Falling Stars

Is there life in folk horror beyond the tired old trope of city folks visiting a remote location and getting into trouble with the locals? This absorbing new work from co-directors Gabriel Bienczycki and Richard Karpala suggests there might be. An utterly immersive exercise in world-building, it posits an alternative present in which witches are real, falling from the sky like shooting stars at harvest time, and a system of rituals and rules has grown up around them – rules which three brothers and their friend are about to break.

What’s missing in most folk horror tales –and indeed in many otherwise diligent historical films – is an understanding of the different perspectives of people with pre-enlightenment beliefs. It’s here that writer Karpala truly triumphs, and in doing so provides a connection to our own world, in which half of the US population struggles to comprehend the thought processes of the other half. This is a place in which understanding of right and wrong derives not so much from reason as from authority, in which curiosity and experimentation are seen as inherently dangerous, and in which people live under the shadow of an existential threat they cannot hope to influence.

At first you might get the impression that the characters we meet think this way because they live out in the desert, in trailers, so are likely to be poorly educated and unsophisticated. A quietly devastating line in the latter part of the film reveals that the city people, who do consider themselves to be more advanced, have a more horrific means of trying to deal with the situation. Ideas change and evolve, but the underlying mindset contributes to keeping everybody trapped and desperate.

The brothers are likeable young men who spend an early autumn evening sharing beers, the older two alternately teasing the youngest and demonstrating their protectiveness of him. With a couple of falling stars visible in the sky, talk turns to the early harvest. We learn what happens when a witch falls on somebody, but the idea of curfew is still miserable at that age. When their friend says that he once shot a witch and buried her in the desert, they decide to pay a visit to the grave, to dig her up and take a look at her. Further lore surrounds the exhumation. It isn’t supported by reason. It doesn’t need to be, because that’s not how people talk in real life, and that’s not how these people think. it’s all the more unsettling for it.

Elements of the witch lore of our own world are woven through the tale. The association of witches with the harvest, and a latter suggestion that part of the world’s harvest is being given as tribute to keep them at bay, recalls the fact that what Medieval people feared most about them was their supposed potential to damage crops. There are also suggestions of a sexual threat to men – always uncomfortable, never eroticised or played for humour. When the brothers’ actions at the grave inadvertently offend the witches, they find themselves and their community in real danger. An older woman – as often, a keeper of lore – exhorts them to take action to assuage the threat. From inside the cosy environment of her small home, the vast dark night beyond seems even more intimidating. One might remember that neither they nor we are really all that many generations away from huddling round campfires for fear of unknown terrors in the dark.

The matter-of-factness of the authoritative voices in this film, the casually but astutely observed relationships between the brothers, and the youngest brother’s dawning awareness of the darkness in his world, which parallels the experience of the viewer, combine to help this simple tale make a powerful impression. After you’ve seen it, you won’t wish upon a star in the same way again.