Possession horrors are almost always based around Catholic lore, and demons are dispensed with via Catholic means. But this, surely, isn’t the whole picture: other traditions and cultures must have their own spin on this kind of horror. Well, The Old Ways at least initially purports to provide a different spin on the genre; however whilst it does some things very well, ultimately it doesn’t really break away from rather more staid, tried-and-tested elements.
We start with a little girl witnessing a possession scene (woman in nightgown – demons don’t like day clothes – rituals being read over her prostrate form) and then – cut to present day, where this is the same girl, all grown up. Cristina (Brigitte Kali Canales) is of Mexican descent but lives and works in the US; she’s back in Mexico, however, to do a report on local rituals and traditions, visiting a cave in a place called La Boca. Or she was; she’s since been confined in a room by two strangers; the elderly woman of the pair examines her, and confirms that she has ‘it’ inside her; the ‘it’, it seems, is a demonic force, something which attached itself to her at La Boca, and they can’t let her go until this is dealt with. The arrival of cousin Miranda (Andrea Cortés) provides a friendly face but it seems that Miranda, too, believes that this phenomenon is real. Time passes, rituals occur, and it seems that they might just be on to something: even Cristina begins to see it their way.
This is certainly an attractive film: it looks great, sounds great, and it pulls off some neat tricks – such as the way in which Cristina is lit to look quite otherworldly, so that you could easily believe that all is not well with her, and the claims about her could be true. For the first half of the film she seems strangely impassive, which again, fits the bill and contributes to the suspense. The Old Ways is at its strongest in the way it’s structured, knitting together different moments in time towards a whole – this does create a few issues with depth, as the first ritual is up and going way before we find out the back story, but as events come together, it fits together fairly well.
There are elements of a ‘stranger in a strange land’ here, too, as although Cristina is Mexican by birth, she has not spent time there since childhood, has forgotten how to speak the language and regards the traditional beliefs unfolding around her as completely alien. However, for all that, the rituals performed by the bruja aren’t a million miles away from what we would recognise; the language is different, but the grimoires (accessible enough with a Spanish-English dictionary) look like all grimoires in horror films. In fact, the horror tropes have followed Cristina to Mexico in abundance; it’s a shame that we didn’t get more specific lore explored, it really is, as that would have really distinguished the horror on offer from a number of other films. The Exorcist (TV series) is clearly a big influence here, right down to some minor details, so if you’ve seen that series, then there will be few surprises here. A few pacing issues creep in, too – understandable, given most of the film occurs in a single room – and (minor spoiler) animal killing always feels like a cheap shot to me, but events pick up as the film progresses, and The Old Ways can boast some well-developed scenes, even if you wait for them.
The Old Ways is by no means a bad film, and it’s a decent enough horror film: coming from a director who has tried his hand at a Muppets movie more recently than he’s worked on a horror project, I suppose it’s fairly extraordinary that it’s emerged at all. For all that, if you’re a fan of the genre then you will pretty much know what’s coming, and once the timeline slots into place, there are no really remarkable resolutions or lessons. It hasn’t taken possession-style horror in a new direction, not really, but it’s a decently entertaining hour and a half.
The Old Ways screened at Glasgow FrightFest (online) on the weekend of 5th March 2021.