She Came From The Woods

Summer camp: a place where generations of American children have had their first independent adventures, and where the slasher genre drew its first breath. It’s a liminal place, where strictly regulated civilisation exists on the edge of the deep, dark woods, and the perfect setting for a genre in which extreme violence exists side by side with comedy – in which we dare to laugh at death even as we watch characters who got into trouble by doing precisely that. Slasher movie fans are always ready to return to those bloody teenage days, and so are the filmmakers who grew up watching that stuff. Erik Bloomquist, who is best known for his acting but has made significant breakthroughs as a horror director with Ten Minutes To Midnight and A Night At The Eagle Inn, is no exception, and here he seeks to place his own stamp on the subgenre.

She Came From The Woods is an expansion of the 2017 short which Bloomquist wrote and co-directed, and it’s a labour of love for him. This shows in the effort he has made to set up an element of mystery and let it unfold slowly, rather than relying on histrionics and gimmicky gore alone to carry the day. Though it’s overlong and too slow in the middle stretch, the film is well structured. It makes sense for the characters to be in different locations when the threat emerges and for the most part they are not required to be stupid in order to get into trouble. Unfortunately a surfeit of thinly written characters and a skittishness which undermines the tension means it never achieves what it might have done.

The comedy element is essential here, not only due to the nature of the genre, but because it’s retreading such familiar territory. As in the original Friday The 13th, the focus is on the camp counsellors. The kids have gone home at the end of the summer (we meet enough of them to get a sense of how trying looking after them has been) and the seasonal workers are about to leave, saying goodbye to the various members of the McCalister family which runs the business. Naturally the young people want to have a party one their last night together and naturally it involves an attempt to summon the camp’s supposed ghost, the spirit of a nurse called Agatha. It’s not the first time they’ve done this, but two of the guys have a new idea which they think could make it work – not that they are prepared, in the least, when it does.

In many a slasher film, this would be the whole of the plot, but Friday The 13th made its mark with its final twist, and Bloomquist packs in a couple of his own. This gives viewers a bit more to do during the slow bits. The killings are varied and suitably unpleasant, albeit not quite as unpleasant as some of the characters, who, of course, receive their due. Most of the young people are not very memorable, however. Sinister's Clare Foley does her best but is underused in a more conventional role than she’s played before. The standout amongst the older cast members is of course William Sadler, playing the family patriarch, but the material he gets doesn’t really allow him to make much of his talents.

Overall, She Came From The Woods is an amusing little romp with a strong nostalgia factor, but not much more.