Like an oak presiding over what came before and what might follow, Kier-La Janisse’s documentary study Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched (2021) roots folk horror to the forces that found the sub-genre while gesturing toward how the tradition keeps perpetuating. To watch the film in 2021, half-in and half-out of the seemingly perpetual plague was its own discombobulation: did the recent ease with which filmmakers, critics, markets, and spectators alike levy the term “folk horror” produce this comprehensive theory doc? Or was the film itself a kind of survey, an act of filmic archeology reacting to something in the dirt?
The rushed and partial answer is that cinema is always a two-way mirror medium. It predicts by building on fantasies; it reacts to the feelings and fantasies we’ve already felt. Folk horror compels in 2024, as it did before this historical moment, because as a tradition of horror storytelling, it susses out dark forces contained in entities too-frequently assumed to be idyls. Reactive forces like nationalism, populism, and pastoralism receive material scrutiny by examining psychic rather than historical structures. Especially in the way it forces Christianity to account for its material acts rather than its Public Relations, folk horror is nothing less than an alternative theory of historicizing storytelling. If it is more evident and popular a mode in 2024, it is because now, as always, we need alternatives to how our stories have ended themselves.
To a constellation of films siphoned from and through various folklores — including but not limited to: The Witch (2015), Midsommar (2019), Lamb (2021) Men (2022), Enys Men (2022), The Watchers (2024) — any study of something like a folk horror revival now must include Starve Acre (2024), the second feature from writer-director Daniel Kokotajlo. Adapted from Andew Michael Hurley’s 2019 novel, the film tells the story of a couple marooned in both an increasingly oppressive English countryside and a totalizing familial grief. Building on the filmmaker’s previous work, Apostasy (2017), Starve Acre is as much a navigation of the superstitions that compel us toward annihilation as it is a speculative paean to beliefs that let us live. It’s a crucial step forward in Kokotajlo’s ongoing negotiation of cinema as a forum that lets us believe in the image for as long as we need to, a constant loss and recovery machine where the horrific may be as liberating as the embrace with a loved one.
In advance of the film’s limited release, I spoke with Daniel over video chat about Starve Acre’s various reference points, the work of shooting land to move a certain way, and how texture affects a spectator’s sense of feeling film.
Frank Falisi: When did you first encounter Andrew Michael Hurley’s novel?
Daniel Kokotajlo: I had already read his previous novels, The Loney and Devil’s Day, so I was well aware of him. I was talking to a producer about his work, in fact, and how much I liked it. And they told me that Starve Acre was coming out soon. And then they sent me a promo copy of it. So I read it a little while before it came out and really liked it.
FF: Did it always seem adaptable to cinema to you?
DK: More so than his other books, but not without its challenges. It took me a few reads to fully, like, put together a plan of what to do with it. Because it’s such an internal dialogue, you know, all the way through the book about these characters, emotions, and feelings. But the one thing it had was the kind of a strong visual symbol, in the English hare and what happens to it, and I felt like that would, no matter what happened in the development, that was the thing I would hold on to and keep as a visual kind of symbol for what’s going on inside these characters lives.
FF: The story separates its co-leads for so much of the time. They’re sort of separately going through these processes, and the hare is the image that connects them. They occupy different spaces, and then they come together around the hare.
DK: Yeah, it’s probably even more so in the book, yeah. Those scenes where I do bring the characters together, those were things that I was conscious of doing and needing to do, to have them discuss what happened, even if it’s just for a moment. There’s only a handful of scenes where they are together.
Credit: Chris Harris
FF: The English hare is so evocative, especially as part of this England-in-the-’70s, Play for Today kind of Gothic storytelling, the M.R. James thing. Was that a mode of storytelling you were already thinking about, even before beginning work on adapting Starve Acre?
DK: Yeah, he’s already been sort of associated with those guys from his previous work. He’s got a sort of reputation for that in the UK, for being that kind of writer, a sort of new Gothic writer really. What he works on combines different elements from a few places. But it also has this, like, oh God, it’s like an old British storytelling, you know? It’s unashamedly so, in a way. But then he’s still doing interesting things with the genre itself. So I was well aware of that. And then, I had conversations with Andrew as well, about the influences. We shared a similar taste in films, shared references. So that was how we started the whole process: talking about M.R. James, Nigel Kneale, people like that.
FF: Is folk horror a useful term for you? Or is it distracting from like, what specifically is going on scene-to-scene?
DK: No, I don’t mind it. I think folk horror is good: I associate it with stories that combine different things, combine the Gothic with the land, like in Andrew’s work. Overall, I wouldn’t say his work is folk horror. I’d say it’s more Gothic writing. But this book in particular is folk horror because it connects to the land. When you’re thinking about writing a script, it’s easier to label it like that. But when you’re making the film, you’re thinking more in terms of Gothic romance, or bigger stories about springtime and rebirth and resurrection… those kinds of ideas.
FF: Speaking of the land, how important was it to find where you would actually film Starve Acre? What was it like finding that land in particular?
DK: Pretty tricky. We looked all around the Yorkshire Dales looking for places that were right. We had a brilliant scout on it though, Mike [Higson]. There were a couple of places I really loved, but they were just impossible to get to. And they were decrepit, falling apart. But then we came across this place that just felt it had all the right elements. The house was in pretty good nick, and the rooms were the right sort of layout. It just had this acre of land in the front that sort of dipped down, into like a bog. And there was nothing growing there, like in the book, and it felt isolated because even when you looked around, you couldn’t see the horizon. There was just something dark and oppressive about it. I felt like we got pretty lucky with that.
FF: It’s so strange. Watching it, it’s both stunning and it’s also terrifying in how it stuns, how it immobilizes you. It’s also shot in sunlight for the most part — this is a real daytime horror film.
DK: Yeah, like a springtime, daytime horror. That’s how I saw it. I love daytime horrors. I still feel like you need to watch this film at night, though, to fully appreciate it. To get that oppressive equality. That’s when I love watching ghost stories, at midnight. In the UK, we have the Christmas ghost story that’s always on at like, 11:00 on Christmas. That for me is the perfect time to watch this kind of story.
FF: It’s also sort of a story about telling stories to children and what effect those stories have. What was it like working with a child actor on the film?
DK: It was a challenge. Arthur was great when he was on form. He had this uncanny ability to just get it right every time, you know, first take. It was creepy. He knew what he was doing. Sometimes I had to bribe him a bit and just talk to him like an adult. That seemed to work as well. But it was tricky. Obviously kids don’t — well, I can’t speak for all kids — but I don’t know if he fully understood what was happening. The concept of death wasn’t something we spoke about. I don’t even know if he understood that that was what was happening to his character. I said he was ill, and that he had fallen asleep and drifted off. That’s how I said it.
Credit: Chris Harris
FF: I mean, that’s sort of beautiful. And maybe that’s the only way to play it anyway? Can you talk a little about when Morfydd and Matt came onto the project? Were they always involved, in your head?
DK: Pretty much from very early on. Morfydd, she was the first person we thought of. I’d just seen Saint Maud and she was looking for new projects because she was about done with her show. I was a little bit worried she wouldn’t want to do it because she’d done a horror movie just before, but she’s a big fan of this kind of story, and loves folklore. That made it very easy for me as well. She got it from the beginning. And Matt’s a professional. I got sort of lucky with him as well — he just finished his big show. He wanted to do something like this, get on set, get on location, get his hands dirty. That was the easiest part of the whole process really, finding them, and working with them both. It being sort of dark and about grief wasn’t something I worried about. Not like on my last film, on Apostasy (2017), which was very difficult, dealing with that grief. But with this film, because it’s located in a folklore, because the trauma is passed down through a myth, it just was easier to talk about and deal with.
FF: How far away do you think religion and folklore are?
DK: That’s a good question. I have a certain perspective on it, because of my religious upbringing. So I do see them very closely linked. A lot of those old British pagan beliefs have sort of become bastardized or demonized by Christianity. So these whole ideas and superstitions around the hare, for example: they used to be positive or ambiguous, you know, in nature. But they always had something to do with love and springtime and coming togetherness. As soon as Christianity came along, suddenly the hares became connected with witches and shape-shifters and demons. It’s all connected to religion in a way, to me.
FF: Do you think this movie has a happy ending?
DK: I think it’s got the only ending it could have. For me, yeah, this is the only way forward for these characters. And there’s also something fatalistic about it. It makes you feel like this had to happen.
FF: I tried to keep track of just how I was feeling as the movie was happening. There’s no revulsion, which I think is normally a reaction horror tries to at least cultivate in a spectator.
DK: No, that’s a good observation. Part of it, the sort of beguiling nature of spirit, of this magic that had been cast on this house and these people, is that it wouldn’t scare them away, it would bring them in, you know? And in my head, that was the concept of the word, the sort of pagan idea of fatalism: that there’s a guiding force that brings people to the place where they need to be. And it does that through various ways, through hypnotism, as a kind of guiding force. I tried to do that mostly with the sound design and the music. But I also talked to the actors about getting them to somehow show this kind of dissonance. Where their characters’ logic would say, “this isn’t right,” but then they couldn’t help themselves.
FF: Yeah, the levels of the film — of performance and environment — are so specific. Can you talk about the texture of the hare itself, the importance of getting it just right?
DK: It was about keeping it as real as possible, to the nature of the English hare. Not to try and exaggerate it in any way or try or make it too ominous. I think they’re sort of beautiful creatures in their kind of lanky, gaunt way, you know? And I don’t think people really appreciate just how unusual they look. People just think of them as rabbits. And so that was my brief to the model makers: just try and keep it as realistic as possible. Just please, you know, use real hair, in a sort of taxidermy way. I just kept begging them to make it look real as possible. I spent weeks working on the eyeball. That was a crucial thing for me: the big sort of golden eye.
