Across the Forest – Review
One of my best friends grew up in Romania. When I ask her about her youth she is very reluctant to speak about it. She doesn’t seem to have much to share. She gives the impression that she did not suffer much under the Ceaușescu dictatorialregime because she grew up in rural Romania, with enough food on her parent’s farm.
When you enter her house here in the Netherlands you can see the Christian Orthodox statues with burning candles in front of them. They always give me the creeps. She always laughs at me, because she says that as the Anti-Christ herself I must be feeling some allergic reaction to it.
In fact, even if I look like the Anti-Christ herself, actually, I am a very religious person.Yet, she is not. So why the Christian Orthodox Statues in her home?
I asked her about it and her answer was stunning…to protect herself from evil forces. That’s why she always burns candles in front of the icons.
Well, I stumbled upon a DVD which blew me away and the burning candles in front of the Christian Statues of my Romanian friend finally made some sense to me.
It was a documentary called, Across the Forest: Tales from Transylvania. Here is an excerpt from the sumMary on the film’s Amazon page…
Two young American filmmakers collect stories from Transylvanian villagers about vampires, werewolves and forest spirits.
Watching it I felt this was the first time that I was not alone. On the Internet you can find a lot of people who believe in ghosts and all the paranormal stuff around it. But if you talk about vampires and werewolves…. They don’t really believe in that.
The interviews in “Across the Forest “with villagers were very special to me.And that’s exactly what we get for the most part throughout the documentary: interviews with Transylvanian villagers telling about their experiences with “Strigoi” ( undead ) andtheVârcolac (werewolves), amongst other entities.
The film is geared towards the true vampire fans out there – anyone else may want to be as interested. But if you are want to know what the people from this strange land actually believe about vampires, I would recommend it 100 % to you. Put it in your DVD player (the DVD is region-free) and I promise you a night of simple, eerie but true narrations.
To buy the DVD go to their website : Across the Forest
