Three Films Make A Post: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Witches’ Well (2024): A successful horror writer (writer/director/producer/editor/cinematographer Amanda K. Morales) on a research trip to Edinburgh encounters a stalker faking supernatural phenomena, and perhaps something supernatural as well.

This short and to the point piece of POV horror by (nearly) one woman band Morales is a pretty neat piece of work that tells a simple but not too simple story efficiently, doesn’t overstay its welcome with its one hour runtime and even gets a couple of decent stabs at the nature of belief in.

An Unknown Encounter: A True Account of the San Pedro Haunting (1997): This “documentary” about an actual paranormal case as directed by Barry Conrad, one of the men who concocted (or experienced, if you’re the eternal optimist) it, is a glorious mix of bullshit, genuinely creepy nonsense, bad science, bad faith, the kind of “actual footage” that manages never to film anything supernatural occurring because (what a surprise) nobody ever points the camera in the right direction at the right time, and perfectly cheesy “recreations” of everything these guys didn’t manage to capture on film (which is basically everything supernatural that couldn’t be easily faked).

While I believe not a single word of it – and abhor the obsession with orbs, the last resort of the desperate paranormal bullshitter – the whole thing is great fun when taken as the fiction it is. Bonus points for being a wonderful time capsule of the unsexy 90s I remember from my teenage years and featuring some excellently overblown narration and presentation by Ferdy Mayne.

The Widow (2020): Clearly heavily inspired by elements of my beloved Blair Witch Project, though only intermittently using POV horror elements, this Russian production by Ivan Minin is a perfectly fine little horror movie that features some impressive Russian forests right out of the most gothic of folk tales, and all the greatest hits of lost in the woods stalked by a witch horror, shot moodily and paced well enough for a fun evening of people dying in various somewhat horrible ways. There are even some moments here that go a bit further – shots of people whose faces shaded by hoods may not exist, haystacks randomly stacked up in the forest for no reason beyond the folkloric (the best reason) – these are the sorts of things I watch random cheap horror for.