# Hagazussa

Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse (German: hagazussa, an Old High German term for "witch") is a 2017 German-Austrian horror film written and directed by Lukas Feigelfeld in his feature directorial debut, and produced by Feigelfeld and Simon Lubinski. The film follows Aleksandra Cwen as goat-herder Albrun, who leads a secluded life in a remote part of the 15th-century Alps, an area which is fraught by belief in witches and fear of heathens and other non-Christian cultures.
The film, an international co-production between Germany and Austria, premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas on 22 September 2017, and received a wide release in Germany on 17 May 2018. It received positive reviews from critics.

## Plot

The film is divided into four parts: "Shadows", "Horn", "Blood" and "Fire", spelled in the rune alphabet of the Elder Futhark and in the modern Latin alphabet.
SHADOWS: A young girl named Albrun lives with her goat-herding mother socially and geographically isolated in the Alps of 15th century Austria. After sledding alongside other children, a traveler warns them to go back for fear of meeting the Perchta. One night, figures in goat skins and horns come to their cottage and, while Albrun and her mother hide inside, go on to stalk around it with torches, bang on their door, call them witches, and proclaim they should be burned. Later, the mother takes ill and is visited by a doctor and nun from a nearby town. They find bulbous growths located below her armpit, exchange resigned looks, shake their heads and leave. Albrun attempts to tend to her mother alone, but her condition rapidly deteriorates. One night, sleeping in the same bed, Albrun's mother overwhelms and assaults Albrun deliriously. Albrun breaks free, and while she collects herself, her mother wreaks havoc in the cottage, attacks the cat and finally runs out into the winter night. In the morning, Albrun finds her mother's lifeless body in a pond, snakes crawling over her.
HORN: Some time later, Albrun, now a young woman, still lives in the same cottage, also tends goats in the hills, and is now herself a mother to an infant girl. Albrun carries goat milk to town to sell, but is antagonised by local children who treat her as a pariah and accuse her of being a witch. The harassment is interrupted by passing townswoman Swinda. She treats Albrun kindly, and later comes by Albrun's cottage to say that the village priest requested to speak to her. When Albrun seems hesitant to leave, Swinda offers to accompany her, which Albrun gratefully accepts.
Albrun meets the parson in the local church, which contains an ossuary and has its walls lined with skulls and other bones. The parson tells her that he came to the area to bring faith to people who have difficult lives, like her, referencing her isolation and her mother's death. He also claims that her estrangement from others leads to temptation, which springs from sacrilege. As he presents Albrun with her mother's polished skull, painted with flowers and greenery like on the mother's garments, he concludes, "To strengthen the faith of a religious community, all sacrilege must be cleansed." Back at her cottage, Albrun takes her mother's skull and places it in a corner, surrounding it with flowers and a candle.
While milking a goat, Albrun embraces its fur and warmth, enjoying and getting aroused by the touch and the milk, but is interrupted by Swinda, who came to pay her a visit. Inside the cottage, Albrun offers her some goat milk and receives a ripe apple in return. Albrun appears to be pleased by Swinda's company, but is quickly distracted by her crying infant. Swinda notices the skull in the corner, suddenly says she needs to take care of her children, and leaves. Later that night, Albrun hears voices from the woods, including that of her mother. The strange sounds continue as she masturbates. The next day, when she attempts to breastfeed her daughter, the infant suddenly refuses her nipple.
Later, Swinda and Albrun walk through the mountains together and enjoy the view. Albrun becomes uneasy when Swinda warns her about "those who don't carry God in their hearts: the Jews and the heathens. They come in the night and like animals they take you, and then some months later you bear a child." On the way down the mountain, Swinda talks a local man by a watering trough into walking and laying down with them. After Swinda whispers something to the man, she turns to Albrun and holds her. The man starts stroking Albruns leg upwards below her garments while Swinda whispers, "It's disgusting how you all smell, your rotten stench." The man then begins raping Albrun as Swinda holds her down. A distraught Albrun returns home by herself, is relieved to find her child unharmed, but then finds all of her goats gone except for one, which has been butchered and mutilated. Devastated and furious, Albrun kills a rat, lays it into the stream upriver of the watering trough and then squats down, soiling it and the water. That night, Albrun lights a candle and communes with her dead mother's skull.
BLOOD: Albrun walks towards the town with her child in a sling. When she sees several dead bodies being transported away, she follows. Observing more bodies being piled up on a field, surrounded by some spiritual markings, she smiles to herself and quickly leaves. On the way, she takes a break in the woods and eats a mushroom from a growth on a goat skull infested with maggots. She starts hallucinating, walks into a stagnant, murky pond, opens up the sling holding her baby, lowers it into the water, and lets it drown. She lets herself sink underwater with open eyes and has psychotic hallucinations of blood flowing out of roots, which seem to slowly morph into a pulsating organism. Eventually, she crawls out of the pond, deeply exhausted.
FIRE: In her cabin, as Albrun sleeps, a snake travels over her body. She wakes and, ignoring the snake, hears her mother calling her name. She rises and approaches the fireplace, hearing her mother's labored breathing. She discovers the body of her drowned baby daughter, and is seized with horror. In another psychotic episode, she approaches the boiling soup on the fireplace with her daughter's lifeless body. A moment later, with shaking hands and a cooked, skinned small body in front of her, she attempts to eat from it. She immediately gets nauseous, attempts to hold down vomit, but is unsuccessful and screams in horror while she throws up liquid resembling that of her dying mother. Her laughing mother appears in front of her while threatening shadows on the cottage's walls seem to move menacingly, causing Albrun to flee into the woods. In the dusky morning light, now with grey, clouded eyes, Albrun lies down on the scenic mountaintop. Her body combusts and quietly burns while the sun rises off-screen.

## Cast

* Aleksandra Cwen as Albrun
** Celina Peter as Young Albrun
* Claudia Martini as Mutter
* Tanja Petrovsky as Swinda
* Haymon Maria Buttinger as Dorfpfarrer (village priest)
* Franz Stadler as Sepp
* Killian Abeltshauser as Farmer
* Gerdi Marlen Simonn as Baby Martha
* Thomas Petruo as Doctor
* Judith Geerts as Nun

## Production

Feigelfeld wrote, directed, and co-produced Hagazussa as his film school graduation project, partially financing it with crowdfunding donations. According to Feigelfeld:
   "After researching about old pagan beliefs and folklore about witches, that were supposed to roam the mountain woods in those times, my interest was to develop a character that these folk tales would have branded as a witch, but to dig deeper into her psyche and see her as the traumatized, mistreated and finally delusional person that society constructed. As well as to understand what utterly evil things people were led to do while suffering from psychosis in the Middle Ages and being surrounded by superstition and religious prosecution. The film tries to depict a very personal and empathetic mental image of a nightmarish and sick mind."
The music for the film was composed by Greek dark ambient duo MMMD.

## Release

Hagazussa premiered in Austin, Texas at Fantastic Fest on 22 September 2017. The film toured the international film festival circuit that year, screening at such events as BFI London Film Festival and the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. It received a wide release in Germany on 17 May 2018, and later received a limited release in the United States on 19 April 2019 through distribution by Music Box Films's genre subsidiary Doppelgänger.

## Reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Hagazussa holds an approval rating of 93%, based on 29 reviews, and an average rating of 7.5/10. Its consensus reads, "Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse weaves a spooky supernatural story that should satisfy horror fans with more adventurous inclinations." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 72 out of 100, based on 6 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Stephen Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter called the film a "spooky, stylish, spellbinding debut", writing that "even if the open-ended story does not satisfy conventional genre rules, Hagazussa works very well as a spellbinding audiovisual symphony". Phil Nobile Jr., writing for Birth.Movies.Death., wrote "Visually stunning and narratively assured, [Hagazussa] presents its horror as the slowest of burns, its ambiguous, stark presentation of the supernatural eventually giving way to tangible, colorful revulsion". Brad Miska of Bloody Disgusting wrote that "Hagazussa is Germany's answer to The Witch that has stunning atmosphere mixed with brooding terror from start to finish". Noel Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "for those who can embrace “Hagazussa” more as an experience than as a spook show, this film is utterly absorbing and hard to shake".
Dennis Harvey of Variety called the film "gorgeously unsettling", writing that "this enigmatic folktale-cum-horror is likely to flummox or even exasperate mainstream genre fans with its sparse plotting, slow pace, and near-impenetrable mysteries. But its mix of the poetical, repugnant, and phantasmagorical will weave a singular spell for more adventuresome, arthouse-friendly viewers". Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave the film 2 1/2 out of 4 stars, praising Feigelfeld's "precise vision" and Cwen's "intense performance", but calling the film "atmospheric and muted ... Those are noble values for a horror movie, but it's a shame they’ve lead [sic] to a frustrating genre pic that's just too dreary to be scary".