Horror as Folk: Lovecraftian Folk Horror in Dark Waters (1994)

Is Catholicism folk horror? Is Lovecraft?

Certainly, the Old Gent from Providence used many of the trappings of modern folk horror (though the term had not yet been popularized) in his stories of backwoods cults worshipping ancient entities. What mostly distinguishes the two is that the folk beliefs presented in Lovecraft stories are almost entirely fictional. Rather than portraying the “old ways” of actual, real-world cultures – or even sampling and remixing those beliefs, as some of his contemporaries in the pulps did – Lovecraft largely created his cults and their deities out of whole cloth.

Which brings us around to Mariano Baino’s Dark Waters, one of about a dozen horror movies to be released with some variation on that title. At a glance, Dark Waters combines two genres that, for the most part, had already enjoyed their acme by the time the film was made: Lovecraft adaptations and nunsploitation flicks.

It’s far from the first – and even farther from the last – work to highlight the similarities between Lovecraft’s famous couplet (“that is not dead which can eternal lie,” etc.) and the Christ story. In this way, Catholicism and Lovecraftian horror seem like easy if not always obvious bedfellows, and Dark Waters may be one of the more atmospheric attempts at marrying the two.

The result is a slow, droning film that is at once unmistakably Italian and yet shot in Ukraine; heavy on atmosphere and light on sense or narrative propulsion but filled with vivid nightmare imagery that keeps everything afloat even when it should sink beneath the waves. Every time your attention begins to wander, there’s a visual that yanks you back, and the repeated motif of water eroding a once-sacred space is ineffably potent, even if the metaphor is probably vague.

Baino himself is an interesting figure, the recipient of an “extraordinary ability” green card for his directing prowess despite having exactly one feature film to his credit – that being this one. His reputation seems to rest primarily on his largely dialogue-free horror shorts, of which there are only a small handful, yet he’s been called “an unholy hybrid of Bergman and Argento.”

That “unholy hybrid” is actually a pretty good way to get across what you can expect from Dark Waters. Compared to the gialli and Italian supernatural horrors that are its obvious precursors, Dark Waters is almost painfully slow and meditative. Compared to the works of someone like Bergman, it is bloody and nonsensical. And yet, it works more than it doesn’t, thanks in part to some absolutely glorious shots and a sustained atmosphere of queasy dread.

Though filmed in English, when you look at the “Countries” column on the film’s Wikipedia entry, a fairly dizzying array are presented, and the film’s cast bring a number of accents to the table that is especially impressive given that there are really only three characters who do much talking at all.

While Dark Waters has an unmistakably Italian feel, it is, I believe, technically a UK production, and was one of the first Western movies to be filmed in Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While the Ukrainian setting provides ample cheap production value in the form of sets and locations that would have been impossible to find elsewhere, it also caused a notoriously troubled production overall.

In his autobiography It’s Only a Movie, Mark Kermode details his attempts to file a set report during the film’s production, which were hampered by travel problems and, if the internet is to be believed, at least two coup attempts before the picture was completed.

Sometimes, when a movie suffers a troubled behind-the-scenes history, it is apparent in the finished product. It’s difficult to say if that is the case here, having no other Baino features to compare it to. Dark Waters certainly has an idiosyncratic approach, and its rambling, recursive, and overdubbed narrative could easily have been compromised by production woes – or it could have been entirely intentional.

While there is a lot of exposition (that says very little) in Dark Waters, much of the film is free of dialogue, instead backed by a droning organ score supplemented by the sounds of children crying, beasts making beast noises, pouring rain, crashing surf, and running water. Like most of the rest of the film, it can get tiresome at times, but it also works more than it doesn’t, and as the picture fragments into nightmare montages, the soundscape helps keep it going.

But, is it folk horror? It certainly could be. The plot involves a young woman who returns to the island where she was born after her father’s death leaves her an orphan. She hasn’t been back since she was seven years old and has no memory of her time there. She stays at a convent which is basically the only thing on the island, where the nuns are up to some pretty fishy (sometimes literally) stuff.

There’s a cult formed around an entity that is described in terms at once Lovecraftian, Christlike, and Satanic. “I am she who liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive forevermore,” and “power shall be given unto the Beast.” That sort of thing. Are the nuns trying to bring the entity back, or are they attempting to keep its power imprisoned? And is our protagonist one of the little girls she keeps seeing in visions of the convent’s past, tied to the amulet that conjures up the Beast?

The answer to that last question, at least, is pretty obvious – to us, if not to her. There are also some majorly Lovecraftian elements in the girls’ origins, and in scenes where our protagonist chows down on raw fish scattered on the shore. Though it’s not an adaptation of any specific Lovecraft story, it seems undeniable that Dark Waters is a Lovecraftian movie.

Whether or not it is a folk horror one is up for more debate.