Arts & Culture
Review: Hokum
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The real horror movie, writes Meg Elison, is the one you grew up in.
The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/folk-horror)
“If you’re drawn to folkloric density, ancestral memory, visceral horror that rejects comfort, or animist logic where houses and bodies blur,” writes Cosette Paneque in her review of Irene Solà’s novel, “this has power. But know what you’re walking into.”
As the sage Lil Wayne once said, there are two ways to make art: be good or be good at it. A film does not have to be innovative or even have anything new to say for audiences to respond. This film is neither good nor good at it. I didn’t want to sing along, so here I am to heckle.
There are those who say a witch is born and others who insist a witch is made. This film suggests a third option: that witchcraft can come upon a person as unbidden and inevitable as puberty, and as impossible to understand.
Starve Acre is domestic horror only in the sense that Britain itself is the domicile. Dig just a few inches into the soil and a riot of irrational myth and impossible happenings is always just below this family’s feet.