Falling Stars
Directed by Gabriel Bienczycki & Richard Karpala
Written by Richard Karpala
Starring Rene Leech, Shaun Duke Jr., Andrew Gabriel, Diane Worman, and Greg Poppa
Unrated
Runtime: 82 mins
In select theaters and on demand October 11

by Rachel Shatto, Staff Writer

Horror has always served as a mirror to our cultural anxieties. As our collective sense of fear and dread increasingly takes on an existential hue, folk horror feels ever more relevant in the way that it puts its subjects at the mercy of nature and larger forces far beyond our understanding.

Set in the American Southwest, Falling Stars is the feature debut of director/producer duo Richard Karpala and Gabriel Bienczycki. It mines not only that sense of powerless dread, but puts a twist on one of the darkest chapters in American history, the hunting and burning of witches. But rather than the victims of a moral panic as they are in our history books, the witches of this tale are in fact everything those early puritanical Americans feared: powerful, mysterious, unknowable, and predatory.

The film picks up on the night of the first harvest, a time when the witches descend from the skies like, well, falling stars, and claim their human sacrifices. What they look like, what happens when they take someone, and where they go after remains a mystery not only to the audience, but to the humans inhabiting the film’s world. These monsters move so quickly that even what they look like, and if they do in fact ride on brooms, remains a total mystery and a thing of myth.

That is until three brothers learn that their friend and neighbor has somehow managed to shoot and kill one, and has buried it in the desert. In an act of youthful hubris and rebellion, they join in him unburying the witch to see this monster that has haunted them their entire lives. What they find is simultaneously more diminutive and more powerful–even in death–than they expected. The situation is made all the worse when one of the friends accidentally desecrates the body, marking them and all who come in contact with them as cursed. Their only chance at survival is to destroy the body before sunrise.

In the same way Near Dark leaned into the feeling of boundless possibility and danger of nighttime in the American Southwest, Falling Stars has a distinct feeling of Americana. There’s tension between a rural small town upbringing and a craving for something bigger, while the oppressive thumb of poverty presses down on those dreams. Rather than race from one set piece to another, the film lingers and thrives in quiet moments of exposition. This includes a scene where the brothers go home to their mother looking for sanctuary and comfort, only to be told a harrowing tale and sent back into the night, rumbling down a country road toward their fate.

Falling Stars is an intimate, deeply human story that uses every penny of its limited budgetary resources as its strength. Rather than lean on bombastic or underwhelming action sequences or CGI, the film taps into the terror of the unseen, relying on special effects sparingly. It ratchets tension though the endless liminal space of the night sky. It turns the screws with quiet moments of human interaction that lay out the terror of living in a world where predators regularly, indiscriminately fall from the sky. The sense of impending doom that’s created is more effective than any jumpscare. Instead, the film basks in the tension of the ticking clock as the sun rises and the plot winds toward its inevitable conclusion.