Black Gate

Swashbuckler (US, 1976)

Let’s face it, in the spate of historical swashbucklers that followed Richard Lester’s Musketeers films, not everything was a classic like Robin and Marian. There were a few toads in the flower garden, some rotten apples in the barrel, and it’s only fair to warn you about them. However, even a terrible misfire can have its amusing side, as you’ll see in the sterling examples gathered below, three attempts to capture the that old swordplay magic that go astray in entirely different ways.

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When I first saw the schedule for Fantasia 2021, none of the films playing the final night of the festival struck me as something I wanted to review here. I therefore decided I’d pick one of the movies available on-demand throughout Fantasia as my personal closing film. Which then raised the question of which of those movies felt like enough of an event to mark the end of a three-week revel in the weirdness of genre cinema. And the answer to this question was clear at once. My big finish for Fantasia 2021 would be the three-hour-plus documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror.

Right beforehand I watched the short bundled with it. “Saudade” is a 20-minute film from Singapore written and directed by Russell Morton, presenting stories and rituals of the Kristang people, a community of mixed Eurasian ancestry that arose in the area of Malacca four or five hundred years ago. The film, in the Kristang language, is structured around three sequences. The first is a folk dance, the second’s a conversation between a fisherman and his wife about stories and the shrimp that have vanished from the seas, and the third is a meeting with a mythic entity called the Oily Man — a human who sold his soul to the Devil. The film’s very concerned with ghosts and the survival of stories; the title’s a Portuguese word that refers to a kind of melancholic nostalgia for a desired thing that will not come again, and there seems a connection there with the film’s interest in history and culture. The movie’s photographed well, with a colourful shot at the end reminiscent of a dance of death, and it’s evocative, though the connections are elliptical to me. That may be deliberate, as I’m not sure whether the movie’s meant to present the Kristang culture to others, to speak to the Kristang people, or to record some pieces of Kristang culture. Or all of the foregoing. Either way, there’s a tone of longing and distance here that, so far as I can tell, bears out the promise of the title.

Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror is directed by Kier-la Janisse, the founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. Janisse has written several books on horror, and her micropress Spectacular Optical has published several more (including Lost Girls: The Phantasmagorical Cinema of Jean Rollin). Woodlands Dark is her first feature, and it has more than 50 interviewees discussing folk horror films from around the world. It’s coming on blu-ray from Severin Films on December 7, available on its own or as part of a 15-disc collection called ‘All the Haunts Be Ours’ which includes 20 of the movies mentioned in the documentary.

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