2013 • United Kingdom
A Vatican investigation team arrives at a remote Devon church with cameras, microphones and a firm intention to prove that nothing supernatural is happening. The Borderlands has a better idea.
Elliot Goldner’s 2013 found-footage horror gives FolknHell plenty to work with: faith being investigated by professional sceptics, a Christian building sitting on something much older, a technician who seems more willing to believe than the priests, and a final descent that makes the phrase “bowels of the earth” uncomfortably literal. The problem is that the film spends nearly as much energy explaining why every camera is there as it does building the thing those cameras are supposed to capture.
Deacon and Mark are sent by the Church to investigate reports of a miracle at a small rural church. They are joined by Gray, a technician tasked with wiring the place for sound and vision so the team can record whatever is happening and, ideally, debunk it.
The investigation turns up unexplained noises, disturbing incidents and evidence that the church may have been built over a much older place of worship. As the team pushes further, the tidy distinction between miracle, fraud and something pre-Christian starts to collapse.
Yes, but with qualifications.
The strongest case is place. The church matters because of where it stands and what was there before it. Christianity has not erased the older site so much as built directly on top of it, which is about as neat a folk horror image as anyone could ask for.
Belief is less convincing. The film gives us pagan symbols, sacrifice and a pre-Christian presence, but very little sense of a living local system around them. The villagers barely register as custodians, victims or participants.
The outsider element is weaker again. Deacon, Mark and Gray are obviously visitors, yet the film gives them so little community to be outside of that the usual friction never really develops. They enter a dangerous place, but not quite a dangerous culture.
So The Borderlands is folk horror in intent and material. It simply does not make those elements feel as deeply rooted as they ought to.
Faith inspected by sceptics The neatest character reversal is that the Church investigators arrive to disprove a miracle, while Gray, the supposedly non-believing technician, is often the one most open to something extraordinary happening.
Old religion under new religion The church is not merely near an older sacred site. It is sitting on it. The film turns the historical practice of building Christian worship over earlier religious ground into its central physical threat.
Found footage explaining itself Gray drills in cameras, distributes headcams and repeatedly reminds people to wear them. The film is so anxious to justify the footage that the justification becomes part of the problem.
A village barely there There are hints of local hostility and odd behaviour, but not enough communal presence to make the investigators feel meaningfully surrounded by a belief system they do not understand.
Horror beneath the floorboards The later descent works because the film finally stops discussing the apparatus and lets space, darkness and physical confinement do the job.
Three 5/10 scores tell the story rather neatly. Nobody hated The Borderlands. In fact, there is a good deal here worth seeing: Gordon Kennedy is excellent as Deacon, the film can produce a proper scare, and the ending has a horrible physicality that sticks around.
But it is a film whose parts promise more than the whole delivers. The found-footage setup is over-explained, the folk horror ingredients are not allowed to thicken into a convincing local world, and several bits of story logic become shakier the longer you look at them.
Worth watching, then. Better as a horror film than as folk horror, and perhaps most useful as an example of how having place, belief and outsiders on paper is not quite the same thing as making them live on screen.
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