This Is the Land of Ghosts, See?: The Haunted American Landscapes of Ethel Cain and “Skagit”

A shakily drawn, Occult-like circle ripped from that possessed videotape in The Ring flashed ominously before transitioning into a montage of country-fried American Gothic scenes: a woman in short overalls walks down a red dirt path, rides in the back of a pickup truck on an empty road, stares into the fluffy blue-clouded sky, and wades into a creek near a hideous decrepit bridge, washing her long hair. In between were random glimpses of backwoods scenery: sunlight as seen through leafy tree branches in the woods, a water tower, a frog half-buried in muck, a window air conditioner. Though dreamy, there was also an undercurrent of danger—tattooed hands stroke a dead bird (yuck!) and sneakered feet climb up a flight of treacherous chipped wooden stairs on the porch of an abandoned farmhouse, recalling the ever-welcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre family home. Not an experimental horror film—or, well, not entirely, this montage played behind Ethel Cain during the opening song—a new track titled “Dust Bowl”—of her recent concert at Central Park’s SummerStage.

It might be because I was standing in the way back, far away from the crush of frequently fainting fanatics, with only a teeny-tiny view of the band—sometimes, if I bobbed my head and strained my neck over the many, many hands holding up phones, I could see the top of Hayden Anhedönia aka Ethel Cain’s little face. But it’s just as well. I was equally captivated by the band’s cinematic visuals, projected on an enormous screen, as I was by Cain’s live performance, in particular her ethereal vocals that outshined her, at times, detached studio recordings. Rather than a tired rehashing of music videos, these videos were akin to short films that each corresponded to a song. For “House in Nebraska,” an isolated yet idyllic farmhouse scene intermixed with a slo-mo angle of lacy curtains fluttering over Cain’s face like a bridal veil. For another new song, “Punish,” a creepy black-and-white shot of Cain’s face, doing a hard Kubrick stare as she floated toward the camera.

Now, these visuals weren’t exactly surprising. Horror has played a significant role throughout Ethel Cain’s music and lore. Cain’s 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter is a cinematic Southern Gothic concept album, an odyssey of Pentecostal religiosity, disavowed family trees, and Wild West pipe dreams that conclude in sexual exploitation, murder, and cannibalism. Beyond the overarching storyline of Preacher’s Daughter, individual songs also recall films. Just listen to “Famous Last Words (An Ode to Eaters),” which was directly inspired by Luca Guadagnino’s romantic cannibal road movie, Bones and All. While, like Guadagnino’s Suspiria remake, Bones and All unravels toward the end, the most successful parts of the film are the utterly gorgeous views of America as seen through the eyes of these roving (and hungry) alienated outsiders. Sound familiar? Likewise, while parts of Cain’s concert visuals flirted with horror-camp (the Kubrick stare made me laugh), I was more taken by Cain’s clear understanding of how the Gothic intersects with the American landscape even at its most seemingly mundane, a theme that emerges in the music as well like when that shimmering dream of the west in “Thoroughfare” turns into a nightmare. America the beautiful is just as deadly—and if you pay enough attention, most of it contains ghosts.

The same notion of the haunted American landscape is at the heart of director and writer Nick Thompson’s low-budget, locally filmed and financed, Washington State-centered horror film Skagit, which was recently released on streaming. In fact, it’s Cain’s concert that made me return for a second viewing of the film, finally comprehending (a bit) what the hell the surreal trip of a movie might be about. And no, it’s not just because fuzzy-eyebrowed Colin (played by Keenan Ward) wanders around dressed like a pioneer woman in a prairie dress that could have been swiped from Ethel Cain’s closet.

Skagit opens, after a jarring home movie of a white mask-sporting boy playing bank robber (or something), with a deceptively hackneyed yet reliable horror flick conceit: four friends—Christian (Allen Miller III), Elsa (Taigé Lauren), Willa (Rheanna Atendido), and Colin—head from Seattle to Christian’s family’s remote cabin in the woods for Halloween weekend. Driving in the vast rose-colored sunset, past farms, mountains, woods, and factories in the dying light, the foursome have good tunes (Lush’s “Light from a Dead Star”), wine, snacks, and the joking, we think, promise of an “orgy of death.” Of course, a vacay always works out at a remote cabin in the woods for characters in horror movies! The laundry list and body count of scary movies set in cabins are too extensive to rattle off in entirety, but to name a few: Cabin in the Woods, Cabin Fever, Knock at the Cabin, The Trip, The Blair Witch Project, Antichrist, and, one of my most recent watches, the phenomenally punishing and unrelentingly grim The Lodge, starring Riley Keough cracking in a religious cult PTSD-driven psychosis.

At first, Skagit doesn’t stray too far from the cabin in the woods trope seen in these films. As soon as the crew reaches the cabin, things seem a tad off and it’s not just their kitschy soundtrack of Halloween sound effects. Dialogue repeats. Willa starts talking up nonexistent stairs while smoking weed by a lake in the dark. Elsa looks grumpy while taking a piss. Christian pours way too many glasses of wine as if preparing for some spectral guests. Scenes repeat too. With a dark closeup of a map next to two candles, Christian shows couple Willa and Colin to their room twice, each time with a different uncomfortable introduction to the bed: “This may or may not be where I was conceived,” and “This may or may not be where my grandfather died.” Alright, thanks…

This is all just vaguely foreboding and mostly can be chalked up to a bunch of crazy kids getting wasted and licking banana slugs. It’s Christian, though, who tips off the first break with reality when standing at the top of the cabin’s stairs, first in shadow, mechanically moving his arms, before choking into the light. Colin, washed in a green light, spies this “creepy as shit” behavior,” his eyes bugging in terror. What Colin misses, though, is his girlfriend Willa having her own Dale Cooper/Bob moment in the bathroom mirror like the finale of the original Twin Peaks. Based on its Washingtonian setting alone, David Lynch quite obviously and inescapably looms large here. Thompson has decided to lean into it rather than avoid the comparison altogether. In some ways, Skagit feels like an elaborate tribute to Lynch, from Elsa sleeping with a 2×4, replacing the Log Lady’s treasured friend, to the “melancholy drone” (as the captions described) score to sudden bursts of speaking backward as if Skagit’s characters finally found the Black Lodge. It’s not just Twin Peaks. There is a dash of Mulholland Drive’s alarming kooky olds when the foursome meets Christian’s neighbors on a hike, a wacky elderly couple that cackle and dance their way across an open field. Colin’s diagnosis? “Dude, they were hella weird. It’s your fucking Skagit people, man.”

The Lynch film that may be the most apt comparison, though, is Inland Empire. Like that three-hour odyssey of a woman in trouble, Skagit also follows a nonlinear dream logic, expressionistic scenes skip from place to place, action to action, never quite making clear what is reality and what isn’t, with ample use of visual effects. This can be frustrating, particularly as the film and its protagonists spiral into complete madness with Christian running after Elsa with a handful of dirt, screaming nonsensically, and trying to take a canoe to nowhere while Willa, drenched in some crackling goo, comes face to face with herself in a sleeping bag. The litany of strange scenes and stiff dialogue that foregoes character development for purposeful weirdness becomes a bit too much at times. Granted, Thompson isn’t the only filmmaker who falls into this trap, particularly with the stilted script that also besets Yorgos Lanthimos’s nihilistic control freak anthology Kinds of Kindness, another film I quite liked despite these excesses. However, by the time Colin began his yeowling—and even worse, singing—pioneer woman bit, I was ready to beg for mercy.

Luckily, the film makes up for this by excelling in its engagement with the unique beauty and spookiness of the Skagit Valley landscape, its history, and the decidedly odd people found within it. There’s even a car window-smashing statement on hideous McMansions marring the sanctity of the land. Beyond tasteless people who want bigger and bigger houses, turning the woods into a suburban plan, Skagit stands apart from most horror by not really having an obvious or even visible antagonist. There is no ax murderer, no aliens dropping in unexpectedly, no devil, no slasher, and no jean jacket-wearing possessive spirit. There isn’t even a sex-hating curse monster, despite the sheer amount of universally bizarre erotic encounters in the film, from Colin and Willa’s jean-burn face-fucking to Elsa’s man in the woods quickie to the final foreshadowed orgy of the dead.

While there may not be chain rattling or cabinet banging, the ghosts inherent in the Skagit landscape, the same ones that just might be sending these characters into a tizzy, drive this horror. These ghosts are not visible but linger just at the edge of Thompson’s stunning views of the diverse terrain. There is a sense, in many of the natural shots without glaring indications of contemporary technology, of a collapsing of the past and present. As Colin says after hiking to the top of a cliff with Willa, “It’s like you can see all the years at once here.” This haunting of the land becomes even clearer in an earlier scene in which the group drinks stolen beer while Willa methodically and menacingly hacks at some cheese with a knife (for whatever reason). After debating snow geese versus trumpeter swans, Christian goes deep into the history of the Skagit City ghost town and, in particular, the first murder in the region. The latter is a story that should be unsurprising to anyone familiar with American history or our criminal justice system: A store owner was murdered during a robbery and, of course, an Indigenous person was arrested and executed for the crime. Then, as Christian tells it, “They found out it was just some white dude” as the stolen items were things a “white dude” would have taken (“a pair of water sandals,” Colin jokes). Later, the actual murderer is found in the woods “screaming, naked” and covered in his own “shit and blood” with his teeth pulled out, lined up in a row, calling out the name of the man who had been executed. Whether true or not, this story feels as if it drives the engagement between these characters and the landscape—that these crimes and many others remain embedded within the place and continue to haunt the people within it, making them go absolutely looney and, who knows, quite possibly join them in the end.

Although Skagit grounds itself in a very specific region of the United States, the same could be said for just about any area of our country as seen in Cain’s Southern and Midwestern visuals. As Willa says, “Who needs burial grounds? It’s all stolen.” Willa isn’t exactly making a particularly novel or incisive observation here, yet the point still stands. What Skagit captures in its best moments is our seething national anxiety that Leila Taylor incisively pinpoints in Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, so perfectly described that I could never do better myself:

“The gothic is a retrograde form of romanticism, but America is a forward-looking country—a Manifest Destiny projection to some idealized point in the horizon, and we do not like to be reminded of the sordid path we’ve taken on the way there. I wish there was a word or phrase that named this particularly American anxiety—the unsettled unease of knowing that any moment the jig may be up. We need a phrase of our own for the muffled heartbeat under the floorboards, the fetid goo oozing from the walls, the screams coming from behind the wall, the festering guilt that comes with getting away with murder.”