When Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight 2 arrived, it landed with the kind of chaotic thrill that only a horror sequel can bring. Messier, louder, bloodier, but weirdly more self-aware. In the first film, the production slasheds its way through the classics in the genre. This time around though, the film we inched into dark strangeness. But more interesting in this case are the people behind it, the cast burdened with the emotional weight of their arcs, the crew who are in charge of guiding a production through a pandemic, and the wild brutality and moral ambiguity of the culture the the audience, especially those of Indian descent, interpret.
Adam Turczyk is a shy, introverted police officer and the film’s protagonist, who becomes the epicenter of a baffling metamorphosis. Adam is portrayed by Mateusz Więcławek, who, in addition to his acting talents, is introspectively recognized in Poland. In one interview in the past, he self-identified as a rather insecure person who did not feel a sense of belonging in his acting school. This insecurity is also present in Adam’s character through the fervency of his wish to be seen, appreciated, and validated in his own life. Adam’s character development resonated with so many Indian viewers who experienced academic and familial pressure in their childhood. The film’s underlying message that we feel the question “Am I enough?” is a question that echoes far beyond the movie’s monstrous screams.
Director Bartosz M. Kowalski purposefully leaned into audience insecurity, as he wanted the sequel to feel like a horror tragedy and not simply a slasher gore fest. He recently reflected on the COVID lockdown period in a podcast and said, “Fear suddenly felt real, physical, everywhere,” a sentiment of fear that Indian audiences would resonate with, considering the country’s pandemic struggles. That psychological heaviness is reflected in the movie as well. The forest is not just dangerous, it’s especially suffocating, just like the emotional clog that was felt universally during isolation.
One of the most powerful presences on screen is Zofia Wichłacz, who reprises her role as Zosia, but with a malicious twist. Zofia’s real-life journey adds even more depth to the character. She transitioned from highly respected drama films to critically renowned supernatural horror, which at first, the Polish media viewed with suspicion. However, she embraced the challenge and described horror as “a playground of emotions where the body reacts even when the mind is not in control.” Indian fans strongly associated her character with the archetype of the “shakti inside every woman,” which is the notion that unanticipated strength would be the result of trauma. Her character’s transformation was monstrous, and represented a woman who was pushed to a level beyond survival, where fear itself turned into a strength.
The theme of isolation is what many Indian audience members resonated with most. As they watched, most were likely to see the dense, merciless wilderness stay as the frame for the isolation that people fall into when misunderstood. Indian folklore—most notably the banshee-like churails and the nightmares of Uttarakhand—depicted the wilderness of these regions as the wilderness of the chaos to come. A sequel goes a step further. Adam’s fragility is transformed, a direct mutation, a reference to the ways in which buried emotions are pressurized and cause eruptions in destructive ways.
Filming also came with its own, real-life, spooky folklore. The 3D makeup artists, for instance, were required to start their day at 3:00AM, which means arriving at the set at 2:00AM, to start work on the prosthetics for the twins. One such artist noted that the layers of silicone they used kept freezing to the point that they were forced to heat their tools at portable stoves, which they had to take to the woods. During one particularly windy September night, parts of the set were blown over and the crew joked that the forest “didn’t want them there.” What goes unnoticed is the effect of these challenges on many of the more ‘improvised’ scenes. Adam’s hands in those early scenes? They weren’t acting. The temperature was really that low and almost the entire team was, in fact, shivering.
The release prompted enthusiastic reactions from fans of the horror genre in India. Online discussions pondered the nature of the sequel: was it intended to be campy, or was it simply a chaotic mess? Users flooded social media with memes centered on the transformation of the character Adam, which was\ especially pronounced in the Hindi-dubbed audience’s comments, which noted the movie as “bizarre but addictive.” A number of people critiquing the film drew comparisons to the Bollywood horror-comedy Stree or Bhediya, which also reflect the cultural nuances of both film industries in employing monsters as mere emotional metaphorical conduits rather than as mere metaphorical threats.
Yet, on the social commentary the film makes on authority and powerlessness is the part the film is most likely to be overlooked. Adam’s character as a powerless young constable derives a significant part of its audience resonance from the Indian social milieu, which demontrates the challenges young people face when trying to navigate their lives and the overpowering frameworks of society. The mutation Adam undergoes in the film should therefore be most accurately understood as a metaphorical representation of rebellion, which, in the context of the movie’s emotional motif, can be described as a breakdown. While, on the surface of the film, the breakdown is of the affective character, it is also deeply social.
Finally, as is often the case with all such films, the audience did not pin point the subtle references. In the case of Broken, these were the frame, where Adam looks into a shattered mirror, a representation of the film’s first theme of fractured self, or in the scene where a television sets the background to Adam’s conversation. The Polish talkshow on the television set comments on the rising violence among the young, and alludes to the shared social anxieties of both countries, Poland and India. The film is not as in-your-face with it’s messages as you’d imagine; in fact, it conceals most messages in the blood and sweat the film is centered around.
The buzz the film is generating is also worthy of consideration. While some Western reviewers felt the film was being with criticism of being “too chaotic”, the Indian audience rather found the film’s being “too chaotic” charming. Indian horror culture is one that has always embraced unpredictability, and started long before modern audiences with films like 1920 and Tumbbad, and what is now the digital series Asur. That genre of madness found a niche with the Polish horror film as Indian horror culture embraced Polish just as. Horror YouTubers in India started cult niche topics with the film by posting framed breakdown reaction videos, and later on became a Bollywood niche topic among teens obsessed with “ decoder” movies with metaphoric social media posts on the genre. \
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight 2, is more than just a slasher sequel. It more a strange emotional mirror. It is the being seen or being hidden, the unacknowledged frustration of the trapped, the trauma that is meant to demolish and twist the recognizable to the unrecognizable. The film’s emotional struggles being the cast’s real life, the crew being battered by the elements, the Indian audience’s struggles with the weather horror of this flawed film bring life to otherwise mundane horror. It is a simple layered film, It’s a chaos, and rather human.
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