The Severed Sun (2024) is the first feature film of writer and director Dean Puckett, who has previously directed several documentaries and short films – notably, The Sermon (2017) and Satan’s Bite (2017), both of which explore themes similar to The Severed Sun. Filmed on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall, The Severed Sun follows an isolated community led by a religious leader, The Pastor (played brilliantly by Toby Stephens). The group’s way of living and dress at first suggest that this film is set in the past, but there are modern buildings, slag heaps, industrial ruins – and so perhaps this community is surviving in a near and potentially post-apocalyptic moment (something Puckett has confirmed in interviews). It quickly becomes clear that the community is strictly, even violently, hierarchical, with the uncompromising Pastor as unchallenged leader of the community and the men in the community as rulers in the family. The trajectory of the film is driven by the film’s rebellious protagonist (who also happens to be the Pastor’s daughter), Magpie (Emma Appleton, also brilliantly played). For her resistance – and the film begins with her killing her abusive husband – Magpie is ostracized by her community, labeled a witch. She refuses to be a victim, however, fighting back against the familial and group structures that oppress her and others in the community.
Check out the trailer for The Severed Sun:
The Severed Sun is a compelling film, one of the best entries in the folk horror genre I’ve seen recently. It tracks very much with two archetypal folk horror films from the late 1960s and early 1970s, Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971). I would argue, in fact, that in many ways, The Severed Sun is an early twenty-first-century re-imagining of Blood on Satan’s Claw. The central difference between the two accords with the generally political orientation of contemporary films – especially post-Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017). Indeed, while I would characterize Blood on Satan’s Claw as fundamentally anarchic, The Severed Sun has a rather pointed political agenda, not entirely surprising as director Dean Puckett has described his shift from making documentaries to fiction – and how he uses fictional cinema, now, to take up politics in a different form.
The politics of The Severed Sun are encapsulated in words Magpie says in her jail cell about the Beast that stalks the community: “It seems to have a taste for foul men.” Most of the men we see, with the exception of Magpie’s friend and lover, David (Lewis Gribben), are violent and abusive – and they run afoul of both Magpie and the Beast, which from the beginning is indeed allied with her and with other abused women in the community. The pretty much strictly gendered politics of the film – the straight white men and closeted gay man are bad/victimizers and the women plus one ally (David) are good/victimized – seem a little pat, pretty much the only point of critique, albeit qualified, I have for the otherwise compelling film.
In fact, there are several things that complicate the politics of The Severed Sun – and that push the film into more interesting terrain. First of all, as I suggested above, despite being labeled a witch, tied up at a local quarry and pelted by the other community members, and thrown in jail, Magpie refuses to be a victim and consistently fights back: the film begins and ends with that resistance. Second, there are some interesting moments in which the Pastor’s right-hand man, John (Barney Harris), who is a closeted gay man, is tempted to join Magpie and David (the man he loves) in their ‘heretical’ rebellion against the oppressive strictures of the community. And, third, there’s the Beast. The Beast is a brilliant creation – dark, oozing, shooting tendrils through the real natural world yet at the same time a part of the nightmare world; it’s a simple dark shape with white glowing eyes, and it ebbs and flows into our view, sometimes quite visible, sometimes obscured in the background. It is a creature – as Magpie says – that allies itself with the oppressed and victimized in the community, but it is also a palpable creature in its own right, dark and opposed to all human moral and religious structures, a figure of potentially pagan darkness.
The Beast
Dark and terrifying, the Beast of The Severed Sun evokes the dark shape of the pagan deity Behemoth in Blood on Satan’s Claw, although there are differences. Behemoth arises from the earth, quite randomly, after a ploughman finds its claw. Its influence spreads and infects, compelling its followers to kill people for the skin that grows on them, skin that will serve to bring Behemoth to embodied life. Behemoth has no aim but to attain material form and rule over its followers, who engage in anarchic and spontaneous rituals. There’s no gender divide, no gendered oppression, no clear political aim. The Severed Sun’s Beast, on the other hand, does seem to have purpose, appearing first to kill a man who routinely rapes his daughter and, generally, serving the victims of the community’s patriarchal violence. The film suggests he may even have been summoned by Magpie, who may indeed be the ‘witch’ the community accuses her of being. And, in this, The Severed Sun is also very much akin to Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015), in which the dark deity (embodied as Black Phillip) is allied with a powerful group of marginalized witches, living in the forest and living out women’s autonomy and resistance to oppression.
The tendrils of the Beast
If Behemoth in Blood on Satan’s Claw came from the earth, ploughed up from the dirt, The Severed Sun’s Beast is also of the earth – of the landscape – enveloping the community. The Beast is dirt black, and several shots show black tendrils snaking around the trees and vegetation, implying that its power is not confined to its most visible form. The earth comes up rather cryptically several times in the film. In the one scene that hints most at some kind of eco-apocalypse, John is urging David not to abandon their community because “this place is our raft in a fallen world . . .” David picks up the lines, as if he’s heard them many times before – “because the river of moral decay ran dry. Just like the black and the ground, and nature had its revenge, and God spoke to us who could hear.” When David and John hug, David marks John with a smudge of dirt, and when John later asks Magpie what they did to him, she says that it’s “something in the earth – the mud.” The Beast’s blackness, its earthly essence, literally rubs off on its followers, and by the end of the film, Magpie is covered in it.
John and David in front of slag heaps and by a ruined building
In an oblique reference to another folk horror film, the blackness of the earth that the Beast represents evokes Lee Haven Jones’s Welsh film, The Feast (2021), in which a woman emerges from the Earth, disturbed by drilling, to exact her revenge on those who interrupted her sleep, encroached on her land. Like The Severed Sun’s Beast and its adherents, her human incarnation – Cadi (Annes Elwy) – leaves streaks of dark earth on the surfaces she touches. The Severed Sun is thus also an oblique ecohorror film (so often aligned with folk horror).
With a great script, breathtaking cinematography and stellar performances by all the actors, Puckett’s The Severed Sun is an exceptional folk horror film, one that taps into the anarchic energy of late 1960s and 1970s folk horror while at the same time tying it – loosely – to the sharper politics (of gender, sex and ecology) that have defined more recent folk horror fare.
The Severed Sun can be rented or purchased on most digital platforms.
Check out the two interviews with Dean Puckett I reference here – both great:
Without Your Head Podcast, Interview with Dean Puckett, May 16, 2025;
Made in England Podcast, Interview with Dean Puckett, The Blood on Satan’s Claw, May 13, 2025.
