Funereal Plots

Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

Lord of Misrule

Director – William Brent Bell

Screenplay Tom De Ville

Rebecca Holland (Tuppence Middleton) is the new vicar in a small, quaint English hamlet, where she lives with her husband Henry (Matt Stokoe, underutilized) and their 10-year-old daughter, Grace. Grace has been selected by the village to be the Harvest Angel at the Harvest Festival, which, if you know anything about folk horror, means she’ll disappear. Thankfully, this obviously inevitable plot point is dispensed with almost immediately. At the festival, Jocelyn Abney (The Witch’s Ralph Ineson, who elevates any piece in which he appears), costumed as the titular Lord, and played with suitable menace by, grapples with a man in the costume of a spirit named Gallowgog. The latter represents a threat to the harvest—the threat of blight—who must be appeased with…gifts.

You see where this is going.

This movie grabs the viewer by the lapels and screams I AM FOLK HORROR—woodcuts, odd drawings, eerie puppets, handmade masks, and blood-tainted eggs fill the screen. Villagers (typically charming, odd, doting, folksy) try to soothe the terrified mother, yet at the same time it’s evident that the whole town is in on the daughter’s disappearance, and that their feelings toward Gallowgog are perhaps less hostile than it seems at the outset.

Through the first half of the movie, the by-the-numbers folk horror accoutrements and plot, combined with an underwritten lead character, are less than promising, and not at all compelling. Sometimes it’s just baffling. Characters burst into laughter for no apparent reason. Much seems to be made of a child’s sneeze, which turns out to be meaningless, just a mechanism for a scene change. And here and there the camera, accompanied by a musical sting, swings meaningfully to an open door or a corner of a chicken coop—but we can’t tell what we’re supposed to be looking at, as it’s far away or swathed in shadows, and the scene ends.

But something happens as the plot progresses, as the atmosphere thickens, as we see a little more of Joceyln Abney’s backstory, as a classmate of Grace’s reveals a room hidden under the floor of the school—we begin to find ourselves invested, to see what exactly has become of Grace, to determine the exact relationship of the villagers to Gallowgog, and to the Abrahamic God that Vicar Rebecca Holland worships there in vain.

The resolution, alas, proves somewhat disappointing, a little dubious; it will likely send the viewer—as it did me—to one of those Reddit threads where someone asks “can someone please explain the ending to me?”

Also lacking are the creature effects when the “real” Gallowgog is revealed. Frankly, the costume from the Harvest Festival was more frightening.

Altogether, Lord of Misrule is worth watching, especially for the folk horror aficionado seeking creepy visuals and atmosphere, but doesn’t require too much in the way of plot or intrigue. It’s a notch or two better than the recently released misfire Unwelcome, despite its not being able to reach the heights of its forebears, such as (obviously) The Wicker Man (1973) or even more recent gems like Midsommar and Kill List. As a fan, and sometimes a practitioner, of folk horror fiction, I just wanted more.