We’re all pretty cut off from the natural world nowadays. That sounds like a typically trite thing to say, but let me ask you something. Show of hands: How many of you have gotten lost in the woods? I mean really lost, to the point where you don’t know how you ended up where you are and whether you’ll ever be able to get back home to watch reruns of The Office ever again?
It’s happened to me, and it’s happened to most people who’ve ever gone off tramping in the woods. It’s not a great experience, I’ll say that much for it. Every sound becomes a predator. And those birds squawking and chirping overhead? Pure evil. They’re plotting to take you down with all their evil bird friends and poke your eyes out and tear at your skin as you lay dying on this rocky outcropping and… oh, wait. I recognize this tree. There’s that meadow I crossed, and my car’s about half a mile up the road. No problem. Whew!
Lost-in-the-woods stories are a basic form of horror storytelling, all the way back to Hansel and Gretel. It’s easy to see why. These stories appeal to a basic fear all of us have of being lost, alone, and abandoned, left to face the natural world—and those evil birds—on our own. Here are five of my favorite lost in the woods movies.
Three college students take a camera in the woods in rural Maryland, searching for the legendary Blair Witch. They never return. Several years later, the footage they shot is found and made into a documentary movie. Terrifying, right? Well, this is a work of fiction! (As if you didn’t know that by now.) When this film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it sent several audience members screaming from the theater, terrified by what was going on with the three student “filmmakers” who tried to find out the truth of the legend of the Blair Witch.
This film pioneered the “found footage” genre of films—movies that are supposedly assembled from footage shot, and then lost for whatever reason, by the filmmakers. The film was made for $60,000 and sold immediately after its initial screening at Sundance for $1.1 million. Co-directed and conceived by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez. Heather Donahue, Michael C. Williams, and Joshua Leonard brilliantly play the three student filmmakers. The dialogue was entirely improvised. The big question about this movie: once you know this isn’t a documentary but an improvised piece of fiction, is this still a scary movie? Oh, my yes!
German director Werner Herzog’s astonishing and gripping documentary about a man who is obsessed with grizzly bears and believes they accept him as one of their own. Spoiler alert: they don’t.
Timothy Treadwell filmed his life in the Alaskan wilderness, where he lived with his girlfriend Amie Huguenard and lots of grizzlies. After his eventual death, the rescuers seeking to find him (too late) discovered the footage used in the film, so this actually is real found footage. Herzog edited down the 100 total hours of footage and combined it with interviews he shot after Treadwell’s death.
When I first heard about this project, I was put off. Who would want to see a movie about a complete idiot doing something completely idiotic? If I wanted to see that, I’d just hire a camera crew to follow me around for a week. Well, it turns out I should have trusted Herzog. Treadwell spent 13 summers at Katmai National Park in Alaska, but in the fateful year of this film, he and his girlfriend had decided to stay into the fall season. Bad idea: fall is when the bears become much more aggressive in their search for food before their winter hibernation. Once you start watching this film, you simply cannot stop. Watching someone this obsessed—and wrong-headed—about these animals is a fascinating and terrifying exercise.
At some point I will forgive Sean Penn for his hideously misguided and incredibly stupid documentary The Day I Met El Chapo (2017). I’m not quite in that emotional space in my life just yet (as we might say here in California), but that doesn’t mean I hold that against everything else Sean Penn has done. In fact, I think he’s an excellent actor and, as this movie showed, an outstanding director as well.
This movie is based on Jon Krakauer’s 1996 non-fiction book of the same name. The film tells the story of Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch), an inveterate rambler who turns his back on a pleasant upper-middle-class life in order to roam around various wildernesses. He ends up in Alaska, living in an abandoned school bus and sort of loving his life until he realizes, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m hungry and lonely.” McCandless then sets out to go back home. How do you think it worked out? Yeah, you’re right. But that doesn’t in any way detract from the powerful and tragic story being told here.
Penn doesn’t attempt to fully explain McCandless, he just tells the story in a straightforward manner. The spectacular scenery is beautifully shot by French cinematographer Eric Gautier. The music is by a number of 1990s alt-rockers, including the always-cheerful Eddie Vedder. This is an excellent cautionary tale in the event you’re thinking of doing anything similar.
Three hunters from the city (two brothers and one’s wife) go into the woods and end up being the hunted. Is this a great movie? Uh, no. But it sure is scary and it sure is a real thrill ride. Shot in the woods around and above Santa Clarita, CA, this film uses a lot of the horror movie tropes, including, most notably, hockey masks on the killers. The fairly mediocre script—written by director Christopher Denham—isn’t particularly notable, although he does manage to get the most out of it.
The main reason to watch this movie is the female lead, Wrenn Schmidt. Schmidt is just simply outstanding. She dominates the picture and clearly is the strongest thing going for the movie. I watched it twice because I enjoyed her performance so much.
My dad once told me that his favorite book as a kid—the only book in his house other than the Bible—was a memoir by Capt. W.F. Drannan called Thirty One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains. Originally published around 1923, the book is pretty poorly done—bad grammar, mistakes, shoddy story-telling. Still, my dad loved it and read it over and over because of its tales of high adventures in the Old West.
This movie has a similar background. It is based on Michael Punke’s 2002 novel of the same name, which itself was based on a 1915 poem called The Song of Hugh Glass. Hugh Glass was a frontiersman (try to get that job nowadays) who went on an expedition exploring the upper Missouri River in 1823. Things were going along pretty well until he was mauled by a grizzly bear and left for dead by his fellow explorers. Hey, thanks a lot, guys!
This is one of those exceptionally well-made movies (Mexican director Alejandro Iñárritu won the Academy Award for Best Director for this movie) with a great cast (Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy) and a highly-regarded screenwriter (David Rabe). Except it’s just ridiculous. DiCaprio’s character is like the Terminator. Nothing seems to be able to kill him. He just keeps surviving one life-threatening disaster after another, and still comes through somehow. At one point, I yelled at the screen: “Oh, come on, man! Just die now!” Nope. He keeps surviving.
This movie is beautiful, it’s thrilling, it’s dramatic, it’s exciting. And it’s preposterous. Should that stop you from seeing it? Of course not. Have I ever indicated even the slightest aversion to recommending preposterous movies to you? No. And I’m not stopping now.
David Raether is a veteran TV writer and essayist. He worked for 12 years as a television sitcom writer/producer, including a 111-episode run on the ground-breaking ABC comedy “Roseanne.” His essays have been published by Salon.com, The Times of London, and Longforms.org, and have been lauded by The Atlantic Magazine and the BBC World Service. His memoir, Homeless: A Picaresque Memoir from Our Times, is awaiting publication.