I did a podcast a while back discussing Kier-la Janisse's massive folk horror documentary, Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, in which one of the panelists (not me) suggested that the parameters of what constitutes "folk horror" might be too broad to be useful. His suggestion was that all horror is folk horror or none of it is. I've been thinking about this idea lately because there's another big folk horror box set on the horizon and because I remembered something after the podcast that's been preying on my mind. There's a section in Stephen King's Danse Macabre in which the author plays a game with the reader. He asserts that all good horror movies are folk tales of a sort or another and suggests describing the plots of well-known horror movies beginning with the classic opener: "Once upon a time." He offers twenty examples. Here's one: "Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night. Only one of them was alive come All Saint's day." And another: "Once upon a time there were two children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other." One more: "Once upon a time, there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when they came home with her she didn't feel so sad. Except one night, she picked up a man wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman." You get the picture. Thinking about these kinds of framings, I'm inclined to think that all horror is folk horror. It's all folklore and fairy tales. Some movies lean into that idea harder than others. Hard enough that "folk horror" seems like a subgenre when maybe it's not. But then, maybe it is.*
In any event, that big folk horror box looming on the horizon includes two films by Jural Herz, a director probably best known for The Cremator. The one that caught my eye was the 1978 version of Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor, or "The Monster and the Virgin," as the copy I have translates it). This is a film I've had for a long, long time on a gray market VHS sent to me by a pen pal. It's been sitting unwatched in a drawer for decades. Its appearance on the list of films on the next edition of All the Haunts Be Ours prompted me to see if I still had it and if it was still playable. I did and it was. I was a fool to wait so long. It's good. It's very good.