Its actual title is 8, but if we relied on that, you'd never know exactly how to find it online. As its descriptor (and often stylized subtitle) says, 8 is a South African horror story. The extent to which it is some kind of "essentially" South African story is arguable, of course, and it seems catered to an international audience. While I'm not sure about any myth or folklore on which the film's premise is based, it seems to be a fairly straightforward -- maybe universal? -- story of demonic influence on suffering human lives. But it's presented to us in the English language, focused on a white family.
A recently bankrupt William (Garth Breytenbach) is returning to his father's home in rural South Africa, accompanied by his wife Sarah (Inge Beckmann) and recently orphaned niece Mary (Keita Luna). While they labor to rebuild the house, Sarah feels like a failing surrogate mother, no doubt causing William stress as a husband and father-figure, and little Mary decides to go adventuring. She stumbles across Lazarus in the woods, an older black man who worked for William's father and who may have never left the property. After William hires Lazarus to help them reclaim the property, Lazarus develops a close friendship with Mary, bonding over their shared grief at losing their immediate family members. But Lazarus hides a dark secret, one that will threaten their entire community.
Tshamano Sebe (Black Sails) plays Lazarus brilliantly, and more than makes up for the acting of the other major players. The plot slowly shifts until you realize the movie is about him far more than the white family. When his wife and daughter tragically died, he called out for their salvation; what he got was a Faustian bargain with a hungry demon. Now his daughter -- or, at least, something that marginally resembles her -- lives in a sack he carries on his back. Lazarus is cursed to roam the countryside for sacrifices, collecting souls for the creature. Sebe's performance is stellar, especially in his vocal power. When Lazarus prepares his victims, he chants over their resting bodies with guttural grunts that sound demonic themselves (which, again, might be one of those thinly veiled problematic moments, as what is made to sound threatening could in fact be a form of communication by certain geo-ethnic communities).
But it's a beautiful movie, with beauty that belies its dark heart. Sweeping vistas of green countryside and hilly ridges under a golden sunrise or thinly forested valleys darkening with the dusk are gorgeously captured by the camera and edited into transitions between almost every scene. It's a heavy-handed approach, sure, but it begins to shape a film deeply concerned with its sense of place as much as its natural beauty. I'd argue the film employs cinematic Romantic imagery with its soft, shimmering light, thick atmosphere, and awareness of thematic purity or corruption. It is realistic but precious, natural and un-, and could be said to be fashioning its own fairytale.
Much like a fairytale, the narrative is predictable and familiar, and the film relies on a few unexpected and unearned jump scares to try and appease the frisson-seekers in the audience. The one time I nearly lost it was when a black bird flew out of the shed suddenly for no reason at all. But the story itself is quite disturbing, all the more so because we are made to empathize with Lazarus. Cursed as he is, he is ostracized by his own community, led by Obara (Chris April) who is less a figure of dogmatic, ignorant, or superstitious influence but rather a leader whose experience and knowledge allows him to confront and challenge this very real threat to his community.
What bothers me about this film, though, is that it is pointedly set in 1977. The only onscreen text identifies this, and its setting "somewhere in South Africa", again fitting its pseudo-fairytale performativity. But the definition of that year is fascinating to me. First because, according to the director (who is white), he wanted to make it as an homage to '70s horror films, a genre which I as a viewer would never consider along with 8. Second because 1977 connotes a period of exceptionally fraught social turmoil and racial violence in apartheid-era South Africa. Yet there is almost no consideration of this in the movie; in fact, race is almost nonexistent here. Sure, Lazarus is black and works for a white family, and the white family is punished in the logic of the film; the black community seem at odds with Lazarus, but they work with the family to rid their land of the demon. It seems deliberately insensitive to have placed this date on the story and then have nothing to say about it.
Then again, taken at face value, the film allows for other interpretations a little too easily. Its central myth of hungry, parasitic demons that everybody (as a granted element) wholly believes in are manifested symbolically as creepy creatures of shadow, smoke, flesh, and flame, all rooted in nature but a terrible and destructive part of nature. Death is part of the cycle of life, which we see in a tender caterpillar burial, juxtaposed thematically with a delicate moth noticed by Mary. Conflict enters the movie with the evil spirit whose hunger upsets the natural cycle. Even William's family -- arguably in a position of privilege over Lazarus and the other black people -- have no power over the darkness that has come to their door. The film seems determined to highlight universal traits of grief, loss, and profound guilt as the most dangerous and deadly aliens in a community, not skin color or wealth or even where you live.
**9/14 EDIT** This movie has finally been released internationally for home media and can be found under the title The Soul Collector.
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