York Witches' Society

I've watched a lot of movies. And I have never felt compelled to write a review... until now. Wow, this movie was spectacularly awful.

I find it shocking that it got made at all. Who green lit this? This film is comprised of A super thin plot line, with SO MANY holes - zero character development, wooden performances from the entire cast... and, SO. MUCH. FOG. You can't see anything for around 70% of this film! It's literally just swirling mist and really low light.

This is a movie about witches, and the actors spend more time trying to get a generator to work, than actual witching. Seriously, the generator should have its own credit.

Please, do yourself an enormous favour, and give this movie a hard pass. Unless fog is your thing.... In which case, have at it!

This film was a dissappointment. The major problem was honestly the script, everything felt like a first draft.

There is perhaps some potential to be wrung out of this concept, a college 'secret society' that is in actuality a coven. But the conversations throughout the entire first half are stitled and strange. The people don't quite talk like people, there's a scene where one character berates a professor that doesn't connect, and the driving incident that puts our protagonist into the coven deeply contrived. The writing here feels like the worst of 80s sitcoms, only without the jokes.

Yet somehow the second half is worse. The tone shifts, and suddenly the movie wants to be a ghostly slasher film. But it's just so...dull. There are admittedly a few creative kills, but the pacing is so slow and the characters have been so poorly fleshed out that these kills don't carry any emotional weight. As other reviewers have said, it feels like you spend 40 minutes watching people run around in the mist. It felt endless, and yet somehow this movie is under 90 minutes long. And the coven is not so much a coven here as it is a collection of cowering college students. Who wants to see a witch movie where the "witches" don't really do magic?

This movie, more than anything, was boring. It's a real achievement to make magic and witch hunts and slasher kills boring. This script needed serious revisions.

I have no idea why this wasn't set in the US and acted by Americans!

English Universities generally do not have shared rooms, nor are Deans responsible for student discipline or communication; neither do they have sorority style societies ruling the roost.

Add that to an excruciating script, appalling direction, amateur acting and a baffling storyline, the premise of which seems to be hinting at a complex battle of misdirected evils but ends up being an excuse for mediocre special effects.

All interspersed with American sayings and not a Yorkshire accent to be heard!

If your thing is to watch moderately attractive girls wear hideous (truly revolting) white dresses and get picked off one by one in yawn-makingly boring ways, then go ahead and watch this film.

I'm off to watch some paint dry instead!

Way too many movies nowadays get put into the horror genre, when there simply is little to none horrifying about them. This movie, unfortunately, is another such example of a movie that simply fails to become scary.

More bad: the actors are definitely B or C-listed actors who we usually only would see in cheaply produced television series. No acting talent or charisma whatsoever.

Not any good then? Well if you are into television soaps you might be interested in this dreck as well, because it really has got more the look and feel of soap than of a real movie.

The only good thing about this "movie" is they use (out of lack of money) a lot of dark settings. That makes falling asleep in front of the screen when watching this failure a lot easier...

Honestly, this film is pretty decent. It gets better as it progresses. The low ratings are probably from viewers that don't appreciate lower budget offerings.

Two of my top three movies of all time are Dario Argento's Suspiria and Inferno, so anytime a movie involving witches and witchcraft pops up and looks half decent I'll give it a try.

I have to say, for the first 15 minutes I was looking at my phone and contemplating switching the film off as I initially thought it looked uber cheap and was going to be crap. Thankfully I didn't, as I ended up enjoying York Witches' Society quite a bit.

The film leans more into horror in the second half and would have benefited from a tad more blood and guts I feel. Going a bit balls-to-the-wall with gore would have drawn in more of the horror crowd.

I got vibes of The Craft, Evil Dead, and Demon Wind while watching this movie, which was nice.

There are complaints about the fog in the movie but I rationalised it as an effect of the shift in reality in the area surrounding the pub. The fog highlighted this state of high strangeness that the girls found themselves in. The British Ufologist Jenny Randles referred to this state of high strangeness as the 'Oz Factor'.

Corn dolls, rituals, the rule of three etc. There is Witchy stuff in the film that is entertaining and satisfying.

York Witches' Society would have probably done really well on the Horror Channel or the Sci-Fi channel if they still existed. It's a perfect movie to introduce horror to your younger family members if they are that way inclined.

With some tweaking of the script (especially the dialogue), a bigger budget, and more gore, I believe this movie could have been a cult hit.

As it is, I enjoyed the movie. A great effort by all involved. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be available on dvd or blu ray, which is a bummer.

P. S If someone involved with this film sees this glowing review please send me a dvd 😁.