The Calling Witch

Deep in the woods is a powerhouse horror movie called The Calling Witch that is calling your name to come out and find it, so it can split your head open. Written by Chris Retts and directed by Mark Wilson, it opens at night with Meredith Laye (Hilary Barraford) working at an easel in a tree house studio in the woods. She keeps looking up and out the window. She then gets down and walks away into the woods, where she hangs herself.

Weeks later, Virginia Laye (Danika Golombek), who is in her 20s, reads aloud to her little brother, Edward (Grayson Eddey), a children’s book their mother wrote and illustrated. The book is named “The Calling Witch,” and it tells the tale of a witch in the woods who calls out at night for children. The children would feel urges to answer the call and go into the woods, where the witch would eat them. After putting Edward to bed, Virginia sits down in front of her typewriter and stares at her graduate degree in creative writing. When their dad, Warren (Marcus DeAnda), gets home, he informs her that he was offered a job that would require him to be away for several weeks. This will require Virginia to put off moving to New York and stay on at the house in the woods, looking after Edward while he does correspondence school.

“…tells the tale of a witch in the woods who calls out at night for children.”

This infuriates Virginia, almost as much as being woken up later that night because Edward’s cat senses something out in the dark. The broken lock they find on their mother’s treehouse studio seems like a prank by locals, most likely that boy Greg (Zachary Cowan), the hell-raising son of Sheriff Dupray (Greg Lutz). However, if you were to look deeper into the forest around the house, you would see a creature in a dress (Nathalie Soderqvist) creeping between the trees, getting closer and closer to the house…

This is so worth it. Is Saturday night worth it? If you spend your Saturday night like I did, watching The Calling Witch, it will be one of the best Saturdays you’ve had in a while. Especially for the horror crowd, as director Wilson and writer Retts have made one of the strongest scary movies yet. The opening sequence with the hanging and the spooky kids’ book set a stake deep in horror movie territory. The eerie book illustrations by Richard Ingersoll are horrifying in a way that instantly pierces through the hair on your arms.