HAVING delivered an auspicious feature debut with her acclaimed ‘found footage’ horror The Devil’s Doorway back in 2018, writer/director Aislinn Clarke is back to creep out audiences again with Fréwaka - currently being touted as the first ever Irish language horror movie.
It stars Clare Monnelly as Shoo, a Dublin care worker whose latest patient, the elderly Peig (Bríd Ní Neachtain), has bigger problems than just her physical and mental ailments - namely the vengeful spirits dwelling in the cellar of her remote, crumbling country house, which she believes are intent on returning her to a horrifying netherworld she barely managed to escape as a much younger woman.
With the suicide of her estranged, mentally unstable mother very much on her own troubled mind, Shoo starts to experience odd goings-on in the house. But are they demonic doings or just a manifestation of repressed grief and trauma?
Spoiler alert: hilarity does not ensue.
A hugely effective film which puts a distinctively Irish spin on the cinematic traditions of folk horror while also leaning into the psychological side of the genre in interesting ways, Fréwaka is the perfect opening night selection for this year’s Belfast Film Festival, which kicks off with its Irish premiere at Cineworld Belfast on Halloween.
Growing up watching horror movies with her father, Dundalk-born Clarke broadened her appreciation of film while working as an usher at Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast. Having studied film and screenwriting at Queen’s University Belfast and the New York Film Academy, the writer/director now lectures in creative writing at QUB’s Seamus Heaney Centre when she’s not busy shooting her own movies.
Thus, she is very pleased to be staging Fréwaka’s first ever Irish screening in the city which helped shape her film-making.
“It’s just as God intended,” chuckles Clarke, whose family moved to Forkhill in Co Armagh when she was 15.
“I’m really looking forward to it. And as you say, having been haunting the halls of QUB and the QFT for quite a long time, it’s nice to have the opening film there.”
Having premiered at the Locarno film festival in Spain earlier this month, Fréwaka arrives on the big screen in Belfast fresh from further acclaimed screenings at the BFI London Film Festival and the Sitges and Motel X horror film festivals in Spain and Lisbon respectively.
It seems Clarke, who already has one Irish language feature on her CV as the writer behind excellent 2021 thriller Doineann (which also starred Clare Monnelly), has been enjoying the audience reactions to her latest picture at these international events.
“It’s been very warm, actually, a very nice response,” she tells me of taking Fréwaka’s as Gaeilge chills overseas.
“You never know if something is going to communicate to an audience or not. All you can do [as a film-maker] is just make it and try to express something that you feel. Then, you just hope that other people will feel that too.
“The type people who go to film festivals in particular are OK with watching foreign language content, and horror fans in particular have been watching foreign language content for a long time. Even if they don’t watch anything else [foreign/subtitled], they’ll have been watching Korean horror, Spanish or Italian horror.”
Set in a 1960s Magdalene Laundry, Clarke’s previous horror The Devil’s Doorway tapped into the historic abuse of women by the Catholic Church. In Fréwaka, the theme of Irish generational trauma, religious and otherwise, runs through its slow-burning story, with creepy visuals informed by the imagery and lore of rural Ireland’s unique blend of Catholicism and paganism.
Horror fans have been watching foreign language content for a long time
— Aislinn Clarke
“I think that Irish Catholicism has always had a very folksy, kind of earthy pagan edge to it,” explains Clarke, whose upcoming projects include Hellish Nell, an adaptation of Malcolm Gaskill’s non-fiction book on Britain’s last witch trial, and a feature for Paramount Pictures.
“It’s not the same as the Catholicism you get just anywhere. So, if you have the shingles, somebody will tell you there’s a guy two villages over who’s born with a caul on his face who can fix that. And they’ll do something mysterious - they’ll use elements of folkiness, but they’ll also use holy water and images of the Virgin Mary, or whatever.
“The two things have been tightly interwoven, probably since the beginning in Ireland. So for me, if you’re making a folk horror film here, Catholicism is part of that.”
Could this be the start of an Irish horror boom? There’s already competition between Fréwaka, which has been sold to IFC/Shudder for international distribution, and another 2024 Irish scarefest, John Farrelly’s An Taibhse. While both pictures have staked claims to being ‘the first ever Irish language horror film’, Clarke is more than happy to leave the bickering to their respective marketing teams.
“Personally, I don’t care,” she says.
“It doesn’t matter and I never wanted to get into that battle in the first place. I think Fréwaka is the first one that’s going out internationally. But for me, personally, I want people to react to it as a film, and as a horror film, rather than worrying about some kind of qualifier like that.”
So far so good on that front.
Fréwaka screens at Cineworld Belfast on October 31. See belfastfilmfestival.org for tickets and full festival programme.
