This may not be the type of movie that will thrill an audience with jump scares or play well at a Halloween party. It is, however, a movie that has some frightening moments within it and images that have stayed with me longer than the latest elevated horror movie that I have been promised will keep me awake at night and dominate my thoughts. That never happens with those movies. It has with Litan.

This is a movie that depends on what you see more than what the film tells you. In that you will be the judge if what you see is in the minds of the characters, if the magic is real, and if these moments are happening. Even the title takes a bit of thought, as a litany is a form of prayer, usually spoken by a priest, in which the celebrant makes spoken petitions to a higher being and the followers answer with a fixed response. If you’ve been to a Catholic Church, there are six approved litanies, and most are answered with “Lord have mercy on us.”

Your enjoyment of this film will also depend on your willingness to accept things like faith and that there could be something beyond all this, even if some of the characters directly state that they have no belief. This film is at once a fantastique – the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative – and a juxtaposition of that concept.

But, hey – let’s stop using college words and talk about the movie.

Nora (Marie-José Nat) has a premonition that shocks her out of her ordinary life and sends her into the streets of Litan, a village amid a Festival of the Dead. Yet, this isn’t a co-opted Pagan rite-turned-commercial. Things just feel off. Way off. As she seeks her husband, Jock  (director and writer Jean-Pierre Mocky), she encounters people dressed as clowns and animals, all as silver masked men who look like Fantomas by way of Destro keep on playing music.

Based on Andrus Kivirähk’s novel Rehepapp ehk November (Old Barny aka November), November takes place in 19th century Estonia. It begins with a kratt appearing. The kratt is kind of like the Warbound in D&D, as its a collection of hay and old household implements powered by the Devil (Jaan Tooming) and three drops of blood. The kratt steals a cow for a villager named Raak (Arvo Kukumägi), who has tricked Satan by giving him three drops of dark berries instead of the blood that is part of his soul.

There’s so much going on in this village, like the Plague descending as a young woman and then a pig, who makes a deal with Sander, an elder, to allow Liina (Rea Lest-Liik) and Hans (Jörgen Liik) to live. But then the pig is killed while swearing on a Bible. Liina is in love with Hans but has basically been sold in a drunken deal with the pig farmer Edsel, while Hans is obsessed with a sleepwalking Baroness (Jette Loona Hermanis). Liina — also a werewolf — gets a magical arrow from a witch, as she wants to kill the rich girl to win over Hans, but can’t bring herself to do it.

The supernatural becomes a way for nearly everyone to attempt to find their doomed love and make it true. Hans sells his soul for a kratt that regales him with stories of love before melting down into the snow, leaving behind a ring that he uses to propose to the Baroness, who turns out to be Liina in disguise. As for the Baroness, she’s sleepwalked to her death. As the kratt melts away, the Devil returns to snap Hans’ neck. Now, two funeral processions make their way through the village.

Liina drowns herself in the river, bringing gold to all of the villagers, who leave her a necklace, the perfect gift for a virgin bride. Before she passes on, she kisses Hans one more time and says, “Oh, yes. Just what a virgin bride dreams of.”

Director and writer Rainer Sarnet has created a black and white world where the rich mock the poor with their manor homes and gold altars, as the put upon hire a witch (Klara Eighorn) to do their bidding. The villagers are able to trick the devils that befoul them once or twice — like wearing their pants on their heads — but the next time, the next person, well they’re not so lucky. No one wants to work and their kratts fulfill their labors, but they’re secretly deadly or unlucky to everyone.

Even though this is a magical realism film set in another world, I couldn’t help but see so much of real life here.

Novemberis part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including a video essay by John DeFore Kratt, test footage, a trailer and the short films Boundary, Journey Through Setomaa and Midvinterblot.

You can order this set from Severin.

Piotr (Itay Tiran) and Żaneta (Agnieszka Żulewska) met over the web and are about to be married. He barely speaks Polish, having lived in England for several years. As he comes back to the country for their wedding, he moves into an old home that was owned by her grandfather. However, as he works in the yard, he unearths a skeleton and starts to have visions of a dead bride, Hana, who slowly possesses him during the reception.

As Żaneta is from a rich family, they want to hide this from their friends, so they ply them with food and drink as a doctor and a priest examine Piotr. Only a teacher (Wlodzimierz Press), who is the last surviving Jewish person in the town, recognizes that the possessed man is speaking Yiddish and has the voice of Hana.

Directed by Marcin Wrona, who wrote the story with Pawel Maslona which was based on Piotr Rowicki’s play Adherence, Demon is a new way of looking at the Dybbuk myth but infused through marriage. In the act of being wed, we move past our previous selves and become someone new, someone united not only with a new person, but an entirely different family. Żaneta’s relatives may have profited from World War II and the extermination of the Jewish people, so their sins have come to infect the person who is joining them.

As the guests drunkenly become debauched and the winds and rain howl with fury outside, the groom is in the basement losing his sanity.

Sadly, Wrona committed suicide in his hotel room during the Gdynia Polish Film Festival where this movie was being shown. Beyond this tragic loss of life, this act ends the art that could have been created. What a loss.

Demon is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an introduction by Slavic horror scholar Dr. Agnieszka Jeżyk, commentary with film historian Daniel Bird and film critic/actress Manuela Lazić, a video essay by Peter Bebergal, author Oo Strange Frequencies: The Extraordinary Story Of The Technological Quest For The Supernatural and filmmaker Stephen Broomer, a trailer and the short film Dibbuk.

You can order this set from Severin.

Deváté srdce is about a student named Martin who has volunteered to seek out the cure for Princess Adriana, who has been knocked down and out by a mysterious illness. But the truth is that it’s no sickness. Instead, the magician Andlobrandini has enchanted her as part of his plan which involves creating a magic potion to return his youth from the blood of nine children’s hearts.

Directed by Juraj Herz, who wrote the story with Josef Hanzlík, everything in this feels handmade, down to the poster by surrealist painter, writer and ceramicist Eva Švankmajerová. This was shot at the same time as Herz’s Beauty and the Beast in an attempt to save on costs and is a fairy tale created in modern times that in no way feels unlike the tales we were told at bedtime.

By literally capturing the young hearts of the young men who have come to save Adrianna, Andlobrandini  seeks to take their vitality and become hale and hearty anew. Unlike them, Martin has no love for the princess. Instead, the Grand Duke (Premysi Koci) allows him to take on this mission instead of sending him and the street circus people he has fallen in with to jail, most especially Toncka (Anna Malova), the daughter of a puppeteer.

Joined by the Grand Duke’s jester (František Filipovský) and wearing a cloak of invisibility, the two men go across the River Styx to the Grand Duke’s former alchemist’s — yes, Andlobrandini — dark and foreboding castle, a place filled with corpses, innumerable candles, a swinging sun and danger around every turn. It’s gorgeous and perhaps the greatest love within this film is for the art of moviemaking itself.

The Ninth Heart is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary by Kat Ellinger, author of Daughters Of Darkness; the featurette The Uncanny Valley Of The Dolls – The History and Liminality of Dolls, Puppets and Mannequins and the video essay The Curious Case Of Juraj Herz and the Švankmajers.

You can order this set from Severin.

Known in its native Czech language as Panna a netvor (The Virgin and the Monster), this was directed by Juraj Herz, who also made The Cremator, Morgiana, The Ninth Heart and Ferat Vampire.

Julie (Zdena Studenková) is the youngest of three daughters born to a widower (Václav Voska). Riding by horseback and looking for a flower for her, he falls asleep and awakens in front of the horrific castle of Netvor (Vlastimil Harapes), a half-man, half-falcon creature that condemns him to death for picking one of his flowers unless one of his daughter’s sacrifices herself to live forever with him. He should be worried. After all, his horse has already died, forcing him to walk and he’s also found the body of a dead woman. So when he asks his daughters to save him, the already married and wealthy Gábinka (Jana Brejchová) and Málinka (Zuzana Kocúriková) refuse, but Julie saves her father just as her beauty will soon rescue the beast.

Yes, just like a Disney film, this is based on La Belle et la Bête by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. Unlike that animated tale, this has no dancing table service. Instead, it’s a gothic and frightening movie, a film that Herz didn’t want to make as he saw the Jean Cocteau film as unapproachable in its perfection. Yet he does the same here, turning nearly every frame into a painting and having an otherworldly beast that is at once terrifying and sexual, with human eyes calling out from behind a bird’s face.

Beauty and the Beast is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including commentary with film historian Michael Brooke, archival interviews with director Juraj Herz and actors Vlastimil Harapes And Zdena Studenková and a short film, František Hrubín.

You can order this set from Severin.

Nearly unknown in the United States, Suzzanna Martha Frederika van Osch — better known as Suzzanna — was crowned the queen of Indonesian horror.

The youngest of six Javanese-Minahasan-Sundanese-German-Dutch children born to singer Johanna Bojoh and actor Willem Van Osch, Suzanna started acting in 1958, winning a contest to appear in Usmar Ismail’s Asrama Dara. By the end of the 1960s, she was married to actor Dicky Suprapto — who this film gets into, as he left her and would not grant a divorce — and then, by 1972, she was the most popular actress in the country. Her film Bernafas dalam Lumpur had a frank depiction of sexuality that was incendiary in its home country, leading to it being banned.

Suzanna’s real fame came from her horror films. With long black hair and a terrifying stare — sort of like an Indonesian Barbara Steele — Suzzanna played frightening villains in a series of movies that thrilled and also frightened audiences. She also kept the appearances of magic up in the stories of her personal life, as some claimed that she prayed to a “lady of the sea” and that she drank jasmine flowers to remain young. Or that story that when she made Nyi Blorong that the wig of snakes that was placed on her head was calm whenever it was near her.

Her death — said to be from diabetes complications — in 2008 was just as mysterious as the life that she led, to the point that some claimed she was murdered.

What she leaves behind is a career filled with many movies playing women done wrong. That’s apparent in nearly every actress’ career. Where she differs is that once the act has been done to her, she returns and gets her comeuppance. Sure, her back may be leaking and leeches could be pouring out of them. But then she’d affix that stare at her enemies and found a dignity that many women done wrong in cinema never attain.

Directed by David Gregory, this documentary combines clips of her most famous films with interviews with family members, colleagues, filmmakers and historians. What emerges is exactly what should from a film like this: a burning desire to seek out all of Suzzanna’s films and devour them with the magical appetite she used to chow down on 200 satay sticks and an entire vat of soup in Sundelbolong.

Suzanna: The Queen of Black Magic is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including a conversation with director/co-producer David Gregory and co-producer Ekky Imanjaya, as well as a trailer.

You can order this set from Severin.

The title of this movie means “prostitute with a hole in her” and comes from Indonesian myth. It refers to a dead sex worker who has either given birth inside her grave or had a child that was born through a hole in her back that is concealed by her long black hair. Wearing a long white gown, this vengeful spirit castrates men and takes children to replace the one that she has lost.

Directed by Sisworo Gautama Putra, this stars Suzzanna, the Queen of Indonesian Horror. She plays Alisa, who learns during her wedding reception that her new husband Hendarto (Barry Prima!) must go out to sea. As she waits alone, she decides to take a job as a model for a clothing store. To her horror, she learns that it’s really from her old boss — back when she was a call girl — Mami (Ruth Pelupessi) and Rudy (Rudy Salam), the scummy owner of the store who attempts to assault her.

As she runs from this, she’s forced off the road as a stationwagon is broken down in the middle of it. Four thugs and Rudy soon emerge to attack her, raping her multiple times. She gets no justice from the courts and a doctor refuses her when she tries to get an abortion, so when she tries to do it herself, she ends up dying, as her maid Bi Ijah (Marlia Hardi) finds her in a pool of blood, along with a fetus.

When her husband returns home, he puts flowers on her grave that mysteriously appear on her bed. He also meets her near-twin, Shinta, who is truly her and able to transform into a cat. Now comes revenge.

The revenge! Trees falling on men, a scumbag impaled by the tombstone of the woman he put on this path, even hands emerging from a wall to kill someone.

How classic is this movie and its lead? When it was remade in 2018, it — and the main character — were retitled Suzzanna: Bernapas dalam Kubur in tribute.

You will believe a ghost can eat all the food and drink all the soup in a restaurant before everything she has consumed drains from the hole in her back. You will hear “Night on Bald Mountain” many times. And your mind will be destroyed in all the best of ways.

Sadly, this is a film that perhaps speaks just as much to our world today as it did when it was made, across the world and forty years ago. A woman cannot get justice in any traditional way, much less rid herself of a child born through sexual assault. Only the supernatural and the other world can give her what she deserves.

Sundelbolong is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including Hantu Retribution, a featurette on the female ghosts of the Malay Archipelago and the short film White Song.

You can order this set from Severin.

As the All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2 set takes us throughout not just the world of folk horror but our world itself, it lands in Thailand with Nang Nak, which is based on the legend of Mae Nak Phra Khanong.

A gorgeous woman named Nak once lived on the banks of the Phra Khanong canal with her husband Mak. As he went to battle in the Kengtung Wars, she died giving birth to their child. When he returned from the battles that he barely survived, he found her waiting for him as a ghost. Despite the warnings of others, he lived with her until learning the truth, running in fear as she attacked the villagers who she felt drove him away.

In some versions of this story, the monk Somdet Phra Phutthachan defeats Nak by confining her spirit in the bone of her forehead, which he keeps on his waistband. The Thai royal family was said to still own this magical relic and Admiral Prince Abhakara Kiartivongse, Prince of Chumphon and the father of the Thai navy, also claimed that he had this occult object in his possession.

Directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, this is the thirteenth and by no means the final adaption of this legend. It moves the story forward in time, as Mak (Winai Kraibutr) fights in the Siamese-Vietnamese War, so it takes place in the 1830s. When he returns, he lives with Nak (Intira Jaroenpura) and their child, as the villagers never told him that she died.

Anyone that tries to tell Mak the truth dies at the spectral hands of her ghost. Mak discovers the truth as she drops a comb and her ghostly arm extends longer than it should (the legend often claims this happens when she drops a piece of fruit). Even after her home is exorcised and burnt, Nak still rages.

Buddhist monk Somdej Toh — the most sainted monk in Thailand’s history — finally convinces her to stop and that she will be reunited in the afterlife with her husband and child. He then cuts the center of the forehead of her corpse open, allowing her spirit to leave, and creates a talisman from it that ends up being in the possession of Prince Chumbhorn Ketudomsak, just as the royal man claimed.

As I have gone from spirit land to spirit land through this set, I have seen how many civilizations have tried to make sense of the unknown, which would be love and death. This story sets forth the notion that one of these does not always stop the other.

Nang Nak is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including an audio commentary by Mattie Do, director Of The Long Walk, and Asian gothic scholar Katarzyna Ancuta, an interview with director Nonzee Nimibutr and a trailer.

You can order this set from Severin.

On an island in the middle of the ocean, the fishermen ensure that everyone has enough to eat by giving the gods their daughters, throwing them into the sea. All of them do this except for Muthana (Al Farhan), who saves Hayat (Hajjar), making her an outcast.

Twelve years later, as her mother becomes pregnant again, there’s a chance she can become part of the village and her family, but a boy is born. She’s taken to the water again and yet escapes, ending up a fisherman herself on the boat sailed by Amer (Ashraf Barhoum).

The older sailor doesn’t know what to make of the woman with scales on one foot; what are we to make of the villagers who have been eating mermaids, the very daughters they tossed into the ocean, reborn?

Directed by Shahad Ameen, this black and white Saudi film is bleak. But isn’t the world getting darker for women over just the last few weeks? The men are free to sail the open waters while the women hide indoors, praying that their child may either feed the village as part of their death or that their next child be a man. I’ll think about this film for many days to come.

Scales is part of the new Severin box set, All the Haunts Be Ours Volume 2. It has extras including a conversation with director Shahad Ameen and producer Rula Nasser moderated by filmmaker/author Kier-La Janisse, a trailer and the short film Kindil.

You can order this set from Severin.