FREESPEAK
Author Martyn Waites explains why folk horror resonates today
Martyn Waites constructs a giant wicker column about folk horror. Ooh, aargh!
In times of national – and international – uncertainty we often turn to genre fiction for escapism and entertainment. This was borne out throughout the 20th century. Vicious new methods of killing devised during the First World War meant that what soldiers were left returned home disfigured, mutilated, damaged both internally and externally. How was this reflected in popular culture? A new wave of horror films, exemplified by Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein, of monsters who terrified and elicited sympathy in equal measure. In the 1950s the combination of Red Scares and fears of nuclear annihilation led to movies and literature based around massive, rampaging child of the atom mutations and body snatchers taking over our identities.
And so it continued. Yes, musicals often emerged to dance our cares away, most notably after 9/11 when Chicago won the Best Picture Oscar. But to understand what’s going on, you’ve got to go dark.
Hence the rise in popularity of folk horror. So what actually is folk horror? Well, for those who have been living on Mars or watching old Gene Kelly movies, folk horror as it’s currently understood takes the unholy trinity of late ’60s/early ’70s movies Witchfinder General, Blood On Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man as sacred texts and moves outwards from there. They’re perfect for our society at the moment. They’re nostalgic in and of themselves but not for a bucolic rural Britain. They all show how scared communities unsure of their place in the world can be easily taken over by silver-tongued and gimlet-eyed demagogues, how fear of change brings about a reliance on old ways, old evils. As such, folk horror is the perfect metaphor for Brexit Britain.
The other main thing about folk horror is that it’s most definitely rural. As urbanites find themselves increasingly priced out of city living and start moving further and further out into the country, they inevitably find themselves looking towards the country to live in. And of course, they aren’t always welcome there. Arrogant city dwellers thinking they know best, trying to patronise their new rural neighbours... Never ends well, does it?
But there’s something else too. And this may be the most important thing of all. folk horror thrives in luminal spaces, in the gaps between worlds, in landscapes of rough earth and gnarled old trees with humming pylons stretching overhead. In the half-imagined things glimpsed in wooded shadows out of the corners of eyes making hiking visitors quicken their step. In the feeling that no matter how alone one feels sitting by a lake on a moor, one can’t shake the feeling of being watched, of being followed. Or walking through a picture-postcard village and noticing strange objects and fetishes hanging on all the front doors. Those luminal spaces are where folk horror breeds and spreads. Because in those spaces and those situations we’re left to confront unpleasant truths about ourselves. We’re not as clever as we think. Or as sophisticated. We’re not in control, we don’t know what we’re doing. And there’s something here with us. Something older than us, bigger than us, something barely glimpsed but definitely there. Our cities could fall tomorrow and it would still be there. It would still thrive. We might not. We are, collectively, scared of our urban future so we look towards our rural past. And our rural past stares back at us. With a cold, unblinking, inhuman eye.
“one can’t shake the feeling of being watched or followed”
The Old Religion by Martyn Waites is out now from Bonnier Zaffre.