notion I had going in, which was very Anglo-centric, of it being very much about these isolated small towns. Pagan customs still flourish, and there’s a protagonist who comes from outside, from the city, and who’s educated. Somehow he ends up in one of these small towns and finds himself in the middle of some kind of pagan ritual. There’s a lot of fear of the survival of these old beliefs. Any American folk horror that deals with early colonies will tend to import that flavour of folk horror.

In another type, which you’ll find in Eastern Europe and Asia, the horror is something that everybody in the village knows about. They believe in these things, and there’s some kind of folkloric demon or creature or entity or force that their old beliefs protect them against.

In the UK and America and Australia, these places that were colonizing nations, the horror tends to be those people who believe in that stuff. It’s not the monsters they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of the people who still believe in the monsters.

Folk-horror: the next generation

Q: One of the films featured is A Field in England (2013), which you’ve said is one of your favourites. Why do you like it so much? Did you have that reaction when you first saw it?

A: I definitely had that reaction when I first saw it. I saw it on the big screen at Fantastic Fest. I love psychedelic cinema in general. I loved that it was a folk-horror movie, that the characters are alpha men, they’re eating mushrooms so you have all of these psychedelic visual effects.

They [inc. director Ben Wheatley; Amy Jump wrote the script] shot a lot of it with toy cameras. They were using a lot of interesting, almost amateur technology to make it. And it’s very funny. Just everything about it. I just loved it. I pilfered that movie quite a bit for my own movie. Not just in terms of using clips, but I also got the composer, Jim Williams, to do the score. Not only did he compose 70 new movie cues but he also allowed us to use music from A Field in England.

Q: And Midsommar [2019], which might be a more familiar folk-horror movie for people? Where does that fit in?

A: It’s obviously important. Even though The Witch [Robert Eggers 2015 indie hit] predates it, I would say that Midsommar was really the film that kicked off a frenzy for folk-horror in North America. It’s very indebted to The Wicker Man [1973]. Anybody who sees Midsommar and wants to see more folk-horror, the first place they’re directed is The Wicker Man. It’s a pretty direct influence.

Florence Pugh in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. The 2019 film is an example of a modern, even post-modern, take on the folk-horror genre.

Lair of the White Worm, the must-see Hugh Grant folk-horror film

Q: Do you totally ignore the 2006 Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man?

A: Yes. I’m sure I could have fit it in there somewhere, but there are all kinds of movies we didn’t fit in.

Q: It was nice to see a mention of Ken Russell’s bonkers 1988 film Lair of the White Worm .

A: That was a late addition. I realized at a certain point that no one had talked about that, or Rawhead Rex (1986), or Company of Wolves (1984). So I got Lindsay Hallam, a British scholar whom I knew had just taught a class on one of these folk-horror films.

That would happen a lot. I would realize no one’s talked about something yet. Who is the expert? So there would be long periods of research in between the edits. I would spend three weeks or a month just reading, trying to find out who the best scholars or historians were who would be able to address this topic.

Q: You must have a heckuva book collection.

A: I do but a lot of it is in storage in Ontario. I’ve had to rebuy Kindle versions of so many books that I already own, just for my research.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you

Q: What is the scariest movie you’ve seen that you wouldn’t want to watch a second time?

A: Maybe a movie called Playground (2016) I saw a few years ago at Fantastic Fest. I don’t even want to describe what it’s about because it gives too much away. I had heard “Go see this movie blind.” It seems to be about a kid who is socially disaffected. There are some behavioural problems. And then where it goes I was, Oh my God. I was angry at the programmer for getting me in there to see the movie without warning me.

Then about four days later I thought, That movie’s a masterpiece. I ended up programming it at another festival in Australia and everyone had the same response, where they were angry at me for making them watch it. But then the same thing: “Oh my God, four days later and I’m still thinking about that movie.” But what happens in it is so harsh I don’t ever want to see that imagery again.

Trigger warnings

Q: You brought up an interesting point, about seeing movies blind. Is that a hazard of your job, knowing more than you want to going into a movie?

A: For me not necessarily. A lot of the work I do tends to be around older films. I can go to film festivals and watch all the movies. I don’t watch the trailers and I don’t read the descriptions, I usually just scan them for keywords that will jump out at me. I do try to go in blind.

For a programmer, the best response you get is if people go in blind. Where it becomes difficult is with trigger warnings. People will sue your theatre if you don’t warn them about something that’s in the movie. Programmers can lose their jobs over it.

So on one hand you have the artistic impulse, where people can have the purest experience where they don’t know anything about it going in. But then there’s the role of the programmer, who’s accountable and responsible for everybody who comes into your theatre.

Things like animal violence and sexual violence are universally considered things you have to warn people about. But then other people don’t like it because they’re like, “Now I know somebody’s going to get raped in the movie, and I didn’t want to know that, I wanted it to be a surprise.”

You have to weigh, what is more important? The person wanting their surprise or the person who’s going to have an episode if they’re surprised by the material? It’s a really tough call. It didn’t used to be like that. I don’t know whether there’s more material getting to people that isn’t in their wheelhouse.

When I used to do Cinemuerte there were people who would never come, it would never cross their mind. Pretty much everybody who came there knew what they were getting into. Occasionally there would be people who had wandered off the street and would get upset about something. For the most part, people weren’t coming to it who didn’t know what to expect. Nowadays, people are getting access to way more media. They don’t have the same framework for everything coming at them. So It leads to more of these situations where people just aren’t ready to see the stuff they’re seeing.

Shawn Conner writes about horror movies whenever he can.