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There was a fantasy gaming explosion in the late 70s, as roleplaying competed with old fashioned table top war pursuits. This dovetailed with the 80s avalanche of low budget, run around the woods, fantasy movies that made a visit to a video store a riot of bare chested warriors with Prince Valiant haircuts, evil hook nosed black magicians, rubber suited monsters and cheap special effects. Some of the cheaper entries in the cycle almost looked as if you could make the costumes yourself… Maybe fashion a sword from available materials… Perhaps, if you were a little kid at the time, you’d go over to the local common and play Beastmaster.

The Wild Hunt is a film about adults who’ve not let their imaginations whither with age and responsibility. The live action roleplay (LARP) scene they are involved with indulges the child-like imagination without being childish and the players take on fantastical characters in order to live out scenarios set in a mythic world of imagination and heroism (or dirty, underhand dealings and betrayal, if your character is that kind of character…).

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MURDEROUS GROUPTHINK

Although we know that that we have been invited into a modern day artifice, as the lines blur in this Lord of the Flies style descent into insanity and murderous groupthink, some of the latter scenes in the movie look remarkably similar to the kind of low budget fantasy movies that informed my earliest film watching. This is one of the reasons I loved The Wild Hunt… The filmmakers were smart enough to up the reality of the fantasy elements in the movie in line with the increasing immersion of the players in the game. Films like the aforementioned Beastmaster, Hawk The Slayer, Conan, Conquest, Ator and Deathstalker sprang to mind during some of these moments. Not the sometimes absurd tone that these films can have, but the look and feel, the lighting and costume… The wooded locales.

GENRE CLASSICS

Now, these films might not be praised by critics but a lot of people, myself included, hold them in real affection. The way The Wild Hunt uses these cues from genre classics to play with audience perceptions and muddle the distinctions between the real world and the magical, if violent, realm of the game added a whole extra level of enjoyment for me.