Also released as
- Don't Go in the Woods... Alone!
- The Forest pt II
- No vayas al bosque... sola
Filed under
Don't Go in the Woods
Don't Go in the Woods is a 1981 American slasher film directed by James Bryan. It is one of the 72 films on the Director of Public Prosecutions' video nasties list, and it was successfully prosecuted for obscenity.
Shot in Utah for 100,000 dollars with a score that never stops. Beloved by a small and stubborn group.
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Shot in Utah for around 100,000 dollars by a crew who mostly had not made a film before, and the score never stops for the entire running time.
Four hikers, a mountain man with a machete, and a sequence of encounters with other people in the woods who exist only to be killed. There is no plot to speak of and no attempt at one.
It has a real following, and the case its defenders make is that the incompetence produces something genuinely disquieting: the geography is incoherent, characters appear from nowhere, the sound is wrong, and the effect is closer to a bad dream than to a film.
The wheelchair sequence is the one people bring up.
Successfully prosecuted. Passed 15 uncut in the UK in 2007.
Banned, seized, prosecuted
DPP 72 · successfully prosecuted
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Trailer
The sleeves
The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.
Where to watch
Canada
Germany
Finland
USA
Legal sources only. Availability data from JustWatch via TMDB.
Checked 9 Aug 2026
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Philip Glass wrote the score believing it was an art film. That mistake is why it sounds like nothing else.
- Next in Backwoods / Hillbilly: The Evil Dead (1981) →
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