Eyes of Fire (1983)

Before The Witch. Before Midsommar. Before folk horror hit the mainstream as a popular subgenre, Avery Crounse made EYES OF FIRE in Missouri in 1983. (The term "folk horror" was actually coined in 1970 by film reviewer Rod Cooper.)

The premise is deceptively simple: a group of colonial settlers, a cursed stretch of wilderness, and something very old and very wrong living in the trees. What Crounse does with it is stranger and more unsettling than the premise suggests - less a monster movie than a fever dream about the land itself as a hostile force, haunted by Indigenous spirits that the settlers have absolutely no framework to understand or survive.

It was originally a longer film called Crying Blue Sky. Crounse cut about 22 minutes for the release version and later said the shorter cut was more commercial but less coherent. He was probably right on both counts.

Decades later, Severin Films restored both versions, which is the main reason the film found a new audience - and why it's now finally being talked about in the same breath as the contemporary folk horror canon it predates.

One other footnote worth knowing: the score is an early credit for Brad Fiedel, who two years later would compose The Terminator. You can hear him finding something here.