A Rush Through Dark Woods

A father races through the night with his dying child in his arms, a boy who begins to rave about fairies and a spectral patriarch, in 1931's The Erlking. Based on Goethe's 1782 poem and directed by French actress Marie-Louise Iribe, it's a short, eerie piece of nightmare.

The full text of the poem is slowly shown to the audience at the start of the film before we're introduced to the man and his boy. They stop at an inn after their horse stumbles. A housemaid sings a song to the boy about the Erlking, a strange being from the woods who attempt to entice children to join him in his fairy kingdom.



This suggests the possibility that the boy hallucinates everything that follows, something that really doesn't help the film in my opinion. But I like how the film becomes almost a chase scene from an action film, with lots of tension in the wild ride throuh the woods while the king, clad head to toe in chain mail, starts to summon his half naked daughters to dance madly.



It's not exactly clear what these entities want except there's also a clear, unspeakable motive. I had no trouble understanding what was going on.

The Erlking is available on The Criterion Channel.