Movie Review: 'She Came from the Woods'

She Came from the Woods (2023)

Directed by Erik Bloomquist

Written by Erik Bloomquist

Starring Cara Buono, Clare Foley, Spencer List

Release Date February 10th, 2023

Published February 24th, 2023.

Camp Briarbook is overseen by your typically telegenic cast of teenagers eager to party on their last night at the camp, after the young campers have gone home. The party is your standard teenager party except that one of the teens plans a ritual to perform. You see, Camp Briarbrook has a dark history. A nurse named Agatha died at the camp decades before this story begins and there is a belief among some that her spirit lingers near the camp. She can be summoned via blood ritual in which campers cut their fingers while chanting her name.

And yeah, it works, Agatha is brought back to life. Oops, should not have done that. Agatha's first act is to influence a shy, gawky counselor named Danny (played by Director Erik Bloomquist) to murder his crush, Kellie (Emily Keefe), after she rejects his clumsy romantic advances. He's then killed by another counselor in order to keep his murder from turning into a spree. Agatha's powers are a tad hard to track. She caused Danny to murder Kelly and later she commands an army of zombie children but she's also made into a corporeal demon but one that only people who did the ritual can see? Yeah, it gets a little hard to follow.

The counselors retreat to the mess hall where they inform the camp owner, Heather (Caro Buono), about the murder. Eventually, they are forced to come clean about the ritual and the potential return of the evil monstrous, Agatha. There is really no clear way to stop Agatha's rampage, nor do we know what Agatha's endgame is. I assume she just wants to kill everyone she comes across that can see her. Maybe. I don't know, it doesn't matter. The appeal of She Came from the Woods is inventive bloody gore. The film spills blood well with some solid shock violence.

Counselors are killed, kids turn into crazed ravenous zombies and come rushing out of the woods, under Agatha's control, and a rather meaningless back story is related by first Heather and then her father, played by the iconic character actor William Sadler, with slight variations. It's fine, it's a good, solid hanger for a horror movie plot. The lore is merely here only to press forward a plot centered around bloody, violent deaths and narrowly escaping bloody violent deaths. The counselor characters, save one who deserves is his ugly fate, are all not terrible people who did not deserve to have to vomit blood or have their skulls caved in.

I can still appreciate a movie that gives us protagonists who aren't awful people. I still have awful memories of obnoxious early 2000s horror movies where the protagonists were so agonizingly unlikable that we preferred seeing them die horribly than spending time with them not dead. For a time, directors fell in love with creating obnoxious characters designed to cause us to root for the slasher and I grew tired of that nihilistic approach to horror very quickly. She Came from the Woods is thankfully not one of those movies. Instead, the characters are all rather boringly likable.

I didn't root for the characters of She Came from the Woods to be killed but don't ask me to try and tell one of their corpses apart from another. Even the final characters are characters I can hardly recall as they lacked much in personality. That's really the problem with She Came from the Woods, the characters fighting against the evil are rather boring and the big evil is under-developed. Agatha is rarely on screen, her motivations and the way that she can be stopped from her murderous rampage are nebulously established.

The most interesting aspect of She Came from the Woods are the little kids who get turned into ravenous, blood thirsty killers. Watching them raise the dead and then violently murder three of the campers was a twisted thrill, and the most fun to be had in She Came from the Woods. Sadly, their plot is resolved at the end of the second act and the movie suffers for not having the kids around, they had the most personality of anyone in the cast, even when they were merely ravenous zombies.

She Came from the Woods is listed on Google as a horror comedy but there is very little humor in the movie. An opening scene featuring the seeming origin of Agatha seems to have a comic tone as a little girl runs and hides from the killer in the absolutely most comically bad hiding place imaginable. But that is the only time that She Came from the Woods ever approaches being a horror comedy. The rest of the movie is made up of variations on horror tropes featuring some solid, professionally crafted blood and guts. If that's enough for you, then maybe She Came from the Woods is for you.

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