The Devil’s Bath (2024)
Des Teufels Bad
****/****
starring Anja Plaschg, David Scheid, Maria Hofstätter
written and directed by Veronika Franz, Severin Fiala
by Walter Chaw Did it start with Robert Eggers’s The Witch, or was it earlier? I’m not speaking of origins–indeed, the origins of folk horror are as old and as long as the origins of Man. No, I’m wondering about when it became an annual thing to release these little folk-horror movie masterpieces. Films that, for the most part, are relegated to a few niche festivals and then banished to the Neverwhere of streaming, entombed for eventual discovery by a devoted audience that will pass them around like secrets scrawled on a parchment browned and creased from the handling. I’m talking about movies like 2017’s A Dark Song and Hagazussa, 2018’s The Wind, and 2019’s Saint Maud (although most would pick Midsommar for that year’s folk-horror contribution). In 2020, we had the brutal The Dark and the Wicked, but there was also Oz Perkins’s Gretel & Hansel and David Prior’s cult-ready The Empty Man. 2021 gave us Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and the Adams Family’s Hellbender, 2022 brought You Won’t Be Alone and Nightsiren, and last year there was Demian Rugna’s When Evil Lurks. Has it always been going on like this–as an anniversary or biannual event, something so many of these films are structured around–without my noticing? And doesn’t it make sense that we use our cave painting and darkest night, our medium of mythologizing and memorial, to put milestones on our terror? Doesn’t it?
by Walter Chaw