Hike the hills and mountains of New Hampshire and you’re likely to run into some odd people, places and things. Wander up Mt. Waternomee and you’ll come upon the crash-site of World War II bomber. You’re just as likely to stumble across more than a few abandoned towns spread throughout the White Mountains.
The starting point for 2011’s Yellowbrickroad is the 1940 disappearance of an entire New Hampshire town. Set and filmed in the Granite State, the film covers a group of documentarians and researchers looking for the lost population of Friar, NH. On the way from the mysterious trailhead, “Yellow Brick Road,” the group wanders further from civilization and deeper into depravity.
A slow paced film, Yellowbrickroad’s shining points are the dualistic use of New Hampshire’s geography and fauna. Hilltop vistas go from beautiful to bleak. Smartly, the filmmakers build a credible New Hampshire experience with a lonely beauty and soul siphoning eeriness. Ultimately Yellowbrickroad dives into a mix of Heart of Darkness and The Shining, with some gory notes misplayed despite some creative camera work. There is a darkness, a psychological ugliness to Yellowbrickroad, that leaves the viewer shocked and dismayed. But this is one of the points, isn’t it, of a horror movie to bring out the worst in man. There are no heroes in Yellowbrickroad, but there are plenty of men and women to drive mad.
If you watch Yellowbrickroad you will see an entire town pick-up and wander into the unknown. Lost to the woods and time. Haunting glens echo with maddening diddies. What if an entire town did just leave en-mass, like Yellowbrickroad? Well other than the abandoned logging towns of Northern New England, there is an example of a town in Connecticut that is said to have been cursed, forcing every last resident to flee.
Dudleytown, known as Owlsbury in the mid-18th century, once thrived with iron and industry until something changed. Locals left in greater and greater numbers. Eventually the town died, turning into an overgrown wasteland, reclaimed by nature and forgotten by only a few. Some say it was the birth and death cycle of a New England town, boom and bust. Yet there remains a nagging belief there is something malignant and supernatural at work in Dudleytown. A curse is said to have befallen anyone who lived in the town, a place where demonic possession mingled with suicide and falls from grace. The town drove the population away. Not unlike the fictional Friar, N.H.
New England Folk Horror 