Courtesy eOne Films

Europe’s Heart of Darkness: How Folk-Horror Helps Us Deal with the Past

Contains Spoilers for The Ritual, Midsommar, and The Witch

When people think of the Crusades, they tend to think of knights from a Christian Europe travelling to the Holy Land to fight Muslims. While the goal of many early Crusades was to liberate Jerusalem, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that as the Crusades went on, they expanded and morphed in scope. Some people may be aware for example that the Fourth Crusade ended, bafflingly, with the sack of Constantinople by Christian soldiers. What many people may not realize is that while some were headed off to the Middle East, many knights went on Crusades closer to home, in an attempt to rid northern and northeastern Europe of Pagans. These brutal campaigns extended into the 14th century, when Lithuania officially Christianized, thus ending a period in European history where Pagan rulers held official power in any European nation.

A painting of a battle between the Livonians and the Curonians

This project also had obvious political motivations. By extending the reach of Christian Europe into the Baltic, these Crusades could bring these areas into a Catholic, rather than an Orthodox, sphere of influence, and Catholic knights could seize the…