Hellbender: Wolves And Sheep

A few months ago, I wrote up a film called The Deeper You Dig - I liked it quite a bit, and was very pleasantly surprised at what the filmmakers were able to achieve on a very small budget. It was definitely a low-budget indie horror film, but it didn’t look cheap - the cinematography and editing were excellent, and it had a distinct, surreal vision. I was also really impressed because it was almost entirely the work of three people - a mother/father team and one of their two daughters. They had some help with special effects and publicity, but the family produced it, acted in it, wrote it, shot it, edited it, and scored it. That’s not something you see every day and that it worked as well as it did is deeply impressive to me, and meant I was going to keep an eye out for anything else they did.

And that brings me to Hellbender, their most recent film. It’s a more ambitious and expansive film than The Deeper You Dig, and shares some of that film’s weaknesses, but more importantly, it shares all of its strengths, and the latter far outweigh the former. It’s a slow-burn coming-of-age story that, ever so gradually, reveals a very dark heart.

It opens in the woods, a group of people in period clothing gathered around a hooded figure strung up in a tree. It looks, for all intents and purposes, like a lynching. Sure enough, the figure drops, gurgles, twitches…and doesn’t die. A woman takes out an old pistol and starts firing into the body, over and over again. It eventually works, at which point the hooded figure bursts into flames and rockets, screaming, into the sky.

A few centuries later, we’re introduced to a young woman named Izzy, and her mother. They live on their own way up in the mountains, forage for a vegetarian diet, and play music together. Izzy is homeschooled, she likes to hike, and swim, and play drums, and draw. Izzy’s mother goes into town to get stuff they need, but Izzy can’t go with her. She’s sick - she’s got some kind of immune disorder.

Or, at least, that’s what her mother has told her.

The setup is pretty simple - Izzy’s starting to get restless, wondering why she and her mom don’t share their music with other people or play live, why she can’t leave the property, why she can’t have friends. Her mom keeps saying she’s sick, but Izzy doesn’t feel sick, and it’s pretty clear that they aren’t like other families in other ways as well. Like how her mother is the spitting image of the one with the pistol from the prologue, and how her mother can use twigs, berries, and blood to see where Izzy is as she wanders through the woods. It’s clear that her mother isn’t telling her the whole truth. It’s not as tense as The Deeper You Dig - it doesn’t have the same cat-and-mouse sense to it. Instead it trades in a very slow burn - maybe too slow at times, though it does pay off well - that for a good portion of its running time is less full-on horror and more a dark character study about a mother who is bound and determined to keep her daughter safe as she’s  beginning to come into her own and is starting to wonder why her life is so limited, wondering what else is out there in the world. It’s got a lot of The Deeper You Dig’s thematic concerns, though. It’s about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, the mother is well-versed in magic and ritual, the daughter is very much her own person - unafraid of the world and more than a little headstrong - and all of these together inform their relationship in ways that tell a dramatic story through the language of horror films.

Like its predecessor, it’s very strong visually. This is a much more rural film, and it takes full advantage of the vast sweep of the Catskills, placing tiny figures in the middle of oceans of trees, under looming skies. Interiors make great use of light and shadow, and the shot composition is again thoughtful, inventive, and focused. It’s also got the same sense of evocative surrealism, though the contrast is less dramatic here because this is a more explicitly supernatural story. Regardless, it’s striking all the same, from small details in the waking world to full-on visions that remind me of nothing so much as Ken Russell at his most hallucinatory or the weirder moments in In The Earth, making use of effects work that runs the gamut from tasteful to berserk, but never cheap-looking. Again, I’ve seen movies made by big studios that don’t look this good or have such a singular vision. The acting and dialogue is still a little stiff, but it’s placed in such a vivid visual context that, like The Deeper You Dig, it’s easy to forgive. It’s working with a much bigger cast, more locations, and a broader visual palette, and its reach rarely exceeds its grasp in that respect. Like its predecessor, it does err a little on the slow and deliberate side, but strange little bits of business are peppered throughout so it doesn’t feel so much like it’s spinning its wheels. Acts are punctuated by Izzy and her mother playing music, running the gamut from gothy to playful to raging, and even though it's just them playing for each other and themselves, they get fully made up and costumed for it, which lands just strangely enough to add to what already feels off-kiler on its own. It does sometimes feel a little inert, like you know what you’re supposed to take away from a scene but it doesn’t have the impact you’d expect, but it more than comes good in the end, which builds real dread as you start to understand exactly what’s happening, the implications of things you saw earlier, landing on an absolute “oh, fuck” moment that inverts a friendly interaction from the beginning of the film in a way that’s absolutely chilling.

In a lot of ways it’s a film about discovery, and legacy, and the ambition of youth. This isn’t exclusively (or even usually) the realm of horror films, but here it ultimately pays off in the language of nightmares. It’s not really a folk horror film, but its take on witchcraft owes a lot to folk horror and pagan beliefs in general, and it’s central to the film’s conceit. The magic is heavily rooted in nature, all moss and berries and mushrooms and twigs and blood. It’s a earthy film, I think, a film that is comfortable with blood and death as part of the cycle of existence, one that’s almost celebratory about things that most horror films use for shock value. It’s all nature, the film says, it all comes from the earth, from the body, from life and death, It’s a cycle as inevitable as the seasons, or the relationship between wolves and sheep. Adolescence is a time of self-discovery, a time to find out who and what you really are, whether others want you to be that or not. It’s not perfect, but it’s got far, far more going for it than yet another zombie film or demonic possession film or slasher movie. It’s entirely its own thing and all the better for it.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon