A Dark Song

A house sealed in salt is already a bad sign. Spending a year inside it with grief, lies and ceremonial magic makes it worse. FolknHell tackles A Dark Song: grief, ritual magic, guardian angels, and whether this eerie occult chamber piece counts as folk horror.

The film is Liam Gavin’s 2016 occult chamber piece about a grieving mother, Sophia, who hires the abrasive Henry Solomon to guide her through an elaborate ritual based on The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage. What starts as a bid to speak to her dead child slowly reveals itself as something angrier, riskier and much more spiritually costly.

“It gives you a peek at the architecture of the universe.”

The conversation leans hard into what makes the film work so well. Andy, Dave and David love the stripped back set-up, the claustrophobic house, the drip feed of uncanny detail, and the way the film makes magic feel dangerous without ever tipping into anything daft. They spend plenty of time on the relationship between Sophia and Solomon, which shifts from mistrust and hostility into a bleak sort of dependence, with Catherine Walker and Steve Oram getting a lot of praise for carrying almost the whole film between them.

“It’s not what she wants, but it is what she needs.”

There is some debate over whether it fully fits the FolknHell folk horror test. It does not neatly match every rule, but the ancient ritual, total isolation, occult Christianity and growing sense of being trapped inside a logic you do not understand push it firmly into folk horror adjacent territory, before Andy finally plants his flag and calls it folk horror anyway.

“A house sealed in salt and a ritual built on lies is never going to end well.”

The big takeaway is that this is one of the highest rated films the hosts have covered so far. They single out the cigarette smoking appearance of Death, the astonishing guardian angel reveal, and the unexpectedly redemptive ending as moments that genuinely stick in the mind.

Final score: 23 out of 30.

Enjoyed this film too? Add your own score and comments for the film at https://www.folknhell.com/scores

Also Referenced in this episode

• The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage
• Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
• Aleister Crowley
• Samuel MacGregor Mathers
• Kabbalah
• Hermes
• Candyman
• The Wicker Man
• Midsommar
• John Constantine
• Clive Barker

Folknhell is the folk horror podcast where Andy Davidson, Dave Houghton and David Hall dig into strange cinema, argue about whether it really counts as folk horror, and score every film out of 30.

Add your own score and comments about the films at https://www.folknhell.com/scores

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