Heresy (2024),(not to be confused with Heretic (2024), starring Sophie Thatcher and Hugh Grant, which came out the same year, is a little Dutch film with a modest 1-hour run time. It tells the story of a young woman battling infertility in her provincial and deeply Catholic village. Here, traditional values run deep, evidenced by the local men repeatedly telling women that having children is, “All they’re good for.” The heroine, Frieda, does every bespoke ritual at her disposal to maintain a pregnancy. She’s interrupted during one and chased into the woods by a local predator, who had recently threatened her. She’s inexplicably rescued just before tragedy by a mysterious and ancient creature that her village had nearly forgotten. The man who tried to kill Frieda, conversely, faces a painful and gruesome fate.
The Folklore of The White Woman
The original name for the movie Heresy is Witte Wieven, which translates to White Woman or Wise Woman. Long before medieval settlers brought Christianity by force to previously unaware corners of the world, and to the Netherlands in the 15th and 16th centuries, Dutch villagers told folk tales and believed local legends as forms of spiritual engagement and community bonding. In fact, the Franks and Saxons began to settle the area alongside the Batavians in the 5th century, leaving the Germanic tribes 1,000 years of fellowship with the land to develop rich folklore. Maintaining such ancestral knowledge after the arrival of Christianity became heresy—witchcraft—more likely to uphold cooperation among the townsfolk than due to any actual theological transgression.
The witte wieven is an all-too-real belief in Dutch and Germanic folklore and refers to misty, quiet figures who live in the moors and the hours between night and day. These ancient facets of Germanic legend earned a broad range of descriptors, from “tricksters” to “guardians” to “evil witches”, referring to scattered theories that the creatures were the spirits of long-departed healers. In 1933, J.H. Bergmans-Beins painted them like alluring dryads, writing, “Have you never heard the soft singing, which moves through every leaf, which glides past the bushes and dies away in the woods like the sound of wondrous music; impossible to follow and barely distinguishable from the rustling of the wind? They are always and everywhere the white women, who with their long clothes brush past everything they meet on their way, with soft fine sounds.”
How earnestly these tribes believed in witte wievens is unclear. It’s more likely that the apparitions existed in popular consciousness as an escapist fantasy, adding mystery and whimsy to an otherwise highly physical, corporeal existence.
Heresey – Portraying the Witte Wieven
In Heresy, Frieda receives hateful vitriol from her neighbors. One local woman screams, “No woman has ever returned from the Dark Forest alive!” They seem enraged by a prophesy that they themselves helped to fulfill: women who see the witte wieven and survive are cursed, haunted by the creature’s presence and obsessed with returning to their domain. In reality, the cruelty inflicted on Frieda played a major role in her ultimate decision to join the witte wieven in the Dark Forest permanently. Her isolation and the constant threat of violence drives her toward a physical and spiritual sense of escape.
While most accounts of witte wieven depict them as delicate, graceful figures, others describe a haggard, ugly, and vengeful old woman, placing her among the ranks of forest witches in Grimm fairytales and Baba Yaga. These women often play the role as teacher, trickster, or malevolent force at their worst and grandmotherly at best. It’s likely that the witte wieven changes form depending on the story to conform to her role in it; is she a healer or a hag? In Heresy, the witte wieven takes two forms: one, the monstrous witch who delivers punishment to men doing evil in her forest; the other, a beautiful ghost who embraces Frieda in her nonconformity–her infertility–granting her safety and her heart’s dearest desire.
Modern accounts and claimed sightings of the figure are few. After the criminalization of belief in folklore, then industrialization, modern hunters of anomalies are more likely to see aliens than respected ancestral phantoms. Were they ways of coping with communal loss of knowledge in insular villages? A combination of rolling fog, imagination, and moonlight? Or, more hopefully, are they a species of paranormal activity that was real and belonged only to a few lucky generations of women in the Dutch countryside 1,000 years ago?