Folk Horror

Widely regarded as one of the foundational 'Unholy Trinity' of folk horror film, The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) has been comparatively over-shadowed, if not maligned, when compared to Witchfinder General (1968) and The Wicker Man (1973). While those horror bedfellows are now accepted as classics of British cinema, Piers Haggard's film remains undervalued, ironically so, given that it was Haggard who coined the term 'folk horror' in relation to his film. In this Devil's Advocate - the first monograph dedicated solely to an analysis of the film, and released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the film’s release - David Evans-Powell explores the place of the film in the wider context of the folk horror sub-genre; its use of a seventeenth-century setting (which it shares with contemporaries such as Witchfinder General and Cry of the Banshee) in contrast to the generic nineteenth-century locales of Hammer; the influences of contemporary counter-culture...

In June 2009 a group of forum-goers on the popular culture website, Something Awful, created a monster called the Slender Man. Inhumanly tall, pale, black-clad, and with the power to control minds, the Slender Man references many classic, canonical horror monsters while simultaneously expressing an acute anxiety about the contemporary digital context that birthed him. This anxiety is apparent in the collective legends that have risen around the Slender Man since 2009, but it figures particularly strongly in the Web series Marble Hornets (Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage June 2009 - ). This thesis examines Marble Hornets as an example of an emerging trend in digital, online cinema that it defines as “folk horror”: a subgenre of horror that is produced by online communities of everyday people— or folk—as opposed to professional crews working within the film industry. Works of folk horror address the questions and anxieties of our current, digital age by reflecting the changing roles and behaviours of the everyday person, who is becoming increasingly involved with the products of popular culture. After providing a context for understanding folk horror, this thesis analyzes Marble Hornets through the lens of folkloric narrative structures such as legends and folktales, and vernacular modes of filmmaking such as cinéma direct and found footage horror. The focus then shifts to the ways in which Marble Hornets’ digital folk context amplifies the classic horror conventions with which the series engages. Primary attention is given to three key components: the monster, the narrative, and the audience. Folk horror might be a new term, but it is an old concept, one that reflects the important role that community plays in the forging of fear. It has been suggested that the Slender Man is a tulpa, a creature brought into physical existence by collective thought. As such he is truly a monster for the digital age as he reflects the many faces—positive and negative—of the increasingly “connected” individual. Through the lens of folk horror we may not only witness significant developments in the horror genre, but also those of storytelling on a broader scale.

The last few years have seen an increased interest in everything remotely connected to folk horror. Folk horror is a subgenre of horror dealing with metaphysical entities and occult dangers that are imagined as coming from a distant, pagan past. Often folk horror has a focus on agricultural customs and rituals.
The paper will start with a discussion of folk horror and its characteristics, its use of folklore to (re-)create an enchanted world of strange traditions and rituals. Furthermore I propose a rereading of Phil Rickman’s Merrily Watkins Series about a female Anglican priest turned diocesan exorcist (14 tomes, since 1998) The focus will be on a) the respective use of folklore and folklore like stories (i.d. the folkloresque) that help to develop a sense of eerie danger and b) on the way these books are steeped in occult knowledge thus showing how this genre is part of occulture and contributes to a continued re-enchantment.

In 'Pathologic' (2006) and 'Pathologic 2' (2019) Russian videogame studio Ice-Pick Lodge – and particularly their founder Nikolay Dybowski – adapt, transfigure and gamify ritual practices of Mongolian/ Buryat shamanism, staging them within a virtual heterotopic space, in order to communicate the importance of ritual and sacrifice in the face of escalating ecological catastrophe.

This paper compares the way in which female sexuality and mysticism are portrayed in specific texts that are or could be considered Folk Horror. It also uses historical accounts of female mystical experiences, that appear to coincide with the Folk Horror genre.
        In the 18th Century, Mother Ann Lee ventured out into the forests of New England to establish a new colony of the newly created Shakers. Mother Ann believed herself to be the ‘woman clothed in the sun’ from Revelations, and New England was the wilderness to which she must run. Her Shakers’ meetings involved fervent dancing, singing, twitching and speaking in tongues, and they caused quite a stir, leading to accusations of heresy. The Shakers believed themselves to be in direct communion with God. Their neighbours believed them to be witches.
        Female sexuality has been a factor in whether mystical revelation is considered divine or demonic.  The decision is often political, based on whether the subject is considered a threat to the existing order of things. Mother Ann, who gave up her sexual relations with her husband and persuaded others to live chastely, was a controversial figure in a country trying to establish itself.  Margery Kempe was another controversial figure, her fits of hysteria and visions of being handmaiden to the Holy Family being subject to much scepticism.
        Whether they are religious dissenters or women who are independent from men, the Folk Horror genre simultaneously supports and provides a meta-critique to the problem of their status. This paper looks at how female divinity and revelation is defined and critiqued in texts such as Ken Russell’s The Devils, the TV mini-series The Devil’s Whore and the recent poetry collection, WITCH by Rebecca Tamás.

The dominant form of folk horror is distinctly anthropocentric, focused on unwitting outsiders who are brutally sacrificed after they stumble into a rural, pagan community. This plot is epitomised by Stephen King’s short story ‘Children of the Corn’ (1977) and its film adaptations (1984 and 2009), as well as by Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973). There is another, less anthropocentric variant of folk horror, however. ‘Folk horror without people’ is exemplified by another of King’s stories, ‘In the Tall Grass’ (2012), written with his son Joe Hill, as well as by one of its antecedents, the TV series Children of the Stones (1977). The critical element of sacrifice is still present in these ‘stone-centric’ folk horror texts, but humans are thoroughly displaced from their central role. Agency and sacrifice belong instead to stone. Both of these folk horror plots, the anthropocentric and the stone-centric, serve to critique—albeit in different ways—the devastating effects humans have had on the environment.

The film genre now commonly known as “folk horror” has been the focus of much research of late. As Adam Scovell laid out in his oft-cited “folk horror chain,” this subgenre of horror consists of films that focus on landscape, isolation, a skewed belief system, and a summoning/happening. Some theorists have argued that the setting for a folk horror film must be rural, while others have noted that counter-cultural beliefs and behaviors can also set a group apart, thus creating an ideological “distance” that can isolate a group and offer the possibility for a folk horror narrative even in urban settings. In both cases, the key element is the focus upon an insular group that holds beliefs and engages in practices eschewed and shunned by members of “mainstream” society. Because folk horror hinges on this recognition of difference, it can productively be examined through a lens of queer theory. Folk horror unearths our fear of the other and sheds light on how we demonize those whom we do not understand; those who hold different beliefs than we do; those who inhabit different lifestyles. As Edward Miller and John Semley note, “Folk horror may be best distinguished not by its mere depiction of Satanists, pagans, witches, buxom nudes wreathed in summer garlands, but by the manner in which they pose threats to our fundamental beliefs.” In this paper I examine three films, PENDA’S FEN, SPIRAL, and THE WICKER MAN to explore the way in which folk horror narratives can be read as metaphors for the power dynamics at play in the policing of “unwanted” elements of society and how these narratives bring our fear of the unknown into sharp focus.

The Blood on Satan's Claw is attentive to what Paul Newland has described as the "haptic materiality" of the soil and the way it is physically worked . Land management is evident throughout the film. The landscape is defined by notions of ownership and control, as well as forming a topographical representation of the social hierarchy that operates upon it. Even the forest wilderness is characterised by virtue of sitting outside these demarcations. Unearthed from the beneath the cultivated space, and then operating freely across forest, field and building, the fiend throws these ideas of demarcation, function and ownership into question. Civilisation, and how it constructs meaning for itself through ownership, function and demarcation of the landscape, is mocked by the devil's transgressive ability to move anywhere and inflict trauma. The fiend's presence challenges concepts of the landscape as an environment controlled and shaped to human need, and instead sugg...

For Gaston Bachelard, movement is key to air’s visibility. In Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement ([1943] 2001), he suggests that air not only moves: it inspires. Though Bachelard’s work on the imagination of the elements is concerned with poetic language, it is so intimately bound up with materiality, movement and a “potential for becoming” that it lends itself well to cinema. Each of the elements (alone or in shifting combinations) will bestow its own sensuous continuity and dynamism upon particular “groups of images”.

Through an analysis of Robert Eggers’ The VVitch: A New England Folktale (2015), this article examines how the materiality of earth and air has a special role to play in folk horror. My contention is that mood in the cinema often involves a making visible of the air and that The VVitch is particularly invested in moody, imaginative interminglings between air, atmosphere and the environment.

The countryside in The Blood on Satan’s Claw is a “world we are living in” rather than “a scene we are looking at” .  Informed by his upbringing on a farm, director Piers Haggard’s countryside is a worked landscape marked by agricultural labour.  From the opening sequence onwards, the film is attentive to what Paul Newland has described as the “haptic materiality” of the soil and the way it is physically worked .

Land management is evident throughout the film, from the straight furrows that Ralph ploughs, to the footpath that Cathy navigates between the fields and the woodland, and the enclosure of land around the Banham house.  As such, the landscape is defined by notions of ownership and control, as well as forming a topographical representation of the social hierarchy that operates upon it.  Even the forest wilderness is characterised by virtue of sitting outside these demarcations.

Unearthed from the beneath the cultivated space, and then operating freely across forest, field and building, the fiend throws these ideas of demarcation, function and ownership into question.  Civilisation, and how it constructs meaning for itself through ownership, function and demarcation of the landscape, is mocked by the devil’s transgressive ability to move anywhere and inflict trauma.

The fiend’s presence challenges concepts of the landscape as an environment controlled and shaped to human need, and instead suggests that it is an “anti-landscape […] the landscape that provocatively throws into question the very idea of the human/national subject as owner of the landscape, as a figure in that landscape, or as an observer of it” .

The fiend’s emergence suggests a landscape that is, if not inimical then certainly ambivalent towards those who occupy it.  From the expansive countryside at the film’s opening to the occlusive foliage that accompanies Cathy’s accosting in the forest, the countryside is depicted as an anti-landscape that diminishes, isolates, secludes and disquiets.  It is an anti-landscape resistant to being subordinated, challenging long-held Enlightenment and Christian beliefs in man’s mastery over nature.  These tensions can also be interpreted psychoanalytically as those between the abject feminine space of nature and the patriarchal socio-political constructs of civilisation.

The objective of this paper is to explore these contested notions of the demarcation, ownership and management of the landscape in The Blood on Satan’s Claw.  In doing so, it will illustrate the tension between landscape and anti-landscape in the film and examine how these tensions can be read as representative of other cultural tensions, such as those between nature and civilisation, rationality and irrationality, and the masculine and feminine.

One of the traits that sets Folk Horror apart from other genres is its particular use of non-linear time. Whereas in Gothic fiction the past has a bearing on the present, Folk Horror develops this theme even further by using cyclic time, a concept derived from folktales, folklore and myth which corresponds to the Ancient Greek concept of Aiôn. Cyclic time creates the illusion of being removed from the consequences of linear time, i.e. events and even deaths are reversible, for example. Folk Horror television series such as The Owl Service (1969) and Children of the Stones (1977) employ the concept of cyclic time and even films like The Wicker Man (1973) suggest the cyclical re-enactment of certain rituals in accordance with the cyclical re-occurrence of the seasons. In Folk Horror, cyclic time has the function of creating a sense of fairy-tale-removedness of time once the space of an isolated community has been entered which sets a stark contrast to the linear time flow of modernity. Another function is to usher in evil and due to its cyclical nature it may be defeated for now by single protagonists, but it will never vanish completely, only until the next cycle is starting again. For instance, in The Owl Service, a fateful love triangle from the Welsh folk tales of the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi is cyclically re-enacted every generation, i.e. the protagonists are trapped in a non-linear time convoluting mythical, historical and present times, resulting inevitably in the misery and even death of all involved. Contrary to the book, the television series’ ending suggests that the cycle will start again. This suggests that in Folk Horror evil cannot be ultimately defeated.

Se la letteratura di genere ha sempre rappresentato lo spazio privilegiato per l'emersione del represso e del non detto, che posizione occupa la letteratura dell'or-rore nella nostra società, e quali angosce, tensioni, confl itti si incarica di incarnare e rappresentare, seppur in maniera fi ltrata e ambivalente? I contributi esplorano il rap-porto tra vecchie e nuove forme dell'horror nei territori della letteratura globale con-temporanea, del fumetto, del videogioco, del giornalismo. Le analisi spaziano da testi di King, VanderMeer, DeLillo, WuMing, Ligotti e Lovecraft a Dante's Inferno e Go ¯ Nagai; gli interventi teorici forniscono una fondamentale messa a punto per orientarsi nella galassia di un genere-l'horror-che non smette di espandersi e rinnovarsi. a Dante's Inferno per un'esplorazione a tutto tondo della galassia dell'horror letterario contemporaneo.

When the sociologist Max Weber postulated his theory of disenchantment of the world, arguing that the Western world had gone through a process of cultural rationalization, he also admitted that, within traditional society, there would remain pockets that would resist the impact of modernity and become ‘a great enchanted garden’.

Since the advent of modern society, according to a plethora of scholars, Ernest Gellner in primis, the individuals who could not adapt to the ‘malaise of modernity’ sought refuge in what Gellner defined ‘re-enchantment creeds’, such as Jungian psychoanalisis, Marxism or phenomenology. The occult revival witnessed in the 1960s and 1970s in Great Britain and the United States, too, has been seen to represent a strategy of re-enchantment of the modern world.

In this paper, I would like to argue that a process of re-enchantment of the British landscape was attempted through the medium of cinema, within the very small niche of films that comprise the genre known as British Folk Horror: through the analysis of what has been called ‘the unholy trinity’ of British Folk Horror films, Michael Reeves’ The Witchfinder General (1968), Piers Haggards’ Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and Robin Hardy’s cult classic The Wicker Man, I will strive to highlight the antimodern red thread that runs through these three themes: such an antimodern stance is best characterised by the three films’ rural setting, seen as an opposition to the process of urbanization, and the recourse to British folklore and pre-Christian motifs as a means to re-sacralize the characters’ beliefs and the very landscape captured in the movies in all of its pagan allure.

The analysis will also briefly extend to minor films and tv series such as James McTaggart’s Robin Redbreast (1970), Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (1969-70) and Trevor Ray’s Children of the Stones (1976).

Actually my script for a presentation about Folk Horror I gave at the first Danish Folk Horror Festival i Kolding, autumn 2020. So to speak a boiled-down version in English of the articles I have published on the subject in the online Danish film magasine 16:9:

http://www.16-9.dk/2020/06/britisk-folk-horror/

http://www.16-9.dk/2020/08/de-sidste-ti-ars-folk-horror-revival/

Ancient antlers, clashing swords, exuberant foliage, and of course, those bells and hankies: English traditional dances are as varied as the country's landscape, by turns joyous and sinister, familiar and strange. The tar-black "Obby Oss" wheeling and diving through the streets of Padstow on May Day or the stately procession of antlered dancers in Abbots Bromley conjure echoes of pre-Christian rites whose magic and meaning endures in fragmentary form. But to reveal their true magic, we must look into their performative power and analyse their historical associations with the language of ritual and arcane, even occult, knowledge.

As described by Adam Scovell, films that can be considered part of the folk horror genre exhibit common elements that fall along what he describes as the ‘folk horror chain’ which includes particular deployments of landscape, isolation, skewed belief systems/morality, and the inclusion of a happening/summoning. Scovell gleaned this ‘chain’ by taking a look at the commonalities among the three films that are often considered the founding triumvirate of the genre, Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves, 1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (Piers Haggard, 1971), and The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), thus establishing a category that has continued to gain popularity and interest among film theorists and aficionados (2017: 17-18). Yet, even Scovell himself recognizes the need for flexibility in the parameters of the folk horror genre and emphasizes the fruitful discoveries that might be made by exploring the subtle connections with films that might, at first, be considered outliers: ‘Folk Horror is best seen, not simply as a set of criteria to be read with hindsight into all sorts of media, but as a way of opening up discussions on subtly interconnected work and how we now interact with such work’ (2017: 5-6). Influential film theorist Rick Altman also argues for the flexibility of genre in his seminal book on the subject: ‘Genres are not inert categories shared by all (though at some moments they certainly seem to be), but discursive claims made by real speakers for particular purposes in specific situations’ (1999: 101). Following Scovell’s and Altman’s prompts, I will trouble the boundaries of folk horror by taking a look at Debra Granik’s 2010 film Winter’s Bone, positioning it as a hybrid that sits on the cusp of the genre. The film is indeed an excellent example of hybridity, falling partially within several genres including folk horror and backwoods horror. Through this exploration I hope to show how films that might not fall squarely within the predetermined limits of folk horror can provide added insight and a richness to the genre that would be lacking without their inclusion.

29.01. 2022: "Early-Modernism in Folk Horror"; Online Conference Contemporary Folk Horror in Film and Media; Leeds Beckett University

Presentation available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4nGUCXJk14&list=PLKDxI0JOa-WhG2jBlhhYyqLeSoNsL92mE&index=7

These are the notes to a 20-introduction to the Folk Horror film "Blood on Satan's Claw" which I gave on the 15th of December 2021 at the Folk Horror film festival at the Danish Film Institute. Originally this presentation was in Danish, but I decided to translate and publish it as paper in order to give more readers the oppertunity to read my views on Folk Horror, which are based on four articles I wrote for the online film magazine 16: 9 and can be read following the link below.
  In my presentation I  give an introduction to the key tropes in Folk Horror as well as the background for its British Classics, the socalled "Unholy Trinity" as well as critize Adam Scowell's "Folk Chain". In think this presentation is a lot sharper than the first one which I have uploaded since I have gotten more experience and reflected more on the subject.
  The presentation corresponds with the slides which I have also uploaded. Therefore, each "chapter" has the titles "Slide 1, 2" etc.

Discussion of the folk horror subgenre emphasizes its use of folkloric materials. By portraying tensions between surviving village lore and the invention of faux-ancient practices, The Witches (1966), an early Folk Horror film, also demonstrates the subgenre's close links with folkloristics. This article examines the folkloresque links between folk horror and folklore's disciplinary history and development, developing definitions of the subgenre and extending our understanding of popular culture's representational dependence on folkloristics.

There are few in-depth examinations of folk horror in urban environments. This is understandable; the characteristics that usually define folk horror-snappily described by Mark Gatiss as an "obsession with the British landscape, its folklore and superstitions"-require a connection to the earth and to our esoteric, pre-Christian past that are less apparent in towns and cities than they are in the countryside. Folk horror also thrives on the isolation, remoteness and secrecy afforded by the rural landscape, again difficult to come across in the busy modernity and technological connectedness of civilisation. There have been some explorations into the urban wyrd that have identified characteristics analogous to those in rural folk horror. Peter Hutchings' 2004 paper Uncanny Landscapes in British Film and Television discusses denuded landscapes that have been abandoned because of their association with the urban space. Adam Scovell, in his 2017 book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, devotes a chapter to hauntology and the urban wyrd, in which he focuses on the folk horror elements in Nigel Kneale's urban based works. This paper will hopefully add to these initial forays into the urban folk horror space, and will do so by examining Gary Sherman's Death Line from 1972, which is set primarily in one discrete and specific urban environment: the London Underground. In my opinion the Underground shares a number of similarities with the countryside of traditional rural folk horror: its antiquity as the world's oldest subterranean transit system, marks it out as the modern, technological equivalent to the pagan sites of rural folk horror. Like those pagan sites, it is a place of hidden and esoteric histories, and like the tilled fields and ancient forests of folk horror it has a close association with the substance of the earth. For those of you unfamiliar Death Line, it concerns the last cannibal descendants of an abandoned group of trapped Victorian labourers, living in and venturing out from the hidden and disused tunnels and stations of the Tube to hunt. When director Piers Haggard used the term 'folk horror' to describe his approach to making his 1971 film Blood on Satan's Claw, he did so to deliberately contrast his film to what he considered to be the

Nowhere in the urban landscape is folk horror's encroachment into the civilised space more pronounced than in the subterranean realms of our underground transit systems. These are familiar and everyday spaces, critical to the functions of urban space. They represent the ingenuity of civilisation, violently and intrusively reshaping inaccessible and hostile terrain for our use. However, despite their centrality to our lives, they remain uncanny and untrustworthy spaces. They are analogous to that other great liminal space – the countryside – in that they illustrate the limitations and vulnerabilities of contemporary, urban society, and suggest this society is built upon ancient landscapes stained by folkloric heritage in which the past is malignant and lurking just out of sight. The London Underground is, in particular, characterised as "a space which is past and future, contemporary and archaic" , a gateway between the modern and urban, and the ancient and folkloric. E...