Logline

A woman on a true crime podcast recounts the mysterious story of a hike that resulted in the death of her best friends several years earlier. 

Synopsis

The Woods is the story of four best friends who first became friends when their middle school took them on a class hike together. Now, about to graduate college and go their separate ways, the friends want to recreate that original hike. However, things do not go as planned, and soon the mysterious nature of the woods themselves drives the friends apart, in tragic ways. The events of this hike, and the unfortunate fate of the friends, is recounted years later on a true crime podcast by lone survivor, Kate Reed.

Director’s Statement

How well do we know the people we think we know? How much of the personalities of the people around are just projections of our own inner hopes and fears? If we were to see the true face of the people we love, would we even recognize them? These are questions I asked myself as I wrote and re-wrote The Woods over the years. It originally began as a middle school writing assignment, but unlike most of the stories I wrote as a kid, I never put this one away. Every few years I would take it out and revisit it. Somehow, I always knew it was the first story I would tell. 

I keep going back to try to figure out why this story is the one from my childhood that stuck with me. Why like Kate Reed, the protagonist of The Woods, I had a need to tell this story, and in telling, release myself of the burden of carrying it around. I think this is the most personal story I’ll ever tell, and deep down I knew that I had to tell it, or else I would always be telling it. Maybe the characters feel so personsal, so uncomfortably close to diary entries, because I carried it around for so long, or maybe I carried it around for so long because they are so personal. It’s a question I’ll probably be asking myself for a long while.

All of the characters in The Woods feel like parts of my own personality that I had to take out, give life and voice to, in order to let them finally move on. I’ve heard people walking away from this film really loving or hating very specific characters, and asking me what I think of them. The truth is I love all of the characters in the film, I don’t have any other choice. They are, or were, a part of the inner woods of my mind for so long. 

So what are the woods? I grew up deep in the woods, they were an ever-present part of my childhood, another place this story grew from, and as anyone who grew up or has spent large amounts of time in heavily forested areas will tell you, woods are never just woods. They are a psychological backdrop, a presence, a living being that threatens to swallow you up and reach out to grab you all at once. People disappear in the woods all the time, but where to? Another question with a circular answer. 

The characters of The Woods return to the place they all became friends as children in order to protect those memories, and end up instead destroying them. I’m not sure if by returning to this story I’ve carried since childhood I’ve done the same thing (sure hope not!) but I  hope that like Kate, I can walk away from telling it lighter and freer than before, with a future of stories to tell. I hope others walk away from the film