Primal fears
Kerry Andrew’s Swansong revitalizes the evergreen genre of folk horror
We like to think we are rational, composed people; immune to superstition and primal fears, always connected to a worldwide web of friends and acquaintances.
So why is there something so creepy about the darkness found outside our cities and suburbs? Why does a walk down a country lane after sunset raise goosebumps? Why does the crackling of a twig, the distant sound of footsteps, flood us with fear?
In a 2015 essay for The Guardian, nature writer Robert Macfarlane explored what he refers to as “the eeriness of the English countryside,” the basis for a broad-based, inclusive artistic approach which constitutes “a mutated cultural terrain that includes the weird and the punk as well as the attentive and the devotional.” The approach draws back the veil to reveal the haunted beneath the pastoral or, as Macfarlane writes, “the skull beneath the skin.”
Macfarlane is quick to (rightly) differentiate between the eerie and horror, contending that “Horror specializes in confrontation and aggression; the eerie in intimation and aggregation. Its physical consequences tend to be gradual and compound: swarming in the stomach’s pit, the tell-tale prickle of the skin.” But his approach in the piece seems a sideways entrance into what has become known as folk horror.
The boundaries of the folk horror sub-genre are, fittingly, loosely defined. Usually rooted in rural settings and landscapes, the works generally deal with a conflict or reckoning between contemporary lives and the echoes of the past, often featuring pagan rites and rituals, or more outright hauntings. While Macfarlane focuses on the eerie, it’s no accident that the works he incorporates into his essay are also those held up as exemplifying – though not limiting – folk horror. The classic literary horror of MR James and Arthur Machen shares space with albums like PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake. Also key to both Macfarlane’s exploration of the eerie and the underpinnings of folk horror are a handful of films, and novels for young readers.
The term “folk horror” was popularized by writer and actor Mark Gatiss who, in the 2010 documentary series A History of Horror, used the phrase to describe a movement in English horror film in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which focused on rural settings and conflicts between the pagan and Christian worldviews. The Blood on Satan’s Claw and Witchfinder General serve as examples, but the key text here is 1973’s The Wicker Man, directed by Robin Hardy, in which a police officer is sent to a remote Scottish island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl, who the close-knit community denies even existed. The staunch (and tortured) Christian faith of Sergeant Howie comes into conflict first with the earthy country ways of the locals, and then with their veiled pagan beliefs, under the leadership of Christopher Lee’s Lord Summerisle. The eeriness Macfarlane describes builds relentlessly through the film to a climax that is at once uncanny and genuinely horrific – though notably without the gore and bloodshed we have come to expect from horror.
Macfarlane also draws on two novels for young readers, one of which – Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (published in 1967 and winner of the Carnegie medal) – uses contemporary teenagers holidaying in rural Wales to revisit and re-enact a story from the Mabinogion, the 12th-century Welsh compilation of earlier folkore. Meanwhile, in Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, 11-year-old Will Stanton discovers he is a key player in the epochs-old battle between the Light and the Dark, the story drawing once again on English folklore in a contemporary, though rural world. Both these novels are usually referred to as fantasy, but, as is often the case, their inclusion into the folk horror canon is rooted in tone and approach: each produces exactly the sense of eeriness Macfarlane describes so accurately.
Whether one views the works as eerie or as folk horror, we’re not talking about simple taxonomy or academic distinction: at the risk of indulging in a rural metaphor, the field is thriving. Films as seemingly varied as The Blair Witch Project and The VVitch fit comfortably into the world of folk horror, and an argument could be made for the inclusion of last year’s Get Out: isolation in the country, strange customs, age-old belief, threatening locals, etc. On the literary side, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent juxtaposes the scienceobsessed Victorian era with the folklore of coastal Essex, while the coastal pilgrimage in Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney draws us back to the classic conflict between Christianity and earlier faiths.
Macfarlane himself needs to be included in this contemporary mix. While he refers in his essay to “four eerie episodes” he included in The Old Ways, his 2012 non-fiction exploration of the pathways crisscrossing the British Isles, he sells himself somewhat short. The entire book – and his similarly approached Holloway, a multi-genre exploration of the “psychogeography” of the sunken tracks worn into the countryside by “centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll & rain-run”– are suffused in the eerie, the ancestral shadows and mists.
The worlds of folk horror and the eerie have also been a constant in traditional music for hundreds of years: folk songs serve as both examples and foundation of the form. Mists, magic, murder and isolation are the stock in trade for the folk world, whose songs continue to be reexplored and reinvented on an ongoing, almost cyclical basis.
In 2014, for example, You Are Wolf released Hawk to the Hunting Gone, a collection of birdthemed traditional English folk songs marrying acoustic instrumentation with elements of contemporary electronica. It’s powerful and invigorating, driven by the vocals and arrangements of leader Kerry Andrew, winner of three British Composer awards.
The second track on that album, “Swansong,” is a version of Molly Bawn, a 17th-century ballad which draws, in turn, on much older elements of the Swan Maiden myth. That track, with all its antecedents and history, also serves as the title and the spine of Andrew’s first novel.
“Swansong” follows Polly Vaughan, a university student fleeing a tragic incident in London by accompanying her mother on vacation into the Scottish highlands. Polly is adrift, spending her days drunk or high, attempting to catch up on her studies, gradually becoming immersed in an ancient landscape of mist and rain, of floating lights and crackling branches in the dark, of closed-off locals and mysterious mines. The novel is a wonderful balancing act between Polly’s defensively sassy voice, constantly in denial of what is happening around her, and the reader’s awareness of an encroaching darkness.
That “tell-tale prickle of the skin?” “Swansong” has that in spades.
In Macfarlane’s essay, he suggests that, with the eerie, “contemporary anxieties and dissents are here being reassembled and re-presented as spectres, shadows or monsters.” Connections have been made to a turning inward in the wake of Brexit, in the same manner as The Wicker Man and its compatriots served as a reckoning with the disillusion of the hippie dream of backto-the-land innocence.
Whatever the socio-political underpinnings, what is significant about the approach is simply this: it works. Folk horror and the eerie hold appeal for both creators and audiences because it is our birthright to be afraid of what lives in the shadows, to walk softly through the dark, to feel, in the unknown, a questioning of our own place in history, in faith, in the universe.
Those are the chills it raises. Those are the fears it stokes.
WHETHER WE VIEW THE WORK AS EERIE OR FOLK HORROR, THE FIELD IS THRIVING.