The Woods (2006)

Movie: The Woods (2006), directed by Lucky McKee

Watched on: Amazon Prime

Ran: 7.64 miles, 8’57”/mile, 01:08:23 (recovery run)

 

Yesterday was a weight-training day, which meant that today my legs were achy and weak—which in turn meant that tonight’s run, even more than usual, was going to have to start slow and build over the course of an hour. So what could I watch to match that dynamic?

Well, as luck would have it, some site or other had posted one of those “everything new streaming this month” articles, and what should I notice in the Prime list but The Woods? And not just any The Woods—for there are several—but the one near and dear to my heart: Lucky McKee’s long-awaited followup to his 2002 indie horror debut, May.

 

May remains one of my favorite horror flicks of all time (yes, I’ll be rewatching it soon enough). I anxiously awaited McKee’s sophomore effort, but it lingered in corporate purgatory for years. Once it finally surfaced in 2006 I was worried that it couldn’t possibly live up to my inflated expectations… and honestly, I was right. It’s no May. But that doesn’t mean I don’t adore it in its own right.

 

The Woods has a lot for me to love: McKee’s direction, of course; the tone-perfect Agnes Bruckner as our hero Heather; Patricia Clarkson as a quietly diabolical headmistress; evil murdery vines; WITCHES, WITCHES, WITCHES; and last but certainly not least, Agnes’s father portrayed by none other than genre legend Square-Jawed Bruce Campbell™. (Yes, that’s his full legal name.)

 

Oh, and a plot AND tone so reminiscent of Argento’s classic Suspiria—another of my all-time favorites—it doesn’t so much walk the fine line between homage and plagiarism as grind any distinction between the two into a thin, delicious paste I hereby dub “homagiarism.” (BAM! Take that, Shakespeare!) Heather is a troublesome girl who tried to burn down her house. Her parents are therefore dumping her at a secluded New England boarding school. Things are weird pretty much right off the bat, and it’s not long before Heather is balancing pencils on their tips and hearing voices from the surrounding woods. It’s clear to the viewer, if not necessarily to the student body, that this here school is run by witches.

 

Heather is granted a scholarship because she’s apparently aced a written test to see if she’s “gifted” (it’s basically the witchcraft edition of the Myers-Briggs test on homemade paper that STEALS YOUR BLOOD), and fifteen minutes into the film’s runtime she’s dreaming about axe murders and a fellow student she’s never met who “attempted suicide.” Soon enough other scholarship students begin disappearing in the night and are replaced in their beds by piles of leaves, which is not at all suspicious. When is it Heather’s turn? The action builds slowly, and things don’t get really frantic until the third reel, when it all comes to a head, the forest gets frisky, the witches are forced into the open, and the body count graph gets steep in a hurry.

 

Did I mention this all takes place in 1965? That’s right, cats and kittens: this is a groovy period piece that only enhances the feel of Heather’s utter geographical and social isolation. The costumes feel spot-on, and the film looks like the 50-year-old slides you found in a box in the crawlspace. It’s gorgeous. They play with saturation levels: a lot of the blood is undersaturated, in stark contrast to what most horror films do, while occasionally (especially in dream sequences and the like) the saturation is cranked way up to accentuate Heather’s red hair against the forest green. Bruckner’s not a natural redhead, but this film makes good use of the ol’ “redheads are witches” trope, so you can see what they were going for. (This leads to one of the movie’s only glaring anachronisms, as I’m pretty sure the term “fire-crotch” didn’t come into use until the early ‘90s. But I can forgive a lot.)

 

I suspect fans of genre horror might find this one too slow to hold their attention (durn kids these days!), but if you appreciate characterization and conspiracy and films that are beautiful to look at, give this one a whirl. This is one of those movies that’s definitely horror, but not necessarily one that people who dislike horror should avoid. It does occasionally and briefly get graphic, but not distastefully so, if that makes any sense. Look, if you can’t hang with watching a ‘60s-era boarding school redhead swing an axe at a bunch of tree-witches, I don’t know what else I can do for you. You may be beyond hope.