Beyond the Beaten Path: 20 Films Set in The Woods

The forest, in our collective imagination, is never just a collection of trees. It is the “other” place, where the laws of the city cease to exist. There are the great films that have used this wild space for unforgettable stories—and you will find them here. But the true heart of this cinema, which rejects familiarity, is drawn to its “enigmatic reality.”

In auteur films, the forest breathes. It becomes an active entity, a mirror for the characters’ psychological traumas, a catalyst for madness, an archive of ancient superstitions, or a metaphysical purgatory.

This definitive guide is a path that unites the fundamental pillars, from the most famous films to the most radical independent works. We will explore films that use the forest setting not as a simple container, but as the beating heart of the narrative: a place where folk horror rediscovers its pagan roots, the survival thriller analyzes human desperation, and arthouse drama finds the perfect stage for psychological disintegration.

Chapter 1: The Pagan Woods – Folk Horror and Ancient Myths

Folk horror is intrinsically linked to independent cinema. It is a subgenre that thrives on a sense of place, isolation, and the collision between modern rationality and ancient, twisted beliefs. In these films, the forest is not empty; it is a temple teeming with ancient gods, spirits, and forgotten rituals, where the landscape itself demands sacrifice.

Hagazussa (2017)

In the 15th-century Austrian Alps, the young Albrun lives as an outcast in an isolated hut. Ostracized by the villagers who believe her to be a witch and haunted by the trauma of her mother’s death, she slowly sinks into a vortex of paranoia, pagan visions, and madness.

Hagazussa, an Old High German term for “witch” or “hedge rider,” is a psychological folk horror that uses the woods as a toxic inheritance. The oppressive Alpine forest, constantly shrouded in fog, is not a refuge for Albrun; it is an emotional prison that visually reflects her mental decay. Director Lukas Feigelfeld explores the psyche of a woman scarred by superstition. The forest is her only companion, but it is a companion that whispers dark secrets, confusing trauma with the supernatural. Nature becomes the stage for a grotesque ritual, a visceral exploration of how isolation and misogyny can transform a victim into the monster others always wanted to see.

November (2017)

In a poor, desperate 19th-century Estonian village, peasants survive a brutal winter by resorting to magic, theft, and pacts with the devil. They create kratts, magical servants made of farm tools and bones, to help them. In this desolate world, young Liina uses magic to win the unrequited love of Hans.

November is a “fantasy-noir” that paints the woods as a desolate supernatural marketplace. The extraordinary black-and-white photography strips the landscape of all romanticism. This is not the enchanted nature of fairy tales; it is a brutal place where survival has a tangible spiritual cost. The woods are where one meets the devil to buy a soul for their kratt, and where these bizarre, wonderful creatures—made of plows, scythes, and animal skulls—come to life. It is a folk horror about desperation: the forest offers no mysticism, only a Faustian bargain to get through another winter.

Luz: The Flower of Evil (2019)

In a remote mountain community in Colombia, a preacher known as El Señor leads his followers with an iron fist. He returns to the village bearing a child he believes to be the new Messiah. The child’s arrival, coupled with the awakening femininity of the preacher’s three daughters, unleashes a spiral of violence, doubt, and mystical terror.

This Colombian folk horror is an acid trip that blends religious fanaticism with the primordial horror of nature. The mountain rainforest is not pagan; it is a hyper-Catholic and hallucinatory space, a “lyrical and poetic” place that serves as a mirror for the “darkness that lives within us.” Like Jodorowsky meets the jungle, the film uses lush beauty as a stark contrast to corrupt faith. The woods are the witness to human madness, a place where nature and femininity are systematically corrupted by man’s primitive desire to control the divine.

Errementari (2017)

Set in the Basque Country in 1843, the film follows a feared and isolated blacksmith who, according to local legend, has a pact with the devil. When an orphan girl, Usue, sneaks into his fortress in the woods to retrieve a doll, she discovers that the blacksmith is holding a real demon chained in his forge.

Based on a Basque folktale, Errementari is a dark, gothic fairy tale. The woods here are the classic darkwood of European folklore: a physical and superstitious barrier separating the civilized village from the unspeakable mystery. Patxi’s forest is a self-imposed purgatory, a place where the mud, iron, and fire of his forge mix with the supernatural. It is a visually rich film that treats folklore with absolute seriousness, using the woods as a liminal realm where humans and demons from hell can literally collide.

Sennentuntschi (2010)

In an isolated Swiss Alpine village, a mysterious mute woman appears from nowhere. Her presence coincides with suspicions that three lonely herdsmen, driven mad by solitude, have created a “Sennentuntschi”: a straw doll brought to life by the devil to satisfy their carnal desires.

This Swiss folk thriller is a brilliant exercise in ambiguity. The Alpine setting, similar to Hagazussa, is a psychological void. The high-altitude forest is a place of such profound loneliness that superstition and repressed male violence boil to the surface. The film skillfully weaves the Sennentuntschi legend with a murder mystery, leaving us in doubt: is the woman a demon born of the herdsmen’s desperation, or a human victim onto whom the community projects its darkest fears? The woods are the catalyst for collective madness.

The White Reindeer (1952)

In the desolate Finnish Lapland, a reindeer herder’s young wife, Pirita, feels lonely and sexually frustrated. She turns to a local shaman for a love potion, but a sacrifice gone wrong transforms her, during the full moon, into a vampiric white reindeer that lures local hunters to their deaths.

A foundational masterpiece of folk horror. The “woods” here are the infinite and blinding snowy expanses of Lapland. Director Erik Blomberg uses this minimalist landscape as a powerful visual metaphor for Pirita’s loneliness. Her transformation is a sublime act of rebellion: frustrated by her hunter husband, she becomes the most coveted and deadly prey, a vampiric incarnation of the wild nature itself. It is an incredibly modern analysis of female repression and desire, disguised as a mythological fairy tale.

Chapter 2: Nature as Satan’s Church – Existential Horror and Madness

In these films, the woods are not just a place of ancient gods, but an active agent of psychological chaos. It is a “twisted limbo of the soul.” It is Lars von Trier’s “Eden,” a place where nature does not heal but infects, dismantling rationality and amplifying pain until it transforms into pure horror.

Antichrist (2009)

After the tragic death of their only son, a couple retreats to an isolated cabin in the woods called “Eden.” He, a therapist, tries to treat her extreme grief and guilt, but the surrounding nature becomes a catalyst for madness, sexual violence, and a terrifying revelation about the nature of evil.

Lars von Trier, writing from the depths of his own depression, creates the definitive manifesto of the woods as psychological hell. The name “Eden” is a cruel irony. Nature here does not heal; it torments. It is the place where, as “She” declares, “nature is Satan’s church.” The woods of Antichrist are a primordial, malignant entity, a “chaos that reigns” and finds its perfect expression in the protagonist’s psychological disintegration. The woods are the lapsarian space where grief, sex, and guilt collapse, leading to one of the most disturbing and discussed acts of cinema ever created.

A Field in England (2013)

During the English Civil War, a group of deserters flees a battle and crosses an overgrown field. They are captured by an alchemist and forced, under the influence of powerful hallucinogenic mushrooms, to search for a buried treasure. Their sanity rapidly dissolves into a paranoid nightmare.

Ben Wheatley condenses the horror of the woods into a single field. This “horizontal woods” is a purgatory, a microcosm of a nation at war with itself. Nature itself, ingested via the mushrooms, becomes the antagonist. In a feverish, stroboscopic black-and-white, the landscape becomes a psychedelic prison. There is no escape. It is a visceral film that shows the woods (or the field) as a place where human hierarchies and the laws of physics are dismantled, leaving only a primordial scream.

Without Name (2016)

A land surveyor, Eric, flees a troubled family life for an assignment: to map an ancient, remote Irish forest. The woods, which the locals call “Without Name” because it refuses to be mapped, seems to have its own intelligence and begins to erode his sanity.

This is a Lovecraftian eco-horror. The woods are the monster: a conscious, ancient, and indifferent entity. Eric’s modern tools—his surveying equipment—represent an invasion of technology into nature, and the woods actively resist. It refuses to be named or understood. Through a masterful use of sound and a psychedelic atmosphere, the forest dismantles the protagonist’s ego. It is a terrifying film about nature as a cosmic “Other,” a place that watches and judges us.

Onibaba (1964)

In 14th-century Japan, ravaged by civil war, an elderly woman and her daughter-in-law survive by luring deserting samurai into a vast field of susuki reeds. They kill them, throw the bodies into a pit, and sell their armor. Their deadly symbiosis is threatened by the arrival of a neighbor and by sexual jealousy.

The “woods” in Onibaba are a claustrophobic sea of reeds. This landscape is not solid; it is in perpetual, unnerving motion. The reeds hide the pit, the hut, and the murders, creating an “outdoor chamber drama.” The reeds are the perfect objective correlative for the women’s primordial existence, driven only by the twin instincts: survival and sexuality. The wind that incessantly shakes the reeds is the soundtrack of their desperation. It is a masterpiece of erotic horror in which the landscape is, for all intents and purposes, both an accomplice and a prison.

Chapter 3: The Primal Urge – Survival and the Clash with the Wild

This section is dedicated to survival drama and horror. Here, the forest is the physical, tangible adversary. It is a place that strips the protagonists of civilization, reduces them to their basic needs, and forces them to confront their own animality in a Darwinian struggle for life.

Backcountry (2014)

A city couple, Alex and Jenn, go camping deep in the Canadian wilderness. Alex, to prove his masculinity, refuses a map and insists on taking a closed trail. They soon become lost, and their misadventure turns into a nightmare when they are stalked by a predatory black bear.

Backcountry is a fierce critique of the “crisis of masculinity.” Alex’s arrogance and insecurity are the true engines of the tragedy. The forest, beautifully photographed, is brutally indifferent. It is not a mythological enemy; it is a real ecological system with real consequences. The bear is not “evil”; it is simply acting according to its nature. The film uses the forest as a stage to demonstrate how male ego and the refusal to admit one’s fragility are the most lethal weaknesses when confronting the real, unromantic wilderness.

The Survivalist (2015)

In a post-collapse near future, a man lives alone in a cabin, cultivating a small garden hidden deep in the forest. His precarious and paranoid existence is shattered by the arrival of two women, a mother and daughter, seeking food and shelter, triggering a tense negotiation for survival.

In this dystopian thriller, the woods are a painfully defended Eden. It is the only thing standing between life and starvation. The film is an austere and tense “chamber drama,” almost devoid of dialogue. The forest is not a place of spiritual escape, but a return to an animalistic state. Survival has reduced existence to only three elements: the earth (food), violence (defense), and sex (negotiation). It is a raw and merciless portrait of what remains of humanity when society disappears.

Grizzly Man (2005)

Werner Herzog’s documentary chronicles the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, an amateur environmentalist who spent thirteen summers living unarmed among grizzly bears in Alaska. The film uses footage shot by Treadwell himself, before he and his girlfriend were mauled to death by one of the bears he loved.

Grizzly Man is a philosophical examination of our perception of the wilderness. Herzog stages a clash between two worldviews: on one side, Treadwell’s romantic vision, a “social outcast” who sees the forest as a paradise of “rebirth” and the bears as friends; on the other, Herzog’s brutal vision, which sees in nature only “chaos and murder.” The Alaskan wilderness is the impassive judge of this debate, and Treadwell’s fate is Herzog’s terrifying answer to human sentimentalism.

Spoor (2017)

In an isolated Polish village on the border with the Czech Republic, the elderly and eccentric Janina Duszejko, an animal-rights activist and astrologer, is devastated by the disappearance of her dogs. When the region’s most prominent hunters begin to be killed in mysterious ways, she suggests to the police that the animals of the forest are taking their revenge.

Adapted from a novel by Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, Spoor is a “forensic thriller” that transforms into an eco-fable. The forest here is the victim of a brutal patriarchy and an ingrained hunting culture. Agnieszka Holland’s film personifies the rage of “Mother Nature” in the character of Janina. The woods become a place of mystical justice, a fascinating work that questions where environmentalism ends and ecoterrorism begins, turning the forest into an entity that, finally, fights back.

Chapter 4: The Refugee Eden, Lost – Escape from Society and Psychological Drama

In this chapter, the woods are a deliberate choice. They are a sought-after refuge, an active escape from society. But this voluntary isolation, often begun as a utopia, becomes a test for human bonds, a psychological prison, or the painful manifestation of a trauma that civilization could not heal.

Leave No Trace (2018)

Will, a veteran suffering from PTSD, lives illegally and off-the-grid with his thirteen-year-old daughter Tom in a vast public forest park in Portland, Oregon. When they are discovered, their perfect symbiosis is threatened by society’s attempt to reintegrate them, forcing Tom to choose between the world and her love for her father.

Debra Granik delivers a portrait of heartbreaking tenderness and intelligence. The woods here are a “refuge,” a necessary “Eden” for Will’s wounded psyche. It is the only place where the noise of the world subsides. But the film’s beautifully articulated tragedy is that one father’s paradise is a cage for his daughter. The forest is the site of their perfect love, but it is also the symbol of their disconnection from the world. It is a superb independent drama that culminates in Tom’s realization: “the same thing that’s wrong with you, isn’t wrong with me.”

Dogtooth (2009)

A husband and wife keep their three now-adult children completely isolated from the outside world within a fenced compound. The children live according to a distorted set of rules and an invented vocabulary, believing they can only leave the house when their dogtooth falls out.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s masterpiece of the Greek “Weird Wave” is not set in a wild forest, but in its bourgeois surrogate: a fenced-in garden. This manicured “woods” is a psychological prison. The high fence is the boundary of the known world. The outside, the “real woods,” is a demonized place, populated by murderous “cats.” Lanthimos uses this isolated green space to stage a terrifying and absurd allegory of totalitarianism, patriarchal control, and political isolationism.

The Loneliest Planet (2011)

A young engaged couple, Alex and Nica, are hiking with a local guide in the majestic Caucasus Mountains in Georgia. Their idyllic journey is interrupted by a single, momentary gesture—an act of cowardice by Alex in the face of a threat—that irrevocably changes their relationship.

This is “slow cinema” at its full psychological potential. The “woods” here are the mountainous landscape of the Caucasus, “overwhelmingly open and frighteningly closed.” Director Julia Loktev uses the vastness and indifference of the wilderness as an echo chamber. There is no monster. The breathtaking landscape becomes a prison of silence, forcing the couple to walk for hours in the emotional fallout of their “small incident.” Nature does not attack them; it merely watches as their bond unravels.

It Comes at Night (2017)

After a highly contagious disease destroys the world, a family barricades itself in an isolated house deep in the woods. Their fragile order is threatened when another young family seeks refuge, unleashing a spiral of paranoia, distrust, and violence.

The brilliant move of this A24 film is its bait-and-switch. There is no monster in the woods. The “it” that comes at night is not a creature, but fear, paranoia, suspicion. The “deeply isolated” woods serve as a pressure cooker. In the absence of society, the forest becomes the place where the only law that matters is the protection of the nuclear family. It is a taut, terrifying psychological thriller, not about the horror hiding in the trees, but about “what you would be capable of” to protect your own.

Chapter 5: The Dark Zone – Metaphysical Landscapes and the Wounds of War

In this final section, the woods transcend the physical. They become a metaphysical space, a purgatory, or a landscape of the soul. These are not real forests, but projections of the psyche, often indelibly marked by the trauma of war, where nature itself is an open wound.

Stalker (1979)

A “Stalker,” a professional guide, agrees to take a Writer and a Professor into the “Zone”: a mysterious, militarized, and dangerous area where a “Room” is said to exist, capable of granting a person’s innermost, truest desires.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical masterpiece presents the “Zone” as the ultimate cinematic forest. It is a post-industrial landscape that nature has reclaimed, a “drenched world” of green, water, and rust. The Zone is a living entity, a labyrinth that is not physical but psychological. It does not obey the laws of physics, but those of the soul. The woods, here, are a philosophical pilgrimage toward the core of human faith, cynicism, and desire.

Come and See (1985)

During the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia in 1943, the teenager Flyora enthusiastically joins the Soviet partisans. Instead of adventure and glory, the boy descends into a feverish, surreal nightmare, witnessing unimaginable atrocities that will prematurely age him.

Elem Klimov’s anti-war film is perhaps the most devastating film ever made. The “woods and swamps” of Byelorussia are the theater of horror. There is no escape. The woods are the partisans’ hiding place and, at the same time, the site of the villages’ massacres. Klimov transforms the forest into a “World War II nightmare,” a mythical and infernal place. The famous scene of Flyora slogging through the “filthy bog” is not survival: it is a descent into hell on earth, with the woods as a mute witness.

You Won’t Be Alone (2022)

In a 19th-century Macedonian village, a girl is kidnapped and transformed into a mute witch by an ancient spirit. Curious about life, the new witch begins an odyssey, killing and taking the shape of various people and animals to understand what it means to be human.

A Macedonian folk horror that inverts expectations. The woods are the birthplace of the “monster,” the space of the supernatural. But the film is not interested in the horror of the woods; it is interested in the witch’s curiosity about the village. It is Terrence Malick meets horror, where the forest represents a pre-human state, and the protagonist, Nevena, uses her terrifying powers for a lyrical and moving journey toward humanity. The woods are the origin, but humanity (with all its pain) is the destination.

Valhalla Rising (2009)

A mute, one-eyed Viking warrior escapes captivity and joins a group of Christian Crusaders. Their ship, shrouded in an endless fog, lands in an unknown land—the “New World”—which they mistake for Hell, as their faith and sanity collapse.

This is Nicolas Winding Refn’s “journey into the heart of darkness.” The woods of North America are not a promised land; they are a metaphysical void. The Christians, their faith collapsing, project their terrors onto a landscape that is simply indifferent. Refn treats “nature as the only true deity.” The forest is silent, primordial, and does not answer their prayers. It is this absence of God, this vast, green silence, that destroys them, turning the film into an existential Viking nightmare.

Naked (1993)

Johnny, a verbose, brilliant, and misogynistic drifter, flees Manchester and embarks on a nocturnal odyssey through the desolate streets of a post-Thatcher London, colliding with other misfits in a vortex of nihilism, philosophy, and despair.

The concluding film is a heresy, a provocation. Naked is a film set in the woods in which the woods do not exist. Or rather, the woods are the city. Mike Leigh presents nocturnal London not as an apex of civilization, but as an urban jungle, an “atomized and fragmented landscape,” cold and hostile. Johnny is the survivor, the animal-philosopher who moves through this wilderness of concrete. Including Naked serves to prove the final point: the “woods” in independent cinema are not a matter of trees, but a state of mind. It is the place on the margins, where society fails.