Filmhuis Den Haag opens October with a new programme in which folk horror takes centre stage.
A strand called Gather ‘Round Folks traces the development of the genre, from centuries-old legends and rural nightmares to the forms folk horror takes today.
Remote places often play an important part in these films.
That is clear in The Wicker Man (1973), in which police sergeant Neil Howie travels to the Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a girl.
His search leads him in the end to a dark ritual with gruesome consequences.
Lamb (2021) is also set in an out-of-the-way place.
On a farm in the Icelandic countryside, María and Ingvar discover a creature that is part human and part animal, and they raise it as their own child.
Their happiness is disturbed by the arrival of someone from Ingvar’s past.
October premieres
Alongside the folk horror strand, several premieres run through the month.
Digger follows the most powerful man in the world as he makes a final attempt to save the world before it is destroyed by a disaster he caused himself.
In Toutes Directions, Sjef, a 71-year-old taxi driver from Limburg, loses his job and takes the wrong turn for the first time in his life.
The Cycle of Love is based on a true story.
PK, from India, falls in love with Lotta, from Sweden, in 1975, and cycles more than 10,000 kilometres to reach her.
It is a film about love, perseverance and human kindness.
In Mémoire de fille, Annie Ernaux returns to the summer of 1958 and to an experience from her seventeenth year that would follow her for decades afterwards.
In Naza, film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor examine how systems, technology and decision-making make the Israeli bombardment of Gaza possible.
Downtown
Downtown follows three young friends who throw themselves into Amsterdam’s hedonistic nightlife, until Aids arrives and casts a shadow over their lives.
Roos Meijer, head of marketing and communication at Filmhuis Den Haag, sees parallels between the Aids epidemic and the coronavirus pandemic.
“In the Amsterdam of the 1980s the LGBTQ+ community seems to find the freedom to be itself at last, until the Aids epidemic brutally disrupts that freedom,” she said.
She added that director Michiel van Erp “weaves past and present together and exposes unexpected parallels between the Aids epidemic and the covid pandemic, showing how the fear, uncertainty and incomprehension that marked both eras carry through into relationships and into the way affected communities are seen”.
If a dark screening room sounds like the right way to sit out a wet afternoon, there are plenty of other things to do indoors in this city.
