Excerpt from piece on the 1973 short film, The Boarded Window

Thursday 4/23/26

Written this morning.

Folk horror often immerses us like a long walk in the forest does the same. Our heads are cleared because of where we are. The choice—for it is also in some measure a choice—to be fragmented, scattered, distracted, isn’t the same easy option that it had been elsewhere. The noise has faded away. For these hours. We are left with our thoughts and ourselves. We can grow and know the self in any environment—in theory—but would we doubt that one who spends time in solitude, thinking, grappling, not deflecting, accepting, formulating, has the greater odds of self-discovery and mastery? Of clear-headedness? Of putting commitment and resolve into daily, latest, and continuous practice?

The Boarded Window is expedient folk horror. To paraphrase the gospel song, it doesn’t stop and tarry, but gets on with its business, as the man—played by Leonard Wolf—does as well. Nature is logical, but we never fully understand it, on account of the breadth of its power. Nature is also a great and daunting mystery, regardless of what we learn from science, but that doesn’t mean effect doesn’t follow from cause, which is the way of nature; rather, that we simply don’t know, as is generally the way of us. Nature can appear unnatural, replete with tricks stashed up a verdant sleeve, but to nature herself this is simply reality.

The man is awoken to a visitor from a non-human neighbor. His mind has lately been so affected—and our minds, by association with his suffering—that he may at first be unsure—as we are—whether this is nightmare or real life. But nightmares are part of real life. As are waking dreams. As is the epiphany of the morning that, yes, one’s life really has come to what one’s life has come to. It’s funny—in the Biercean mode—how we can sometimes wish what we were living was instead a nightmare, given that when we’re having such a thing, we want the nightmare to end, for it not to be true.

The title refers to what becomes of the window after the events of the story. A narrative enveloping postscript that is also the starting point of an experience. Nature cycles, which isn’t the same as nature being cyclical. “The Open Window” would’ve been a far different story, and we mustn’t forget that titles are themselves stories if they’re any good. The Boarded Window could be a film of the supernatural. Or not. There’s evidence on that dreadful next morning that this perceived event did literally occur, just as there’s evidence in the “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” episode of The Twilight Zone that a gremlin had been having at the plane’s wing. Who’s to say the gremlin isn’t as “natural” as the bird on the wire?