Festival explores the role of folklore in horror flicks

When she returned to the city of her birth to take the job of assistant programmer at Winnipeg’s Cinematheque in 2007, Kier-La Janisse brought a bold voice to the cinema’s already vaunted reputation.

Before her departure in 2008 to launch her microcinema, Blue Sunshine, in Montreal, she started, among other things, the Saturday Morning Cartoon Cereal Party (the TV cartoon/breakfast food binge was a holdover from her time as a programmer at Austin’s Alamo Drafthouse), Plastic Paper, a festival of animated, illustrated puppet film, and the cutting edge documentary festival Gimme Some Truth, which she envisioned showcasing "the kind of films that left you feeling as though you’d been punched in the face."

During her time here she worked closely with the late Cinematheque artistic dirctor Dave Barber.

"It’s hard to imagine the Cinematheque without Dave," she says. "It really is his theatre. He had such a unique perspective on things, he championed so many Canadian filmmakers, but it was never to fill a quota or satisfy some funding requirement — he genuinely loved Canadian cinema and saw all the things that made it idiosyncratic and weird."

It is fitting, then, that Janisse returns to Winnipeg from her Pender Island home in British Columbia as the headliner of December’s Gimme Some Truth fest in her new capacity as a documentary filmmaker. Janisse brings along her epic, three-hour-plus doc Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, a fascinating examination of folk horror in cinema, as the cornerstone of this year’s festival.

Janisse has been working on the film for years now, acknowledging she was fascinated by folk horror going back a decade.

"It was really around 2010 when the term was used in Mark Gatiss’s (BBC TV series) A History of Horror and people started to use it more," Janisse says in a phone interview from her home.

In cinemas, a couple of exciting films popped up as exciting new variants of the form, both directed by Ben Wheatley: Kill List and A Field in England "and I started to see the term folk horror pop up a lot in articles, especially in British magazines."

Janisse, 49, got a chance to act on her personal fascination courtesy of Severin Films, an American film production/distribution company specializing in restoring cult films and releasing them on Blu-ray. Janisse has worked there since 2017, mostly as a producer and editor, creating supplemental DVD material for various releases.

"It really started with Severin Films announcing they were going to be releasing the film The Blood on Satan’s Claw around May 2018," she says. "So I suggested to my boss David (Gregory), ‘For an extra, why don’t we do a documentary about folk horror?’

"He said, ‘OK, sure, go do it.’ So that was it."

That assignment would take Janisse years to complete, drawing on her many contacts from the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, the organization she founded in 2010 devoted to serious study of genre films. For Woodlands, Janisse interviewed 50 filmmakers, critics and scholars, as well as cobbling together footage from more than 200 films.

"It was really supposed to be a short featurette that would go on another Blu-ray," she says. "And within a few months, I handed in a piece that was over two hours long … so it was longer than Blood on Satan’s Claw," she says. "So instead of telling me where to cut it to get it down, David said, ‘You have pretty much half of a feature here. Why don’t you just keep going?’"

Although the doc’s range of movies spans pretty much a century of filmmaking, it feels relevant, Janisse says.

"I think there’s a lot of discussion in folk horror movies about community and what community means and the kinds of things people sacrifice to be part of a community," Janisse says. "Which of those things are good things and which of those are bad things?"

As a bonus, Janisse also got to work with Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin, who designed the film’s eye-popping animated collages.

"I knew Guy did collages because he had a really active Instagram account where he would always post them," Janisse says. "And really early on, I knew I needed some kind of flair to the film that I wasn’t really capable of myself.

"So I asked Guy if he would consider making some collages based around vague themes — occult and nature/landscape — that I could get animated for the film," she says. "And luckily for me, he obliged."

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Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror screens at Cinematheque Saturday, Dec. 4 at 7:30 p.m. (with an introduction by Janisse), with additional screenings Friday, Dec. 10 at 9:15 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 2 at 3 p.m.

The film is already available online through services such as iTunes, and will be coming to Blu-ray on Dec. 7, by itself, and as a centrepiece of a monster 15-disc box set with a total of 19 folk-horror films included.

In addition, the Janisse juggernaut will take over much of Cinematheque’s December programming with additional screenings of folk horror films including:

Blood on Satan’s Claw

Described in Janisse’s film as one of the three foundational folk horror films (alongside Witchfinder General and The Wicker Man), this 1971 thriller by director Piers Haggard visits an 18th century rural village where the young people seem to be taken over by a demonic presence. It screens Tuesday, Dec. 7, at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Dec. 15, at 9:10 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 30, at 9:15 p.m. and Sunday, Jan. 2, at 7 p.m.

Clearcut

One of Canada’s few examples of the folk-horror form, this 1991 film from director Ryszard Bugaiski stars Graham Greene (in reportedly his favourite role) as a trickster figure who kidnaps the manager of a logging company to teach him a harsh lesson in environmentalism. It screens Tuesday, Dec. 7, at 9:30 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 16, at 9:15 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 19, at 3 p.m. and Wednesday, Jan. 5, at 7 p.m.

The Wicker Man

A serene peak in the folk horror realm, Robin Hardy’s subversive 1973 thriller pits a dour Christian policeman (Edward Woodward) against the charismatic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) on a remote isle populated by a pagan populace under Summerisle’s sway. It screens Friday, Dec. 17, at 7 p.m., Wednesday, Dec. 22, at 9:15 p.m., Tuesday, Dec. 28, at 9:05 p.m. and Thursday, Dec. 30, at 7 p.m.

Midsommar — Director’s Cut

Ari Aster reinvigorated folk horror in this Wicker Man-esque 2019 film, the followup to the equally impressive Hereditary, with a tale of American students taking a trip to rural Sweden, where they encounter a bizarre pagan cult with deadly proclivities. It screens Saturday, Dec. 18, at 1 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 19, at 7 p.m., Sunday, Dec. 26, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 30, at 2:30 p.m. and Wednesday, Jan. 5, at 9:15 p.m.

Cinematheque’s complete program is online at www.winnipegfilmgroup.com.

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