Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 10, 2006, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Maybe they should just call The Woods a remake of Suspiria; that might encourage a studio to actually put the movie into wide release, considering how popular horror reduxes are these days. And it would be nice if, in an era when dross like the revamped When a Stranger Calls is the kind of thing the majors are selling to the newly discovered audience of young female horror fans, a movie like The Woods (which has been sitting on the shelf since being filmed three years ago for the now-defunct United Artists) that approaches teen girl-centric frights with actual artistry could have a chance in the theatrical marketplace. Certainly, the movie’s well-received North American premiere at this year’s Fantasia festival demonstrates that an audience will respond positively to it.
And yes, the movie does bear a few basic similarities to Dario Argento’s 1977 classic, being set in a girls’ school where witchcraft seems to be afoot and one newcomer sets out to uncover the mystery. Director Lucky McKee has acknowledged Argento as an influence on The Woods, but there are moments where he and cinematographer John R. Leonetti seem to be taking their cues more from the work of DP Sergio Salvati for fellow Italian shock-maestro Lucio Fulci. In several shots, small pools of light isolate pockets of a widescreen frame otherwise suffused in darkness; this is one of those laudable horror films that makes night truly look like night, dark and threatening instead of lit up with blue “moonlight.”
McKee does interesting things with color as well; when heroine Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner) first arrives at the school located in the middle of dense forest, the red of her hair and the green of her jacket stand out against an environment in which the hues have otherwise been desaturated. It’s an appropriate visual scheme for this setting, as the all-girl student body lives under the strict control of Ms. Traverse (Patricia Clarkson) and her chilly staff of middle-aged, also all-female teachers. The place is, of course, haunted by more than the threat of severe discipline; there’s something unnatural out in the trees, which Heather is sensitive to right away and which some of her classmates tell her is related to an incident involving three witchy girls who emerged from the woods many years before.
More will not be said here about ensuing plot developments and Heather’s role in them, in part because some elements of these are a bit murky; there are moments when you can’t see the forest of the storyline for the lack of trees. (It’s hard to tell whether the narrative shortcutting is a factor of David Ross’ otherwise densely imagined script or studio cutting.) In any case, this is a movie that makes its strongest impression through the style in which it is told, and not just in the way McKee conjures up visual frights. He also, as he previous demonstrated in May and Masters of Horror’s Sick Girl, is a horror director who seems especially attuned to the psychological world of young women, and isn’t just focusing on them for demographic reasons. The de rigueur establishing shot of the school’s packed cafeteria breathes with an honest life you don’t often find in teen pix, and while the key supporting characters include the time-honored shy, put-upon girl the heroine befriends and the blonde bitch who torments her, the actresses (Lauren Birkell and Ivana Shein, respectively), McKee and Ross give the characterizations touches of true humanity and don’t take them in directions you’d necessarily expect.
At the center of it all is a solidly affecting performance by Bruckner, whose Heather is as distinctive as her part in last year’s Venom (don’t ask me to remember her character name there) was generic. Clarkson makes an efficiently chilly impression as her nemesis, and among Ms. Traverse’s right-hand women, Marcia Bennett (also seen in Sick Girl) has a number of funny, twitchy moments. Most notable for horror fans is the presence of Bruce Campbell in a rare dead-straight role as Heather’s father. In this femme-centric story, it’s not surprising to find him initially dominated by Heather’s monstrous mother, but he gets a chance to come into his own later in the story, in ways that hark back a bit to his Evil Dead days without upsetting the story’s focus, or appearing too contemporary for the movie’s 1965 setting (which allows McKee to not only eschew issues of modern technology influencing the proceedings, but lends them a slight otherworldly quality and gives the director the chance to make evocative use of Lesley Gore songs on the soundtrack).
If not all is entirely made clear by the climactic sequences, they do allow the previously suggestive film to cut loose with some very impressive living-vegetation FX that, like what has come before, are all the more effective for being drenched in shadows, along with brutally persuasive special makeup work supervised by Adrien Morot. It’s the kind of stuff that would certainly get a rise out of a modern youth audience, and here’s hoping that an adventurous distributor gives The Woods that chance. It’s kinda ironic that this movie forced M. Night Shyamalan and co. to rechristen their project The Village, and yet that movie received wide theatrical play two years ago while this easily superior one still has yet to receive its shot.
