The Devil’s Bath, Folk Horror Part 2: In Which We Restore Our Faith

The Devil’s Bath, Folk Horror Part 2: In Which We Restore Our Faith

The Devil’s Bath (2024), directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala

Check out Part 1 Lord of Misrule, folk horror, and why we’re still arguing about The Wicker Man

Warning: if the death of a child is something you can’t bear, do not watch this movie or read this review. Be kind to yourself. 

Well that’s the hardest sucker-punch I’ve had from a film in a very long time. Seriously – subject to the warning above – you have to watch The Devil’s Bath. (On the other hand, if a child murdered hurts too much for you to watch, don’t put your heart through this; it’s rough enough even if you don’t take it personally. I’ll see you in the next one.)

This is going to be a review in two halves. The Devil’s Bath is a film best gone into blind: it has a marvellous structure in a truly upsetting way, and seeing it reach its dire ending is all the more satisfying if you’ve been following it a footstep behind rather than knowing where it was headed. So for the first half I’ll avoid spoilers – but it’s difficult to talk about how good it is without spoilers, so at a certain point there will be a warning, and if you haven’t seen it yet I sincerely advise you to cut out and go watch the movie rather than reading on. Honestly, stop reading now. Go away. Go watch it. 

Here’s how we begin. 

We hear the sound of a baby crying – not really screaming or weeping, but grizzling in the way that babies do when they’re lonely and want some love. Certainly not enough to drive anyone to their limit. 

The title card (German, subtitled), tells us this bald fact: ‘Based on historical records of Upper Austria, 1750.’ Then we open on the scene. 

A little boy tries to comfort what’s evidently his small brother or sister. A youngish woman, presumably the mother, shoos him off and picks up the infant herself, walking into the woods. The baby calms; the mother hushes and loops a rosary around its neck. 

Just a little further and she’s reached the head of a waterfall. She throws the baby over the edge.

It falls.

Quietly, calmly, she goes up to the local castle and knocks on the door. When it opens, she says matter-of-factly, ‘I’ve committed a crime.’

After her execution, people cut fingers and toes from her displayed body. For the moment, we don’t know why. 

And then we meet our protagonist Agnes (Anja Plaschg) on her wedding day and the story starts.    

Here’s the question The Devil’s Bath turns on. We are given life, the priest tells his congregation, ‘to say yes . . . to life, to our Lord God.’ Saying no – that is, suicide – is the worst sin to commit, even worse than the child-murder we see as the film begins. 

But what if everything in your life says no to you? 

Agnes, a devout and hopeful girl, sets out on her story with real good will. She’s alive to the beauty of the place in a way many of her neighbours aren’t, collecting dead butterflies and saying the forest is ‘singing’ when she hears the trees creak. A modern young woman who did these things would probably have a witchy streak, but that’s not Agnes. (And that’s not witches in this time and place either. Hold that thought.) Agnes is bright and alert and she lives in the world to make the best of it, and little scraps are one of the few things there to enjoy. But she’s a sincere Christian; she prays all the time, and she does it honestly. 

And on the surface, there’s no reason her marriage to Wolf (David Scheid) shouldn’t work out.

It’s a practical arrangement – it begins with Agnes and her family hauling her dowry up a muddy road, the first of many carts and hurdles that’ll drag life and death through this landscape – but nobody has any romantic ideas around here, Agnes included. Wolf seems less clever than her but he’s friendly enough, and she’s quite willing to marry him. What Agnes wants is what every proper bride should: she wants to have children and be a mother in this new community.

Except that Wolf can’t make love to her. There’s another invisible crisis going on in this little hamlet: the story of what a man does when he has to get married, but his real love is for another man.

Agnes has left her family to become someone new: a wife and mother. This is a community where women who can’t have children get commented on without sympathy. And there’s no way for Agnes to tell anyone, and no one to tell, that it isn’t her fault she’s failing.

The film is beautiful, and it makes its beauty count. 

I started watching to follow up reviewing Lord of Misrule, figuring I might as well stay on the folk-horror kick, and after a movie of meaningless prettiness it was so refreshing to see real beauty – beauty that tells a story, that shows you the characters’ lives from corner to corner. A film that’s just pretty like a holiday snap doesn’t say much, but here every piece of beauty is narrative and world-building, packed with information. In The Devil’s Bath, the screen speaks. To look at this place is to see the lives of the people in it. 

The mossy banks are gorgeous, and you can’t go for a walk without a constant up-and-downhill struggle.

The fields stretch out, and everyone has to till them. The houses are quaintly rustic, and it’s an endless toil to keep everyone in them fed and the community has no time for anyone who doesn’t pull their weight. Every shot shows you an occupied landscape: the places people work so they can eat, or the places they pray for the strength to keep going – or the places they hide for a brief respite from the claustrophobia that comes with living in a big, lightly-populated place where everyone knows your business.

This isn’t pastoral; it’s what they call a ‘Georgic’ tale – set in the countryside, but a place of agriculture and labour and no room for sentiment. People don’t live against a backdrop; they live in a place, and if they don’t fit there then they aren’t welcome. But there’s nowhere else to go. 

Two minutes in and my feeling was, ‘Thank goodness. I can tell I’m in safe hands.’

Six minutes in and I could feel the hands around my throat. 

This is a slow-moving catastrophe of a movie, and if you can get into its rhythm then it’s mesmerising. It’s one of those films some people find dull depending on taste, but if it speaks to you, you may never get its voice out of your head. 

How is this horror?

When I mentioned online I was reviewing The Devil’s Bath, a couple of friends – fellow folk horror fans – mentioned that they didn’t know why it should be considered horror. Wasn’t it just a historical drama? 

And yes, you can make that argument. Put it this way: if a viewer is one of those who officially ‘doesn’t like horror’, but they do like period pieces and they have a strong stomach, they might very well be drawn to The Devil’s Bath. In how it creates a sense of place and time with all its textures and necessities and constrictions, it’s not unlike an extra-upsetting version of Daniel Vigne’s The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), another period tragedy with a precise eye for detail and a relentless story.

In setting it’s not unlike Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), another chilling tale of a pious community where a young wife can’t live with the impossible and suffers the consequences, and most people would put that on the ‘classics’ shelf if only because it’s so extremely good. (Really, go watch it, it’s amazing. The Return of Martin Guerre’s very good too.) So as horror, The Devil’s Bath doesn’t exclude non-horror people.

Why do I think it’s horror? Well, there are two reasons. One I’ll say now, the other I’ll say after the spoilers. 

The first is simply that this is a film by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala, the Austrian duo behind Goodnight, Mommy and The Lodge. Psychological horror is what they do. Their previous movies were modern and they’ve taken to historical drama as to the manner born, but the eyes that look upon the world of The Devil’s Bath are horror eyes. The aesthetic isn’t intrigued but appalled. We are on the edge of our seat not because we’re excited or curious, but because we’re afraid. 

This is a monster movie where the entire setting is the monster. 

So that’s one reason: I love The Devil’s Bath with the same part of me that loves horror. That part cherishes the old Gothic idea of the ‘sublime’; what Edmund Burke wrote about in 1759 with A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, where terror is an essential ingredient in the experience of delight. Burke talked about mountains as being sublime where gentler terrain might be merely beautiful, and this is a mountainous film – not just in its location, but psychologically mountainous. There are peaks of piety to which the characters aspire, and there are chasms down which they can fall. Nothing in this story is without danger. 

I really mean it: this film is sublime. And it couldn’t be if it didn’t horrify. 

And I can’t go any further without spoilers, so this is your final warning.

It’s impossible to discuss the film properly without knowing the end because it’s a tragedy in the classical sense of the word: everything draws to its inescapable finish, and it’s only once you get there that the perfect structure glares in the full, unforgiving light of day. I’ve heard the criticism ‘predictable’, but for my money a better term is ‘inevitable’. So from here, let’s talk about what comes of the failure of Wolf and Agnes’s marriage. 

We see little of Wolf’s secrets, but we know one thing: Lenz, the man he loves, hangs himself halfway through the film. And the funeral they give him consists of the priest gravely warning the congregation that suicide is a worse sin than murder, that even the child-killing woman we began with confessed and was forgiven, but Lenz is beyond salvation. 

They don’t bury him. They throw his body out in the fields to rot. 

What drove Lenz to despair?

We can only guess the specifics: every heart in this community is carrying invisible burdens and we don’t get to see much more than Agnes would know. 

But we know Wolf won’t do the one thing she needs: he won’t get her pregnant. He can’t get hard for a woman and he doesn’t want to talk about it; after the silent non-event of their wedding night he won’t even try. In a time and place where sodomy was a reviled sin and a capital crime, what could he say? 

His mother bosses Agnes about – not cruelly, she’s trying to help, but she treats Agnes as a subordinate as a matter of course and corrects her preferences as if they were mistakes, and it wears down Agnes’s joy. Agnes tries to make a friend in the village, but her mother-in-law won’t let Agnes repay the woman’s generosity so the only warm connection she had in this place ends in bad feeling. A loving husband would stand up for his wife over such things, but there’s no sexual or romantic bond that would move Wolf to do that, so he shrugs it off: his mother is more family to him than the woman he had to marry. Wolf doesn’t treat Agnes like a wife, but as someone he doesn’t quite know what to do with. 

None of this can be spoken of.

It’s just an absence at the centre of her life, a negation of every little pleasure and a lack of anything to live for. And when it goes on long enough, Agnes sinks into a deep depression. ‘I think she’s in the Devil’s Bath,’ Wolf says; it’s as much as they know how to say, because this is a place where mental illness is bound up with sin and nobody knows how to manage it. 

And again, Agnes’s new family aren’t deliberately cruel; they try to get her help. But ‘help’ isn’t a doctor, it’s a barber, and his idea of treating ‘melancholy’ is to thread a horsehair through the skin of your nape so it’ll fester and ‘let the poison out’ – one of those old ‘cures’ that probably did have anecdotal evidence on its side, because anything so painful would probably get patients hiding their symptoms for fear of further treatment. 

But the only thing that would help Agnes is a baby, and she can’t have one and that’s not something she can hide. 

Since nobody in her new home loves her she tries to flee to her family, but they return her to Wolf. They do it with some regret, but what else, their sorrow seems to say, could they do? Wolf’s not a cruel man: the only question her brother knows to ask is ‘Does he beat you?’, and since he doesn’t, she has to go back even if it means dragging her. 

Agnes tries slow suicide, but the priest is too busy to come and absolve her between taking the poison and dying of it – her one hope of getting into Heaven. So after she survives that, there’s only one thing left she can think to do.

After all, the priest said the woman who killed a child and then repented will go to Heaven, didn’t he? 

The history

After Agnes’s execution we get a final title card with this bleak fact: this kind of suicide-by-murder was a common problem in seventeenth-and-eighteenth-century Europe – four hundred cases in German-speaking regions alone. Most of the murderers were women, and most of the victims were children. That, we can see plainly from the film, is not just because children are easy targets; it’s because children are innocent and will go to Heaven, so really, as Agnes tells her little victim, ‘Everything will be fine.’ 

This is based on a real work of scholarship, a book called Suicide by Proxy in Early Modern Germany: Crime, Sin and Salvation by Kathy Stuart; you can check it out here: 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dxbNEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false,

or a brief interview with her here: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/473/transcript.   

It’s a study of what German jurists called ‘Murder out of Weariness with Life’, and that’s what happens to Agnes. She tries to live life, and it doesn’t work, and nobody will help her. So according to the culture of her time and place, there is one logical solution. 

Let’s talk about witches.

They’re in movies a lot, right? Including horror movies. The legend has been interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries, but the accusation that historical witch-finders often made while on the hunt was this: witches, traditionally, preyed on children. Stuart’s own book begins by discussing the figure of witch as child-destroyer; it was deeply embedded in the beliefs of the day.

Witch-hunters believed witches kidnapped unbaptised children to sacrifice to Satan. Agnes and her predecessor kill children for the same reason, only backwards: an unbaptised baby belongs to the Devil, baptised children belong to God, and each can be traded to your spiritual master in exchange for getting what the world won’t give you. 

The word ‘witch’ is never spoken, but even before the final title card of the film we can see it plain. This is a society that has no truck with sin. And this society is a field for growing witches. 

How is this horror? Again: a little folk horror aside

In the Lord of Misrule review I mentioned Adam Scovell’s ‘folk horror chain’ https://celluloidwickerman.com/2014/09/25/the-folk-horror-chain/; it was first delivered in 2014 and is popular among horror folkies as an attempt to define the archetypal folk horror plot. It’s a perceptive essay that makes an excellent case, but let’s never exclude anything horror folkies love just for not fitting it. We are better when we contain multitudes.  

However, it’s deeply relevant here. Scovell describes the classic folk horror plot as a chain of cause and effect. To recap: the landscape and environment creates an isolated community; in isolation, this group develops ‘skewed morality and belief systems’; these beliefs lead to a ‘manifestation’, whether a supernatural summoning or earthly violence. 

Given that Scovell explicitly includes ‘the simple abuse of Christianity’ as a variety of skewed morals . . .

well, there’s no way you can argue The Devil’s Bath doesn’t rattle the folk horror chain. Agnes’s community is isolated in the working countryside where even a short journey will walk you tired; they live under a doctrine that suicide is worse than murder . . . and that’s parter of a bigger, unspoken belief: that you should fit into your social role no matter what, and if you don’t then asking ‘why’ is a pointless question. This place will watch your hands and your womb, but what’s in your heart? That, everyone believes so deep they never bother to articulate it, is not worth wondering about. You have a role to fit, and if you don’t so there’s something wrong with you and that’s all there is to it. 

And then Agnes does what she does. Her internal motive is suicide, but the external forms all fit the doctrine, and according to the nosy but incurious morals of her community the external is all that matters. The skewed beliefs are manifested and everyone except the horrified audience is satisfied. 

Fitting something into a genre just for the sake of it is a game I’m not especially interested in playing – but there is one particular link in the chain I do think is worth examining closer here. Because it’s in that final link, the manifestation, that The Devil’s Bath speaks to cinema as well as to history. 

What is the manifestation?

Is it Agnes’s murder, or Agnes’s execution? The thing is, in a way it’s both. They’re both, in their way, Christian human sacrifices. 

Christianity has a deep relationship with sacrifice, of course: the foundational story is of how God Incarnate sacrificed Himself for our sins, and martyr after martyr has relived and re-died that story in miniature. Christians understand the idea of an innocent dying for the sake of sinners. 

But innocence is a difficult concept for most of us. What if you want out of this world, but your faith forbids the direct route – but you still want to preserve everyone’s innocence including your own? Well, that’s when devout Christians can try to work a kind of doctrinal black magic. 

Folk horror has a human sacrifice problem

In reviewing Lord of Misrule I talked the plot problems of human sacrifice – to wit, that, ‘Guess what? There’s going to be a human sacrifice now!’ is no longer a surprise ending. If anything, it’s a cliché.

And then The Devil’s Bath surprised me. 

Technically there’s no ritual sacrifice in this film, or at least not in the pagan sense. Everybody in this film, innocent and murderer alike, is a devout Christian: that’s the whole problem. But human sacrifice pervades every moment of the story, in dark and real and unspoken ways.

For a start, of course, there’s the fact that children get sacrificed so that women can take their life by-executioner. But it’s more than that. The community behead the criminal and leave their body to rot in the woods, and they collect trophies from the body. The day of her wedding Agnes’s brother gives her a finger severed from the body of the first murderer, and while Agnes keeps it hidden there’s no sense that it’s a particularly occult thing to own. He gives it to her as a lucky charm so that she’ll have children, the same way a more pastoral film might give a bride a horseshoe or a sprig of heather. 

It’s odd and unsettling until right at the end.

Then the headsman slices Agnes’s neck clean through and holds a bucket to the spouting stump – and most people in the crowd run forward to pay for a souvenir: a little bit of blood from the executed corpse. Once upon a time Agnes’s body was a community resource that should have been producing children; her life fell apart because it didn’t. But now the sinner has been purged, her body is a community resource of a different kind: everyone literally wants a piece of it. Music plays and the audience dances, a festive party celebrating justice done while Agnes’s carcass cools, and suddenly it’s there: this is human sacrifice just as much as anything in The Wicker Man or its hobbling imitators. 

Agnes alive was worth what she could do for the community, and when that wasn’t enough, it’s time to butcher what’s left of her and dance a reel while we do it. That’s the most skewed belief of all: the worth of a person, or at least a woman, is what you can get out of her. 

Is this film folk horror?

Well, the team that made it cut their fangs on psychological horror, and it’s definitely that too. But it’s also deeply in dialogue with folk horror. It’s an answer to The Wicker Man I didn’t see coming. 

There’s nothing supernatural about The Devil’s Bath, but horror doesn’t have to be supernatural, and in fact a lot of the most influential folk horror films aren’t. The Wicker Man (1973) is a clash of faith against faith where each side wins a spiritual victory on its own terms. Witchfinder General (1968) is essentially a West Country Western where a good man fights a bad one, becoming spiritually corrupted in the process; the fact that there are no real witches is the whole point. Robin Redbreast (1970), another touchstone of the genre, is a tale of human sacrifice with no magic to be seen. Even Midsommar (2019), little though I like it, is without magic. There are naturalistic stories aplenty in the folk horror genre, because what it’s really about is the frightening ways our folk beliefs can cut across human life.

But can’t Christianity be a folk belief? 

I don’t mean to play Obnoxious Atheist when I say that. (I’m not even an atheist; agnosticism is more my speed.) Of course Christianity is a genuine faith. But so, diegetically, is every religion in a horror movie where people get sacrificed to a cult. That’s the whole story. And Christianity has shaped folk culture deeply for a very long time. 

There are times and places where, as in The Devil’s Bath, absolutely everything happens in the context of a bone-deep belief system. The locals collect bits of executed criminals as charms, which is not strictly doctrinal, but even that’s part of their version of Christianity: the power comes from the presence of sin purged. It’s Christian in the same way as putting up a Christmas tree; the Bible says nothing about it and the strictly doctrinaire say you shouldn’t, but it’s part of Christian culture and pretty much everyone around here does it. It’s a Christian folk tradition. 

Which happens to involve a body sacrificed to justice because its owner sacrificed a child to escape Hell, either in this life or the next. 

Of course, it’s also what a Christian would call idolatry. Idolatry isn’t just about depicting divine figures; it’s about honouring something ‘in place of God’, as the Catholic catechism has it. And it can be about more than objects: many sects argue that one can make an idol out of doctrine itself, worshipping the letter of the law over the spirit. That’s what Agnes does, alas: she sets aside the laws about loving thy neighbour to make an idol of confession, penitence and absolution.

But the community does it just as much as Agnes: it’s her neighbours’ failure to love her that drives her to this point. She was plunged into a living death, so she killed, so they kill her, and everyone treats this as a happy ending. Only Wolf cries; everyone else parties like it’s harvest festival. Playing the part you were given is what they really believe in, and it’s a social idolatry as profane as worshipping a golden calf – or setting fire to a policeman. But everyone on screen believes it’s Christian. They see their faith through a glass, so very darkly. 

We witness the human instinct to create killing rituals even when our religion says we shouldn’t. In the name of piety, we use each other up. Agnes’s murder and her execution are manifestations of the same urge, and a lover of charity should find them terrifyingly skewed. Christian or pagan, The Devil’s Bath seems to say, there is something wrong in our communities that can’t be solved without opening our hearts – and sometimes that doesn’t happen. And when it doesn’t, down comes the sanctified blade. 

Saying all this is probably fairly obvious.

But it’s one thing to say it in words. It’s another thing to see it enacted on screen, with all the scripting and performances and costuming and locations and sets and music combining together to make you feel it. When you see it lived out before you, it hits with the force of a wordless revelation. 

‘Tell all the truth – but tell it slant –’ as Emily Dickinson would say. So many of Scovell’s skewed beliefs are idolatry of some kind, fixing on the forms of a faith that broke when it forgot to love goodness and love people more than anything else. And it took The Devil’s Bath to point that out. Folk horror, in its way, is a form of religious art.

In my last review I talked about how folk horror comes from the myths that spiderweb the earth on which we stand.

The Devil’s Bath isn’t doing quite that, but something subtly related: it’s in dialogue with that horror. And what it has to say is ferocious and compassionate and important. Sometimes myths arise from our world because there’s a pain too great to be expressed any other way. But sometimes artists take on the challenge and look directly into the eyes of that real pain. 

This is a superb film. And in a movie review, one thing to take away from it is hope for art, if not humanity. However cliched something may seem, a fierce enough intelligence can always find a way to make it new. 

And it hurts. The Devil’s Bath doesn’t soften the blow. It’s in grave mourning for those who died in times past, so honestly that it feels almost disrespectful to talk about it in the context of pop culture. But isn’t that what good art should do? Shouldn’t it make us care about people more than idols?

In the Heart of Hidden Things (The Gyrford series) by Kit Whitfield

Jedediah’s father walked out of his life forty years ago. Now he’s back. He won’t apologise, he doesn’t explain – and, impossibly, he hasn’t aged a day.

If you asked the folks of Gyrford, they’d tell you Jedediah Smith looked up to his father. After all, Corbie Mackem was the Sarsen Shepherd: the man who saved the Smith clan from Ab, the terrifyingly well-meaning fey who blighted a whole generation with unwanted gifts.

Corbie was a good fairy-smith. And if he wasn’t a good father, well, that isn’t something Jedediah likes to talk about. Especially since no one knows where Corbie’s body lies: the day of his son’s wedding, forty-odd years ago, he set off to travel and was never seen again.

These days Jedediah is a respectable elder, more concerned with his wayward grandson John than with his long-buried past, and he has other problems on his mind. There’s the preparations for Saint Clement’s Day, and the odd fact that birds all over the county have taken to hiding themselves, and the misbehaviour of Left-Lop the pig – which has grown vegetation all over its back, escaped its farm and taken to making personal remarks at folks in alarmingly alliterative verse.

But then disaster strikes. Ab is back. And Corbie, thought long dead, returns to Gyrford – younger than his son .