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wake wood

Without Name
Posted on March 16, 2019

7 Exceptional Recent Irish Horror Films Ranked

Dawn Keetley

Irish horror film has definitely been undergoing a renaissance recently and so, for this St. Patrick’s Day weekend, I’ve created a list of the best recent Irish horror, ranked. They are all excellent, though. Click on the “Read more” link to get the full review and the trailer.

The Hallow

Bojana Novakovic as besieged mother in The Hallow

  1. The Hallow (Corin Hardy, 2015). Irish folk horror film, The Hallow follows a couple, Adam and Claire Hitchens (Joseph Mawle and Bojana Novakovic), along with their baby, Finn, who go to stay in a house deep in the Irish forest, which has just been sold for development. They discover there is a frightening truth to local folklore about “the hallow”—fairies and other supernatural creatures who want humans to stay out of their woods. Read more.

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Posted on May 29, 2016

The Other Side of the Door (2016) and Wake Wood (2009): Folk Horror and Grief

Dawn Keetley

DEFYING DEATH IN THE HORROR FILM: Since at least Pet Sematary (1989), we’ve known it’s not a good idea to try to bring loved ones back from the dead. Indeed, this theme goes back still further. What was Frankenstein (1931), in the end, if not a warning about what happens when you raise the dead? But if horror is at bottom about the inevitability of death, it’s also about our efforts to defy that inevitability—efforts that are at the same time heroic and dangerously hubristic. Both The Other Side of the Door and Wake Wood demonstrate this in terrifying fashion.

The release last week of The Other Side of the Door (2016), directed by Johannes Roberts, written by Roberts and Ernest Riera, and starring Sarah Wayne Callies (The Walking Dead, Colony) and Jeremy Sista (Six Feet Under, The Returned), is a dramatic manifestation of the fact that we’ll never get over (or around) the implacability of death.

Indeed, we can see the persistence of the human desire to overcome death in the fact that The Other Side of the Door is strikingly similar to another relatively recent Irish folk horror film—Wake Wood (2009), which was directed by Arthur Keating and stars Aidan Gillen (Game of Thrones), Eva Birthistle (The Children), and Timothy Spall (Harry Potter, Mr. Turner). Both films are worth watching, both in and of themselves and also because of what their similarities say about an enduring theme of horror. Read more

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