I was a big fan of folk horror before it became Folk Horror, back when the term didn’t exist – ‘rural horror’ was what some of us called it – but we might have made a loose connection between effectively unrelated films that dealt with isolated communities, witchcraft, occultism, tradition, pagan belief and the rest. There was a vague kinship between a film like Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man, but not one that you would necessarily consciously think about. You could just as easily connect the films to other, decidedly non-Folk Horror movies of the era – The Wicker Man fits alongside The Brotherhood of the Bell, All the President’s Men and The Parallax View as a paranoid 1970s conspiracy film, while Blood on Satan’s Claw was part of the ‘kids gone bad’ film strand that was influenced by Manson, religious cults and the dissolution of the traditional family unit.
Folk horror seemed a pretty nebulous concept that had stories that could take in ideas about old religions, sinister isolated communities, the class divisions between the modern cities and small, rural villages, ancient legends, the fascination with cryptozoology as well as witchcraft and the occult. When you think of it like that, there’s precious little horror that isn’t folk horror – it is everything from H.P. Lovecraft to Day of the Animals and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Vampires, werewolves, demonic possession, suburban witch cults, Jaws and the Loch Ness Monster – it’s all effectively folk horror when you sit and think about it. In fact, horror as a genre is almost entirely based around mythology – including urban myths about knife-wielding, hook-handed killers – and legend. Folk horror is a redundant idea when you think about it.
But we love subgenres and there is profit to be made from narrowing everything into specifics, even when you have to tie yourself in knots deciding what does or doesn’t qualify. Fair enough – if people want to make connections between unconnected films or find a place for the movies that sat uncomfortably outside the gothic, the slasher, the monster movie and so on, then I’m all for that. If it brings attention to films that had previously been unfairly overlooked because no one knew what category they belonged to, all the better.
The problem is that once you set up a sub-genre with a set of definitions, it all starts to become a bit contrived and restrictive. Folk Horror – as opposed to folk horror – is very popular right now and so a lot of people are making films that are determinedly Folk Horror with what feels like a little checklist of ingredients. Since becoming a genre, Folk Horror has become as generic and narrow as the 1980s slasher film. Worse, it has become the genre of choice for horror’s pretentious and self-important filmmakers, the sort who embrace culturally elitist terms like ‘intelligent horror’ and ‘elevated horror’ as a way of standing above the rest of the genre while often delivering inferior and empty product. And so we come to All You Need is Death.
All You Need is Death is announced in the credits as ‘a digital cinema package’ by Paul Duane and you know, just fuck right off with that. Yes, DCP might be more technically accurate than ‘film’ but it also smacks of pretension (and, in fact, is inaccurate as DCP is a theatrical presentation method, so it is like an old movie calling itself ‘a 35mm print’). With credits that roll backwards and a title that is a lot clumsier and less witty than I suspect all involved believed it to be, it all smacks of someone trying a bit too hard. That might be fair enough if the film itself matched that level of ambition. But inevitably, All You Need is Death is a cack-handed bag of cliches and ideas that other filmmakers have done more effectively.
In fairness, the initial concept is a fascinating one – a young couple are touring Ireland in search of lost Irish folk songs when they hear of a woman who knows the most secretive of them all – a song sung in a language from the times before Irish, handed down orally from generation to generation. It is forbidden for the song to be recorded or for men to hear it – so you can imagine what happens next. The song unleashes a family curse into the wider world, as dark feminine spirits rise up to take revenge. This has the potential to be a creepy study of ancient belief and magic, you might think. Sadly, the film doesn’t live up to that potential.
The first half of All You Need is Death, where all this narrative takes place, feels like a clumsy reading of an interesting idea, full of half-developed story strands that go nowhere and stilted performances. The biggest offender in the latter is Charlie Maher as Aleks, whose character is a Russian refugee (did we tell you that the film takes place in the 1980s? Well, of course it does) and so is saddled with the most unconvincing accent since the days of Dick Van Dyke. Why is he Russian? Who can say? Certainly not the film, which doesn’t explore this plot strand at all. Next to him, Simone Collins as folk singer/student researcher is simply flat, while Catherine Siggins does her best as the mysteriously villainous Agnes but is stuck with a character whose villainy is so mysterious that it might better be described as undeveloped.
All You Need is Death is full of these dead ends. It vaguely explores The Troubles (note that it takes place in the Irish Republic, not Northern Ireland) and then lets that fizzle out. We’re introduced to witchy old woman Rita Concannon (Olwen Fouéré given the film’s best performance by far) as she hides in a cupboard, from where she prefers to conduct her business we are told; but then she immediately emerges and so that moment of eccentricity goes nowhere. The movie begins as though it is a found-footage film with a character who only pops up a couple of times to spew exposition but is hardly significant enough to have his police interview appear as the opening scene. And on it goes.
The second half of the film is more annoying, if only because it becomes increasingly clear that the ideas floated in the first half are not going to go anywhere. The movie seems unable to develop the idea of the cursed song in any meaningful way and so focuses on more generic possession themes, never allowing any of the characters to develop enough personality for us to care what is happening to them. It all leads to an ending that is a laughably damp squib.
All You Need is Death feels like a lot of random ideas – many of which we have already seen in other, better films from Suspiria to The Lords of Salem and Possession – that are thrown in without any idea as to how to combine them into a whole. It doesn’t feel like a film that has been made by someone who understands the horror genre – generic ideas are presented as though they are the height of originality and so many plot points are half-developed that the whole thing begins to feel like a cynical opportunist attempt to cash-in on a sub-genre that – unusually for the horror film – has both mainstream critical and funding body approval. There is nothing in this film that suggests Duane is a fan of the genre,. Not that that is essential – some of the best horror films have been made by people who have no interest in the genre. But those filmmakers at least seemed to have an innate understanding of what makes it work, while this film just feels like a series of cliches that never come together as a whole.
There are still interesting, original Folk Horror ideas being explored by filmmakers who understand and love the genre, like Sean Hogan’s To Fire You Come at Last, but it is increasingly becoming dominated by generic, opportunist nonsense. All You Need is Death isn’t the worst example by any means, though it is perhaps the most frustrating because I can see the possibilities that it had – there is a great short film in this story, maybe even a great feature in the hands of someone more focused. As it stands though, the film is a disappointing and depressing failure.
DAVID FLINT
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