The creative mind behind a documentary can oftentimes be as vital to understanding its thesis as the film itself, and this is absolutely the case with folk horror documentary WOODLANDS DARK AND DAYS BEWITCHED.
I had the privilege of interviewing its writer and director Kier-La Janisse on everything from her history with folk horror, experience as a first-time director, to her love of bubblegum music and beyond, including a brief discussion on Slavic folk horror that for me, as a first-generation Polish American, was an absolute delight.
DG: So first off, that was an incredible documentary. I now have a viewing list about a mile long for things that I’ve missed.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Yeah. There’s lots of stuff. I mean, I was still finding stuff in the last month. I mean, there’s still tons of other stuff that has come out since we were kind of wrapping up editing that could fit in it. Some of the things that were added at the last minute were actually much older films that I happened to stumble upon very late in the process.
DG: Really? Like which ones?
KIER-LA JANISSE: I would say the last one added to the movie was THE RITES OF MAY, which is a Filipino film by Mike De Leon; and that was just like a weird happenstance. On January 2nd of this year, I remember I had an all day movie marathon where I would host and have my friends watching on Zoom, and I would just pick a bunch of movies that I didn’t know of that I had on my wish list of stuff I wanted to see; and there was a different De Leon movie that we watched and everybody really liked it. So then I was just kind of Googling him after that screening and found this other movie and people describing it as folk horror, so I searched for that movie and found it and I was like, “Oh, this is great.” I felt like it was an underrepresented region in the movie as well, so we got it in there at the last minute.
DG: How did you get into folk horror as a genre? Like, I grew up with my grandma reading all of Algernon Blackwood and writers like that and liked it, but I never knew what it was called until very recently. I probably didn’t hear the term “folk horror” until THE WITCH came out.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Yeah. It was not called that then. The term wasn’t really widely used. Jonathan Rigby kind of gives a rundown of some earlier uses of it, but it really wasn’t until Mark Gatiss’ History of Horror in 2010, that it suddenly became widely used, like an actual style of filmmaking that fans and audiences would actually look for and have some sort of name to call them. And also when you started to get filmmakers who started deliberately trying to make folk horror movies it was different since all the people who made the early films that we would call folk, never set out to make folk horror movies, it’s just that they had certain things in common. I think as William Fowler says in the movies talking about David Rudkin, who did PENDA’S FEN; a movie like PENDA’s FEN would not have been remotely discussed in the same kinds of conversations as a lot of the other movies in this documentary. It’s really only since people started using that word “folk horror” that you start to get on these completely disparate movies brought into the same conversation and some of the filmmakers don’t like it. Some of the older filmmakers don’t like that their films are called folk horror because they feel like it simplifies their films too much, like David Rudkin. I tried to get David Rudkin in the film, but he didn’t want to be interviewed, and he is apparently not a big fan of the term “folk horror,” and doesn’t really see how his work fits into it.
DG: What was your first experience with seeing something that would be now considered folk horror? Did you get into it quickly or was it more of a gradual thing?
KIER-LA JANISSE: I think it was a gradual thing in terms of there was no definition for those films at the time, so it wasn’t like I went looking for them, but I mean, as a kid, I would have seen things like THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME or CROW HAVEN FARM, but even then I would not have necessarily clumped them together. Although, maybe I would have seen some sort of similarity between those and CHILDREN OF THE CORN. I saw that in the theater. Then THE WICKER MAN was obviously really big one, but even then people didn’t see THE WICKER MAN and CHILDREN OF THE CORN as connected, whereas I feel like now it’s a much more common comparison. But THE WICKER MAN was a big movie for me as a teenager, because I remember it was still hard to get at that point, you know? So you would get bootlegs that were kind of composite cuts or the uncut movie, and you would get like bootleg VHS of it.
And so I became really obsessed with THE WICKER MAN, partially because I just really liked movies with these really insular communities that have their own weird value systems, but also the music was a big part of it. It [the original music] was so convincing as traditional folk music. It was songs that were written for the film, but they were so successful in creating this idea that Summerisle was a real place and that this was the music of that region, like I totally believed it was real when I first saw it. I eventually went and visited, I guess it would have been 20 years ago now, the town where the harbor scenes were filmed and went looking for the harbor master’s boat, which I had heard was still there in like, a woodshed somewhere in the woods. So I went there by myself all the way to the Scottish Highlands just to visit this town. So that was probably the first folk horror movie that I’d say I was kind of obsessive about, but there’s lots of people who are even more obsessive about it than me. I haven’t even visited all the locations I’ve visited like that one location, but I did find the boat. It unfortunately no longer exists. It was ruined in a storm years ago. And then I think I would have seen BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW and WITCHFINDER GENERAL probably around the same time that I saw THE WICKER MAN. But even then, I don’t know that I would have considered something like WITCHFINDER GENERAL to be not only connected to THE WICKER MAN, but in the sense of, “Oh, these three movies clearly form a Trinity of movies.”
So it’s really interesting how when somebody makes that connection, the way that Jonathan Rigby did, how all of a sudden you can see it and it’s like, wow, this was right in front of me the whole time; but it takes somebody mentioning it for these pieces to somehow fit together and become so obvious to people, you know? Um, yeah. So I loved CHILDREN OF THE CORN, but THE WICKER MAN probably more likely put me on a pathway to wanting to find other movies that felt like that.
DG: I mean, you can’t, you can’t go wrong with Christopher Lee. You just can’t.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Yes.
DG: It’s wild how many of the big names of old guard horror were popping up in those films, like Vincent Price and Christopher Lee and then, with WHISTLE AND I’LL COME FOR YOU, I was looking at the main actor and I couldn’t place him for the longest. But then I was like, oh, it’s Michael Hordern who I’d seen as Jacob Marley in the Alastair Sim SCROOGE.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Oh yes, I have seen, but I totally didn’t place that.
DG: Yeah. I grew up on that movie. It’s my preferred CHRISTMAS CAROL movie, I think.
KIER-LA JANISSE: I liked the animated Richard Williams one, it’s very creepy.
DG: Were there any films that you had in mind from the start to put into the documentary but weren’t able to because either you couldn’t find footage or there wasn’t enough information?
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well at some point in the British section, we had the John Bowen Play for Today called A Photograph and we ended up taking it out because we just couldn’t find a copy of it that wasn’t low-quality or had a big time code running on it. And then there were things that we really tried to find better copies of that we did keep in anyway, just because they were so important to the movie, for example AS FILHAS DO FOGO, the Brazilian film, is probably the worst quality of everything in the movie, but it was really important to me to have it in there.
Then there was the other film, ICH-CHI, which is this Russian film from last year, 2020, and it’s from this far-flung region of Russia that you just don’t see depicted on film very often. I think it only played a couple of festivals and I would have loved to have had more on that film, but we really limited it to just a few abstract images from it because it was so new and nobody had gotten a chance to see it because of COVID and we just didn’t want to spoil anything from that movie.
So originally we did have a much bigger section on that movie and then we took it out also, because we were like, well, people haven’t gotten the chance to see this movie at all. So we wanted it represented. So there are like a few images there, but they’re kind of unconnected to anything. So it doesn’t really give anything away, but I had hoped that just having the name there and having people watching it kind of log all the films that are in it, that it would make them then want to see that movie and like try to seek it out or make film programmers or shutter or somebody like that, like release it, you know?
But what happened with lots of movies was that because the movie was so long, we ended up having to cut down certain movies to where they just became images supporting a general idea rather than the discussion being about them. There were so many movies where originally we had somebody talking about that specific movie and we ended up having to cut all that talking and then resituate the footage so that it just became part of the bigger ideas and themes, and HAGAZUSSA for example was one of them, which I really like and had written about it for the Blu-ray that came out in the UK.
DG: How did you approach writing and working on this in comparison to your books?
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well, in some ways it was similar, and that was how the editors really saved it because originally I had done the rough cut of the movie myself and it had all the information, but it just felt very crammed together. One of the potential editors I had spoken to said it was really organized like a book, and I said, well, that’s probably because I’m used to doing books and collecting information in a certain way.
It had all the right people, all the right movies, but it just didn’t feel like a movie, it felt like someone was just lecturing information at you. So the editors, Winnie and Ben, really transformed the movie and made it feel more like a movie. So I would say that when I was putting together a lot of this stuff, it actually was a very similar process for me as books, but doing that, you realize that editing books is not a directly transferable skill to editing a movie. You need editors who are used to working with images, cinematically, you know?
DG: Where did the idea for those fantastic transitions with poetry and folk songs and paper art come from?
KIER-LA JANISSE: The poems I think came partially because I was inspired by the poem at the end of THE COMPANY OF WOLVES. So that poem really what made me think, “Oh, I wonder if I could get someone like Linda Hayden to read.” It actually wasn’t even Linda Hayden at first, I didn’t know who it would be, but I wanted the film to open with a little poem and have it feel like that poem from COMPANY OF WOLVES; and then my boss was going to be interviewing Linda Hayden for the BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW Blu-ray and I think it was his suggestion that, “Oh, maybe we can get Linda Hayden to do it.”
And she agreed to do it, and I thought that was amazing, and then we were interviewing Ian Ogilvy for the documentary and I just was like, well, he’s got a great voice too, maybe we can ask him if he’ll read some poems too, because I knew that the film was going to need breathing room. It was going to need moments where it could just kind of slow down for a minute because there’s so much information. So the poems came from that and then the animation; the first commissions were the two Guy Maddin collage paper cutouts, and then Ashley Thorpe did the rest of the animation, and he did like three or four different styles of animation. He made a documentary of his own called BORLEY RECTORY, which is about the most haunted house in England. And he did a pop-up book piece in his movie so I saw that and thought I wanted that but with like an Appalachian theme, so he did that and then he did the animation in the international section and the opening credits which are riffing on the Owl Service credits because I love them so much.
DG: It made the documentary feel like a story with stories in it, if that makes sense.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Jim Williams, who did our score, did the folk songs. The Appalachian song in the pop-up book animation is a song called Lampkin, which is a folk song that would have come from the borders of Scotland and England and then been moved over as people migrated to that region, and his wife sang it. The folk song earlier in the British section with the landscape collage is from Jim Williams as well, and he actually made that song out of a Thomas Hardy poem and sang it himself.
DG: How did you decide to structure the elements/chapters of the film?
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well, when it was in the very beginning of it being made, it was just going to be British folk horror. It was supposed to be a DVD extra for BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW, so it was just going to be a 30 minute thing and it was all focused on the British films, essentially what is the Holy Trinity and the Signposts of British Folk Horror sections condensed into 30 minutes; but then, I think it was Robert Eggers, was the only person I spoke to for it in those early stages that was American and talking to him, he just brought up some things that I hadn’t thought of because originally I kept thinking of American folk horror as being very much connected to England, that folk horror was this very British thing.
And the reason why EYES OF FIRE and THE WITCH were folk horror was because they were very much connected to that life in the colonies and directly related to this kind of British parentage. And then Robert Eggers started talking about THE WITCH and how they use the hare in it. He was saying that in England, hares are part of all this mythology and we don’t really have that in North America, but they do have jackrabbits in Native American mythology, as kind of an offhanded comment; but it was really that statement that I think is the thing that prompted the movie to then completely expand beyond its initial scope because as soon as I started looking at American folk horror as something that actually predated the colonies, then you see there already was folk horror or the makings of folk horror that was separate from the British experience. And then when I handed my boss at Severin the rough cut of the movie, it was two hours long when it was supposed to be a small 30 minute thing, but instead of telling me to shorten it, he just said to keep going and make it into its own movie.
I never had any plans of making movies, being a director, or anything. I know lots of friends of mine where that is what they wanted to do, so in some ways it’s ironic that now I’ve made a movie, but it all kind of happened accidentally. Then once we decided that it was going to be a feature, the structure that it has now is pretty much what it was going to be. The only thing that’s different is that originally psychogeography had its own chapter, but then after looking at the other sections we felt like the British section needed a big idea or the big theme that the films were connecting back to, so we decided to take the psychogeography section and just put it in the British section since so many of the British films were connected to that idea.
The only other thing that changed was the international section originally kind of went more country by country, but then, my editor, Winnie, who was also a co-producer by then, thought it would function better if we tried to go thematically in that section instead of going country by country, because some of them just didn’t have as many speakers or as much screen time as other countries and felt unbalanced that way.
DG: As a first-generation Polish American, thank you for putting Polish horror movies in that section since nobody really sees them and it does get frustrating.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well, do you know other ones?
DG: Um, yeah there’s actually one that I saw two years ago. It was impossible to find but it’s finally been released on Shudder. It was called KREW BOGA, then it got translated into THE MUTE and now it’s called SWORD OF GOD. The basic premise is it’s medieval Poland and two Christian missionaries go to this Island to try to convert the pagan population of the Island. It’s one of my favorite, not even just Polish movies, but one of my favorite horror movies in general.
KIER-LA JANISSE: That sounds like I should have seen it before making my movie.
DG: So yeah. Thank you for including Slavic horror in there. I genuinely wasn’t expecting it.
KIER-LA JANISSE: Actually, originally there was more Slavic horror. DIABEL, the Andrzej ?u?awski film, was in it more for example. Definitely more Czech stuff, more Polish stuff, and again, it kind of got cut down to people talking about ideas because the film was already three hours long so unless we had some kind of big idea around that movie, then we ended up having to take that movie and fold it into one of the other ideas, you know?
DG: Do you think the documentary will ever get a physical release and if it does, do you think you would put any of those cut sections back in?
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well, it’ll definitely get a physical release because Severin Films, who produced it, release Blu-ray as their primary business. So it’s definitely gonna get a Blu-ray release and it is definitely going to be packed full of extras, including a lot of the stuff that was cut out, but then lots of stuff that never made it into the film in the first place that I just knew we weren’t going to have space for we also have whole little sections we can put in as their own thing already edited and everything.
DG: Exciting! This being your first film and it kind of accidentally snowballing into a film, did you like the experience? Would you want to ever try again or is it more of a one-time thing?
KIER-LA JANISSE: I think I definitely want to try it again, which I think is a natural instinct because it was my first time doing it. I did a lot of things backwards, or not the most efficient way, and so I kind of want to do it again to see if I can do it better, to see if I can manage all those things better and faster because when you’re doing something for the first time you don’t know the things you’re not doing that you should be doing until you’re done. And then you realize you have no idea what offline editing means or things like that.
DG: Right.
KIER-LA JANISSE: But I definitely feel like I want to do it again because I feel like I did learn a lot doing it. And so I want to make at least one more film I think now knowing those things, see if I can get it better.
DG: Do you have any ideas floating around about what you might want to tackle in your next one?
KIER-LA JANISSE: I don’t know. I mean, one thing probably, but it would only happen if it was somebody like the BBC doing it, which is that years ago I made this kind of fan super cut based on a book called Bubblegum Music is the Naked Truth. It’s all about bubblegum music from 1967 to 1972. It would have been about 2005, and I had asked the people who made the book if I could make kind of like a video clip show type of thing to like go along with the book that I could then play at this theater I was programming films at.
They agreed, and so I cobbled together a script out of all the writers who had contributed to that book, there was like 30 different writers or something, and I narrated it myself and there were no interviews or anything, literally just footage that exists already from television appearances of these bands. That was the first thing I ever edited and it turned out pretty well. I mean, it’s very clunky technically, but if you’re into bubblegum music I still think it moves at a really good pace and is totally entertaining, and I always imagine if I actually had a budget to get decent quality clips and actually interview some of the people from the bands or whatever this could be the ultimate thing to do. I have this rough cut that I could show people, like if you wanted to fund something like this, here’s an example of like what it could be except 10 times better, so that’s something I’d probably think about pursuing just because I feel like it’s something I’ve kind of half done already that could just use some resources to make it into a real movie. Other than that, I’m not sure, but I definitely think it’s going to be animation or documentaries because I’m a real introvert so I like the modular aspect of those things. I don’t know that I could make something with actors and a crew on a set.
DG: If there were some greatest hits from this documentary that you think people who are getting into this should absolutely watch what would be your must sees?
KIER-LA JANISSE: Well, if you’re talking about must sees in terms of the foundational things, then I feel like it would be leaning towards British things. It would be things like the Unholy Trinity, and it would be like Robin Redbreast and The Owl Service, a lot of those kind of things. I feel like in some ways that British Signposts section is the greatest hits, you know, because I feel like for a lot of people who got into folk horror, how they got into folk horror often was through the British stuff. So if you want to know what people are talking about, those are the films to see first probably.
Other than that, EYES OF FIRE, the American film, is very important, and CHILDREN OF THE CORN, THE DARK SECRET OF HARVEST HOME, there’s so many. And then a lot of the international ones are interesting because in many cases, people wouldn’t think of them as folk horror until they’re prompted to, you know? For example, the Australian film THE DREAMING. When I was interviewing Alexandra Nicholas about those movies, it kind of took her a minute to think if Australia had folk horror movies until she realized, “Oh yeah, I guess we would call them folk horror.”
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