The newly revived Hammer Film Productions had got off to a terrible start with the dreadful vampire piece Beyond the Rave (2008) but were on far better form with David Keating’s “folk horror” tale Wake Wood. Hammer’s exact role in Wake Wood is unclear – according to which print you’re watching, or at which point in the film’s production you were reading about it, the company name tends to come and go. On home video prints you’ll find mention of Exclusive Film Distribution, Hammer’s old distribution arm, similarly revived, but not a single mention of Hammer though they were credited on theatrical prints. The bulk of the production work was carried out by the Irish Fantastic Films, who had been involved with werewolf film Wilderness (2005) and had the interesting “folk horror” Outcast (2010) awaiting release.

Wake Wood gets off to an upsetting and grisly start with the death of a young girl, Alice Daley (Ella Connolly), mauled to death by a dog in the grounds of her father Patrick’s (Aidan Gillen) veterinary practice. Traumatised by their loss Patrick and his wife Louise (Eva Birthistle, making her third in a string of films about unsettling children – she’d previously been in The Daisy Chain (2008) and The Children (2008)) retreat to the small village of Wakewood where he sets up a new practice and she revitalises the rundown pharmacy. When their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere one night, Louise witnesses Arthur (a nice turn by Timothy Spall) seemingly conducting a strange pagan ritual in the woods. Farmer Mick O’Shea (Dan Gordon) is killed in a farming accident and Arthur approaches the couple with a strange proposition – he can bring the dead back to life, but only for three days and only if the death occurred less than a year ago. Offered the chance to see Alice again, the couple agree to take part in the ritual, that needs the use of another body, in this case the unfortunate O’Shea’s. Alice is revived but is almost killed when, against the rules of the ritual, she wanders beyond the village borders and is struck down with the wound that originally killed her. But the couple soon have other things to worry about – they hadn’t been entirely honest with Arthur and Alice died more than a year ago. As a result, she’s now a murderous psychotic, starting out by killing animals before moving on to make short work of various villagers.

There are undeniable echoes of Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Semetery (filmed by Mary Lambert in 1989 and again by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kölsch in 2019, and there are traces here too of W.W. Jacobs’ much filmed short story The Monkey’s Paw which, in turn, informed King’s book. But Wake Wood has enough new wrinkles to largely avoid any charges of being a simple copycat. The ritual that Arthur uses to raise the dead is never explained (it’s just a part of village life that no-one questions, presumably a practice passed down from generation to the next) and is pleasingly complicated (it’s not a simple case of a quick incantation and a drop of goat’s blood.)

It’s a surprisingly grisly film too, with everything from a graphic Caesarean section performed on a cow (this seemingly throwaway bit of business pays off in the film’s bleak twist ending) to the various injuries inflicted on the locals by Alice. But it’s the atmosphere that really carries the film. All good “folk horror” films are aware of their landscapes and Keating and his director of photography Chris Maris make excellent and sometimes very creepy use of the picturesque village of Pettigoe in County Donegal (interiors were shot in a studio in Sweden to justify co-funding from Film I Sköne and the Swedish Film Institute.) The bight-time scenes in particular are nicely claustrophobic, and a climactic scene set in the heart of a huge wind farm is excellent, the constant woosh of the turbine blades lending the soundscape a surreal and unsettling quality.

Connolly is very good as the appropriately dead eyed Alice, especially in grisly bits of business like her slaughter of a group of elderly men or her agonised reactions to drifting across the forbidden border. Birthistle and Gillen (a couple of years before joined the cast of Game of Thrones (2011-2019) as ‘Littlefinger’) are likable leads, important in a film that needs you to not only sympathise with the characters’ loss but also understand their foolishness in concealing the facts from Arthur. But it’s Spall who really impresses, cannily not playing Arthur as sinister but simply as someone who knows things that are beyond the comprehension of city dwellers and willing to use it help if he can.

There’s not much in Wake Wood that hasn’t been done before – you won’t have to look too far to detect the influence of things like Carrie (1976), Zeder (1983) and, perhaps inevitably, The Wicker Man (1973) – but Keating does a fine job of rejigging old tropes into something extremely creepy. It’s certainly head and shoulders above the dismal Beyond the Rave and remains one of the best films that the “new” Hammer were involved in – even if their name didn’t quite make it to every copy of the film…