Do you think this is one more of these stories “based on true events”? You might suspect this. You and me we know this is most of the times part of the marketing campaign for the movie. Thus, in the end the story is not really true and we can relax. I am afraid my case is more complex. The Forest Dark Feature Film project didn’t start as some sort of another genre movie project “based on a true story”. It was pure fiction. But that changed.
Do you know where ideas come from? We invent them. Sure? What would you say if I would say, sometimes stories are remembered. I hear someone say, of course, something from your childhood. Some people write up their own biographies when they think they are writing fiction.
I have to admit that anything with the subject of The Forest Dark Feature Film Project was not related in any way with my personal experience before I become involved with this.
But did you ever remember anything and didn’t know where that thought came from? Maybe from a former life, a dream?
There are much weirder possibilities, possibilities I never imagined. I learned we live in a world which is super natural. Behind the thin veil of our everyday world exists an otherworld. This otherworld isn’t really separated from our realm. There are strong intelligible forces following us and watching over us. Sometimes these forces are shaping our lives and even our projects.
And when we start to question our experiences during our individual journeys we may find that we indeed live in a “forest dark”.
Is it possible that the forest itself lets people disappear?
We are used to the idea of witches (as in Blair Witch), demons, creatures, or ghosts haunting the woods and being responsible for disappearances or uncanny encounters.
Furthermore, films and literature also often use a tangible solution or explanation to solve the mystery in the story.
The Woods themselves as the source of mysterious disappearances – we might not take this too literally. It’s not like the trees suddenly have legs and can take hold of somebody (even though there are stories about the trees becoming active elements in supernatural events).
Grabbed by the woods is more like taken by the woods in a form we do not quite understand yet.
Of course, this refers only to certain cases, as there are numerous cases that have natural explanations, such as accidents or even crimes.
That’s not new.
What’s new is the huge “database” which is online today. In former times, we had to look for rare books or conventions where often small circles showed continued interest in these themes. Beginning with the creepypasta channels, there are now an endless number of YouTube channels and podcasts out there.
It is, of course, only in parts a positive development. First of all, more data doesn’t mean better quality. Furthermore, some channels don’t contribute valuable information, especially if they are KI-driven or “automation channels”. But there is gold out there. An outstanding example is the German “Mythen Metzger” Channel, which is now on Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/show/4Ih7LQtFSbApMRcIoummPP, The channel delivers excellent researched material often found in rare books like Robert Lyman’s Forbidden Land.
Of course, numerous other channels have also developed into sources providing high-quality content, such as the previously mentioned YouTube Channel Truth Proof.
Therefore, there are more well-documented stories about mysterious disappearances and strange encounters in forests around the world. They give us interesting data about repeating patterns, which helps to get a more detailed picture of what is going on.
A common pattern connected with mysterious disturbances or with cases where people returned is the kind of hypnotic call coming from the woods. Somehow, they feel compelled to go into the woods like some strange entity is controlling their thoughts. Something is pulling them into the forest. Perception is altered sometimes. People then suddenly discover it’s in the middle of the night, whereas they thought before that it was already morning. When they are found, they are disoriented and have no precise recollection of what happened before. These phenomena are also described as time-missing stories. But often not only time is missing, but the victims of such experiences also report that they were at a different location for this time span:
SHAPESHIFTING FORESTS
Another prominent experience which pops up in many accounts is the sudden change of topographic features: The surroundings suddenly look different, a well-known path seems to lead into an unknown landscape.
There are both distortions of space and of time: It suddenly takes hours to reach a destination that is normally reached within minutes. People lose hours or resurface after days in the woods. It might be that they experience only a short timespan, while in the outside world hours and days have passed, or vice versa.
These are similarities in many stories from around the world, at different times in different cultures, which ensures that they weren’t copied from one source.
Another similarity is the nature of sightings: Both in the US, Europe, and other countries, strange creatures and light orbs are seen. From fairies, black cats, to Bigfoot, there is a huge variety. However, there is one parallel everywhere: It is never exactly clear on what plane of reality these things happen. Orbs and cryptoids seem neither completely material nor ghosts nor purely imagination.
SIGHTINGS
Another similarity is the change of atmosphere and circumstance heralding supernatural encounters in the forest: Often, the forest falls completely silent. No birds singing anymore, no other animal noises. The air feels different; sometimes it is suddenly getting colder, or there is a sort of pressure. The mood is affected for no reason, from sudden sadness to fear.
Overall, it is a change of reality, like entering an otherworldly realm where concepts like literally true vs not literally true no longer work.
Those who do not get lost in the woods without return are often changed forever. Often, the recollection of events doesn’t make a lot of sense in the traditional way.
Similar tendencies in the vast, growing set of “data” indicate that there are no simple explanations here. First of all, mysterious events can’t be explained away as made-up or as a sort of psychological explanation. Secondly, what really happened might not be the same as what was experienced in a literal sense. The “creature” or the “Lady in white” might be an expression of something different. The phenomenon is much stranger, much weirder than we imagine. Think of it as a strange higher consciousness that humans can’t grasp.
SIMPLE EXPLANATIONS DON’T WORK
Furthermore, it means that typical simple fantastic solutions like the “old legend” do not work. There is a tendency, especially in commercial TV formats, to come up with a slightly supernatural but still “reasonable” explanation, the old story, like the crime that happened at a certain place and the solution that some “souls” roaming the woods must be freed. The idea behind this is that there is an Otherworld around us, which works very similar like our ordinary world. Without ruling out anything, these explanations are often used “to make a story work”.
If we want to stick true to the nature of the phenomenon and what numberless accounts tell us, true forest horror must be more daring. There will be no satisfying explanation. We must comprehend that we don’t understand the phenomenon, yet, how people are grabbed by the woods.
That’s also why the native inhabitants of America marked certain territories as forbidden land. There are zones out there where our common understanding of nature doesn’t work, where things happen that we cannot grasp with our reasoning. The unknown is never far away.
Is it the forest that lets people disappear?
We don’t know, but it can be that larger dimension behind the visible world that does it.
Fiona Barnett’s excellent novel “The Dark Between the Trees” presents a fascinating idea within a compelling modern story of Forest Horror.
A doomed expedition gets caught in a mysterious, otherworldly forest that is superimposed over the normal forest they enter at the beginning of the story. A huge oak tree disappears overnight, and another realm breaks into the ordinary reality with flickering and shimmering perceptions that appear like hallucinations in the first place and then become a brutal reality.
It’s a fascinating concept since it gives the well-known ideas of the power of places and the zones of the supernatural a new dimension.
The book, which stands in the best tradition of Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen, shows convincingly how a hidden dimension breaks through the fabric of normal reality:
“There were two forests, and one of them kept flickering into sight – not even on the edge of her vision now – but sometimes right in the middle of it.” (From Fiona Barnett’s book)
Even though it is fiction, it provides a promising premise for real investigations into the unknown.
The zones of the paranormal
The otherworld as an (normally) invisible landscape behind the ordinary makes sense: If we go through the different phenomena of the supernatural, from mysterious light orbs, UFOs, to ghostly apparitions, the lowest common denominator is location:
Again and again, it is certain hotspots: notorious haunted forests, zones where Ufos are seen, bewitched fields – landscapes where things happen.
Local legends and witness accounts “draw” maps over time: There are clusters of mysterious disappearances or places where “lights” are seen more often: Hessdalen in Norway is a prominent place, or the Brown Mountain Lights in the US. Somehow, the otherworldly “landscape” is connected to our landscape. Or is it vice versa? Are our landscapes the “normal”, “visible” part of a larger unknown dimension?
These unknown dimensions might manifest in many ways, and it is the dark forest behind the visible world. It is the layer between the trees. A layer where orbs, beasts, and ghostly apparitions can occur. At night. Mostly. And it is indeed, like in the novel, the impression that something gets superimposed over the normal reality. A layer that is active under certain circumstances.
Another interesting concept in the book is the overlapping of different times, which allows one to go missing and still be alive after centuries (no more info here to avoid spoilers).
It is interesting because we see a common thread that runs through fiction, folklore, and eyewitness accounts of real experiences: It’s always certain places where the veil between ordinary reality and an unknown dimension is thin. Time seems to run different and the motive of getting lost and trapped in a realm where time is different pops up again and again. We see typical motives from the fairy lore here, which then appear again in UFO-stories of close encounters and abductions.
But does it have some real relevance?
Our media is full of replicated content or even KI-created stories. We need to look out for the real stuff: Original field research, original interviews with witnesses, and verified stories. Then it would be interesting to see how much real events reflect this common thread.
A great discovery is researcher Paul Sinclair, who made the documentary WOLF LANDS, wrote books (Night People and the Truth Proof), and is the creator of a YouTube channel. His channel TRUTH PROOF and work are pure gold in the flood of “automated content”. His expeditions and talks with witnesses often lead to the fascinating forests and landscapes of Yorkshire, which has a reputation for the paranormal. He and his friends and family do what everybody should do who has a serious interest in phenomena: Talk to the people, visit the locations, and – important – analyse. Its a pleasure to have someone who combines open-mindedness and critical thinking, and it is interesting to hear the conclusions of such an experienced researcher. Things shouldn’t be taken too literally.
In one of his best videos, “Something haunts the woods,” he concludes: “Do certain locations guard secret knowledge? Is Danes Dyke ( a forest in Yorkshire) one of those rare places where reality frays at the edges? Here, ancient earthworks stand watch over centuries of whispered tales… To some, Danes Dyke is just a relic of a forgotten age. but to those who know its secrets…it’s a gateway to something far stranger” (Taken from the video description).
What we see again and again is that there is a convergence here. Fiction and researchers paint a similar picture, and also that researchers, authors, and scientists coming from different perspectives and different backgrounds often present similar conclusions after years of thinking and working on these themes.
Many insights from Paul’s videos find confirmation in the writings of Patrick Harpurand Jacques Vallée. Again, the common denominator is the power of place; it is location. The best of fiction, such as Fiona Barnett’s “The Dark Between The Trees” or the classics from Algernon Blackwood (The Willows, The Wendigo), takes these insights further and is also a way to deepen our understanding of an otherworld which might be right next door. Another world, which indeed is a Forest Dark.
Paranormal events, such as UFO sightings, mysterious disappearances, and supernatural phenomena, not only happen within notorious zones, such as the Bennington triangle, but also in liminal time spans in a certain zone.
It is like a temporarily electromagnetic charged field, where the physical conditions are altered. For example, if a thunderstorm is very close, your hair rises, radio and TV reception can be disturbed, and in extreme cases, so-called Elmo’s fire can be seen. Or electromagnetic storms coming from the sun not only create magnificent aurora borealis but also disruptions in the power grid.
Witnesses of otherworldly events describe the world around them suddenly “ensouled”, enchanted but sometimes also terrifying, altered uncannily. What was a familiar object before suddenly has a second, deeper meaning or is simply different.
A good example is in the First Twin Peaks series by David Lynch, when Agent Cooper’s room in the hotel is suddenly engulfed in bright light, and the giant appears.
It seems at certain times, a portal is opened, and a connection to the Otherworld is established. The air is charged with energy, much like electricity, but in a different way. This is when we experience premonitions in dreams and weird phenomena, such as Poltergeist-like occurrences, where a light bulb suddenly turns on by itself and becomes way too bright.
We can also speak of a heightened reality, a hyperreality taking over, which implies the supernatural, but not necessarily extreme effects. Things happen not clearly in the literal realm of reality, but in an intermediate realm where uncanny things can occur, often in a subtle manner.
If we look into myth and folklore, we find many interesting reports and traces of this phenomenon. It seems that there are liminal time spans where there is a heightened reality happens like an overlay to the layer of mundane reality periodically. We all know about Samhain, the night when the veil is thin, or about the dangerous winter nights between Christmas and Epiphany, called “Rauhnächte”. This is a time when people have visions and sometimes premonitions about the future. It is also a time when ghosts and demons are unleashed, and the wild hunt is roaming the woods and the sky.
Then there are these endless witness accounts of supernatural events within a short time frame.
Jacques Vallee described an exemplary episode in his book “Confrontations”: It happened in HAPPY CAMP, Northern California, autumn 1975, where, for a short time span, all kinds of UFO phenomena, supernatural and poltergeist phenomena happened.
Different types of sightings, often of a combination of completely different things as cryptoids, strange animals, and UFOs, within a few days, are a typical pattern. Another famous case is the Rendlesham Forest incident in the UK in 1980: USAF personnel reported various unusual observations at RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters, two American air bases located in England. Their reports included lights in the sky, a metallic triangular object in the forest, multi-colored lights moving through the forest, and higher levels of radiation.
Another famous case of heightened (paranormal) activity happened around Randolph in Massachusetts in the notorious Bridgewater Triangle in Spring 1979, where reports of UFOs put police officers under stress for weeks.
There are numberless other cases which give an impression that a certain region was under some sort of “radiation” which induced the phenomena.
Of course, there are cases where natural things like weather balloons or Drones created a mass hysteria where people misinterpreted things after some initial reports. But there is still an impressive number of reports, and it is also a personal experience that in certain moments of life, reality seems strangely altered, heightened, or full of otherworldly energies.
The important point is something which seems illogical at first sight: Often in these historical records of “paranormal episodes” it is not like what we would expect, it is not some sort of “alien invasion” with a series of UFO-sightings, but a strange mix of different kinds of phenomena and events. It might be some sort of sighting of a weird animal, the same time people see glowing orbs in the sky or some poltergeist phenomena, at the same time, people had weird dreams and visions. Often, everything is more subtle, like a sudden change in weather when the air feels different. Something which makes it difficult to lay a finger on it.
This reflects on the typical attributes of daimonic reality as Patrick Harpur coined it. The phenomena that we see might not be taken too literally; it is more like a representation of the daimons or some hidden force. Forces that don’t show their true faces to us. There is a dreamlike quality here, even if the events are literal, but their contents might sometimes be symbolic, sometimes just mysterious.
Over the past decade, the term’ liminal spaces’ has gained popularity. The reason is the modern use of “liminal” within the internet culture. The most prominent example is the backrooms, which originated in the creepy pasta subculture.
The Backrooms are mostly abandoned spaces that exist in an intermediate realm between our world and another dimension, but are also sometimes claimed to be real. They emerged more like an urban legend rather than an actual discovery, and were visualized by filmmaker Kane Parsons on YouTube with his channel Kane Pixels. The foundation was the original backroom picture posted on 4chan, which depicts an abandoned office space with fluorescent light, green-yellowish walls, and old carpets. The picture and the videos present an unparalleled eeriness and become a setting for many follow-up horror stories with the labyrinthine and endless office spaces increasingly populated by monsters and other creatures. Meanwhile, the A24 studio is preparing a Backrooms movie.
The backrooms concept is particularly interesting because of the otherworldly concept: Entering the backrooms is based on the premise that one enters the backrooms by “no-clipping“, which means slipping from our normal reality into the backrooms. This term stems from gaming language but represents an old idea in connection with the otherworld: you could slip through reality into another realm and be caught there.
Folklore is full of such stories, where people went off the way and ended up in fairyland. Sometimes, as in the Rip Van Winkle Story, time runs differently than in ordinary reality, and the protagonist spends ages there.
The similarity between the Otherworld in folklore and liminal spaces was also identified by Ethan Sabatella in Senchas Claideb: “The concept of liminality in storytelling is nothing new and has motifs in folk traditions spanning back for centuries”.
The no-clipping concept is one fascinating example of how an old concept of the otherworld reemerges into the modern digital world. The whole liminal spaces phenomenon proves that the otherworld always finds a backdoor to slip into our modern consciousness.
It’s not surprising that these transition spaces between the ordinary world and the intelligible higher (spiritual world) take the shape of abandoned malls or empty labyrinthine office spaces. Imagination is at work here, and otherworldly or daimonic visionary worlds often take shape, which makes sense for the individual experiencing it. An abandoned office space makes more sense in our mechanistic, technological-dominated world as a cave inmidst the woods where fairies or dragons reside.
However, there is more to these liminal spaces. They are at the same time familiar and not familiar; they are like lost places, but seem less defined, more out of touch with ordinary reality.
The strong impact the images and videos on the web have lies with their representation of the uncanny. The uncanny is always at the core of horror and has a much stronger effect than any monster that might occur later in the videos.
The basic principle of the uncanny is that something that should be normal becomes unsettling.
This is where liminal spaces become interesting: it’s often the most normal, even boring places that become unsettling just because one or two things are changed:
An airport stripped of passengers, an empty mall where usually shoppers fill shops, or an endless office space where people work.
It’s maybe not a surprise that these liminal spaces became popular at the time when the pandemic happened.
During the corona crisis, a lot of normal places became temporarily similar liminal spaces: streets without pedestrians or train stations without people.
That uncanny feeling is not so much an intellectual experience, but rather an emotional one or something which comes from deep inside: The fear that our normal world is fragile, that in truth everything can fall apart at any time.
Furthermore, it is the anxiety that goes on in these rooms and the idea of being trapped without escape. However, it is not only anxiety; it is the typical ambiguous feeling in horror of being attracted to something and being repulsed at the same time. Attracted because the room might represent something of the past we are longing for and repulsed because of the nightmarish scenario of being imprisoned in an otherworldly realm that is just bleak, cold, and merciless.
Is the forest a good candidate for a liminal space?
We find different opinions about this question. At first sight, the forest might be something completely different, because it is a natural world – the fear in the forest is created by other factors, like getting lost or paranormal phenomena, and it is not related to these more technological liminal spaces which dominate the liminal spaces subculture on the web.
In a more traditional sense, the forest is full of liminal spaces: There are many areas where the mysterious and the familiar merge as secret groves or edges of the forest. The core idea of the liminal spaces is their transitional nature; it is about potent places, and they can change the visitor fundamentally.
If we dig further into the definition of liminality, it has a double meaning. It can be both spatial and non-physical states, such a rites of passage.
The forest as a setting for rites of passage is nearly a stereotype, which perhaps makes the extreme opposite – urban areas, lost industrial places – attractive for subculture to be different.
However, that is not what we mean by liminal spaces in the forest when it comes to the Otherworld, because the forest is not just a metaphor or setting; here, the forest is a daimonic entity itself. It is full of soul and can be as shapeshifting as the industrial liminal spaces.
In many stories and accounts, the familiar forest becomes uncanny. A wanderer gets lost because landmarks are suddenly not there, animal noises disappear, and lighting becomes more unnatural, even though it was daylight a few minutes ago.
Then we find ourselves often lost, cut off from civilization, and unable to navigate a dense and confusing environment. This leads to paranoia and a breakdown of sanity.
We see some obvious similarities between modern liminal spaces and the dark forests of this world.
However, the much more interesting similarity is grounded in the very fabric of reality as described by Patrick Harpur as daimonic reality, in which the Otherworld is defined “as a subtle, intermediate realm of existence, also referred to as Daimonic Reality, that is neither purely objective (physical) nor purely subjective (psychological)“.
Most important here is the definition of the Otherworld as an intermediate realm:
Intermediary Realm: The Otherworld sits “in between” the spiritual/intelligible world and our familiar material, sensory world. It is this “middle realm” that allows for communication and mediation between human beings and “the gods” or the divine.
In Harpur’s definition, the Otherworld is a liminal space, per se. The modern liminal spaces are excellent representations of the old idea of the Otherworld in a new form. Their constant shape shifting and ambiguity, real/not real, meet exactly the long tradition of descriptions of the otherworld.
In this sense, the question is not if the forest is a liminal space because certain dark forests and modern liminal spaces as the backrooms, are both manifestations of the Otherworld.
