HELLBENDER

Hellbender has all the furniture of folk horror: witches, woods, sigils, inherited powers, strange rituals and a mother keeping her daughter far away from ordinary society. The problem is that the furniture never quite becomes the house.

Izzy has been raised in isolation, supposedly because she is unwell. Her mother knows the less reassuring truth: Izzy is a hellbender, a witch whose power grows through consuming living creatures and their fear. When a teenage drinking game ends with Izzy swallowing a worm, what should be a fairly insignificant dietary error becomes her supernatural puberty.

That is where Hellbender is most interesting. Izzy discovers that the thing she has been protected from is herself, and that her mother’s restrictions have not removed her nature, merely postponed it. Their recurring meal-time chant about one season consuming another neatly prepares the ground. Daughter follows mother, appetite follows awakening, and eventually the question becomes whether inheritance can ever be responsibly contained.

Unfortunately, the filmmaking too often softens the very ideas that ought to bite. Izzy’s first threatening encounter with her new friend should make her emerging power frightening, but the moment barely lands. Later transformations, magical effects and sound cues announce strangeness without generating much unease. Even the gloriously horrible notion of a key emerging through Izzy’s hand is accompanied by a sound effect so emphatic that the moment becomes less uncanny than oddly squelchy.

There are striking images. A figure perched above another character on a lamppost is exactly the sort of peculiar visual that makes us want the film to become stranger than it does. But Hellbender remains surprisingly linear, its witchcraft more about Izzy embracing power than confronting something ancient, communal or genuinely destabilising. The woods provide isolation, but there is no real isolated community and little sense of an older system pressing into modern life. What emerges is less folk horror than a supernatural coming-of-age story wearing folk-horror jewellery.

There is ambition here, and considering its tiny family production that should not be dismissed. But Hellbender repeatedly introduces ideas sharper, nastier and more unsettling than the film it ultimately makes from them.

Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com
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