Logline: In a 15th-century Alpine village haunted by a generation-old curse, a reclusive young goat herder, scorned as a witch’s get, must decide whether the whispering darkness within her is a madness to be cured—or a power to be unleashed.
Setting: A remote, mist-choked valley in the Austrian Alps, 1487. The village of St. Gertraud is a cluster of black timber huts huddled against a treeline that never seems to let in full sunlight. The soil is sour. The goats give bitter milk. The people speak in low voices.
Characters:
Story Beats:
1. The Stain of Blood Open on a memory: young Albrun (8) watches her mother tied to a ladder. No fire yet—just dunking in the tarn until she stops fighting. The villagers chant “Hagazussa” (hedge-rider). Albrun is spat upon and dragged to the forest edge. She watches her mother’s drowned body laid on a pyre that night. No one adopts her.
2. The Skin of the World Present day. Albrun lives by ritual: milk the goats at dawn, rub their foreheads with ash (to ward off “the eye”), never eat meat, never light a candle after vespers. She speaks to a skull she keeps wrapped in wool—her mother’s? A goat’s? Unclear. She discovers a strange fungus growing on her doorstep: black, veined, pulsing slightly when she touches it. She eats a small piece. That night, she dreams of roots growing through her ribs.
3. The Visitor Brother Markus arrives in the village, not to exorcise, but to document. He has a wax tablet and a lancet. He asks Swinda about Albrun: “Does she bleed at the new moon? Does she speak to the water?” Swinda lies enthusiastically. Markus visits Albrun’s hut. He is not cruel—worse, he is curious. He asks to examine her cough. She lets him listen to her chest. He presses a cold metal cross to her sternum. No burn. He frowns. “You are not a witch,” he says. “You are a wound that hasn’t healed. That is far more dangerous.”
4. The Gift Swinda brings a clay pot of butter. “For the cough, dear.” Albrun knows rancor when she smells it, but she is starving for kindness. She spreads the butter on black bread. Within hours, her belly seizes. She vomits blood into a bucket. The goats circle her, bleating. That night, feverish, she sees her mother standing in the goat pen, water dripping from her ears. “They don’t burn what they fear,” her mother’s corpse-mouth says. “They poison it. Slow. Then call it God’s will.”
5. The Crossing Albrun recovers but is changed. She stops speaking. She milks the goats and pours the milk into the earth. She eats only the black fungus now. Her cough stops. Her eyes no longer reflect firelight. Brother Markus returns to find her sitting in the center of her hut, goats gathered around her in a perfect ring. He asks, “Are you in pain?” She smiles. Her teeth are stained with something dark. “No,” she says. “I am the pain.”
6. The Valley’s End Swinda’s butter churn explodes overnight. Her milk turns to clotted black curds. Her husband walks into the forest and doesn’t come back. The village sends three men to Albrun’s hut. They find the goats standing on two legs, chewing something that looks like rope but smells like hair. Albrun is gone. But her footprints in the snow lead in a circle—and end. Brother Markus, writing in his final journal entry: “The hagazussa does not ride the hedge. She becomes the hedge. We have not burned a witch. We have fertilized one.”
Final Image: Deep in the forest, a child’s handprint appears on the inside of a hollow tree. The tree is breathing. Hagazussa
Themes for a Solid Story:
This story works because it earns its horror through patience, silence, and the unbearable weight of being unwanted.
Writing a "proper paper" on Hagazussa: A Heathen's Curse (2017) requires looking beyond its classification as "folk horror" to explore its deep roots in Alpine folklore, psychological trauma, and the "monstrous-feminine". Directed by Lukas Feigelfeld, the film is often compared to
for its slow-burning, atmospheric dread and focus on societal isolation. Thesis Statement
functions as a visceral exploration of how religious superstition and patriarchal violence "birth" the very monsters they fear. By tracing the protagonist Albrun’s descent from an ostracized goat herder into a figure of dark myth, the film argues that "witchcraft" is less a supernatural choice and more a psychological refuge from an unforgiving, misogynistic society. Suggested Paper Outline Introduction: The Alpine Gothic Introduce the film as a "medieval, feminized Eraserhead
Contextualize the setting: the 15th-century Austrian Alps, where nature is both majestic and menacing. Define the term
(Old High German for "hedge-rider" or witch), signifying one who exists on the border between civilization and the wild. The Inherited Curse: Traumatic Isolation
Analyze the prologue with Albrun’s mother. The "curse" is not a spell, but the social stigma of being a lone woman in a superstitious community.
Discuss how the film uses silence and minimal dialogue to mirror Albrun’s extreme psychological and social isolation. Cinematography and the "Metabolism" of Nature
Examine the visual style: long, static shots of mountains and bogs that suggest a "metaphysical journey" where the landscape itself feels sentient. Logline: In a 15th-century Alpine village haunted by
Discuss the use of body horror and "visceral" imagery—such as the milk and the bog—to represent the breakdown of the boundary between the human body and the natural world. The Monstrous-Feminine and Revenge
Explore how Albrun’s eventual "transgression" (the poisoning of the village water) is a reaction to the specific acts of sexual and emotional violence committed against her.
Contrast the village’s religious "purity" with the biological reality of Albrun’s life, utilizing Homi Bhabha’s concept of "hybridity" to explain her position between "mother" and "monster". Conclusion: The Reality of the Nightmare
Summarize how the film forces the viewer to question what is "real" versus what is a hallucination born of trauma. Conclude that
is a "moody, atmospheric masterpiece" that uses folklore to critique the historical dehumanization of women. Key Resources for Research Film Reviews: Critical perspectives from The Hollywood Reporter Sight & Sound highlight its stylistic debt to German Expressionism. Thematic Analysis: Academic discussions on Frames Cinema Journal
explore the "monstrous-feminine" and the role of women's bodies in folk horror. Cultural Context: Insights into how heritage and culture
shape horror tropes can provide depth to your analysis of Alpine paganism. tone for a university submission, or a analysis for a blog or personal project?
To appreciate Hagazussa, you must abandon conventional narrative expectations. The film is structured in four chapters, tracking the life of a woman named Albrun in the Austrian Alps during the Middle Ages.
Chapter One: The Shadow We open in 15th-century Austria. A young girl, Albrun, lives with her mother, a woman already ostracized by the tiny mountain community. Her mother is sick—perhaps with the plague, perhaps with madness. She speaks of a "black thing" that visits her at night. The villagers keep their distance, already treating the hovel on the hill as a plague house. In a devastatingly slow sequence, Albrun’s mother dies. The little girl, utterly alone, places stones over her mother’s corpse in a futile attempt to keep her in the ground. This chapter establishes the film’s core thesis: isolation is the true curse.
Chapter Two: The Horn Years later, Albrun is a young woman (played with haunting physicality by Aleksandra Cwen). She lives alone with her infant daughter, surviving by grazing goats and selling trinkets. She is a Hagazussa in practice: she lives on the hedge of the town’s tolerance. Here, the horror shifts to social paranoia. A local villager, Swinda, feigns friendship with Albrun. But in a cruel act of "baptism by fire," Swinda accuses Albrun of using a goat’s horn as a phallic idol. The film’s most shocking sexual assault sequence occurs not as a jump scare, but as a muddy, realistic violation. Swinda and her husband hold Albrun down, smear her with filth, and beat her. The Hagazussa is not powerful here; she is a victim. Story Beats: 1
Chapter Three: The Witch This is where the film abandons reality for hallucination. Broken by the assault and starving in the winter snow, Albrun’s grip on sanity shatters. She begins to believe that a demon lives in the reflection of her water bucket. She mistakes a dead rabbit for a sign. In the film’s most controversial sequence, Albrun—convinced her own infant has been corrupted or is not human—kills her child in a trance-like state. This is not a jump-scare horror movie. It is a slow, agonizing observation of psychosis. Feigelfeld forces us to watch the disintegration of a soul. Is she a witch? Or a traumatized woman accused of being one until she becomes the monster they always saw?
Chapter Four: The Hagazussa The final chapter is a five-minute static shot of Albrun, naked and covered in soot, sitting in a burning hut. She does not scream. She does not run. As the flames consume the wooden structure, Albrun reaches a state of ecstatic transcendence. She is no longer Albrun. She is the Hagazussa—the one on the hedge, finally crossing over into the spiritual fire.
Because both films are slow-burn, period-piece folk horrors about ostracized women, comparisons to Robert Eggers’ The VVitch (2015) are inevitable. However, the differences are vital for appreciating Hagazussa.
At its core, Hagazussa is about otherness, inherited stigma, and how patriarchal and religious structures label, persecute, and internalize deviance. The film interrogates the intersection of mental illness, grief, and superstition: is Albrun truly touched by witchcraft, or is she collapsing under the weight of trauma and social alienation? Feigelfeld resists tidy answers, preferring to let ambiguity linger. The mountainous setting also functions metaphorically: the landscape both isolates and shapes cultural belief, suggesting that geography and hardship can harden communities into superstition and cruelty.
In the pantheon of modern horror cinema, certain names elicit immediate recognition: The Witch, Midsommar, The Lighthouse. These films are celebrated for their "elevated horror"—a slow-burn blend of psychological dread, historical accuracy, and artistic ambition. Yet, lurking just beneath the surface of these mainstream hits is a far more obscure, unsettling, and radical film: Lukas Feigelfeld’s 2017 debut, Hagazussa.
For those who have searched for the term Hagazussa, you are likely looking for something more than a typical witch movie. You are looking for the intersection of Alpine folklore, pagan dread, and slow-cinema nihilism. This article is a deep dive into the history, symbolism, and terrifying power of Hagazussa—a film that refuses to hold your hand as it descends into medieval madness.
The film follows Albrun (played by Aleksandra Cwen), a young woman living in isolation in the mountains during the Middle Ages. The narrative is loosely divided into chapters:
The Core Question: The movie asks the viewer to decide if Albrun is a victim of her circumstances and mental illness, or if she is actually transforming into the mythical "Hagazussa" (a figure from Alpine folklore similar to a hag or forest spirit).
Feigelfeld’s Hagazussa is primarily an atmospheric study. Cinematographer Benedict Neuenfels composes frames that turn alpine vistas into hostile, suffocating spaces — fog-shrouded valleys, jagged rock faces, and cramped wooden interiors that feel more like cells than homes. The film’s slow pacing is deliberate: long takes, minimal cuts, and extended silences force the viewer into Albrun’s perception, where nature’s indifference reads like malevolence. Natural light and muted earth tones ground the film in tactile realism, while sudden, disorienting sound design ruptures that realism and hints at the supernatural.