memory, femicide, and the useful dead 🪶

Last month I watched She Will, an impressionistic, feminist horror film about Scottish witches set in the Highlands. Aging film star Veronica Ghent travels to a remote location to convalesce and instead finds herself transformed by the darkness she encounters there.

I missed this film when it came out in 2021, but it’s a cinematic companion to my book about how Scotland remembers the witch hunts. The book is called Ashes & Stones. She Will is a film about memory, femicide and the ‘uses’ of the dead. It is also about confronting past trauma—both personal and historical— while dismantling toxic, predatory masculinity. In the film, as in life, these things happen simultaneously. Yet their relationship remains mysterious in the film: ashes billowing through the air are called ‘witch feathers’ by the locals, and the lore surrounding the land claims the death of women hundreds of years ago gives the earth curative properties.

I am intimately familiar with the filming locations of She Will. In the ‘art class scene’ Veronica sits with her easel beside Loch an Eilein in the forest of Rothiemurchus. A boulder inscribed with witch marks lies behind her, off camera. Did the film makers know this? There are legends surrounding the atmospheric, 14th century castle on the island. There was once an underwater, zig-zag causeway linking the island to the shore, though this has never been found. Legend also claims it is the ancestral seat of the Shaw clan in the 14th century—if one believes these things.*

I loved the film’s powerful vision of bonds women share with both the living and dead. It’s also a delicious tale of revenge. I only wished it were longer, and that the character of Desi Hatoum, in a show-stopping performance by Kota Eberhardt, had been given more of a story.

The Janet Horne Memorial Stone in Dornoch is part of the film, transported to a woodland setting. I wrote a piece about the Janet Horne Memorial stone for the Association for Scottish Literature’s online journal, The Bottle Imp in 2019. Did the film makers read it? There is probably no way to know, but I like to think they did.

As part of my research for Ashes & Stones, I repeatedly visited the Janet Horne Memorial Stone. Each time I visited, it was different, surrounded by different tributes that have increased since the book was published. Janet Horne is not the name of the woman who supposedly died near the stone’s present location. Everything we know of her vague story was written down one hundred years after her death, in the notes of English occupiers who wanted to portray Highland Scots as superstitious, backward and unable to rule themselves. She is supposedly the ‘last witch’ executed in Scotland but there is no ‘true story’ of Janet Horne’s life or death, only invention.

In my research I found many photos of the stone through the ages, some from the Dornoch Historical Society and others on the internet without attribution. Here is a gallery.

*This notion is put forth in LOCH AN EILEIN AND ITS CASTLE by Alex Inkson M'Connochie. in The Cairngorm Club Journal 014, 1900.