This review looks at the recent Northern Irish found footage horror film The Glenarma Tapes (Tony Devlin, 2023). The story follows four young student filmmakers whose disappearance in the Glenarma woods has not been solved in the two years since they vanished in spring of 2020.

I present a reading of the film through a folkloric lens. This reading examines the film’s depictions of institutions, such as the police and educational bodies of Northern Ireland, as visually aligned with the folkloric concept of the Wild Hunt/Fairy Cavalcade. Found predominantly in northern European folklore, the Wild Hunt takes the form of “a procession of spirits or fairies in pursuit of game, whether animal or human” (Spyra 2017: 303-4). These hunters frequently represent the coming of plague, and are often led by mythological figures of authority, hunting sinners and cement their consistent folkloric role as allied with authority. The Glenarma Tapes provides a visual and narrative doubling between the film’s antagonistic agents of institutional power and the folkloric group of hunters. After establishing the links between the film and the folklore it elicits, this review engages with this reading to examine the ways in which the film self-consciously uses its institutional/folkloric mirroring to critique the role of statutory bodies in mandating and overseeing regulations during the recent COVID19 pandemic. By implication, it represents the hardship endured by young people during those “lost years”. Through the framing of the institutions that upheld lockdown rules as the folkloric Wild Hunt within the film, The Glenarma Tapes uses a tale of its characters’ two-year disappearance to launch a critique of official attitudes towards the experience of the youth of Northern Ireland during COVID19 lockdown.

Débuting at 2023’s FrightFest film festival before getting a wide Video on Demand release in 2024, The Glenarma Tapes was produced through Northern Ireland Screen’s “New Talent Focus” initiative. Using the style of found footage horror film, the film traces the steps of four students who retreat to a forest along Ireland’s northern coast in hopes of catching filmic evidence of two of their teachers having an affair. However, as the genre dictates, things go awry quickly, leading to the disappearance of all four students, a fifth classmate, and the two teachers. Despite being a rare example of an Irish found footage horror film (the only other mainstream example being Aislinn Clarke’s The Devil’s Doorway from 2018), the film has not drawn much critical attention. However, the attention that it has garnered has been quick to draw the links between the film and the folkloric inspiration behind the film’s antagonists. These antagonists arrive in the film’s second half as a group of disguised hunters who are seeking to chase down and kill a classmate of the principal four students in the darkened forest. These hunters are not only led by and partly comprised of the teachers, but it is also shown that the local police are aware of these routine hunts and have done nothing to stop them. As noted in a review of the film: “Alongside the interest in Irish folklore, the horror elements with the people in the forest and The Huntsmaster only begin to scratch the surface here leaving some room for development” (McIlhagga 2024). Further investigation into these folkloric aspects of the hunters enables a more in-depth reading of the film’s critique of authoritative institutions, as well as creating a visual and narrative scapegoat for the years lost to the COVID19 pandemic.

A quick search into the folkloric appearances of a hunting group or huntsman leads the reader to the discovery of what is known as the “Wild Hunt”. The Wild Hunt (also conflated with the Fairy Cavalcade of western European belief) is a northern European premodern folkloric concept which depicts “an aggressive, night roaming spirit horde” often “killing those in its path, particularly the young” (Wilby 2010: 309). Across Europe this group of hunters is often led by authoritative mythological or historical figures, with most regions electing a female goddess such as Diana or Hecate to lead the group, while other depictions see the Norse god Odin, King Arthur, or French King Charles V as the hunt’s central figure. The hunters of The Glenarma Tapes visually elicit the Wild Hunt through their donning of premodern outfits, their capacity for hunting the young, and their election of a female leader. Beyond this, however, the film engages more deeply with some of the other beliefs surrounding the Wild Hunt: most notably in the hunters’ use of arrows, an element that becomes a central set piece of the film’s second act. The folkloric dimension of these arrows relates to the hunt’s capacity to inflict plague upon those struck by them, as an “infliction of disease by means of potentially supernatural agency represented by arrows” (Spyra 2017: 303). The importance of these arrows in the film and their link to the plagues spread by the Wild Hunt take on a greater significance when it is recognised that the film’s student group disappears on a very important date – March 13, 2020 – significant as the first day of Irish schools and colleges’ closure under newly mandated pandemic regulations (Leahy et al. 2020). The link between COVID-19 and the Wild Hunt as a bringer of disease is made even more interesting by the participants’ ritual of escorting their prey to the fairy realm (Greenberg 2020). This formalised conducting of their prey forms a link to the hunters of the film, whose encounter with the students results in their two-year disappearance. What is symbolically significant about this vanishing is its implicit alignment with the real-world two years of mandated lockdown experienced across Ireland. Tellingly, in the film, the two surviving students are only discovered in summer of 2022. The visual orientation of the film’s hunters with the Wild Hunt takes on a greater meaning when elements of this folklore – such as their ability to bring plague and capacity for abduction – are compared with the timeline of a story set between the initiation of enforced regional lockdown, and the easing of the same prohibition on movement two years later.

The threefold conflation of the Wild Hunt, the hunters of The Glenarma Tapes, and the institutional bodies of Northern Ireland starts to emerge as a clearer picture when viewed through the lens of the pandemic. The visual and mythological dichotomy between the Wild Hunt as bringers of plague and abduction, and the hunters of the film is apparent. Merging this dichotomy with the timeframe of the film, and the fact that these hunters are made up of, and supported by, institutional powers, sheds even more light on the filmmakers’ assessment of the pandemic. These hunters, already associated with disease and the capturing of youth, are represented in the film as school staff, who are supported by the police from behind the scenes. The legal guardians of the Repressive State Apparatuses enable illegitimate activities through their assistance in gathering “prey” for the group, and their deliberate turning a blind eye to the hunts themselves. Much as the Wild Hunt’s arrows signify the coming of plague, the arrows that capture the students of the film also signify the coming of the COVID19 pandemic, as they disappear from public view for two years between 2020 and 2022, having been abducted by the hunters. Taking this reading of the film a step further, the hunters’ two-year abduction of the students becomes an act of temporal erasure against the students by schools and the police. An antagonistic force of hunters comprised of school staff and police, two institutions that upheld COVID19 lockdown in a manner that most oppressively impacted young people across the island, frames the characters’ two-year abduction by these forces and their subsequent lost years within the context of the long period lost by the nation’s real students during lockdown. This reading is further cemented when we discover that the finished film, as seen by the viewer, has been diegetically edited together by the two surviving students, thus completing what began as a college project two years prior to their abduction in 2020. The film equates the coming of plague and subsequent abduction of youth by the folkloric Wild Hunt with the loss of years experienced by students during lockdown, as announced and upheld by the institutional bodies like schools and the police which make up the film’s own hunters.

A folkloric reading of The Glenarma Tapes reveals previously hidden depths to what is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the film: the premodern folk-like appearance of the film’s antagonists. Through a visual and thematic alignment with the European concept of the Wild Hunt, the film’s hunters are imbued with the mythological capacity to foretell disease and abduct the youth of Northern Ireland. Already mirrored with a mythological group historically led by figures of authority, the hunter’s ranks of school staff and police take on a greater significance when viewed within the specific timeframe of the students’ abduction: effectively the beginning and ending of the country’s pandemic-triggered lockdown. It is clear that these elements combine to create a critique of the role played by schools and police in announcing and upholding a lockdown that kept students trapped inside for a parallel two-year period diegetically experienced by the abducted students of The Glenarma Tapes. This reading enables the film to step beyond its generic trappings and to become a fully-fledged account of the lost time experienced by the youth most affected by Ireland’s lockdown.