There is a kind of horror film that shows you the monster in the first reel, and a kind that never shows it at all, and then there is They Feed at Dusk, which does something ruder than either: it shows you the ground, for ninety minutes, until you understand that the ground is the monster and it has been patient with you personally.
The setup is a parish-record whisper. A drainage company arrives to reclaim a peat bog; the village objects, too quietly; the crew's foreman starts keeping a camera log of what comes up out of the cuts, and item by item the log turns into an inventory of a very old arrangement. Nothing in the bog is hungry, is the film's nastiest idea. Everything in the bog has been fed.
Director Ilse Marek shoots wet earth the way other filmmakers shoot cathedrals, with awe and bad light, and her sound design does the actual wet work: the film's scariest instrument is suction. The cast, mostly non-professionals with faces like weather, deliver the dialogue as if every line costs them standing in the community, which it does. And the mud itself gives the performance of the year. It swallows boots, tools, arguments and eventually the film's entire visual field, until the screen is one wall of peat and you realize you have been leaning away from it in your seat.
A word about the ending, because our mailbag has already started arriving on the subject: you are wrong. The final shot is not a cheat. It is the arrangement, honored. Watch the hands.
Ninety minutes of mud, and we mean that as praise. Bring boots you are willing to lose.