The Field Guide to Evil (2018)

As we regular viewers of things like them know, horror anthologies are often a bit of a mixed bag, never more so than when they operate like The Field Guide to Evil does and bring together thematically linked short features from different directors. In The Field Guide’s case, these directors are also from different countries and apparently found themselves tasked with making movies based on the ghosts and ghoulies of local folklore, so the tonal connection is often loose to non-existent.

That’s not much of a problem for me, for a collection of eight interesting short films isn’t anything to sneer at, and giving money to filmmakers that wouldn’t necessarily make shorts anymore is a thing to praise. Stylistically, most of the segments come down on the more artsy side of genre filmmaking, which isn’t much of a surprise given the involvement of directors like Peter Strickland (of Berberian Sound Studio fame), Agnieszka Smoczynska (The Lure), or Can Evrenol (Baskin). These are not the kind of directors you go to when you want to make a bro horror anthology in the spirit of the VHS films. I’m quite happy with that, though I have to admit this does result in a film that’s very uneven in tone and style, which may be weakness to some viewers but a strength to others.

My personal favourites are the first tale, “Die Trud”, as directed by Austrian filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, that recommends itself as a fantastic example of how to do the supernatural as metaphor right, while also hitting my personal sweet spot by being in mood and style a lot like an Austrian version of The Witch, creating a very deft picture of a specific time and place, as well as containing a pretty great looking monster.

Then there’s Can Evrenol’s “Al Karisi” that shares the same nightmarish quality that made his feature Baskin so impressive, expressing a young woman’s anxiety about pregnancy, child rearing, loneliness and loss of identity via a goat-based demon that is as bizarre as it is disturbing.There are, by the way, quite a few goats in the film.

Equally nightmarish is Smoczynska’s “The Kindler and the Virgin”, that takes the more unappetizing elements of a traditional folk tale, puts them into a drily funny (but not comedic) short film, adds some acerbic social commentary and some appropriate imagery and is over so quickly I found myself a bit stunned by it all.

Also lovely in a completely different way is Strickland’s entry “The Cobbler’s Lot”, which takes the most fucked-up version of a traditional fairy-tale (and those can get pretty messed-up if you read beyond children’s books), adds more foot fetishism, shoes made out of human skin and sexuality expressed through dance, and then films it in a mock silent-movie style (with sound effects). It’s the sort of thing that will probably have some people mumbling something about pretentiousness, but to me, style and content fit together here rather more comfortably than I would have expected and are certainly doing right by the Weirdness of folklore and fairy tales.


I didn’t connect as well with the other short films in here – and frankly have no idea what was going on in Yannis Veslemes’s “Whatever Happened to Panagas the Pagan?” – but that’s probably more on account of personal taste than them being objectively weaker, so I found myself still rather satisfied with the film as a whole. It is, to emphasize it again, really meant for people who enjoy art house horror, so just don’t go in expecting something more mainstream in its sensibilities.

In short: Berberian Sound Studio (2012)

I find two types of films the most difficult to write about. The first one are films so mediocre in all aspects they leave me with the feeling they don't exist as anything else than as artefacts created to fill otherwise empty spots in DVD stores or TV schedules; these movies aren't painful to not write about.

The second type, on the other hand, are films like Peter Strickland's utterly brilliant Berberian Sound Studio that leave me a little exhausted by their sheer aesthetic perfection. Here, the only way to write appropriately about a film is to describe every noise on the soundtrack, every edit, every movement on screen in the most meticulous detail possible. Proceeding thusly, one does of course only produce a long, tedious piece that could never even hope to explain or reproduce the aesthetic richness of the experience of actually watching the movie. So that's not a thing to do either.

Therefore, the only out left - apart from ignoring a film much too wonderful to ignore - for me is to pretend being a professional movie critic. That song goes a little something like this:  "Berberian Sound Studio - Brilliant acting, brilliant soundtrack, brilliant sound design, brilliant direction. 10 out of 10! Watch if you have even the slightest bit of love for Italian genre movies of the 70s, hauntology, films that don't slavishly adhere to the most simple narrative structures, intelligent weirdness, critique for genre tendencies that still loves the genre it critiques or just plain great cinema!"

Gosh, I sound just like Entertainment Weekly if they'd let people with actual taste write for them.

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