Folk horror has enjoyed a revival of popularity in recent years as evidenced by the release of two impressive Blu-ray box sets from Severin Films All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Volumes 1 & 2 as well as such theatrical releases as Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), Kate Dolan’s You Are Not My Mother (2021) and Danny & Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me (2022). Starve Acre (2023), based on a 2019 novel by British author Andrew Michael Hurley, definitely falls into this category but, more importantly, it harkens back to the great folk horror flicks of the seventies like The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973). In fact, it even takes place during that time period. The ominous rural setting and gloomy atmosphere also set it apart from anything taking place in the 21st century and creates a mounting sense of dread that gets under your skin.
The main characters are a married couple, Richard (Matt Smith) and Juliette (Morfydd Clark), and their young son Owen (Arthur Shaw). Richard works as an archaeology professor at a local college in rural Yorkshire while Juliette manages the household but something seems a bit off with this trio. The relationship between husband and wife is unusually tense and their son begins to exhibit disturbing behavior. The fact that they returned from the city to live on Richard’s family farm was supposed to give them all a fresh start but the pastoral setting seems to bring out the worst in everyone. Richard is cranky and aloof with his work associates, Juliette is ill at ease in this isolated place and Owen hears strange whistling tunes in his head.
Events quickly take a dark turn at a country fair where Owen inexplicably blinds a horse with a sharp stick (which echoes Peter Shaffer’s Equus) but seems to have no awareness of his actions. He is given an EEG testing and studied for brain abnormality but Richard suspects that his son is spellbound by local folklore involving an evil spirit named Jack Grey. Gordon (Sean Gilder), an old family friend and neighbor, may be responsible for filling Owen’s head with these tales but he denies it.
Soon Juliette begins experiencing strange visions on the farm and, during one of her trances, Owen collapses and must be rushed to the hospital. He dies from an asthma attack and his parents are emotionally devastated. Yet the tragedy seems to drive them further apart with Richard spending more time rummaging through his father’s notebooks which depict a sacrificial tree fed by the blood of a man, woman and child. It is also revealed that Richard’s father was cruel and abusive to his son which explains why Richard was determined to give Owen the happy childhood he never had.
Meanwhile Juliette deals with her grief by inviting her sister Harrie (Erin Richards) to live with them temporarily for emotional support. Through Gordon’s local connections, Mrs. Forde (Melanie Kilburn), a local psychic, pays a visit and performs a séance to help Juliette find closure over Owen’s death. But the session only encourages Juliette to believe Owen’s spirit is still hovering around them.
Events take a more unsettling turn when Richard begins excavating an area of his pasture in hopes of finding the roots of an ancient oak tree depicted in his father’s drawings. When he finds the bones of a large hare, he reassembles it as a skeleton and it soon begins to grow flesh and come back to life as a living creature. When Juliette learns of this, her response isn’t one of alarm but fascination and the strange phenomenon helps reunite the despairing couple. They eventually release the hare back into the forest and appear reunited as a couple but the road ahead quickly descends into dark, uncharted territory.
Starve Acre is a slow-burn thriller that takes its time transitioning into the unexplainable but rest assured that everything goes completely bonkers in the last ten minutes. This is not the kind of horror film that is loaded with mechanical jump scares and manipulative sound effects. It is played completely straight without any tongue in cheek humor or campy affectations. Think of it as more of a doom laden character study about the effects of grief and the power of pagan rituals and you have a good idea of what to expect. It is also necessary to completely suspend disbelief when both Richard and Juliette begin making peculiar decisions based on their distressed psychological states. Otherwise, you’ll have a hard time buying into the entire shebang.
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo, Starve Acre trafficks in the familiar tropes of the best folk horror films but it wouldn’t work as well without the committed performances of the main players, especially Matt Smith (Prince Targaryen in the HBO series House of the Dragon) and Morfydd Clark (the title character in 2019’s Saint Maud) as the traumatized parents. Two of the more sensible characters, Eric Richards as Juliette’s sister and Robert Emms as Steven, Richard’s work colleague, help ground the film in a believable reality despite the craziness around them. Yet, we know this will not end well for those who do not embrace the edicts of a pagan cult.
You can see the influence of other classic horror films throughout Starve Acre. Owen’s disturbing behavior invokes memories of Regan’s possession in The Exorcist (1973). The resurrected body of the dead hare recalls Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1989). The seemingly benign involvement of Gordon and Mrs. Forde recall the elderly next door neighbors, Minnie and Roman Castevet, in Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Richard’s obsession with digging up bones in his yard while ignoring his wife reminds me of Jack Torrance’s slide into madness in The Shining (1980). [Spoiler alert] And one of the closing shots of the film – Juliette letting the diabolical hare suckle her tit – seems like a homage to Valdimar Johannsson’s folk horror oddity Lamb (2021).
Despite this, Starve Acre remains an original take on a familiar genre and often eschews an all-out horror approach when moments of surrealism or quiet dread work just as well. The cinematography of the Yorkshire Dales by Adam Scarth and the music score by Matthew Herbert also add immensely to the overall creepiness. And the animatronic hare, created by the special effects department, is the stuff of nightmares.
Regarding the demonic hare who reappears in the final act of Starve Acre, director Kokotajlo said in an interview with Stephen Saito of The Moveable Fest, “I’m a big Jim Henson fan. I love “Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth” and I really got into talking to the puppeteers and rehearsing with them. It’s an amazing craft and it felt appropriate for this story that was set in the ’70s because this is the way they would have done it [then]. The option of using a real hare wasn’t even on the table because you can’t train a real hare — they’re so timid and nervous that apparently they die before you could train them. We did actually we did have two real Belgian hares [on set], and there’s a couple of shots in the film where I am using a rabbit, but you just see the back end of it and you can’t quite tell. Most of it’s puppet work.”
Starve Acre was produced by Access Entertainment, the BBC and the BFI (British Film Institute) but ithad a limited release in the U.S. and certainly deserved wider distribution based on the mostly positive reviews. Wendy Ide of The Guardian wrote, “Starve Acre is steeped in arcane rituals and underpinned by the layers of pagan mythology that lurk beneath our thin veneer of civilisation. The brooding atmosphere is as oppressive as the haunted-looking wallpaper in the couple’s farmhouse. Some pleasingly icky special effects add to the general sense of mouldering menace.” Guy Lodge of Variety noted that “This is not predominantly a film of nighttime fears, with Scarth’s lensing finding rather more terror in the flat, muzzy gray light of a Northern afternoon, or the moldering browns of a house’s most ordinary but unloved corners….No one person in “Starve Acre” screams, speaks or behaves quite as people should, which is key to the film’s baleful pull: Kokotajlo, at least, brings a fierce discipline to its disorder.” And Perry Norton of Film Threat said, “The best thing about Starve Acre is that it adds substantially to folk horror, both in terms of nuggets of bizarro action and by hinting at a deeper, delicious Lovecraftian mythoi sunk in the soil and twisting like roots.”
Brainstorm Media, a Blu-ray distributor out of Los Angeles, has released Starve Acre on Blu-ray with a host of additional features including interviews with Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, and the special effects team, audio commentary by director Daniel Kokotajilo, behind the scenes footage and more. You can also stream it on Kanopy.
Other links of interest:
https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/starve-acre-daniel-kokotajilo-folk-horror
https://suffolkcommunitylibraries.co.uk/meet-the-author-andrew-michael-hurley/
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