Ten years ago, A24 found its stride with its utterly haunting folk horror film, The Witch, the directorial debut of Robert Eggers, which defined his creeping and deeply disturbing style. However, if the achingly patient pace of the film was too slow for you, but you were enamored by the eerie setting and witchcraft as a device for female rage, then you need to watch Shudder’s folk/fantasy horror, Heresy. Capped at a tight 60-minute runtime, the Dutch indie film drops viewers straight into a stampede of psychedelic terrors and provocative anti-patriarchal frustration. With a surplus of gory yet mesmerizing visuals and a knack for keeping our nerves frayed, Heresy is the perfect late-night watch to keep you flinching at shadows in the dark.
Fantasy Monsters Create a Psychedelic Atmosphere in This Folk Horror
Set in a small medieval town near a wall of ominous trees, Heresy follows a young woman, Frieda (Anneke Sluiters), who is desperately trying to become a mother. She often goes to the town’s priest for help, using various spirituality-based remedies to help the process, but much to her husband’s visceral annoyance, she only faces one failed attempt after another. One fateful day, she has an awful encounter in the woods, which is followed by a spine-tingling scene of an otherworldly creature latching onto her. When she returns home, the town abruptly turns on her, accusing her of witchcraft and of corresponding with the Devil in the woods, forcing her to fight for survival on two fronts.
Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
🪆Chucky
01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
Heresy is a visual feast, ensuring our eyes never wander from the film’s distinct style and mind-bending nature. Before the turning point in the woods, the camera lingers uncomfortably on potential threats in the town, whether that be the abusive stranger on the sidelines or the husband prone to emotional outbursts, mimicking the wariness of how women tread through the space. We’re made to feel disconcerted and isolated just as Frieda is, our hair standing on end to sense the approach of danger. It’s a dread-laden atmosphere with dark, shadowed lighting and a distinct sense of inevitability in the air, eliciting claustrophobia despite the vastness of the forest right beside the thatched huts.
The film wastes no time reaching the turning point, shifting the atmosphere from disturbingly realistic to hauntingly supernatural. It stretches its budget through stunning practical effects, where the fantasy creatures in the woods initially skirt the edges of the camera, hidden by murky fog and the constricted view of a terrified Frieda. This kicks off a series of increasingly psychedelic horrors and visuals that are simply too captivating to look away from, even if they set your skin crawling. With some grand flourishes in graphic body horror and a later sequence that feels like personified catharsis, Heresy is constantly pushing the boundaries of what can be considered beautifully macabre. With an equally unsettling orchestral score to tie it all together, it’s an immersive watch that foregoes the slow-burn penchant of folk horror and races for the viscera instead.
‘Heresy’ Is a Provocative Portrayal of Female Rage
Driving the narrative of Heresy forward is the deep-seated and profound feeling of feminine rage, one that is felt rather than deciphered. The film never inundates us with social commentary, but rather allows the palpable atmosphere that is typical of the genre to be directed against the established hierarchies and expectations within the town. It is never explicitly mentioned, but we quickly understand that Frieda’s value in the town is tied to motherhood, while her own motivations for a child seem to be partially driven by instinct and by a desperation to escape into something other than herself and her surroundings. The screen is practically pulsating with frustration, helplessness, and an animalistic need for release — all heightened by the psychedelic nature of the horror movie.
Shudder’s Most Overlooked Horror-Thriller Is the Found Footage Film You’ve Been Waiting For
How do you fight a demon with a gun?
At the center is Sluiters’ performance, which makes up this emotional core of Heresy. Though Frieda is predictably submissive and quiet at the beginning of the film, Sluiters layers a fierceness underneath that we excitedly anticipate will bubble up to the surface. Her dialogue is fairly limited, but Sluiters’ face is incredibly expressive and magnetic, powerfully relaying the woman’s turbulent emotions, particularly fear and wrath. She is a major reason why the film is so visually arresting, making just as much an impact as the special effects and cinematography, while essentially weaponizing the sexist expectation of a woman being seen, not heard.
Many films have attempted to capture female rage, but not many have done it with quite as much visual panache and reality-bending proclivities as Heresy does. The film jam-packs all the beats of folk horror that we love in a single monstrosity of an hour, one that will linger on the fringes of your mind well after the creatures of the forest have gone to rest.
