The Gutter’s own Carol Borden has some thoughts on the new British folk horror film, The Severed Sun (2024):

Writer/director Dean Puckett’s The Severed Sun‘s opening credits have the perfect blood red font on a black background. The story itself begins with an almost Vermeer tableau shot in golden light as Magpie (Appleton), her son, and her stepson David (Lewis Gribben) wait for abusive family patriarch Howard (Eoin Slattery) to join them at breakfast and drink the poisoned tea she has set out for him. Magpie and her family are a part of a small, rural conservative religious community led by her father the Pastor (Toby Stephens). Divorce is not possible here, so Magpie joins a long history of wives who poison their abusive husbands before no fault divorce. Magpie sees something in the woods, something that watched her with glowing eyes as she disposes of Howard. The community calls it a Beast (James Swanton), but it stands upright with horns and has the overall appearance of something between animal and arboreal. (As with the spirit in Witte Wieven). It’s deep black and it seems to have tendrils. And as Magpie later says, “It seems to have a taste for foul men.” When a man is brutally killed in his home, the community turns on Magpie, accusing her of conspiring with the Beast and heresy.

While The Severed Sun is firmly in the British folk horror tradition, one thing that struck me was that the forest was far more enticing than the civilized areas the Pastor’s flocks inhabits. The Beast that dwells there does kill, but it is hard to say it is worse than the “foul men” it stalks. As in Witte Wieven, it is nature, speaking the truth, and perhaps the pagan past that is the only salvation at hand for those trapped in the community’s bunker of patriarchal religion. And maybe not salvation only for women, but for anyone.

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