Hagazussa

• It started as a film-school thesis. Hagazussa is Lukas Feigelfeld's graduation project for the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie Berlin, made partly on crowdfunding money before it ever sniffed a festival. A student film that ended up at Fantastic Fest and the 2017 London Film Festival.
• The title is the whole thesis in one word. 'Hagazussa' is the Old High German root that gives modern German 'Hexe' and English 'hag' — scholars have argued over it since the 1800s, with readings running from forest-demon to 'hedge-rider,' a spirit straddling the fence between the human world and the other one. Feigelfeld named the film after the etymology, not a character.
• The score is the real co-star, and it came from a doom band. The soundtrack is the work of Greek dark-ambient/chamber-doom outfit MMMD (formerly Mohammad), built from sub-bass drones, bowed strings and whispered incantations. It got its own vinyl release on the Antifrost label in 2018 — low monolithic frequencies doing the work most folk horror hands to a string section.
• It's structured in four runic chapters — Shadows, Horn, Blood and Fire — with the titles cut in Elder Futhark runes. The herd's decay tracks Albrun's: as the goats sicken and die, so does her grip on what's real.
• The infamous goat-milking sequence is deliberate, not incidental. Critics flagged the eroticized milking as one of the film's standout provocations, sitting in the same frame language as the skulls, candles and horned beasts — Feigelfeld treating the body and the barn as one continuous source of dread.
• It runs 102 minutes, shot by Mariel Baqueiro, premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin on September 22, 2017, and didn't reach US theaters until April 19, 2019 via Music Box Films' Doppelgänger arm. It carries a 93% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 72 on Metacritic.

There's no supernatural curse — only an inheritance of trauma and a community that manufactures the witch it fears. Read straight, every 'magic' beat has a worldly cause: grief, isolation, abuse, the goats' sickness, and a fistful of psychedelic mushrooms. The plague Albrun finally spreads isn't witchcraft, it's the literal contamination she carries down from the mountain — the village's cruelty boomeranging back as exactly the evil it imagined.

The four runic chapters aren't a timeline, they're a descent into the title itself. Shadows-Horn-Blood-Fire walks Albrun from the human side of the fence to the other, and by Fire she's stopped straddling and crossed over — she becomes the hagazussa the etymology describes, the hedge-rider, not because she cast a spell but because the world left her nowhere else to stand.

The mother is the whole film in miniature, and Albrun is doomed to repeat her exactly. Watch the skull she drinks from and the baby she can't soothe: the daughter re-enacts the mother's sickness, shunning and death as ritual rather than coincidence. The real curse is generational — branded woman makes branded woman, and the mountain just keeps the cycle running.

High in the 15th-century Alps, a goat-herder named Albrun lives where the village already decided what she is. Her mother died strange and shunned; the daughter inherits the suspicion like a birthmark. Feigelfeld unspools her undoing in near-silence — sickness in the herd, a baby she can barely hold, a "friend" who leads her somewhere cruel, and a human skull that becomes a relic she drinks from. By the time the mushrooms take her, the line between curse and breakdown is gone. The plague she becomes is quieter and worse than anything the villagers feared.