Directed and co-written by Eric Bloomquist, She Came From The Woods is a farcical pastiche of the golden age of the American slasher film. Set in the 1980s, the film is an ode to holiday camp horrors such as The Burning (1981), Sleepaway Camp (1983) and of course Friday The 13th (1980). She Came From The Woods centres around the final day and subsequent evening of summer camp Briarbrook. Haunted by its own dark ghost story, the camp is the perfect setting for the counsellors to not only celebrate the end of camp, but also to do some fireside summoning Briarbrook’s urban legend of Nurse Agatha, a former camp nurse who was found to be experimenting with occultism.
Peter McCalister (Spencer List) is a slacker camp counsellor, grandson to the founder of Briarbrook and looking to shake off the pressure to grow up set upon him by his older brother Shawn (Tyler Elliot Burke) and his mother Heather (Cara Buono). After encouraging the rest of the counsellors to join him in the woods to take part in a blood ritual, Peter raises the spirit of Nurse Agatha who intends to exact her bloody revenge on the whole of Briarbrook. The resurrection of Agatha also reveals dark and damaging McCalister family secrets that go on to prove that in Briarbrook, nothing stays buried forever.
Having had its premiere at the UK’s FrightFest 2022, She Came From The Woods doesn’t break any new ground on the slasher genre which is notorious for being formulaic, however, the film is an entirely enjoyable ode to 1980s slashers without being eye-rollingly tropey. Apart from the film’s questionable use of a homophobic slur by the stereotypical camp bully, which although “era-appropriate” is pretty much unnecessary in its inclusion, She Came From The Woods has some thoroughly entertaining moments which include a hoard of homicidal possessed children, as well as the levels of gore employed which appear to be a love letter to practical effects maestro Tom Savini.
Whilst She Came From The Woods does not reinvent the slasher genre, it is a fun and easy watch along the same retro-influenced vein as Stranger Things and Fear Street (2021).
Blue Finch Film Releasing presents She Came From The Woods on digital 26 June
Ygraine’s Archive: She Came from the Woods
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