With a carnival accordion wheeze, woodcut interstitials, and titles in Wicker Man font, Ric Rawlins’ Rewilding announces itself as exactly what it is–a feast of folk horrors rooted deep in green modern pagan dreams of green pre-Christian pagan rites and the conflict when the modern world scuffs up too closely on the Old Ways. Ghost stories in secluded villages, apparitions in beach caves overlooked by secluded villages, legendary trees connected with witchcraft persecutions in secluded villages. If that is your ideal travelogue, book your ticket now and get cozy with a mug of something warm and a pumpkin spice candle. Rewilding’s three featured vignettes may or may not suit according to taste, but their evocation of the work and the whole vibe of Nigel Kneale, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Thomas Tryon, et. al. is perfect. It’s tempting, with AI so much in the headlines now, to say Rewilding is like someone fed a chatbot all of the (excellent, unmissable, I love it so much) folk horror documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021),  but I would never accuse Rawlins of consorting with the GPT devil. These stories may obey a recognizable pattern, but they’re not formulaic. They’re not content. And the pattern they do follow is less like an outline, and more like a dance. Or a spell.

The scariness of Rewilding is roughly the temperature of a classic Doctor Who episode–the Tom Baker years also recall a certain effects sequence in the second story–but maybe that depends on how comfy one is with ritual suicide or whether or not you would be Team Summerisle in The Wicker Man. For me, a lapsed Hårgan, there is more cozy than discomfiting in the languid, supersaturated panoramas of rural Britain featured throughout. Much as in Alex Garland’s Men, the landscape owns its screentime in Rewilding, contextualizing the small, old mysteries the stories concern in a vast and timeless geography. And the beauty of the film is something I do want to emphasize, both in the visuals and the folk music score, the latter asserting itself almost as a narrator linking story to story.

The film is surprisingly compact, however, only just crossing an hour, although it’s the right size for the three stories within, and I’m not sure where I would have added, or what I would have added, to push it to the more conventional feature length. It’s actually pretty perfect and very rewatchable as it is. Thematic and aesthetic connections suffice to make it feel cohesive, and I would positively compare this to another (excellent, wonderful, I love it so much) contemporary folk horror anthology, A Field Guide To Evil (2018),* which filled a full two hours with a good deal more variety, but at the cost of a certain mood. Both approaches have their argument, but the consistency here suits the length and vice versa.

As for the substance of the tales, they each manage to proceed to the same tune without stepping in each other’s footprints. The first of the three stories, and probably my favorite, “Stone Mothers,” follows a kindly old retired archaeologist, Professor O’Mara–absolutely a character M.R. James would have loved–who is enlisted by the local priest, Father Hallow, to investigate the sighting of the devil, the actual one, in one of the sea caves down on the beach. Modern and a bit nebbish, Father Hallow doesn’t think it’s the devil, of course, but, well, when you have a weird phenomenon and a learned stranger from out of town, are you going to waste that setup? No, this is folk horror law, where the only thing more doomed than a stranger is a learned one. And so Hallow tasks O’Mara, who was already digging without permission on the cliffs, and the archaeologist dutifully checks out the cave. Along with a few curious apertures in the rock, O’Mara discovers a cave painting depicting some kind of goddess, inscribed with a Latin phrase which translates as “The music will revive.” Fascinated, the archaeologist gets himself a room at the lonely pub overlooking the beach and continues his investigation, stopping only for the tides that regularly overtop the cave. What began as an act of earnest helpfulness becomes something else, and watching O’Mara puzzle it out is satisfying all to itself. Meanwhile, curious locals grow uneasy with O’Mara’s secretive progress, and once he brings his discovery to Hallow, Hallow tries to shut it all down. 

Prof. O’Mara: Father, archeology is all about shared histories, different stories juxtaposed one on top of the other. This can be a source of tension, but it can also bring great depth to a community.

Fr. Hallow: Professor, you and I are not on the same page. It’s not the devil I’m afraid of. It’s the fever. The fever of the devil. Some of the villagers have a very active imagination.

And this is the common theme in all of these stories, a favorite substrate of folk horror in general, although far from the only one, putting the folk in folk horror. The title, Rewilding, and its excellent tagline “Nature waits” would insinuate these stories dwell on the reclamation of man’s work by nature, as inevitable as the tides lapping O’Mara’s soles, but it is not exactly nature in ascendance here. More like human nature, as expressed by old traditions and new religions alike. This is something I love in folk horror–the resistance of the stranger, the modern interloper, and the eventual victim to believe their senses, or indeed the word of the folk, and accept difference at face value. The Gutter’s own Carol, of course, has written brilliantly about Sergeant Howie’s intransigence and Lord Summerisle’s pretension to a pagan heritage in The Wicker Man, and that’s exactly what I’m talking about here. It’s exactly what Rewilding is on about as well. In the negotiation between an old world and a new one, the first to rationalize is going to end up sewn inside a burning bear.

And so these stories are not meant to push boundaries, like Garland’s more audacious Men, or subvert them, like Oz Perkins’ clever Gretel & Hansel.** No, in finest folk horror tradition, these stories are about laying boundaries, which is an intensely human activity. And I think that is a big part of the satisfaction amid all the creepiness, seeing O’Mara tease out the mystery of the sea cave, watching the heroine of another story innocently carve into an infamous tree, or in the final story, following a young reporter as he is half-serenaded, half-menaced by a guitarist singing the ballad of the reporter’s imminent doom. Patternmaking is part of the genius of our species, and it is one of the first signs of healthy human intelligence–tell this from that from this. It’s how we make language, it’s how we make cities, and it’s also how we make sacrifices. 

I’ve seen reviews of this film that dismiss the stories as being too simple, the acting too amateurish. It’s true that there are a couple of very minor supporting performances that aren’t so good. You might take it as a kind of verisimilitude, like Charles B. Pierce casting actual backwoods locals in his bigfoot movies. Or you might just laugh at it, which also happens to Pierce’s Boggy Creek saga. But as far as the storytelling, I find Rewilding more candid than simple, in the way that all the best folk horrors, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar, are unblinkingly sincere and their folk covens are absolutely candid, if you pay attention. I love the bald-faced authenticity of these stories, both in the sense of their semblance to classic folk horror in the mold of M.R. James and also in that signal straightforwardness. Honestly, I am so tired of horror shorts that break the back of their own plots simply to twist its head around in a gotcha that doesn’t make emotional or logical sense. These are vignettes that are confident enough to just be what they are, warnings to the curious with nowt so queer as folk, as the saying goes. There is nowt so beautiful to me.

*”The Sinful Women of Hollfall” is particularly brilliant.

** Gretel & Hansel is also incredible.

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Good lord a’mercy, Angela got to tend to her fires.