There is something fitting about The Woods having spent much of its existence lost in the shadows.
Released in 2006 after a troubled production and delayed release schedule, Lucky McKee’s Gothic horror film arrived with little fanfare, quietly slipping through the cracks during a period when mainstream horror was dominated by remakes, torture horror and the lingering aftershocks of J-Horror. Audiences largely overlooked it. Critics were divided. The film faded into obscurity.
Yet twenty years later, The Woods feels less like a forgotten oddity and more like a film released a decade too early.
Long before the resurgence of folk horror ushered in films such as The Witch, Hagazussa and You Won’t Be Alone, McKee was already exploring the dark intersection between female experience, folklore and institutional oppression. Viewed retrospectively, The Woods now emerges as a fascinating companion piece to May and a precursor to the righteous fury that would later define The Woman.
Like much of McKee’s work, The Woods is concerned with outsiders.
More specifically, it is concerned with what happens when young women are forced into environments designed to suppress who they are.
Set in 1965 New England, the film follows troubled teenager Heather Fasulo (Agnes Bruckner), who is sent by her estranged parents to Falburn Academy, an isolated girls’ boarding school hidden deep within an ancient forest. Already burdened by familial neglect and simmering anger, Heather quickly discovers that both the school and the surrounding woods harbour secrets far older and more dangerous than she could possibly imagine.
At first glance, The Woods appears to occupy familiar territory. The isolated boarding school, strict authority figures and adolescent anxieties evoke echoes of classic Gothic literature. Yet McKee uses these conventions not merely to generate atmosphere, but to interrogate the social structures that seek to discipline and define young women.
Falburn Academy is less a place of education than one of containment.
The institution demands conformity, obedience and silence. Individuality is discouraged. Dissent is punished. Heather’s rebellious nature immediately places her at odds with both her peers and the faculty, particularly the formidable Headmistress Traverse, played with delicious severity by Patricia Clarkson.
As in May, McKee once again demonstrates an extraordinary empathy for those who exist on society’s fringes. Heather is prickly, defensive and often difficult to like, yet McKee never judges her. Instead, he recognises her anger as a natural response to abandonment, alienation and emotional neglect.
She is not broken.
She is resisting.
This focus on female alienation has become one of McKee’s defining artistic signatures. Across films such as May, The Woods and The Woman, he consistently explores how patriarchal structures marginalise, pathologise and seek to control women who refuse to conform.
In The Woods, these themes manifest through the film’s central metaphor: the forest itself.
The woods surrounding Falburn are not merely a setting. They are a living, breathing presence — ancient, unknowable and overwhelmingly feminine. In contrast to the rigid order imposed by the school, the forest represents instinct, freedom and a primordial power that cannot easily be domesticated.
Nature, McKee suggests, remembers.
And nature resists.
Viewed through a contemporary lens, it is difficult not to see The Woods as an early entry in what would later become the modern folk horror renaissance. Its fascination with isolated communities, feminine power, folklore and the tension between civilisation and the natural world anticipates many of the thematic concerns explored by later filmmakers.
Admittedly, the film is not without flaws.
The screenplay occasionally struggles to balance its competing ideas, while certain narrative revelations feel somewhat underdeveloped. The final act, in particular, leans more heavily into conventional supernatural spectacle than the film’s earlier psychological ambiguity perhaps warrants. There are moments where one senses studio interference, an understandable consequence given the film’s troubled production history.
Yet these shortcomings do little to diminish the film’s considerable strengths.
Visually, The Woods remains a sumptuous piece of Gothic horror. McKee and cinematographer John R. Leonetti cloak the film in autumnal hues, transforming the New England landscape into an intoxicating realm of beauty and menace. The atmosphere is consistently rich, evoking the sensation of wandering through a dark fairy tale where danger lurks just beyond the treeline.
And at its centre stands Agnes Bruckner, delivering one of the strongest performances of her career. Heather’s journey from frightened outsider to self-possessed young woman provides the film with its emotional core, grounding its supernatural elements in genuine feeling.
The Prognosis:
Twenty years on, The Woods deserves rediscovery.
Not merely as an overlooked curiosity within Lucky McKee’s filmography, but as an important stepping stone in the evolution of contemporary folk horror and feminist genre cinema. In many respects, the film feels startlingly prescient, anticipating conversations that horror audiences would only fully embrace years later.
Some films fade because they have nothing left to say.
The Woods disappeared because audiences simply weren’t ready to listen.
- Saul Muerte
Surgeons of Horror 