I did something very different with this episode of my YouTube show. I added video to my audio, but it’s not video of the movie I’m chatting about, which is the 2024 lost-in-the-woods freakout movie The North Witch. No, it’s a spiritually similar scene to what I’m talking about from the 1960 (also witches and roadtrips movie) Horror Hotel AKA City of the Dead. I want you to watch this; it’s less than four minutes. But if you insist on reading instead, you can scroll down.

The North Witch, which has recently been put up on Shudder, could be a movie about social anxiety. I think a lot of the horror movies now are about social anxiety.

It starts out with a girl named Maddie who’s getting kicked out of her roommate situation for reasons that aren’t clear. They say that she has no boundaries and she’d be better off living on her own, and she needs to be out by the end of the month. So she calls her last friend, and her friend says, well, I’m going on a hiking trip and it’s gonna be rough. Oh well, I guess you can come along.

So there’s Maddie with her friend and three strangers in a van, and they’re going to this place in the woods where seemingly 40 people have disappeared in the last 20 years, or vice versa, and there’s a cabin that keeps moving, and it could be the Bermuda Triangle of cabins. And one girl is on her period, which always means something when they bother to put that into a movie, probably that there’s going to be a lot of blood or somebody’s easily going to be able to track them, which they would be anyway if they were a supernatural creature like a witch, and that’s what happens.

They’re camping and the wind comes and it blows them away, and it blows a house into the area, which is all sort of sounding kind of familiar. The North Witch, the witch of the north, but you know, you have to suffer through this movie with Maddie, who is also the writer of this film and the star, so she wanted us all to suffer along with her.

The horror of no one wants you there, or you just think they don’t, and something is wrong with you that makes you never quite click with people, but nobody will tell you what it is, maybe because they don’t know.

And when I think about the mental problems that we all have as society right now, because I certainly have them, think about the Victorians, and how we look back on them and think, you know, those poor people, they were taking photos with their dead relatives and being real uptight and wearing lots of layers of clothes, and that maybe someday in the future, humans will have progressed, and they’ll look back on us and think, wow, they just ate themselves alive with imagining what might happen and being afraid of each other and afraid that no one really cared about them.

That’s what—that’s what a movie like this makes me think about. It was pretty hard to endure, and yet somehow I couldn’t stop watching it.

I wouldn’t say it was entertaining. And, you know, I’ll never tell you if a movie is good or bad, but I liked it. I thought it was well done, and as always, I could be completely wrong about the ideas here.

But I just want to say that if you’re feeling bad, if you’re feeling like no one understands you, you can leave me a comment and I will talk to you. So we’re all in this together, we really are, and stay out of the damn woods. Have a good night.