It’s a brand new week and a brand new theme. This week we will be looking at a selection of folk horror movies. Folk horror is generally characterized by an outsider protagonist coming from their modern urban life and intruding upon a rural area with old pagan beliefs and superstitions. The big poster child for this would be the original 1973 The Wicker Man but you also get more modern stuff like Midsommar. The genre is normally fairly euro-centric with lots of focus on druids and fae and pagan ritual so I figured I’d start the week looking at a Mexican take on the classic tropes.

Our outsider protagonist for the movie is Cristina, a journalist from Los Angeles that had originally lived in rural Mexico until her mother died in what might have been a botched exorcism or she might have just been sick. She starts the movie in chains, being held by a bruja and her assistant as they insist that she has a demon inside of her and they need to get it out. They say because she went to La Boca, a cave/ruin that houses many demonic entities, that one managed to possess her. With no way out and no one to help her as even her cousin is helping her captors, Cristina is forced to go along with the rituals until she can find a way to escape. But is escape really going to save her or is there a demon inside her that is waiting to be freed from its captivity?

I love that this movie hits all of the standard tropes for a folk horror movie but uses them for so many different thematic things. The demon inside of Cristina is representative of so many things that it ends up being hard to nail down the exact metaphor. She is addicted to heroin, which is one of the demons that she is carrying around. She abandoned her home, her culture, and her language and this disconnect from her heritage represents another demon. The guilt and anger that she feels over her mother’s death is another demon inside her. All of these heavy thematic ideas are wrapped in a demonic possession movie that does more with that genre than simply having someone get a fucked up looking face and scream obscenities. Though it does also do that.

Brigitte Kali Canales, who plays Cristina, does such a good job of carrying this film. Everything is either her interacting with others or having to act solo and she does a great at displaying the character’s full arc over the course of the run time. The movie is not big on gore or kills and has only a couple jump scares, so it relies on the emotion that Canales brings to sell the horror of what is going on. From a personal standpoint, I think it would have been better served with a bit more of the standard folk horror trope of “is this real or are these people crazy” but I understand. It was more about the celebration of tradition and titular old ways than the normal euro folk horror which makes the old ways out to be barbaric and horrific rather than something to be embraced.

I really enjoyed watching this and would love to see more folk horror end up embracing the folk aspect rather than making it the villain. Definitely worth watching for fans of the genre.

Score: 4.5 out of 5